Beneath Ceaseless Skies #230 Read online

  I opened my eyes to see the stronghold of his deepnames flare to life, immense and steely. I had, long ago, perceived a great coldness in it, but it was warm now, deep and potent and shining with brilliant lights. He placed his hand again on my chest and began to speak, to say new deepnames as they were birthed from his mind and ran down his arms to settle under my skin. It was an act of Strong Building I recognized as something called imbuing, where a builder lets new deepnames settle protectively in the walls, upon the foundational grid. He used this technique now, subtly and with great skill, planting deepnames just under the surface of my skin, until I was abuzz with it, abuzz and floating. And I remembered, too, how my star had not removed its presence. I felt, deep inside me, a second layer of deepnames, a ball of light which was the Hillstar, dense and fascinated and waiting.

  The Raker looked alight. Radiant. He tugged on the web of deepnames he planted, called them up to rise through the surface of my skin. The pain of it was immense, and it was joy, pure joy that suspended me between my star and his hand—and I screamed with it, and he stopped, motionless and waiting. “Continue,” I gasped. “Please.” He moved his hand, submerging his half-risen deepnames into my flesh once more. Nothing else existed. Nothing else, unless I made it be, and I would choose it so.

  I lifted my hand, not touching. Struggling to speak. “Please. I, too, desire...”

  His face went very still, and I waited, breathing with him, doing nothing, until he was ready to speak. “Carefully.”

  “Always.”

  “Yes.”

  I stretched my hand and placed it on his chest, until again we were mirrored in each other, touching and touched, seeing and being seen. I breathed in my own deepnames, tethered to the deepnames of my star, and then reached under his skin with the barest pinpricks of light. I made the feeling subtle. Barely there. But it was there.

  He closed his eyes, just getting used to that feeling, while his deepnames dug under my skin, harsher than before, then gentle again. He said, “More.”

  I spoke then, making pinpricks into deepnames, a temporary working yet no less potent than his, and he did likewise, our voices ringing harsh against each other until we netted each other, held each other in a web of light and fierce joy. His deepnames expanded, moving deeper in me, brushing the surface of my star. In that moment, I knew, in that perfect moment of trust much deeper than anything I had allowed to Ladder, the Raker could have overpowered me if he wanted. I had not taught him expansion, but he seemed to learn from observing—and so he could learn it now, take control of my star and of me.

  I did not recoil.

  He tugged on the brilliant net of his magic under my skin. Close. So close. I, too, pulled on the deepnames I planted in him, each bringing the other close to the surface, cresting and falling and cresting again until with a harsh cry he broke the surface of my skin, a hundred brilliant sparks of light that buzzed and melted in the air around us. Light welled out of my wounds, and I cried with the perfect feeling of it, a crown of that night and everything it offered. I made a fist and pulled likewise, breaking through the barrier of his flesh. As his scream crested and faded, the white brilliant pinpricks of deepnames I had made congealed into diamonds on his torso and arms. I spoke again, to make the lines of white gold run between these stones, to make for him a wearable net.

  When he could move, he touched it, a puzzled look on his face. “What is this?”

  “A gift. You can take it off or you can wear it. The stones will help you regulate the pull you exert on others, so it will not overwhelm if you do not choose. Until you learn to do this perfectly and unaided.” I leaned back against the cushions, dizzy and spent, floating.

  He frowned. “I touched your star. In that moment you could have destroyed me.”

  “And you, me. And even my star.”

  “But you do not wish to be consumed,” he said. “Or subsumed.”

  “And neither do you.”

  He smiled, floating with me. “This is better. This is good.”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  And now what is hidden becomes revealed

  A lifetime later he lay in my arms, and a lazy smile flickered on and off his lips. I reclined on the settee, dressed in an opulent robe of crimson damask. I looked down on him. Oh, he was beautiful like this, the unbraided dark weave of his hair fanning out and down to the rug-strewn floor. His bare torso was embraced by a different weave, the net of white metal I had made for him, grid-bright and studded with diamonds as resolute as single-syllable deepnames. He had not taken it off.

  I traced a hand over this net now, touching skin and precious stones where they sparkled in the shadows of his body. He stretched, content and relaxed, and I wondered if he was finally getting tired. For myself I had crested on my exhaustion like a sandbird lifted by the torrents of air, gliding as if without effort. It was a dangerous illusion of vigor for me, but while it lasted, I was not about to push it away.

  He smiled up to my face. “Can I ask...”

  I laughed. “You have not had enough?”

  He touched my lips, my chin. “Never.”

  Of course not. “Yes,” I said, pretending exasperation. Indulging him. Indulging myself. “You can ask.”

  He leaned back again. “Your name. Whether given or taken.”

  “It has been a while,” I said, evasive.

  “They cannot all call you Old Royal,” he said, “as they lie fatigued and full of wonder in your arms.”

  “Hah.” I leaned back against the cushions on the settee and closed my eyes. What should I give him, then? Each new rebirth brought a name with it, discarded in early adolescence when my star would find me, fold me back into my own antiquity. Oh, certainly I could fool him with these half-truths, but I did not want to hide anymore. I would hide still, perhaps, but it had little meaning.

  “At the dawn of time,” I said, “They called me Angzariyad, rhayg nvera enghkordat.”

  “Hah.” He desisted stating the obvious, that it was not a name born in the Burri desert, that I had not spoken Burrashti. “It is beautiful,” he said. “As beautiful as you.”

  As ancient as me, I could say. Instead I simply smiled down at him, awaiting his own revelation.

  He yawned. “You probably guessed mine.”

  And in truth, I could have; the great families of the Coast were all accounted for in my books—for all it was a minor land, it was rich in named strong, and for that I had always kept records.

  “I probably could have, if I wanted.”

  “Were you waiting for me to consent?” One corner of his mouth lifted up, in a shadow of its former self—now more amusement than disdain. “I am Ranravan.”

  I know that much. The seven great families of the Coast were all accounted for, and only one of them had been named after Ranra. So much for not guessing. But he did not look at me, and could not see my frown. “I see her sometimes in dreams. My foremother, Ranra. You know the story? Ranra’s Unbalancing?”

  “Yes,” I said, my heart suddenly heavy. “What does she tell you, in your dreams?”

  “She does not speak. But I think she would have wanted me to come here.”

  Oh, yes, she would have. The question, of course, is why.

  I cleared my throat, about to speak, but something stopped me. I sighed, gathering my thoughts. “Is that the name by which you wish to be known to me? Given or taken?”

  He smiled up at me, his brilliant dark eyes clouded with the onset of sleep. “You pretend to be patient, but you are as persistent as me.” His hand squeezed my arm. “It is Tajer.”

  “Tah-zher,” I repeated. The syllables of it rolled off my tongue—not quite right and clothed in a subtle heat.

  “I like how you say it.” He did not correct me, just nestled more comfortably in my arms. His eyes closed. “Perhaps I will dream of her tonight. Of her, and of you.”

  Bird forfend. I shifted a cushion under his head, tasting his name on my tongue. You are still so youn
g. I did not know why I thought this, why, watching him drift into sleep, his trust seemed unguarded to me like mine had not been. I had prepared to die. I had divested. He had not, for he was tethered to no star. He had named himself a scion of one of the most powerful families of his country, but he had no home and no retainers to guard him. His trust had grown like a stubborn young tree that clutches at a bare rock, its roots more powerful than the crown of its branches, its roots studded with deepnames that touch the foundation of the land.

  I leaned back against the cushions, hoping to drift gently to sleep. When a subtle current touched my cheek, I kept my eyes close for a moment, hoping that she would go away. But, like her great-great-grandchild, she was persistent. “I need to speak to you.”

  I waved a hand in the air, my eyes still resolutely closed. “There must be a better time, Ranra.”

  “I have not interrupted your tryst this time,” she snarled. “Though, believe me, I wanted to.”

  “Why not then, if there’s an urgency?” In my arms, the Raker—Tajer—did not stir.

  “Because he has much power, and that is why it can work, it can truly work this time.”

  I opened my eyes. Ranra appeared floating in the air before me, her previously neat korob stained and tattered, as if singed by the flying soot and ash from an awakened volcano.

  I shifted my lover’s sleeping form gently to lay on the cushions; the loss of his weight felt disorienting and wrong to me. But she demanded my attention, and it wouldn’t do to hide from her secrets much longer. “What are you saying?”

  Ranra crossed her arms at her chest. “I am saying this: stars are people.”

  The Raker stirred and settled again, one arm flung over my thigh. I sifted my fingers gently through his hair. “Yes, of course they are people, Ranra, though not all entirely human. My star, for example—”

  “The twelve stars had once been people—whether human or not—persons with composite minds who expanded beyond the law of deepnames, who grew beyond the reckoning of our books, transcended what is possible for people. The stars were carried here by Bird from some other world to seed ours, just as the First Ones came here from elsewhere.”

  “Yes, Ranra.” Almost two thousand years ago I had written a book about it. The Accounts and Annals of the Twelve Stars. Only three copies exist to my knowledge. One in my honeycomb library. One in the great mountain-library of Keshet. One stolen from me by the accursed Khana criminals Berutiah and Makiel. “Yes, Ranra. I know.” I did not want to lose my patience, but I felt it sifting through my fingers like sand. “So tell me something I don’t know. Tell me something new.”

  “I will tell you something of the discipline of which you claim to be the preeminent living authority. I will tell you of starlore. For I thought you have seen it, when you looked at the grid in your wanderings across the great desert, but you have become drunk to obliviousness on this power of his and on sherbet, as many before you, though I assure you it is but a small solace.”

  I ignored her jabs, for underneath her harshness she sounded as uneasy as I felt. “I have seen the grid,” I said.

  “You have seen the north?”

  “I have seen.” I swallowed, for truly I had seen and I had refused to see, in my eagerness to come here with the Raker on my wings, and he had asked no questions, simply accepting the glorious vision in all its splendor and not in its wrongness. “I have seen the vision of the grid, and it is changed from before.”

  “Yes, it is changed from before. Because of the twelve stars that Bird had brought, my star was not the only one quenched.”

  I sighed. “The Katran star is an old wound by now.”

  “What you saw was not an old wound. There is new disturbance in the north. In Laina,” she said. “And maybe one more brewing, in the far northwest. I cannot see clearly.”

  I nodded. Yes. It did feel true to the perturbation I had experienced in the vision of the First Ones. And yet, it also was true that nothing had been determined yet, no new star-deaths. Only fear.

  She must have sensed my thoughts, for she said, “It will be too late when it happens. Even a single additional star-death will overwhelm the grid. Two would be a disaster.”

  Nothing had happened yet. But these words rang hollow. Ranra of all people would know a disaster that brooded, unspeakable, for generations, before the cataclysm became unstoppable. “What do you propose then?” I said. Why are you here?

  “If stars are people,” she said, “then it follows that people can become stars.”

  “A person cannot hold more than three deepnames.” Yet the living proof of that possibility lay asleep in my arms.

  She said. “There is a way to push beyond the law of deepnames by linking the minds of multiple named strong.”

  Oh. Oh. “The new geometry you spoke of.” Realizations tumbled into my mind like pebbles before the avalanche. “And that’s what they call Ranra’s Unbalancing. You attempted to replace the Star of the Tides with a star of your own making, made from you and from the people you convinced to try this endeavor.”

  “It would not work.”

  “No.”

  “...because my star was not dead yet, and I was still tethered to it. It fought back. In the end, everything ended.”

  “I see.” How could she be so wise, and yet so oblivious? “There was a different reason why it did not work. It did not work because it is impossible. Your people were not of a single mind. They were not tools but people, people you sought to subjugate to your will.”

  She raised her voice. “That’s why it did not work, because I did not subjugate them—I asked, they said yes, they said yes to this work—and I had hoped that we would act in harmony...”

  “People do not work that way,” I said, “No, people rarely act in unison, rarely completely agree to something as tumultuous as this. Even if they do say yes, a commitment of this magnitude must be always and repeatedly made.”

  “There is a better way. Not for many to come together, but for a single person to push beyond the law of deepnames, draw upon the living might of the land’s naming grid and the freely given souls of others, to expand—and then the new starmind will need to appease nobody other than itself.”

  My stomach sank as I absorbed the meaning of her words. Beside me, the Raker—Tajer Ranravan—my lover—stirred and settled.

  I crossed my arms at my chest. “You seek this fate for him. For his mind to be broken. To die.”

  “He will not die. In fact, he will never die, will never know the end of days, just as your star does not know them. As for his mind, it is already broken.”

  “No,” I said. “Only his trust.”

  “You jest. Did you hear his story?”

  “I have not. Not in full.”

  “Then I will tell you of his crime against his own—”

  “No!” I cried. “He will choose if to tell me. Of his own free will he will tell me or he will not, and it is not your place to betray that.”

  “He bears four deepnames,” she hissed, spilling that secret, if not the others.

  I sighed and said, “It seemed like more.”

  “Yes. Yes, it seems like more. Because he can easily take so many more and it often seems like he’s already done it. Please, understand—”

  Anger flooded me again, such anger as I had not experienced in centuries. “I understand. You seek to make of him a tool to fix the great harm you caused, and you will seek to justify it with his pain, with his crime, as you say, to shock me—”

  “I should have come to you before you tangled with him, for it has clouded your judgment. In that, too, you are not alone. People flock to him. Fling themselves at him. Beg him for death, even.” She looked away, bitter. “He makes for a frightening person, but as a star—they will be of one mind in him, and quite content there, I assure you.”

  “He does not frighten me.” From the very beginning he

  wanted my fear, but he had been content with my refusal. He had not pushed. And
he remembered, later.

  I turned away from Ranra’s apparition. “I will not have a part in this.” My lover stirred again, and the air above us acquired a purple haze.

  “It seems like nothing to you, foolish Royal,” Ranra cried. “But the grid is worth more than your passion. The preservation of the land is a far greater task than our lives. You might refuse to hear me. Then go out. See again. Taste the metallic tang of disintegration under your tongue.”

  And, I would judge, that was true, true even if that danger has not yet been born into the world. I had been agitated before, and yet now my limbs filled with heaviness, as if of sleep. Ranra’s form began to flicker.

  “Teach him. I beg you. Teach him the lore of expansion which you know, even if you never used it—because of the twelve triumphant stars that Bird had brought, some had—”

  “When the First Ones came,” I said, my lips barely moving with fatigue, “they sang. Song underlines the foundation of the land.”

  As if through a haze, I could see Ranra’s agitated form dart to and fro in the air, and the flashes of purple became more pronounced. The Raker stirred and grunted in his sleep, and I touched his shoulder, as if to assure myself that the world still existed. My tongue felt wooden in my mouth. “They sang—because it is joy—not betrayal—”

  The doors to my chamber opened. My student, Urwaru, stood there, a candlebulb in her outstretched hand. Invisible smoke oozed from it, as if from a brazier. “Forgive me for interrupting, my sovereign—”

  Joy, not betrayal, underlies the foundation of the land.

  The truest and most advanced thing I teach. The closing lines of the Accounts and Annals of the Twelve Stars.

  A white-robed figure stepped behind Urwaru, around her, gliding through the air with the perfect precision of one fully trained, one who had never failed any test.

  Joy is the oldest geometry.

  The Raker’s arms flailed, as if he was fighting something in his sleep. I could not move. By the doors, Urwaru’s three-deepname stronghold flared to light, burning as if with torches, exuding even greater clouds of smoke. The assassin who came with Urwaru moved forward, stepping around Ranra’s agitated form, as if they did not see but sensed her in the turmoil. Slowly, as if through a thickness of air, their hand extended to strike.