Beneath Ceaseless Skies #89 Read online

  The men had grumbled a good deal over that one, and it had nearly come to knives. In the end they’d had gone against him, and his second, Datsil, had taken them after the wagon. Which was why they were on their way south in chains, courtesy of the Imperial Legion whose nearby camp the peddlar had been on his way to supply, and Kellisaw was here in this squalid little village, hungry perhaps and empty-pocketed but whole-skinned and free. He knew how to trust his luck.

  The door opened, and the squint-eyed peasant behind it gaped stupidly at him. Kellisaw put on his most ingratiating smile. “Have you a mug of something for a poor traveler?” he asked. “I’ve come a long and weary way.”

  * * *

  Sharide flipped open the cover of a book that lay on the table beside her bed. She had found it there when she last woke up. She was still sleeping a great deal; not surprising, Lady Adelie said, with both of them coming up with visions now. She had tranced three more times on her own. After the second time, Lady Adelie stopped trying to forbid her.

  At first, Sharide had suspected it was because the sorceress wanted her gone as much as she herself did. But then another thought had come to her, and this book seemed to confirm it. It lay carelessly on the edge of the table as though left there by chance, but she had learned by now that nothing was left to chance in this house.

  Nothing in Skep’s Anvil, for that matter, she thought grumpily. But she was tired, and there was little to do while she was resting, and she knew her letters.

  The title of the book was Principles of Light-Bearing, and Sharide was engrossed in it by the second page. It described how light was the underpinning of the world, and the relation between light and physical things. Sharide didn’t understand all of it, or even know all the words the author used, but the book offered a glimpse of the answers to questions she had never thought of asking, or hadn’t been able to formulate even in dreams.

  Dreams, she thought. She had dreamed of being a weaver, and a fisher, and a soldier, and many different wives, but the life of a seeker of knowledge had never come to her yet. When next she slept, she decided, she wouldn’t merely drift into whatever path was easiest, but would try to find a life wherein she had read this book, and other books, and understood them. The days with Lady Adelie had made it clear to her that there was far more to be known in the world than anyone in Skep’s Anvil had ever been told.

  * * *

  “We don’t get many travelers here,” said Linnet as he carved the goat. “Tell us the news, friend. How fares the world?”

  Kellisaw raised his glass and sipped, doing his best not to wrinkle his lip at the rawness of the wine. The peasants were obviously delighted to have a visitor; he guessed even peddlars and other wanderers were generally daunted by the height and steepness of the plateau. The farmer, Linnet, had slaughtered a goat for their supper, and his broad-faced wife, Sherell, had brought out a dusty bottle of wine from the cellar. Kellisaw supposed he was lucky it hadn’t turned to vinegar; the farmers likely wouldn’t have known any better, and he’d have had to drink it anyway to be polite.

  “The world is much as it was,” Kellisaw answered. “Emperors and kings contend with each other for borders, and we smallfolk try to avoid them. You must find that easier than most do, in such a place.”

  “Oh, aye,” Linnet agreed readily. “No-one comes here.”

  “A hard life, I imagine, but a satisfying one,” Kellisaw continued.

  “Better than elsewhere,” Sherell said with obvious pride. “We’ve no sickness here. No children die, nor are born monsters. We’ve never known bandits or sheep-stealers. The Lady protects us.”

  Some god? Kellisaw wondered.

  “We live well,” Linnet agreed. “Thanks be to the Lady.”

  Hungry for news though they obviously were, the peasants responded readily enough to Kellisaw’s probing about the village. They raised mainly goats and mountain sheep here, Linnet explained, the ground being too steep in general for cattle. Kellisaw nodded, feigning interest. What difference did it make how peasants lived? Cattle and sheep alike were of no use to him, being too slow of foot to be easily stolen. Horses, now, he’d often made a profit on horses, but there were none to be had here, not even at the manor house.

  “Ah, that’s Lady Adelie’s home,” Sherell said when he inquired.

  “She’s our sorceress,” Linnet added proudly.

  Kellisaw kept his face smooth, but under the table his fingers twitched. There was his profit.

  * * *

  Evenings on the plateau were long and blue. The sun dipped below the edge of the cliff, but its light still lingered in the air until it crossed the lowland horizon, so between sunset and night there was a shadowless hour too bright for stars.

  Sharide sat in the walled garden, her book in her lap, another on the ground beside her. She had asked Lady Adelie the meaning of some of the hard words, and the sorceress had provided her with a dictionary in response. The dictionary was, she thought, a marvelous idea; even if she didn’t understand all the words used in the definitions either, just the fact that there was a book that told you how to read other books was staggering. Maybe, Sharide thought, all books explained each other. Maybe they all came together in some vast totality that, if one were able to read them all, would explain everything, everywhere.

  It was getting too dark to read, and Sharide closed the book and leaned her head back to look at the sky, comforted by the familiar gathering darkness. There would be half a moon tonight, she thought. That should tell her how many days she’d been here, but she couldn’t bring a number to mind. Already her old life seemed like half a dream, lost among other dreams, other lives.

  She might have fallen asleep; she wasn’t sure. Her dreams, if any, were confused. She seemed to be wandering, lost. It was no trance, not a true life, just a dream—but still true, she thought, and became aware then that she was dreaming, She stirred and struggled in her sleep, and was pulled down again.

  A sudden furtive rustling woke her fully and made her glance over at the wall. Against a backdrop of stars, the top half of a face appeared for just a moment amid the vines, then vanished. Sharide blinked, wondering if she’d imagined it. She put her book aside and stood—

  A figure vaulted over the wall and landed lightly on the grass in front of her. Sharide managed half a scream, and then a hand covered her mouth, almost choking her. “None of that now,” a man’s tenor voice said pleasantly. “Are you the sorceress? Just nod.”

  Sharide shook her head frantically. The man’s face was partly covered by a scarf, but she had the impression that he smiled. “A servant then? Good. I’ve no taste for harming servants, girl, but if you scream again I’ll have to cut your throat. If I take my hand away, will you give oath to be quiet?” Sharide nodded, and the man released her.

  “What—what do you want?” she managed. It annoyed her, a little, that her voice trembled; wasn’t she brave? Hadn’t she been a soldier?

  The man glanced around the garden, and his eye fell on the two books, Principles of Light-Bearing and the dictionary. “Now those may be worth something,” he said. He picked them both up, hefted them consideringly, and then tossed them casually over the wall. Sharide winced. The man chuckled. “Relax, girl. The buyer won’t be able to tell if I’ve taken out torn pages or not. I know a boy who has a knack for that.”

  “So now you’re leaving?” Sharide asked hopefully, though she knew he wasn’t. It made the thief laugh again, though, and at that moment she knew him. “Kellisaw!” she said without thinking.

  His laughter chopped off as though with a cleaver, and Sharide gasped as his fingers dug suddenly into her arm. “How do you know me?” he demanded. “How?”

  “You’re Kellisaw,” she said helplessly. “The—” Commander of the Green Company? Pirate captain? Daring smuggler who relieved the siege at Thistlerock? Bandit chief? “The warrior,” she said finally, figuring that was safe enough. In every future where they’d met, he’d been a fighter of some kind. Some
times he’d fought for the Emperor, and sometimes for another king, and sometimes for himself. In some futures he’d been an honorable man, and in others merely an expedient one. All her contradictory knowledge of him crowded together in her mind.

  “Aye, well, I am that,” he admitted, unwinding the scarf from around his mouth. “Though how you know me—have we met someplace? I’ve never been to this village before, I’m sure of that—”

  There was a sound from the house. In an instant Kellisaw had ducked behind one of the tall rosebushes, dragging Sharide with him. “Stay very, very quiet,” he hissed in her ear.

  The back door of the house opened, and Lady Adelie stood there, outlined in light. She was dressed in the blue gown she’d worn when Sharide had first awoken, and a silver chain held back her silver hair. She looked directly at the rosebush. “Come out,” she said, her voice light and musical, unworried. “You won’t be hurt if you come quietly.”

  “And I won’t hurt your pet if you don’t threaten me,” Kellisaw responded. He stood, dragging Sharide up with one arm tight around her windpipe and the fingers of the other hand digging into her upper arm. Sharide fought not to gag.

  Lady Adelie nodded. “Stay calm,” she said to both of them. “This is no place for the shedding of blood. Tell me, fighting man, what do you seek here? What will appease you?”

  “Riches,” Kellisaw answered, as though it were obvious. “Magic to sell in the Cities of the Plain. But I’ll trust no gift you give me, sorceress. Step aside and let me enter your house, and I’ll take what pleases me. No-one need be hurt this night.”

  “Indeed?” Lady Adelie murmured. “That seems more than fair.”

  Kellisaw bowed jauntily without letting go of Sharide’s throat. “Then by your leave, Lady.”

  This is a trap, Sharide thought, not sure which of them she wanted to warn.

  She must have twitched, or communicated her thoughts somehow, because Kellisaw tensed beside her. She realized what he was thinking from what she knew of him: that he would have to turn his back to Lady Adelie as he crossed the threshold into the house, and if she were to attack him, it would be then. So, a diversion, and then a quick run-and-snatch through the house and out the front door, just like they’d done together in Chowan City—no, wait—

  They reached the low steps into the house. Sharide felt Kellisaw’s muscles tense, and could have cried a warning, and didn’t.

  Lady Adelie moved, blurringly fast, but Kellisaw was faster, and his hand snaked away from Sharide’s neck, his elbow snapping around and impacting her temple, so quickly she barely felt the blow.

  She fell to the ground, momentarily stunned, and in that split-second loss of consciousness a vision came on her, the strongest one yet, and she saw a future where she seemed happy.

  She was Lady Adelie’s pupil, and later her partner in magic, and later still the inheritor of her place. Sharide saw herself nurturing Skep’s Anvil, bringing boys and girls on the cusp of adulthood to her home and searching out futures for them. She saw herself living out the years and decades with Lady Adelie, sometimes quarrelling with her methods but always in harmony with her aims. She saw Lady Adelie dead and buried under the autumn roses, and herself, Lady Sharide of Skep’s Anvil, living on for centuries after, never again questioning her role, because she had decided it was right, long ago—

  But long ago was now, and Sharide lay on the flagstoned path, Kellisaw’s bulk blotting out the sky. Behind him, having somehow appeared on the other side of the garden, Lady Adelie lifted her hands, and starlight poured into them. She blurred again, and was at Kellisaw’s back. Sharide looked at her and saw herself, her future, choosing people’s destinies for them, the lonely sorceress of the plateau. She opened her mouth—

  And made her choice.

  “Behind you!” she shouted.

  Kellisaw, suspicious though he was, recognized the urgency in her voice as real, and turned. He saw the light in Lady Adelie’s hands and dropped instinctively into a crouch, spearing upward with a knife he hadn’t held until that moment. The light vanished. Lady Adelie staggered back, fingers plucking strengthlessly at the hilt buried in her belly.

  Sharide scrambled to her feet. Kellisaw was already turning toward her with a second knife, but she spoke a word and the air became clear steel around his limbs. Sharide was delighted, and a little shocked. She had never heard of such a spell, or seen it done, but the memory was still fresh in her mind of centuries of magical study. She gestured, and the air made Kellisaw kneel.

  Lady Adelie moaned, and Sharide hurried to her side. The older woman’s mouth moved, trying to shape a spell. Sharide recognized it and completed it; the knife turned to spiderwebs which wove the edges of the wound together. Sharide watched it happen, awed. Already, in moments, the spell had faded from her mind. She couldn’t hold the vision, not much longer.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Lady Adelie. “I can’t be like you. I can’t do this to people. They need to make their own way, and so do I.” She touched her left eyelid, and then Lady Adelie’s, and the older sorceress simply fell asleep—natural sleep, without dreams.

  With the last thread of her fading memory, Sharide released the bonds that held Kellisaw immobile. He dropped to the ground and lay there, shivering. “Oh, stop that,” Sharide told him. “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “I guessed that,” Kellisaw said, still shaken, “seeing as how you saved me from whatever she was doing. Why’d you do that, though?”

  “You’ll never know,” Sharide said, with what she hoped was a mysterious smile. She felt more than a little unsteady.

  Kellisaw licked his lips. “Yeah, well—whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Mine,” said Sharide. “Come on. We ought to be well away from here by the time the sun comes up. She won’t follow.”

  “If you say so.” Kellisaw stumbled to his feet, rubbing his wrists as though they were cold. “We traveling together, then?”

  Sharide nodded. “If I’m not mistaken,” she said, “you seem like someone who might want to have a sorceress around.” Not that she really was one yet, the magic of her vision being completely gone now, but she could learn. Maybe they could go to the Jade Court; it was supposed to be a place of marvels.

  And I know your futures, or some of them, she said silently to the man who now walked beside her, the futures where you’re a good man, and maybe I can make things better, for you and the people with you. If I’m going to meddle with the world, at least let me be part of it, not shut away in a tower somewhere. Lady Adelie says the worst people make other people worse; maybe it works the other way round. It’s a wicked world out there; let’s see what I can do about it.

  “And maybe you’ll even decide to help me,” she said under her breath, looking at the shaken bandit. She knew he had it in him to be a leader, a general, a power in the world; it didn’t seem so far-fetched that he might be persuaded to use that strength for good. She’d already seen stranger things.

  She led him to the path down from the plateau, and the two of them turned eastward. The sun rose ahead of them, shining red and gold along their road. Below the mountains, the world was wide, and waiting. Sharide took a deep breath and walked away from Skep’s Anvil.

  And she lived happily ever after.

  Copyright © 2012 Grace Seybold

  Read Comments on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Grace Seybold has lived in Montreal for the past eleven years, where she spends most of her time dodging oncoming traffic. She works as a copy editor for McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her fiction has been published in ChiZine, Neo-opsis, AE, Tesseracts Twelve, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies,among others, and will be in the forthcoming Machine of Death 2 anthology. Her name is pronounced “SIGH-bold”.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  SHADOWS UNDER HEXMOUTH STREET

  by Justin Howe

  Yengec watched dust motes tumble across the empty apartment. No question about it—Hjel Lotspiec
h, Longmere’s polisomancer, had disappeared.

  The landlady, a towering Northland woman with braided white hair and a wooden hand, stood in the room’s center, watching him. “I told you. He left. He hired some porters last Sootday and took everything away.”

  Yengec found that fact hard to comprehend. He’d been to Hjel’s rooms often enough to remember the way the old man had doted upon the overstuffed book shelves, the rustic blackwood furniture, and the walls with their mementoes: the mounted homunculus carcass and the crossed pair of rat-sized spears.

  “Any idea where they went?” Yengec asked.

  The woman gestured downtown with her wooden hand. “That way.”

  Afterwards Yengec stood on Alabaster Street, with Longmere’s crowds swelling around him, his ears numbed by passing shudderwagons, chittering homunculi, and shouting broadsheet sellers.

  “Chaos in the Council Chamber! Wizards battle to determine Longmere’s fate!”

  Yengec bought a sheet and hopped aboard a passing omnibus. Hjel would’ve hated to hear those words. He hated the word ‘wizard’ almost as much as he hated Chief Alchemist Jurgen Trenche’s plan to ‘free’ Longmere through selective demolition. Whole neighborhoods would be destroyed as if by some rampaging dragon’s whim. Even the Curio Market District where Yengec rented rooms from a maternal cousin would be destroyed. Work crews had already put up barricades throughout the district’s graying colonnades and wood-frame houses.

  Now no one could stop it. Yengec frowned at the crowded streets beyond the omnibus’s window. Least of all a simple apprentice polisomancer.