Beneath Ceaseless Skies #144 Read online

  Issue #144 • Apr. 3, 2014

  “Golden Daughter, Stone Wife,” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  “At the Edge of the Sea,” by Raphael Ordoñez

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  GOLDEN DAUGHTER, STONE WIFE

  by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  For skeleton, steel and stone. For life, the edge of youth and command.

  These are the things my daughter is made of. These are the things she leaves behind when the spell is gone and the wish is dead.

  * * *

  Sometimes I’d cup her chin and say that I wished her skin was like teak and her hair like the vestment of a crow, the natural shades of my lineage. And she would tell me, I would have been ugly and despised to the one whose wish bought my provenance.

  Do you think me ugly, then?

  Golem honesty, she answered. You aren’t beautiful. Neither are you ugly. And children, Mistress, must believe their mothers pretty—thus I do, imitating the limits and distortion of their perspective.

  I laughed. It was glorious to have a child such as she, frank and strange. A child that was old when we boarded the exiles’ ship. A child my wife named Areemu, her last gift to me.

  “Mistress Erhensa,” someone says. They’ve been saying that for some time, in the belief that shock has deafened me and robbed me of a voice.

  My brow to the window, Areemu’s remains in my arms. The road outside is a black ribbon, wet-sharp with frost under the halo of my seahorse lamps. An empty road. This is not a season for visitors.

  “Mistress Erhensa. The Institute of Ormodon is here to collect the golem.”

  A girl purchased her some two hundred years past. A girl gold of hair and skin, eyes like the canals after a storm. “Tell them there is no golem.”

  “But there must be, Mistress Erhensa.” This voice does not belong to my servant. “We detected the flux of its dissipation. I was dispatched immediately.”

  It’s too dim for the glass to glare, and so I’m obliged to turn. The Ormodoni is ludicrously young, ludicrously freckled, and it is an insult they’ve sent this over a gray-haired officer. Her gaze severe, her shoulders high beneath the weight of pauldrons, her stance square despite the bulk of plating. Much too proud, before age has earned her the right.

  “You must be tired from the journey,” I say, rote. There’s no journey—it is a step and a thought from the Institute of Ormodon to my domain, a requirement all practitioners must heed. Keep our doors open, or else. “We don’t often have visitors. Lais will find you a room and supper if you want it. In the morning we will talk.”

  “I’m Hall-Warden Ysoreen Zarre.”

  “I’m sure you are.” I did not ask.

  “I am to bring your answer within the night.”

  “Expectations have a way of being thwarted, Hall-Warden Zarre. Your superiors will have to understand. Over breakfast, we may discuss the golem. Or you may depart now and we may discuss nothing.”

  Who defies Ormodon; delays its enforcers? Who dares? No one wise, but lately I am past wisdom.

  “In the morning, then.” Hall-Warden Zarre turns on her heels. “I look forward to it.”

  I watch her back and watch the door shut behind her, thinking again of the girl with the pale hair. A child with no real thought between one act and the next save her own pleasure. I consider the matter of remaking and redoing, of resurrection.

  Her death is new. There is time. If one callow wish animated Areemu once, might not another bring her back?

  * * *

  Ysoreen’s gums burn, acidic, with the residue of golem death. Unlike most officers she doesn’t need Institute scryers to sense this. Gifted, they’ve always praised her; fine material for thaumaturgy. Instead she trained to understand golems, those double-edged creatures, those threats to Scre from within.

  To think Erhensa—a foreigner living on sufferance—would treat an Ormodoni as she has; to think Ysoreen did not teach the sorcerer her place. This failure stays sour on her tongue and keeps her from tasting the foods. They are foreign: a tea red as garnets, pastry that crumbles at a glance, a smell of cardamom and tropical fruits. An island to the west, bordering turquoise sea under a gilded sky; so she’s heard. She does not believe, for if there exists such a paradise, why would Erhensa be here? The reality would be a patch of territory off the coast, mired in gray silt.

  But Erhensa’s fancy has been given part-life in the piscine gazes blinking at her from between mosaic tiles, in the murals moving out of the corner of her eye. Figures in the distance balanced impossibly on the crests of tides; birds slashing through a burnished horizon.

  Ysoreen sleeps against an unpainted wall, pulling the blankets over herself, breathing her own leathers and steel. Tomorrow she will confront; tomorrow she will demand. Ormodon assumes efficiency in its operatives, and she’s armed to subdue wayward sorcerers. In this house she is no one’s lesser.

  She is up before dawn may warm the room and wake the fish. She straightens out the sheets and coverlets so no imprint of her may linger in the creases. She drinks from a bedside jug and rinses her mouth. When the manservant comes she is ready.

  He takes her to the garden with its outland trees, its high walls of iron and lazuli. So high the world outside may not be seen; so high the house seems its own dominion, the islander its queen.

  She comports herself like that too, as though the bushes are her throne and the scarlet ixora her maids. The sun glances off the darkness of her skin so she seems chiseled, more wood than life. Within the circumference of Erhensa’s power, the rime stays out and the flowers thrive.

  The sorcerer does not rise; barely stirs as Ysoreen approaches. In her lap is a clear casket holding loose gemstones, platinum filigrees, a fistful of thread.

  Ysoreen points at the box. “I’ll be taking that, Mistress Erhensa.”

  “This is a collection of baubles, nothing more.”

  “I am not unschooled.” This specific golem is a common choice of study for its unusual construction, and she has read the manuscript of its creation; more than can be said of the islander. “Nevertheless it is law, and by law the golem never truly belonged to you. As all constructs it belongs to the Institute, and so does its material.”

  A smile on those thin, lined lips. “Technically I brought my golem with me when I came to Scre, but of course I’ve agreed to your laws. What do you do with their parts? It can’t be avarice that drives you to collect—were this one baked of mud and silt you’d have demanded the same.”

  “Yours is not the place to question.”

  “As you will,” Erhensa says. “Allow me to make you a gift, as amends for making you wait a whole night. Fox fur imparts excellent warmth and will make the season more tolerable.”

  Ysoreen’s teeth click together. Protocols force her to accept tribute from any sorcerer, so long as the object inflicts no harm or malice. “Fox fur, in this weather?”

  “I was hoping you would hunt. Inconsiderate of me to ask of a guest, but I’m no good at the business of tracking and conquering animal wits, a task that perhaps better suits you.”

  The insult needles, but Ysoreen does not react. She is stone, Erhensa less than wind.

  * * *

  I watch her through the bright, clear eyes of a fox. You see the world differently this way, closer to the ground, sight plaited from smells, nose to soil and snow. A fox’s mind is so wide, made of simple geometry and immediate needs.

  The fox sniffs and tosses its head. She comes.

  I lied to the Hall-Warden: the hunt is no mystery to me. It is different here in a country that know
s no frost, where predators and prey do not have to contend with a chill that would shrivel the lungs and bruise the cheeks. But there are certain principles in common, certain rhythms that aren’t so unlike. A need for subtlety, a requirement for finesse.

  Ysoreen Zarre disregards them all. Her boots stamp deep prints, and she marches without care for tracks or stealth. She is unerring in her pursuit, and though I make the fox give her a good and worthy chase, she never loses the sense of where it is, where it heads.

  It is fleet, but she is fleeter. It is clever, but she is cleverer. It tires long before she does, heaving on its legs.

  When she has pierced its side with arrows, is she aware I am watching? Her knife cuts abrupt and efficient, opening its belly: entrails steaming in the snow and flecking her gloved wrist.

  The fox’s vitals push their final beat, and my sight extinguishes in smears of blood and heat.

  * * *

  Erhensa nods when the manservant brings her the fur, cleaned and scented and brushed to a sheen.

  Ysoreen sits by as the sorcerer works. “A description of the golem in your own words?”

  “Your Institute is obsessed with cataloguing everything, reducing the world to verbiage. It’s no way to be.” Erhensa leans back into her cushions. “Her name was Areemu. It was something else once—a thing bleached as summer-beaten bone, frail as sun-baked clay—but when one takes on a child, it’s correct to recast her a little.”

  “Golems are servitors, Mistress Erhensa. You do not call a shovel your daughter.”

  “Golems,” the sorcerer says, “are vessels of wishes. When you’re done building one it is as if you’ve given birth. When you take one in it is as if you’ve adopted new kin. You put so much of what you want into them, just as with offspring of the womb. Less blood, less mess. No less love.”

  Erhensa has threaded copper wire through the fur. She has quick, nimble fingers; Ysoreen finds herself entranced by their speed. She pushes away from that and jots into a little book. Surrogate daughter. “Who made the golem?”

  “Have you ever wished for something fiercely, desperately, only to discover that the world does not contain it?”

  “No.”

  “You must’ve led a perfect life. A loving family, a good wife.”

  “I’ve no more need for a wife than I do a second head—less, since a second head could guard my back.”

  Erhensa laughs. “So many ardor-notes must’ve crumpled under your heel. But Areemu, yes. There was a girl. A princess or the daughter of a puissant magistrate. She was beautiful, it is written. Eyes like the glaze of honey on scarab wings. A little like yours.”

  She’s less than wind. But there’s no stopping the rush of blood, no hiding the surge of heat. Like her mothers and sisters, Ysoreen is one of the best to have graduated from the Academy of Command. One of the best, save her unruly moods. She tries too hard, they told her; as long as she fights herself, as long as she pours effort into suppressing rather than understanding, she will be like this. “My eyes are no such thing. What would a princess want with a golem? She couldn’t possibly lack for slaves.”

  “She wanted a lover.”

  “Then she must’ve been brutishly ugly.” A relief; the thought of being compared to a hideous girl sits better on Ysoreen than the opposite.

  “Hardly. Areemu could not lie, and she said the girl was so lovely she might stop the stars in their tracks. She had suitors uncountable. A duchess who wooed her with a gift of elephants and birds of paradise. An arctic queen who sent a chariot pulled by white tigers and an ice house that never melted. A witch who enchanted an entire aviary for her, so the birds would always sing and never die. To each the princess said no, and no again. She’d been told all her short life that she was perfect, and she would take nothing less than perfect for her consort.”

  The volume Ysoreen read was a golemist’s manual: formulae and procedure rather than history. It doesn’t mention from whence came the commission, whether there was a princess or whether she was coveted. Erhensa’s tale may well be apocryphal. She records, all the same.

  “Her mother sent for conjurers instead of suitors. The best thaumaturgists in the land and several lands surrounding. From east and west they came, from north and south they journeyed, to prove themselves supreme among their kind and make for her a paramour. One who would not betray, one who would be gallant to her always, one who would never weep come what may. What woman of mortal matter could do so much?”

  Wish fulfillment, Ysoreen adds. It’s a common motive to buy a golem; perhaps the most common. Surrogate parent. Surrogate child. And lovers, always lovers. Left unchecked half the nation of Scre would have been golems.

  Erhensa shifts the fox away from her lap. Even her magic is alien. She has not murmured an incantation, dropped a pinch of powder or struck crystals together, but somehow she’s liberated a triangle of fur from the rest. A perfect isosceles, as though measured with ruler and ink. “The true challenge was volition. She did not want a mute toy which would come when called, say yes when asked, kiss her when pressed. The princess wanted to be loved back truly.”

  “Not likely,” Ysoreen says. “Golems don’t have emotions. They can pretend, if it’s inscribed into their cores. Nothing more.”

  “I’m glad you know so much about golems. It is enlightening. They must give you a peerless education that you may know such subjects better than practitioners.”

  “I have made golems my study.”

  “Is that so? Ah, it seems I’ve run out of feathers. Will you bring me some? I’m a stranger to the way of winged things, the difficulties of ensnaring and capturing. An owl will do, Hall-Warden. Something gray, with a coat like velvet.”

  * * *

  You see the world differently as a bird, so much closer to the sky. Thought is like the center of a yolk, sloshing within a brittle shell. Bones so light, sinews so lean.

  I reach from the inside and make this one a girl.

  The confoundment is partial; her shoulders flare into wings rather than arms, and her stare remains amber, dark-seeing and immense. Feathers give her modesty, shrouding her skull in place of human tresses.

  She flits from branch to branch. Hardly any skin on her; hardly any hip or breast. Ysoreen sees through the guise, as she must. Does she pause, does she hesitate? For the length of a blink.

  The fox was fast, but it was a slash of red on sunlit snow. The girl-owl is gray nearing black and the moon is a half-lidded eye. The Hall-Warden must keep her gaze trained skyward; keep her feet firm on the wet mulch.

  The owl grins down and laughs into her wings.

  In the end she falls too, an arrow’s fletching in her belly, for Ysoreen does not permit herself failure. The Hall-Warden stands over the girl who is slowly reverting to an owl. Her knuckles drag over her face, and this time her knife is not so swift.

  She makes small noises in her throat as she dismembers and flays. The knife-point plunges into the owl-girl’s eyes, and my sight burns out in a flash of steel and moonlight.

  * * *

  Ysoreen jolts into a morning so white it blinds her and for a moment she pants into the glare, blinking down tears.

  The smell of blood clings. There is no help for it; she fills the brass tub and strips. The lidded jug is warm and the water steams, an enchanted courtesy. When she sinks into the bath the scent of foreign flora rise. Citrus. Her mind drifts and snags on the thought of Erhensa’s fingers. Long, elegant, tapered like candles.

  She pulls herself up short and out of the bath. The sorcerer turned an owl into a woman to do—what? Annoy and disturb. Quickly she dresses, slotting and strapping on the armor. When the manservant comes only the stains on the floor where water has dripped mark Ysoreen’s indulgence.

  Erhensa is busy with the charm, sewing feathers into the lattice of copper wire and fur. Her needle flashes, disappearing and reappearing. “It’ll be a fine thing. Not so often do I make these with such attention, with such fresh ingredients.”

 
; “Using magic against an Ormodoni officer is misconduct that merits execution.”

  “Putting on slightly unusual clothes is enough to have me put in chains, Hall-Warden Zarre, so must we go over such tedious minutiae? No harm was done and none was meant.”

  Anyone else Ysoreen would have cut short and confronted with the exact penalties for their offense. She’d have disabled them and brought them to the Institute, there to be stripped of their properties and status, there to be fettered and their magic ripped out. The crime warrants that and more.

  Instead she kneels in the grass, where each blade comes up to her shoulder and casts a stripe on her cheeks. Why allow Erhensa to believe that the owl moved her. It was only a bird.

  “Permit me to continue where I left off,” says Erhensa. “Areemu was the labor of two sisters, a goldsmith and a carpenter who dabbled in alchemy. They wouldn’t have recognized a formal axiom if it sank teeth into their ankles. A convocation of scholars, and they were bested by a pair of tradeswomen.” Erhensa’s mouth curves, wicked. “Imagine the insult of it.”

  Ysoreen’s lips twist as though yoked to the islander’s amusement. She straightens them at once.

  “They made her out of the most delicate filigrees but also gave her a spine extracted from a rare and special ore: strong as steel but weightless, lustrous as silver but untarnishing. They enameled her skin and shielded her joints in diamonds. For might she not be the princess’ knight as well as her darling?”

  Made for combat, Ysoreen writes. It matches the two sisters’ journal. Anywhere, any time, there’s always a thaumaturgist investing in the idea of an army that knows no pain or disobedience.

  “Areemu was presented before the court. The princess had been taught: you are the fairest and none may compare, you are the moon and the stars while all else are candlelight. Yet here Areemu shone, a sun.” Erhensa sets the charm down. “You had too little sleep, didn’t you?”

  Because she dreamed, all night, of a girl who was a bird. She dreamed of driving the blade into eyes too enormous, of tearing out a heart too small and holding it in her fist still beating, always beating. A clot of nausea, a tactile memory. “It is nothing. I’m the mistress of my flesh and it my slave, not the other way around.”