Beneath Ceaseless Skies #165 Read online

  That was near enough her own thoughts that she didn’t argue. Friendship counted for something, even on the borderlands of the dead. They had staked so much on that.

  Semira took Endreidon’s place. She watched Aniver’s narrow chest rise and fall, mopped the sweat from his forehead and collarbone. She dampened another cloth and moistened his lips.

  He might falter, but she remained. It was her quest now as much as his. Together they’d braved half the curses of the world. Alone, she had faced Arisbat. Alone, he had faced Kahzakutri.

  And from here—?

  It was not a question she could answer by herself.

  Aniver did not awaken that day, or the next.

  * * *

  It was tempting, so temping, to just lie there and die. To slip away into the current pulling him, to flare to ash in the conflagration. To return to the hollow land he’d not quite managed to fight his way back from.

  It would be easier.

  At least there would be something left of him.

  The dead did not rest, not truly; to rest required living flesh, muscles to know the ache of exertion and to recognize resting’s ease; a mortal brain to fall quiet, to dance with dreams. Knowing that death would not relieve his exhaustion made Aniver a little more interested in living. But there remained the fact that if he lived much longer, in the sort of fashion he led...

  Kahzakutri was right. He was in danger of unmaking himself, of unweaving his very soul.

  Already he had only fragments left, held together by the will to bring Nurathaipolis back. The very grief which had spurred that resolution was gone now. So much was gone. If he was to resurrect a city—that would take more power than he contained.

  Which wouldn’t, on its own, stop him. Aniver was no longer intimidated by the impossible.

  If it was possible, though—the price of making it possible, that frightened him. Wizards valued their souls as much as anyone else.

  Among the frantic paths trod by a fever-driven mind, he found another: the straight track of a realization. If the dead could no longer lose their souls, they could no longer win them either. Could no longer have the experiences, emotions, beliefs, and hopes that shaped a person’s essence, changed them, grew them into something greater and more intricate and vaster, vaster with every day of life. If he died now, he would forever be as he was: stunted; more than that, maimed.

  So it was decided.

  Unfortunately, living proved to be a matter more complicated than simply resolving to. Consciousness slipped; became a half-thing, a twilight where each breath felt like swimming to the surface from the bottom of a well. Hot and cold wracked him in turns, and through it all, weakness like a weight threatened to draw him down through the cushions. He couldn’t summon the strength to throw his gauzy blanket off or to draw it closer as he shivered. The gauze abraded his skin. Ice trickled across his lips, sweat, and then something cleaner.

  * * *

  “He forces no one but himself to undertake these risks,” Semira told Endreidon.

  “But why do you undertake them?”

  “Because...” She wet the cloth in the cup and wrung the medicinal water over his lips. “Isn’t it worth it? To save the cities from oblivion?” And what of those still sleeping in them? She almost asked the question that had haunted her since coming to Simrandu, the question that none of the exiles seemed willing to face. Not, she thought, out of callousness. Which was why she hadn’t asked—she didn’t want to inflict that pain, reopen those wounds.

  “If they can be saved.” Endreidon looked down at Aniver’s gray face and reached for a cloth to mop away the sweat already dewing again. “I’m not certain it’s worth this.”

  “What?”

  The two of them jumped as if the walls had spoken.

  Aniver sipped more of the water Semira had left for him, and said in a somewhat clearer voice, “Worth what?”

  “You,” Endreidon said, straightforward with shock.

  Aniver blinked up at him. His gaze hardened more than it cleared. “Do you believe I’m worth more than all of Nurathaipolis?”

  “I think,” Endreidon said, “that you’re a surer thing.”

  Aniver laughed, even though he had no strength for it and could only produce a hoarse rasp like the growl of a prowling beast. Semira grasped his shoulder, trying to soothe him. She’d rarely touched his bare skin before, and today it was pale and glossy as marble and hot and moist as steam. She flinched away—but not as far as Endreidon did.

  Aniver sat up, looking around him. His chuckle died off. “Thank you for your... care of me,” he said at last. “Whatever your thoughts on my value.”

  “What are your thoughts on your value?” Endreidon asked.

  “Kahzakutri,” Aniver said, “is very upset with me. I’ve come to know Her... too well. We’re much alike.”

  “No,” Semira said.

  “At the least, we both know what it’s like to lie dying. It offers an interesting perspective.” He turned back to Endreidon. “If you want to remember me as a sure and certain thing, then leave now.”

  Without hesitation, Endreidon went to his feet.

  “Thank you,” Aniver said. Then—”Did you play for me while I was asleep?”

  “No.” He flushed. “I didn’t think to.”

  “I wish you had.” Aniver drew the blanket up higher. “I think I lost your music while I was... away. I’m sorry. I expended a number of things that I hadn’t intended to. It took more... and I had less left than I realized. I’m sorry—” But before he finished speaking, Endreidon had fled.

  “So was it worth it, to get to know the Queen better?” Semira asked.

  “Probably wise of me to scout the territory ahead first.”

  “And what’s it like?”

  “Harder,” he said, “than telling Endreidon my magic devoured his music. Just barely.” He was so exhausted his tone was leached even of dryness.

  He’d been lying half-dead for three days, summoning the wrath of the Queen of the Dead, expending pieces of his soul without realizing it; without ever intending to.

  Semira swallowed.

  “Will it be worse than Arisbat?” she asked.

  Objectively, Arisbat had been nothing. A library, haunted by sourceless fear. That was its trick. Aniver, in extremity, terrified for no reason, had left her.

  But she no longer sought the return of Nurathaipolis only for his sake, if she ever had.

  For what it was worth, he had returned then. And again, just now.

  “I came through all right,” Semira said, answering her own question.

  Aniver smiled weakly. “You could turn back.”

  “And let you go on alone?”

  “I could turn back.” His smile vanished. “Settle here with the rest of the exiles. Learn to live with my losses. Content myself with what is... certain.”

  “Listen to music again.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Or,” Semira said, “I could go on without you.”

  “You aren’t a wizard.”

  “Neither was Kahzakutri, until the end.” Until the sheer horror of death had transformed Her. Until She had remade Herself in desperation—not to save Herself; She was beyond that. But to become more than a victim of Fate.

  After Arisbat, Aniver had said that Semira had the makings of a wizard. Insofar as wizards could be made.

  At the beginning of this journey she’d fancied making herself a hero. That fancy had been lost somewhere along the way. But she still felt loyal to the idea of it.

  “You’re not even Nurathaipolean!” he said.

  “And you and Endreidon and Melviater are. Does that count for something?”

  He sighed. And smiled again, but even more faintly than the first. “You think we should go on, then?”

  “You’re deferring to my judgment?”

  “Perhaps I lost my wisdom along the way...”

  Or his strength, his courage, or any number of the things Semira had lately f
elt quite strained in herself. But she met his gaze. Almost clear now. Trusting.

  “I think,” she said, “that once we’ve come so far, it’s a waste of time to worry about how much we’ve already lost.”

  “You may be right,” he said. He reached for her hand, and she grasped his. Clammy but no longer feverish, and above that, healing scars.

  “I still have you,” he observed.

  “Are you surprised to?”

  “I would have been, once.”

  “You should rest,” she said. “Get well.”

  “I will.”

  He did, after that. Quite quickly in fact. In a few days more he was on his feet and walking the halls of Simrandu again. Semira went with him so he could grasp her arm if he needed support. He made two brief visits alone—one with Melviater, one with Endreidon.

  He never told her what happened in either of them. He was slightly more communicative about his conversation with Kahzakutri.

  “A dying woman,” Semira mused. “And you were—dying. You think you understand Her, then, based on that?”

  “I think She can be convinced,” Aniver said. He added quietly, “After all, it’s no cost to Her to bring the Polean Cities back.”

  “And She is a wizard,” Semira said tartly. “Always thinking of costs.”

  He grinned at her. It was his first grin since he had awoken from the Kingdom of the Dead, though his smiles had been rare even before that.

  The next day, they left Nurathaipolis-in-Exile, heading for the Western edge of the world.

  Copyright © 2015 Therese Arkenberg

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Therese Arkenberg writes and runs a freelance editing business from her home in Wisconsin. Her fiction has recently appeared in Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and a forthcoming issue of Ares Magazine, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including a story featuring these same characters. She blogs sporadically at ThereseArkenberg.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  DAY OF THE DRAGONFLY

  by Raphael Ordoñez

  The nighted street was a canyon of carved brownstone. It was raining.

  A young man pushed his way to the sidewalk counter and ordered a dish. The cook, a shaved ghul, began tossing sea vegetables and trilobites on the griddle. Pedestrians strode through the rain and steam beyond the circle of white light. A train rattled past on the elevated line.

  Rainwater dripped on the young man’s back. He slid forward to get further under the awning. Though of normal height, he was a pygmy next to the phylites around him. He had golden skin and golden hair and eyes like twin jades. His hands were strong and clever.

  A girl squeezed in beside him, spraying him with droplets from her poncho.

  “A sea-milk,” she said. Her voice was both girlish and peremptory. The man-beast paused to pour her a drink. She put a pin in its hand.

  “I’m looking for Keftu,” she said lowly, twirling her glass.

  The young man turned to stare at her. She was smaller than he was, with bones that looked as though they might break at a touch. Her brown hair was drawn back in a coiled braid with a white lace bow. He judged her perhaps eighteen.

  The ghul finished the plate and set it before him. He dropped a rod in the box. “Why do you want him?”

  “Someone told me he knows the Dragonfly.”

  “Who told you?” He began eating.

  “The old woman who runs the antique mart.”

  “Who sent you to her?”

  “The man who raises maugrethim for the pit fights.”

  He tapped his plate with his fork. “You’ve been plumbing the depths of Enoch tonight.”

  “How do you know I did all that tonight?”

  “I’d have heard about it otherwise.”

  “Well? Do you know him or don’t you?”

  “One rod.”

  She slid the dramach down the counter. With his fork he moved it under the rim of his plate. “I’m Keftu.”

  “I thought as much!” she spat. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  He shrugged without looking up from his eating.

  “So? Where do I find the Dragonfly?”

  “One rod.”

  She grabbed his arm. “Listen, shorty. I only have so many of those. You got your money. Now tell me where to find him.”

  He looked at her. “Why do you need him?”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  “Fair enough. But the Dragonfly’s busy. If he didn’t hide out, people would be after him all the time. He likes to make sure they’re serious before they come bothering him. What I’m asking for is earnest money.”

  She clapped the rod on the bar. He moved it beside its mate. “Follow this street to its end. Building on the left. Third story. He’ll be expecting you tomorrow morning.”

  Without another word she got up, leaving her sea-milk untasted. He waited a moment, then slipped off his stool and went after her. For a while she just drifted along with the crowds. He kept about half a block behind.

  There was an incessant commotion of mechanical hisses and screeches and groans, tramping feet, and recorded noises blaring from countless sources, but no one spoke. The downpour went on unabated. The storm drains were cataracts, carrying the water to the nearby sea. Keftu ducked his head down and thrust his arms in his tunic.

  Suddenly he realized he could no longer see her. He shouldered his way to where he’d last spotted her. An alley opened on the right. He ran down to the back street and looked out.

  The railway and crowds had been left behind. He was in an uninhabited district where the windows were like skulls’ empty eyes. The narrow streets were quiet rivers of ink.

  Something clattered. He dashed silently after it. He was just in time to see the girl going up the steps of an abandoned building. A moment later an oil lamp lit up one of the windows. The girl’s silhouette was thrown against the grimy glass. She seemed to be alone.

  The rain had slowed down. The wet street was a mirror of the sky, a river of corpse-light.

  * * *

  It was morning. Keftu stepped out of the steam lift. Sea air drifted in through the open window. Brown cliffs fell sheer from the tower’s foot to the crashing surf. Farther out, big black rocks waded in the green, glassy sea, wet with salt spray.

  The building was one of a continuous chain that ran along the cliffs. Such was Enoch, the world-city, the coast-long downtown that surrounded the sea on three sides like a giant omega. But here on Lesser Panormus, the peninsula that reached like a hand from the northern coast, this arrangement was inverted, and the ocean-girding city enclosed land instead.

  He unlocked his door and went inside. The walls were veneered with soapstone carved into square spirals and hung with relics. He opened a window and sat in his chair.

  There was motion in the adjoining room, whose outer door he always kept unlocked. “You can come in,” he called.

  The girl thrust her head through. She gasped. “You—you maugreth!”

  “Surprised?”

  “You said the Dragonfly would meet me here!”

  “He has. I am the Dragonfly.”

  “You’re lying. Why, if someone like you could help me, I’d have gotten help already, with a lot less trouble.”

  He shrugged. “You can take me or leave me. But perhaps you’ve had a description. That’s my armor over there.” He jerked his head toward a corner.

  The panoply hung on a tree—cuirass, arm guards, greaves, helmet, all of bronze, green with eld, partially burnished by blows. A dragonfly stood out on the breastplate. Moss forests flourished on the arm guards and greaves.

  “He died, most likely,” the girl said, “and you robbed his corpse. Or stole it outright from his house. You have the look of an undernourished footpad.”

  Keftu laughed. “You don’t look so well-fed yourself, at least next to phylites. Well, just as a matter of form, perhaps you’ll sit down and tel
l me what your trouble is...?”

  “Yanesa,” she said, sinking reluctantly into a chair. “People call me Yani.” She leaned forward, and said in a low, urgent voice: “I come from the City of Anadogra. I am the archon’s daughter of the House of Zim.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s in the inner city, not more than a hundred miles from here.”

  “How could it be surrounded by the city and I’ve never heard of it?”

  “Haven’t lived in Enoch long, have you?” she said. “Wait. It’s just dawned on me.” Her eyes narrowed. “Where are you from?”

  He leaned back. “Arras.”

  “Arras. I’ve heard of that. Some old story. A place in the desert.” She shook her head. “You mean to say you’re an autochthon?” She frowned.

  “We didn’t consider ourselves such. Anyway, I’m the last of them. I was the phylarch’s son, though, so perhaps even the archon’s daughter of the House of—what was it you said your House was?”

  “Zim. Of the City of Anadogra.”

  “Perhaps even the archon’s daughter of the House of Zim of the City of Anadogra might deign to take up with me without fear of sullying her hands. How large is Anadogra, by the way? Its population, I mean.”

  “Well, there’s us—me, and my father the archon, and my older sister, the heir—and the free oikoi and thralls. Perhaps fifty all told. Our traditions tell us that we dwell in the garden of man’s infancy, and that all men are our children, all lands our colonies.”

  “Uh-huh. So what’s the trouble?”

  “A year ago a worm descended out of the sky. We’d never seen anything like it. It ravaged the fruit-fields and patties.”

  “Rather selectively, I imagine,” said Keftu.

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “It wants something. The worms of Anûn don’t go in for wanton destruction. It’s just trying to make its point. Which is what?”

  “I don’t—”

  “What does the worm want?”

  “Oh. My sister. It wants to devour her. My father is to chain her to a rock the day after tomorrow. Once the worm has her it will leave us in peace.”