Beneath Ceaseless Skies #12 Read online

  “In my viewing room,” he said, stroking his beard.

  Phylly darted forward and seized Reg’s hand, but he shook her off so that she fell to the floor. A tiny green feathered head peered out from his collar. My hand throbbed at the very sight of it. I wanted, no, needed, something, but could not say what.

  “This is another world,” Bella said. “Another place, not the one of your birth at all.” She tried to smile, but it looked out of place on her strained face.

  Phylly picked herself up. “Aren’t you coming with us?” she asked Reg.

  He stood up from the divan, and I realized he was taller than he’d been just the night before. His face had lost its roundness, his bones become heavier, as though he’d grown—older.

  “What? So I can put myself under that Nanny creature’s tiresome authority again?” His lip curled. “I think not.”

  “But—” Phylly hovered on the brink of tears. “You’re our brother. You belong with us.”

  Reg turned to gaze out the windows, which were remarkably similar to those of the orangery. Out in the darkness of this foreign night, I could see the glowing colors again, like flowers composed of fire instead of petals. “I shall never go back, so there’s no use in pestering me about it.” The strega slithered out of his collar to coil about his neck like a jeweled green collar.

  Mirnas laughed. “I think you should go back,” he said, “at least for a time. It might be amusing.”

  Reg whirled on him. “You know that’s impossible!”

  He was older than even I was, now, I realized numbly. Time didn’t pass at the same rate in this other place, and in the space of a single night he had become the eldest.

  “Come back,” I said, “please.”

  “Yes, go.” Mirnas waved him off. “I command you.”

  Bella fell at Reg’s feet, head bowed, satiny black hair cascading down to hide her face. “Caro, try, please! You know it’s no use. He’ll have his way in the end.” One hand stole up to caress his ankle as though stroking a cat. “He always does!”

  Reg flinched from her touch, trembling. How old was he now, I wondered. Fifteen? Sixteen? “It needn’t be forever,” I said in a calm voice that belied my eagerness. I reached out to him. “Just for tonight. You can come back here tomorrow, or whenever you like.”

  The strega around his neck hissed, the feathers standing up in a ruff around its head like the hood of a cobra. Need pulsed through me, an appetite for something unnameable. I jerked back and cradled my marked hand against my breast.

  His shirt slipped down, revealing a similar mark at the tender juncture where neck and shoulder met, three concentric circles of emerald that glowed as though illuminated beneath the skin. These were older than mine and much more healed, resembling an odd green birthmark rather than a wound.

  He saw me looking and laughed. “Yes, it burns, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s just a bite,” I said, though my hand was shaking and I attempted to conceal it in the folds of my skirts. “It will fade in time.”

  “Not this bite,” Reg said, “though some bear its stigmata better than others.” He looked over his shoulder at the man. “Isn’t that right, Mirnas?”

  The man scowled and turned away, his face flushed.

  “Anyway, we just want Phylly now to have a complete set.” Reg eased the strega from around his neck and held the slim green creature out to her. “As I recall, on that night so long ago, you were first to pick him up. It should have been you all along.”

  Phylly stared, her eyes wide, either in fascination or horror, I could not tell which. “Don’t!” I reached to pull her back.

  Mirnas was at my side in two quick strides and prevented me from reaching my sister. His fingers dug into the tender flesh of my arms. “It is the price of coming here,” he said into my ear with a hot exhalation of tobacco-breath. “You, all of you, chose this place.”

  I tried to free myself, but could not. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing! She’s just a child!”

  “As are you,” he said. “As were we all, each and each, when this dark land first called to us.”

  I didn’t feel like a child. I felt old and worn, far beyond my years. Fear streaked through my veins. “Phyllida Regina Hamilton Darcy,” I said, mimicking Nanny’s fussy tone as nearly as possible, “go upstairs to bed this instant!”

  She looked at me then, hazel eyes huge in her pale little face. I could see the logic assembling itself in her seven-year-old brain: Reg and I both bore the strega’s mysterious mark, and in all her short life, she’d never consented to being left out of anything.

  “You were such an ugly little boy,” a voice hazed with cracks said from the darkness back by the orangery door. “I always knew you would come to no good end.”

  I turned, but Mirnas would not release me. “Nanny?”

  “He had a monkey, you know,” she said, making her way through the maze of potted trees, allowing none of the leaves to brush her clothing. “A vile, dirty creature. I warned his father, Lord Alderoy, that no good would come of allowing vermin in the nursery. In the end, I found them, beast and child, to be much of a kind.”

  Bella looked up from her knees. “Oh, Nanny!” she said, and her voice was filled with longing. “It’s been such a long time.”

  “And, you,” Nanny said, coming into the light of that other room. She held a cut-glass tumbler half-filled with clear liquid in one hand and gazed down at the beautiful Bella. “You had such promise, for a foreign child. As long as you kept your mouth closed, no one would have known you were not English. You might have made a very good marriage, had you employed your assets to their best advantage.”

  Bella bit her lip and looked away.

  “What is it about this dreary place that calls children so strongly?” Nanny gazed about at the draperies and silk, the expensive carpets piled one upon the other. “I couldn’t wait to escape, when I was your age, to live in the clean, bright sun of a world that knew seasons. You always have the best of everything in your own world, and yet, one after the other, you inevitably abandon it all to come here!”

  “How did you do it?” Mirnas gazed at her with a terrible hunger in his black eyes. “How did you cross the barrier? Tell us the secret!”

  “It’s a little trick I learned,” she said, “a subtle shading of the heart.” She sipped from her glass. “But you have to possess a heart, and as was evident to all who knew you, even in the nursery, you have none.”

  Mirnas dragged me back. “See to your puling infants, madam!” he said to Nanny over his shoulder. “You’re not wanted here!”

  “It’s too late, isn’t it?” She ran a hand over the orange tree leaves so that they rustled. “You’re all quite, quite lost, aren’t you?”

  “Not Phylly!” I said as Mirnas threw me onto the divan. “She can still go back!”

  “No!” Phylly cried. “I want to stay with you!”

  “And we must have our Phylly,” Reg said with the quirk of one eyebrow. He raised the strega again. “What ever would we do without her?”

  I put a hand to my bruised arm. A few feet away, Phylly was stretching her hand out, strangely mesmerized, as the creature hissed. I felt the surge of my mark’s hunger again, terrifying in its unquantifiableness. It was unnatural, wrong, tainting.

  The strega’s neck feathers flared. I could see the glitter in its tiny black eyes and struggled up from the divan, reaching Reg’s side in two quick strides. Bella watched from the floor as I seized the loathsome beast with both hands and broke its back with a strong twist. It writhed, lashing its tail, then went limp.

  “No!” Mirnas struck me to the carpet. My fingers dug into the purple and black pile as I struggled to rise. Only a stride away, I could see that Phylly’s feet still stood on white tile bordered in blue and gold.

  The orangery faded, along with Nanny and my sister. I was left alone with Mirnas, Bella, Reg, and the strega’s broken body.

  Its feathers were falling away, two and thre
e at a time, like autumn leaves from a tree. Its eyes dulled, and green ichor trailed from its open mouth.

  “Now—” said Bella brokenly. “Now—”

  But she never completed the thought.

  Much later, though, I would understand she actually had.

  * * *

  Sometimes, when I can bring myself to hum Nanny’s wretched tune, I see the orangery and Phylly, wandering the avenues between the trees, her face stricken. Time is different there. To her, I know we’ve only just gone, while here, the better part of a year has already passed.

  It’s always night in this eerie land, though it possesses five moons of various sizes, and their combined light allows the vegetation, such as it is, to grow and bear. But I find it strange never to see the sun rise, never to feel its heat on my face or see the seasons turn. It’s as though we are mired in some strange eternal twilight and never quite awake.

  We live in what can only be termed a palace, full of rich furniture and servants with an oddly feral cast to their features, and we’re served exotic meals, strawberries and cream, truffles, along with other delicacies which do not exist in our world, though I have no idea who supports such extravagance.

  The flowers in these gardens are made of living flame, as I first thought, beautiful to gaze upon, heavy with fragrance, but strangely without warmth. If you touch them, they burn your skin with a cold that eats away at your heart. I have learnt to take great care in approaching them. In the dark skies overhead, bizarre elongated beasts fly, crying out. I think perhaps they are kin to that dreadful strega.

  And though many fruits grow here, tart as well as sweet, always I crave oranges, of which there are none.

  Reg, who has grown so tall and serious, walks the gardens with me occasionally, but seldom can be prevailed upon to speak. Having been here longer, he knows more about this place than I do, but seems to blame me for our exile.

  That brute Mirnas has gone for now, reportedly traveling the foreign reaches of this world in search of another strega, but there are many others in residence here, men and women, children, some from our world, some from others, all lured here at some point by some agency I have never met and cannot imagine.

  Nanny evidently numbered among them at one time, the product of a liaison between two residents, but then found her way into our world. I wonder where the strega marked her and how she managed to conceal it all those years.

  My own mark’s hunger grows ever more savage, and it seems, like Mirnas, I am one of those who does not “bear it well,” as Reg says. I believe it’s the hunger for our former lives, which we can never again possess, unless we learn the fashion of Nanny’s escape, and so far, she is the only one ever to do so.

  And for her, it was different. She was born here as we were not. For the rest of us, I am told if we surrender our desire to return to what we once were, the mark loses its ability to torment. I think, to some measure, in the years since Reg translated to this realm, he has achieved that state of mind.

  I fear I never will.

  Copyright © 2009 K.D. Wentworth

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  K.D. Wentworth has sold more than seventy pieces of short fiction to such markets as F&SF, Hitchcock’s, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Sword and Sorceress 23, Witch Way to the Mall, and Return to the Twilight Zone. Three of her stories have been Finalists for the Nebula Award. Currently she has seven novels in print, the most recent being The Course of Empire, written with Eric Flint and published by Baen. Her forthcoming book (also co-written with Eric Flint) is tentatively titled The Honor of Empire. She lives in Tulsa with her husband and a combined total of one hundred sixty pounds of dog (Akita + Siberian Hussy). Visit her website at http://www.kdwentworth.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  UNREST

  by Grace Seybold

  Papa says often you will be looking for one thing and find another, and Papa is very wise and often right, for I was looking out for trolls in the pasture when I saw the soldiers instead.

  We see soldiers often, because the road between Kulosep and the Hado runs along the northeast edge of our farm. The Kuloseppae are very tall and paint their faces in war, and carry long spears. The Suhado wear helmets like birds’ heads and their women fight. We are neither. We are Esh. We were here before the armies came.

  These soldiers were Kuloseppae and they were off the road and coming across the field. I could have hidden but three dozen sheep could not, and if all they wanted was provisions and they stole a sheep because there was no-one nearby to buy it from, Papa would be angry. Instead I rang the night bell, and stood in place as they came.

  “Where’s your father, boy?” one asked as they stopped just past the sheep fence. His face was unpainted, which I took as a good sign. We had not heard of a war, but one’s first news might well be a night fire or a knife. So Papa says, and so he listens to the wind.

  “Coming, honoured sir,” I told the soldier, hoping it was true. For good measure and to seem eager to please I rang the bell again. The sheep stirred uneasily, butting against each other. I felt the same. Sheep are not clever as people are clever, but they are not stupid as city people think. We Esh understand these things. I felt the threat in the wind and the dark, whispering in my ears like a hungry ghost, and I stood and waited longingly for Papa.

  He came out from the house soon, his coat over his shoulders and a cudgel swinging from one hand. Once I saw him kill a full-grown troll with it, smashing its ribs with his first blow and then caving in the back of its head as it doubled over. Now as he saw the soldiers his posture shifted a little, became more shuffling and slumped. Just an old farmer, worried about his sheep. We Esh have been here a long, long time.

  I went back to watching the sheep, a few of whom had decided to make a foray along the fence toward the trees. As I was urging them back to the flock and away from where trolls could be hiding, I heard Papa sob, once, as though trying not to. They will take one of the sheep without paying, then, I thought. Papa is a great bargainer, but he is wise enough not to argue too far.

  “Tekel,” he said to me when I came back within earshot, while the soldiers grinned at each other, “you will go with these men.”

  I could not understand. The words were sounds only, without meaning. Papa would not send me away, not ever. I had misunderstood. I touched the fence, the back of one of the sheep, my father’s sleeve, seeking reassurance in solidity. He moved away, and the world shifted.

  They told me then that they were a recruiting party, and that the laws had been changed so that Esh and all who lived between Kulosep and the Hado were now citizens of one or the other. As citizens of Kulosep it was the duty of all able-bodied males to serve a term in the army, but in their kindness they would allow one man of the new citizens to serve for all his family.

  “You’re lucky you’re not on the Hado side, boy,” the speaker added. “They’d take you both and your mama too. War’s coming.”

  “Esh do not fight in wars,” I said numbly, and they laughed again.

  “Well, you’ll be the first, then, won’t you? Come on, boy, say goodbye to your daddy and let’s get moving.”

  Then I understood, and seeing my father’s face knew I was right. If war was coming, someone would have to keep Mama and my little brothers safe, and if I refused to go, they would take Papa instead. And would I, Tekel, fifteen years old, keep looters from our doorstep or lead our family to safety if the farm burned? No, Papa must stay, and I must go.

  Then it was darkness around me and a long walk through the night, and finally a cleared place where other men and other boys slept bewildered sleep. I wondered where we were going, and if I would see the walls and towers of Kulosep tomorrow or in days to come. I had never wanted to leave the farm, but if this was to be my life, let it at least be filled with marvels. Let me yield to fate and be borne up by it, like a plucked leaf that soars far from the tree. It is no disgrace, to yield to fate.

  We ar
e Esh, after all. We understand these things.

  * * *

  You’d think the damned greenies would teach these poor kids not to sleep on watch, first thing. He was leaning on his spear when I got up to the sentry-line, and I could tell even in the dark he was a new one, because he was out on his feet and didn’t wake up when I came up behind him. When you’ve been out awhile you learn the trick of sleeping so lightly a dragonfly on your shoulder wakes you.

  Not that I ever sleep on watch. No sir.

  Didn’t wake up even when I came up behind him and dropped my wire over his head. Garotte’s a quiet way to kill if you can manage it, that or a stab in the kidneys. Don’t ask me what kidneys have to do with not screaming, but it works, ask anybody.

  Left him and the next one and the next all in a nice pile under some bushes, after I took the trophies. That part I hate, I’m not ashamed to tell you. Leave a soldier some dignity, let the family have a body to weep over that looks like their boy or girl, not one so hacked up they’ve got only the sergeant’s word who they’re burying. You think when I die I want my mama looking down at me and telling them “No sir, that’s not my daughter, I don’t believe you?” But orders are orders and we were told to scare the bastards, so we did.

  No idea why they were out recruiting along the highway anyways. That’s what they were doing, we knew it, we’d been following them for days. I’ve been out with recruiting parties before, yes sir, but the farmers between Kulosep and Hado-home were supposed to be exempt. We’re not stupid; we know who grows our bread. If the damned greenies had been able to offer them something, or threaten them with something, to make them take sides (and I’ve talked to Esh and I can’t for the life of me figure out what that would be) we needed to stamp the whole thing out as hard as possible.

  So: the recruits died. By now the rest of our squadron would have done their parts. Adadaro and Omibibiro were sneaking into the camp itself to kill all the new boys who were sleeping, while the rest, me included, took out those on watch. That was most of them. It was part of their training, I get that, but still stupid not to have somebody keeping an eye on them. But by now I don’t expect greenies to be too smart. Tricky, sure, they’re tricky as all hell, but stupid.