Beneath Ceaseless Skies #12 Read online

  “Who’s there?” I asked aloud, attracting a curious glance from a passing ribbon-seller.

  Thibo, the voice said after a pause, but hesitantly, as though the speaker wasn’t quite sure and was desperately afraid of being called on it. Thibo. I was—

  We are his dead, a second voice interjected. This one was stronger, surer. You must come. You must stop him.

  “The gate—” I began.

  He will not see you. Come.

  I followed it (followed what, exactly? I don’t know) back to the gate and through it then, the twin portals swinging inward at my touch. The grass beyond was level and unbroken, and lapped at my ankles like a sea. Come, follow, the voice urged, hurry, and led me forward, until suddenly the house appeared before me and had always been there. There was a murmur of approval from the air. Steadfastly I followed the two voices, the strong one and the frightened one, through illusion after illusion, until at last I stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs, facing a copper-sheathed door.

  The door was slick and cold to the touch, and as I opened it a sudden reddish light poured over me, and I knew with sick certainty that all that had come before was a trap, that I was betrayed and had now been lost. I froze in place, terrified. Then my sight shifted, and I realized that the light was only sunset, filtered through leaded glass windows set high in the heavy walls, and that the magician sat motionless on the floor of this his workroom, eyes closed and unaware.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I whispered, my lips barely moving.

  We do not cooperate, the strong voice answered, sounding strained. He tries to make us. The other was whimpering: oh God oh God it hurts make it stop I shouldn’t be here I didn’t do it stop—

  I had to hurry, but I couldn’t think what to do. My eyes fell on a bronze-bladed knife, lying on a table near me. Kill him, then, I thought, and reached for it, but was stopped by a sharp No! from the strong voice, now tight with agony. No, he’ll—just—his power is— It broke off with a peculiar kind of grunt, and was silent.

  Magic, I thought despairingly, what do I know about magic? The magician’s shoulders were tight and his fists clenched as he bent all his energy to the control of his unruly spirits. Any moment now it would all be over. Time was slipping away from me. If I couldn’t just kill him—and I did understand what the ghost had been trying to say; if the magician’s power came from boundaries and borders, liminal spaces, then how much stronger would the nearness of his own death make him?—then what was I to do? I knew nothing about magic. I had spent almost my entire life in the temple, and there was no magic of his kind on holy ground.

  Holy ground—

  Cautiously, I bent down and laid my hands on the stone floor. There was no warning from the ghost this time, so either I was doing the right thing or he had been wholly subdued. I began to speak the holy words and I think it was only then that the magician noticed me, as I began to try to consecrate the earth on which I stood. I would make it pure and holy; I doubted few things could be more anathema to a practitioner of border magic than that. I don’t claim the supremacy of God in this; had I known a way to make it entirely unholy, that probably would have worked just as well.

  He sent his shadows against me like a swarm of biting insects, like a cloud of darkness, and in their whining voices I could hear the strong one and the frightened one, two notes in the chorus, under his control again at last. They still fought against him, though, and that blunted their attacks, and I was able to continue with the prayers and the rituals and all the rest of what makes a place pleasing to God. I kept one eye on the magician, whenever I was not blinded, but he never moved. I don’t know why. Maybe the magic prevented him, or the ghosts; I don’t understand magic and I don’t intend to. I will never be in such a place again if I can help it.

  The ghosts were fighting him as much as me, and that was all that allowed me to keep going, that and the sheer familiarity of the rituals that had been part of my life since I was given to the Bound and that I probably could have recited sleeping or dead. As a child I had chafed at the endless rounds of prayers and resented the other children who had never known anything different and so didn’t mind, but now the words flowed from me like water and I was grateful.

  It was dark outside when I finished and so the light that poured through the room, dark gold and thick like maple syrup, was all the more shocking. I had not been ready to expect a miracle. The magician lifted his head and for the first time stared at me, his face twisted with terror. His mouth shaped words I couldn’t read, and then he stiffened and collapsed forward, his face striking the stone. Blood seeped out around him, only a little.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  He had to choose a side, the strong voice whispered, now barely more than a flutter of the air. You cannot be both alive and dead in a holy place, and we—we chose for him, dragged him with us. The light was fading, thinning. Tell my family, Priestess, if you would. I was called Tekel, before. They are Esh, near Stonegate on the Kulosep highway. Tell them what happened. Please.

  As though in a trance I stood and went out from that place. The house was quiet now in the centre of its green lawn and its walls, only an ordinary house. I would come back, I decided. I would go to the Esh family and give them the news of their son (brother? husband?) and then I would return, and build a chapel here, and spend my life in contemplation of this miracle.

  Or, more probably, I would be denied entrance to Hado-home, or arrested as a traitor. Life is strange, I thought, but I was more willing now to put it in the hands of God than I would ever have been before. I looked back over my shoulder one last time, and then headed for the city gate.

  * * *

  strange cub is gone. howl, weep, cry to the hills and stones, they have taken strange cub away. followed them, followed them far, but when they left the woods, safe trees broken by scar of road, stayed. weep alone now, weep alone forever.

  dark now and under hill silence of small things, small fears running from tree to tree. hunger, blood smell. could chase but why? not enough now.

  down scar in backbone of hills one comes riding. no smell of fear. only ones with claws of iron smell brave and calm as she smells brave and calm. but she is alone and no smell of metal. do not understand.

  do not understand, should pass her by. should stay in trees, find small wet delicious, fill belly, sleep. but strange cub gone, last cub. others long dead, dead on riverbank or by claws of iron or belly-tearing sickness. wander alone until strange cub crying under tree. not food. iron claws never good to eat. iron claw woman die near once, find strange cub soon after.

  kill iron claw woman now, other iron claws bring strange cub back?

  * * *

  I have never told Daphel just how frightened I am of the dark. I was born in the city amid lamps and walls, and the wide blackness of the fields and woods is fearsome to me even after thirty years of nights.

  But Daphel is ill and Nicos and Tamevall are not yet grown, and Tekel has gone for a soldier. If Daphel knew the night frightened me he would get up from his sickbed and stand the watch himself, and so I say nothing and sit here in the field, my back to the lantern so as not to blind myself and the bleating of the flock all around me. Two more weeks until the lambing is done and the dogs will be enough to care for the sheep. I am so tired.

  A sudden movement in the dark jerks me fully awake, and I stare out into the dark, lifting the lantern high overhead, careful not to look directly at it. Nothing. Shadows. The sheep mill uneasily, a few of them lifting their heads to smell at the air. The dogs lie at my feet, asleep.

  There it is again: motion at the edge of sight, out near the road. A man-high figure creeping from tree to tree. It could be a lone traveller, a refugee from the war maybe (more and more common on our highway of late), but no man or woman ever walked with that peculiar shambling gait. My skin prickles: troll.

  I nudge the dogs awake with my foot and take a firmer grip on my quarterstaff. No reason to panic, or to reac
t even, not unless it comes into our field. We will have to get up a hunting party with our neighbours eventually if there is a troll nosing around who has lost his fear of humans, but it does not need to be tonight. No fear of falling asleep now. I watch.

  Then I hear the screams and am halfway across the field before I know it, staff in one hand, lantern in the other and both dogs yipping at my heels. Terrible screams from the road: horse, rider. I swing the lantern in wide arcs, trying to frighten the troll away, though they have been less afraid of fire in recent years. They learn, Daphel says. They are almost people, that way.

  The troll turns and flees, arms dragging, full of prizes. Horseflesh, I see as I come to the road: huge bloody chunks have been torn from the horse’s belly and hindquarters, and it thrashes in the road, screaming, still horribly alive. I bring down the end of my staff solidly on its skull. To ease its suffering, I tell myself, knowing it cannot live, but I think I might have done the same even for a lesser wound, just to make it quiet. I do not know.

  The rider was a woman, white robes stained now with blood—the horse’s only, I think at first, and perhaps she has merely been thrown. Then I shine the lantern on her face and see bloody froth at her lips, blood bubbling from the gashes along her ribs: lung wounds then, and beyond my help. Trolls kill messily but surely.

  She looks up at me, tries to form words. “Hush,” I tell her. “Rest now.” Her face is slack with pain. “It’s gone,” I say.

  “Too late,” she manages.

  I nod. “Yes.” We are Esh; we do not lie to the dying. “But I can make you comfortable at least. I’ll bring you back to the house; you can sleep by the fire.” There is little enough else that can be done; I have none of the herbs that ease pain or send souls on. If by some miracle she lives until dawn I will send one of the children for the healer then, and he can smooth her passing.

  She smiles, shakes her head. “No use.” Her lips are blue under the blood. She knows. “Esh,” she says. “Tekel,” she says, and dies.

  Shaken, I reach for her arm as though to pull her back, and feel rough skin under the robes: old scars, burns, long healed. For some reason I am reminded of another traveller, long ago, a little girl fleeing a burning house, running out into our pilgrim-train. She would have become a priestess when she grew up, I think. It is not impossible.

  Tekel, she said, and I wonder what she shares with my son. Perhaps he will come riding home along this road someday, and wonder where this priestess is. We are borne up by fate like leaves on the wind, and sometimes carried home.

  Copyright © 2009 Grace Seybold

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  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 twice in Beneath Ceaseless Skies,among others, and will be in the forthcoming Machine of Death 2 anthology. Her name is pronounced “SIGH-bold”.

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  COVER ART

  “Endless Skies,” by Rick Sardinha

  Rick Sardinha is a professional illustrator/fine artist living and working on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island. His passion is to create in traditional oil media, however, he is just as comfortable in front of a computer and often uses multiple disciplines in the image creation process. More of his work can be seen at http://www.battleduck.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

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