The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight

  “Children of Ru!” she panted. “You must go now! They have set the precinct afire!”

  “Are you going to release me, too?” one of them called up.

  “No,” said the jailor, assuming it was me. “The building is stone; you’ll be safe. I’ll lower you down some food and water quickly. But the goblins need to get back to the water before the fire surrounds us.”

  “You’re going to leave me here?” another of them said in a whining, panicked tone that I hoped sounded nothing like me.

  “You’re to be executed,” the jailor said. “I can’t let you go; I’m sorry.”

  The three goblins looked at one another, and some wordless communication must have passed between them, because two of them immediately shifted their forms and began to climb the walls. The third remained seated, leaning back against the wall, watching me. I stared back at him, looked into my own eyes from across the cell.

  “Aren’t you going to go?” we said at the same time, in the exact same tone.

  I stared at him, and he stared at me.

  We both whispered, “Tuo.”

  “Come on!” the jailor called down. “We don’t have much time!”

  I’m staying, said Tuo’s voice in my mind. Say it.

  “I’m staying,” he and I said at once.

  “Begging your pardon, Child of Ru,” said the jailor, “but you will die if you stay down there.”

  “Please go,” I begged Tuo, even as he begged me the same. “I’ll be safe down here. Go!”

  “Stop it!” said the jailor, clearly beginning to panic. “Child of Ru, if I let you die, the mob will draw and quarter me! You have to come out. Please! The precinct is burning!” She began to weep, sinking to her knees by the grate. “Ah, Ru, what do I do? What do I do?”

  Tell her to lower the chain.

  “Lower the chain,” we said. “It seems we must leave together or not at all.”

  “There’s no time for this,” sobbed the jailor, rising to her feet. “I’m sorry; Ru forgive me.” With that, she fled.

  Bewildered and weeping myself now, I moved to Tuo to give him my hands and help him to his feet. He stood, exactly my height; my own eyes stared into mine. He did not let go of my hands, and when he saw my tears, his own eyes filled. For a moment I was shocked, until I realized he was only adjusting his disguise.

  This was not the time nor place to say the things I most wanted to say.

  “Don’t die down here, Tuo,” I whispered instead, still holding his hands. “It was a brilliant plan. But it’s over. I’ll be fine. You have to go.”

  She left so that I would leave you. When she sees I am not giving in, she will return.

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  Of course I can.

  “Please, Tuo, go.”

  You say this as you grip my hands more tightly.

  I let them go and turned away, pacing toward the center of the cell and staring upward. He followed me and did the same. The dim light reflected off of the tears on his cheeks. My cheeks.

  “Why are you doing this?” I whispered to him. “Have you not caused enough chaos?”

  I would preserve your life a while longer.

  “Why? Your kind aren’t capable of love. I’ve never been anything but a tool to you.”

  Such disdain for tools! Small wonder that everything you build falls apart.

  I struck him a brisk blow to the cheekbone. He neither avoided nor deflected it, but the relaxed, economical way he caught his balance afterward suggested that he had been expecting it. I resisted the urge to press my knuckles to my mouth, letting my hand fall to my side.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not looking at him.

  Regret is wasteful.

  Above, the door opened. I heard the jailor’s footfalls and then the grinding sound of the heavy grate being moved aside.

  ~ ~ ~

  The extent of the fire suggested that it had been set on purpose, by a crazed mob running through with torches. Even on the driest of days, a fire could not have spread through the precinct so quickly. The air was thick with smoke, and Tuo swooned the moment he exited the building. I tried to catch him, but he shifted form as he lost consciousness, slipping through my arms and the rough robe the jailor had given him and landing in a glossy black heap at my feet.

  The jailor and I locked eyes. The game was over.

  “I don’t know who you are,” she said, “or why the High Seeress wants you dead, but a Child of Ru has risked his life for you. I will row you out of here myself.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Once we were clear of the worst of the smoke, Tuo regained consciousness and sat up, as serene and unruffled as if I had not just been cradling his limp form in my arms. He shifted seemingly effortlessly into the form I had known ten years ago, the gaunt poet with tangled hair, and took the discarded robe I had laid across my lap, reaching up to pull it on over his head. I looked away from the flawlessly human flex and stretch of muscles under his pale skin.

  At Tuo’s quiet request, the jailor rowed us through Starlight Gate and to a dock outside the city wall, near the Children’s Causeway. Tuo helped me up the slippery stairs, and the jailor gave the both of us a deep bow before rowing away.

  Tuo walked to the end of the dock and paused there, gazing out over the water. I started to follow him, then stopped myself.

  “Now that I’ve done what you needed,” I called to him, “I suppose I’m allowed to die?”

  He did not look at me. He spoke aloud in his flawless Jiun-Shi accent, but his voice was barely audible. “You are human. You will die whether I allow it or not.”

  “And it will make no difference to you.”

  He turned and devoured the distance between us, seizing my jaw in his hand and looming over me in a way that would have looked, from a distance, like a show of anger. But his eyes were as tranquil as the lake.

  “Stop,” he said, and brushed my lips with his, not quite a kiss. His grip on my jaw was punishingly tight, and I told myself that this was why I did not pull away. “You have so little time,” he said, hovering over my mouth. “Why do you spend it this way? Why do you all spend it this way? You throw yourself, again and again, onto a knife I have never concealed.”

  “I’ve tasted passion,” I said, “ and I’ve come to feel I deserve it.”

  “The woman at the Temple.” There was no heat in the statement; it was merely a clarification of fact.

  “Yes. I’ll confess it was satisfying. There is too much of the Betrayer in me.”

  He released me and stepped back, smiling a little. “The god of truth was false to Ru, but Ru is true to him.”

  “What? What blasphemy is this?”

  He arched a brow at me until I heard the absurdity of my own accusation.

  “You imply that Ru is still loyal to the Betrayer,” I said. “But why would a goddess of change be constant?”

  “There is nothing constant about loyalty,” said Tuo. “If your shadow stayed constant, you would lose it by living.”

  “Who are you lecture on loyalty, when you’ve left a string of broken women behind you?”

  “I did not break them. They broke themselves against me. Just as you are doing now.”

  I looked into his eyes, trying to reframe his history in light of what he was telling me. Each of his women had left him, either by suicide or abandonment, unable to bear the sight of his blank loveless eyes. It was his lack of mourning that had made him seem disloyal, the way he had moved so swiftly each time to a new lover. Each time except one. A current ran through me at the realization.

  “Why was I different?” I asked him. “Why, when I left, did you not find another lover?”

  He looked at me for such a long moment that I realized with a shock that I had actually confused him. At last he spoke, with the air of a man giving up on a particularly difficult riddle.

  “When did you leave me?” he asked.

  I must have looked at him, baffled, for twice as long. But then I
understood how very differently the same tale had played out for him and for me. I was at the same time humiliated and chastened, angry and weak-kneed with futile tenderness. I gave a shaky laugh.

  “I deserve a lover who doesn’t casually misplace me for a decade,” I said.

  “I placed you quite deliberately.”

  “It amounts to the same,” I said. “Your loyalty is—moving, but it isn’t enough.”

  “Farewell then,” he said, and turned to gaze back out over the water.

  I let out an animal cry of frustration and pushed him into the lake. He made no effort to stop me and disappeared beneath its surface with a great splash. I watched the water rock itself back to sleep where he had fallen and waited to see if he would resurface, but he did not.

  “Tuo,” I said to the water. “Come back.” But I knew he would not, for he had not done the leaving. “You know I won’t go back to her,” I said. “You know it’s you that I love.”

  I couldn’t tell if he heard me. It didn’t matter. It was I who needed to hear it, as a woman needs to hear that her business is bankrupt, her house burned, her child stillborn. A woman or a man needs to hear these things, so that she can begin to assess the damage, shoulder the weight, and move forward.

  I slipped off my robe, took a deep breath, and dived at a shallow angle into the lake. I hit bottom almost immediately. The waters there were not deep, but the cold was shocking. A chaos of bubbles burst from my startled mouth. I felt myself lose buoyancy as my lungs emptied, and I settled face first onto the soft lake bottom. For a moment all was dark and icy-still as I fought to keep my nose and mouth sealed against the mud.

  Then I felt hands gently turning me over. I resisted the urge to open my eyes. A slippery palm, cold as the water around it, pressed against my mouth, fingers sealing my nostrils shut. I twitched and kicked, panicking as my body began to plead for air.

  Do you want to live? It was Tuo’s voice, echoing in my mind as though he had just spoken.

  I don’t want to live alone.

  Would you rather die with company?

  My white-hot need for breath made the question intensely immediate and relevant. It also clarified my answer.

  No, I said. No. Let me go.

  What will you do?

  I tried not to panic; it only made me need air more urgently. I don’t know. I will find a place to start again. I have years left.

  So few.

  Enough. Let me go.

  No. I felt him draw me against his small, cold body, twining his limbs around me, holding me down. I thrashed with terror at first, but even as I did so I understood that he did not mean to kill me, only to make me fight for life, value it. A profound, childlike trust melted through me, and I relaxed in his arms.

  There, he said, and though I was fading from consciousness, I could almost swear that I felt him tremble.

  Without warning his magic rearranged my skin and my bones and my flesh, shattering me and putting me back together. He was still there in my mind, but without words: watching, questioning, studying.

  Only when he released me and I drew in a deep instinctive breath did I realize what he had done. I gasped the muddy lake water with as much relief as I would have drawn the night air. He had lent me his shape - I breathed as a child of Ru.

  If you wish to travel, he said, this is the fastest way. He slipped his webbed fingers between mine, and I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was his own eyes, white as winter suns and nearly blinding. Around him, what had once been suffocating blackness was now a soft gray world, low-ceilinged and infinitely broad, a world I saw as much through my skin as my eyes.

  Tuo tugged me southward toward the wall, toward the Starlight Canal, which led through the city to the Weeping River. I could feel the immensity of the world’s water at once, as though every distant shore reached out at once through that liquid web to beckon me.

  I watched the movement of Tuo’s strangely jointed legs and tail, and I mimicked him until I found my own rhythm. Then, as I sensed we were of one mind about our destination, I let go his hand. The two of us glided side by side through the water, heading for the sea.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Mishell Baker is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Fantasy & Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop. Her debut novel Borderline, first in the Arcadia Project urban fantasy series, was a finalist for the Nebula Awards and the World Fantasy Awards. “Fire in the Haze” is a sequel to her story “Throwing Stones” in BCS #47. She can be found on Twitter at @mishellbaker and maintains a blog and website at mishellbaker.com.

  IN SKANDER, FOR A BOY

  Chaz Brenchley

  SKANDER: city of exiles, assassins, plotters and panders and whores. City of poets, of lovers, of embassies, liars of every hue.

  Skander sits on every man’s horizon. I gazed at it in contempt, where it lay off the starboard rail like a smear of lit charcoal spilled at the sea’s edge; I called for greater effort on the oars. These tideless waters had nothing to offer. Our own work would bring us in, see our task complete and take us home again. Untainted, if we were hard and fast.

  ~ ~ ~

  Rulf had sent us, standing raucous above the coffin in his high rede-hall. That was a memory for me to cling to, appalling and wonderful: torchlight on silver, shadow on bone. Rulf—Lord of the Seamarch, Kingslayer, the Iron Hand—weeping into his beard, roaring for mead, rejoicing and cursing and lamenting this death above any, that had left him with no enemies worth the name.

  The coffin had come by way of many hands and many holds, fetched in at last with a shipload of Rothland horses, breeding mares that had waited out the winter storms in Landrëas. Rulf had a fancy to be Lord of Horses too, to ride and rule inland as he did the coastal waters. It was madness, and so I told him—which might perhaps be a reason why he screamed my name above the coffin.

  “Croft is dead,” he said, thrusting a torch into the dark casket to make it evident. “Take ship to Skander, and bring me back the boy.”

  This was almost more stupid than his notion of turning sea-harriers into horsemen. I said, “How can you know this is Croft? All I see is bones.” Bones with the meat boiled off them, ingeniously wired together in the figure of a man.

  “Bones and hair,” he said, showing me the long plait he had snatched up. It was coarse, blond gone to white: it might have been Croft’s. Or mine, or his own. Any northman’s.

  “His name is on the lid,” he said. It was: in silver inlay in a strange corrupt southern reading of our own strong runes, as though it spelled the name out with a lisp.

  “Anyone can write on a box and put bones in it.”

  “And then ship it two thousand miles? Why would they?”

  “To make you believe, of course, that Croft was dead.”

  “But he is,” Rulf said simply, wafting his torch again. “He is here.”

  “You cannot know that.”

  “And yet I do. See his legs?”

  I saw what he showed me, as he lowered the torch: how twisted the leg-bones were, how they had been shattered and brutally mis-healed.

  “I did that,” he said, as if I hadn’t known it, hadn’t been there. “These are the ways, the places where I had the bones broken and then tied up so they would set so bent he could never stand or walk again. Three months he screamed in the cesspit, before I was sure they were beyond any man’s doctoring.”

  I remembered. All summer Croft lay in shit, and made sure that we all lay in the sounds of his pain and loss. I had thought that almost Croft’s victory, rather than Rulf’s.

  And then he had been washed and dressed—in a woman’s skirt, because those dreadful legs would never wear trousers again—and set in a skiff with the boy for deckhand and servant, and he had sailed into the sun’s setting on his way to exile and death.

  Eventual death. It had been twenty years before his twisted bones came back to us.

  I said, “Why do you want the boy back now?”

  “Harlan, I have no heir. They tell me it i
s the gods’ curse on my blood, for what I did to the old king his father. What I took from him. Some of that, at least, I can restore.”

  “He will claim the kingship.”

  “He is welcome to it, when I’m gone. I can adopt him, train him, make him a better man than Barent ever was.”

  “Rulf, you gave him to Croft. He will have been trained already, to despise you and all of yours. Will you make a gift of yourself, to a young man who is right to hate you?”

  He shrugged ruefully, confused perhaps by his own sudden penitence. “Harlan. Fetch him back.”

  ~ ~ ~

  At least the voyage home would let me see what kind of man Croft had made of him. If I judged it needful, I would keep him in chains and be sure at least that Rulf had to make his own mistakes.

  We were two months abroad before we sighted Skander, a smudge of smoke in the east as we lost the sun, a sullen glow in the dark to guide us. Any other port on any other water, we would have held off for a daylight tide. Skander has no tides to wait for; and besides, I ached to be swift, in and out.

  In, then, slow and steady on the oars, all sail furled. I was a windmaster and we had barely rowed all journey, but these were strange waters and this my own ship beneath me, manned on Rulf’s gold and charged with his mission. I would be twice a fool to take a risk with her.

  In fact we could have sailed right to the lamplit wharf and never scraped a rock nor jarred a timber; Skander’s harbor is as deep and clean as legend paints it. We’d know, when it came time to be leaving. A man old enough to have grown wise always keeps it in his head, that he may be leaving swiftly.

  That same old wise man knows it’s good to come in slow and quiet. To seem tamer than you are.

  I was old enough, even in my own eyes. I dragged my own long reputation like a twilight shadow at my back, but still: it had been a dreary voyage and the crew had seen every year of my age tell on me as we came. I was tired already, hungry only to go home. They were a pack of wolves at my oars, and I feared loosing them in the city. Any city, but Skander more than any: its reputation was longer, louder, lewder than my own.