Issue #177 • July 9, 2015

“Seasons Set in Skin,” by Caroline M. Yoachim

“Stone Prayers,” by Kate Marshall

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

SEASONS SET IN SKIN

by Caroline M. Yoachim

Cherry Blossoms

         Spring followed Horimachi as she hiked up the steep trail. The branches of the cherry trees had been heavy with flowers when she left the capital at the end of March, but here the cold mountain air hindered even the turning of the seasons. She was condemned to make her entire trek under pink petals that drifted down from the trees like snow.

         It reminded her of the cherry blossoms that she’d tattooed into her daughter’s skin. Months of pain, and the faeries killed her anyway. After ten years’ service as an artist for the Imperial Army, Horimachi had left the capital in shame. Her tattoos were failing, and soldiers were dying for it.

         Aya had died for it.

         The ancient road that Horimachi walked was lined with abandoned shrines and thousand-year trees. There were no other travelers. Forests were the domain of the gaijin fae, invaders from the West, and there were dark rumors even in the most isolated villages. Horimachi had done hundreds of tattoos for the Imperial Army, but her own skin was unprotected. Her tattoos were from before the war, when black ink was made of soot instead of faery blood. The only color on Horimachi’s skin was a cadmium red, not the deeper crimson of ground faery wings. She carried the protective inks with her, but she had vowed never to use them. She was done with soldiers, and cities, and war.

         Horimachi hesitated at the edge of the village, at the bottom of the hundred stone steps that led up to the outermost temple. She’d lost her eldest daughter to the war, but not her youngest. Suki had been too small to go to the capital, only twelve when Horimachi left with Aya. She had always been respectful in the messages they exchanged—tiny scrolls of paper tied to the legs of gray waxwings—but a relationship only on paper was not the same as living under the same roof. Horimachi’s last scroll, the one she could not force herself to send, was in the breast pocket of her shirt, close to her heart. It bore the news of Aya’s death.

         Swords clashed in the temple courtyard. Two women fought with wakizashi, short swords like the one Aya had practiced with before she joined the Imperial Army and graduated to a longer katana. When the women noticed her, they stopped their practice, and one of them rushed over to greet her.

         “Mother?”

         The woman who approached bore an eerie resemblance to Aya. Suki was a nurse now, tending the fae-addled veterans who had retired from the war, but Horimachi still remembered her as a skinny twelve-year-old girl who had bravely fought back tears the day she and Aya had left. The sword tied to Suki’s waist sash was Aya’s practice sword.

         Horimachi bowed her head. “Suki. I’m so sorry. I didn’t protect her well enough.”

         “Aya.” Suki mouthed the word but had no voice to speak.

         They held each other and cried.

* * *

         The cold mountain air had not kept away the destruction of war. Men and women, covered head to toe in tattoos, wandered aimlessly through the village and babbled about sources of life energy and swirling eddies of time. These were the soldiers that had been ridden but not killed. Men and women who had watched, helpless, as the fae used their bodies as puppets, forcing them to slaughter their compatriots. It was probably for the best that their minds were broken, because it spared them the knowledge of what they had done. Horimachi spent two days nursing the veterans before Suki pulled her away from her work.

         “I need a tattoo.” Suki had shaved her head to prepare herself for the protective ink. Without her hair, she looked like a new soldier, like all the soldiers that had been assigned to Horimachi in the capital.

         Like Aya.

         “The northern provinces are falling to the fae. I am going to fight and banish these intruders back to the West. Will you offer me protection?” Suki stood, her bald head bowed in respect, waiting for Horimachi to reply.

         “Tattoos are painful. They take a long time. They are not for foolish girls who rush off to the city to be soldiers.”

         Suki lifted her head and stared in disbelief. “The waxwings from the north no longer bring news, only scrolls of names, soldiers killed by the fae. Thousands of people died in the early attacks, before we knew to protect ourselves, before the tattoos. Nearly all our men are either fae-addled or dead. Foolish is not a young woman wanting to fight. Foolish is pretending that war will not come to the village when it is done with the cities.”

         “If so many soldiers are dying, it means the tattoos are not working. My tattoos are not working.” If she had done better work, Aya would be alive.

         “I’ve seen your work, and it isn’t flawed. The fae are getting stronger somehow. The tattoos aren’t giving as much protection as they once did, but they are better than nothing.” Suki paused. “But I will go to battle with bare skin if you refuse to help me.”

         Suki was so much like her sister, with the same soft fierceness. They were rivers that wore away at rock. Flexible but persistent, fluid but strong. Horimachi would do the tattoo, despite her old back and her aching hands. She would cover every inch of her daughter’s skin, so that she could fight.

* * *

         Horimachi started with cherry blossoms, their outlines winding up Suki’s neck and covering the pale skin of her skull. The branches and flowers were carefully arranged to ensure that there were no gaps large enough for a faery to slip into her body and drain her life away. Never more than fingertip’s width between two lines of faery blood. Suki was a good canvas, quiet and still. She bore the pain well. Over her breathing was the clicking sound of needles sliding in and out of her skin. Shakki. Sha sha sha sha. Horimachi dabbed away the ink and blood that pooled on the surface of Suki’s skin, then continued making the blood-black outline of petals. Around the lines, the skin turned pink and slightly swollen, a temporary effect that made the flowers look three-dimensional and almost real.

         Horimachi stopped after five hours of work. The fine-lined blossoms and branches on the back of Suki’s neck and skull looked almost like the hair she’d shaved away. “We will continue in two days’ time.”

         It was the schedule she had used with the soldiers in the city, five hours of work every other day. It was painful, but fae-based inks healed faster than ordinary tattoos, and by the time a soldier’s entire body was covered in an outline of black, the first sections of tattoo had healed enough to begin shading.

         “Tomorrow,” Suki countered. “At this rate, the tattoo won’t be finished until the end of summer. If I don’t leave for the capital soon, there will be no capital to defend.”

         “Two days. Be glad we aren’t using cadmium and soot because then you’d have to wait two weeks. Even with the fae inks, your body needs time to heal.” Horimachi didn’t say it, but her own body also needed time to heal. Her aching joints were getting too old for so much work.

* * *

Water Lilies

         Golden magic was strongest at sunrise. An hour before dawn, YMsei went to a field outside the capital where humans buried their dead soldiers. The ancestors told YMsei to practice magic on the dead. Safer that way.

         The corpses were arranged in neat rows. YMsei could feel the blood of the ancestors embedded in their human skin, even buried beneath several feet of earth. The humans preferred to burn their dead, but the blood on the soldiers’ skin made them impervious to flame.

         YMsei uncovered a girl, three months dead. Even in the dim predawn light, her skin was striking. She was a canvas covered in black and red, decorated with an intricate design of dragons and flowers and koi. There were swirls of water below her waist and swirls of clouds above. Water lilies floated on her hip, the line where water met sky. A symbol of summer, and even in the early hours of the morning, the August heat was enough to make her body reek of death. The tattoo that protected her skin slowed internal decay but did not stop it.

         Stolen blood from YMsei’s ancestors, injected into human skin. An ink made from ground red wings tinted the petals of flowers and the scales of dragons and fish, granting protection against red magic. Generations of red-winged warriors had died trying to reclaim the sacred land where the humans had built their capital, but YMsei was different. A thousand generations ago, a group of ancestors left the war and escaped into a faster swirl of time. Centuries flew by in less than a decade, and they used that precious time to breed themselves for color. Instead of red wings, and red magic, YMsei had wings the color of gold.

         In a thousand generations, the magic was not the only thing that had changed. The ancestors were filled with a rage as red as the magic of their wings, but YMsei was calmer, more rational. Most of YMsei’s generation favored war, but some believed that peace was possible. What they needed was a way to communicate with the humans, a puppet to speak on behalf of the ancestors. Any human would do, but as the ancestors said, corpses were safer.

         The blood-black outlines of the dead girl’s tattoo were enough that YMsei could not have killed her, had she been alive, but there were more subtle magics to be done. The first thin crescent of the sun appeared on the horizon, filling the sky with golden light, and YMsei knelt beside the girl.

         Slipping into her body was like meditating inside a stone, cold and still. YMsei filled the girl with tendrils of gold and divided life energy between two bodies—one cold and dead, the other hot and familiar. The girl was too plump, too dense, and filled with tiny creatures that decomposed her flesh. These YMsei banished, drowning them in golden light.

         She merged into the human.

         YMsei began to mend her otherself. She used golden tendrils to draw blood upward from where it had pooled in the lower portions of her body. She collected the blood back into her vessels and repaired the veins and arteries where they were broken. She inspected all her flesh and healed it, and when the work was complete, she restarted her heart and opened her eyes.

         YMsei’s true body recoiled in distaste. Her human body sat up, disoriented. There were traces of the dead human lingering in the connections of her brain. The ancestors said that humans were like puppets to be worn and discarded, but the dead girl had memories and emotions, and even a sense that YMsei did not know.

         Mosquitos buzzed. Hateful little birds flaunted their ability to fly, calling attention to themselves with boastful songs and trills. Wind rustled through the tree branches, and dark clouds drained away the powerful light of dawn. Fat raindrops fell with a steady patter, striking the skin of both her bodies before dripping down to the earth. Discordant yells, almost meaningful to her human mind, came from the far side of the field. Unfamiliar with the workings of her brain, she could not quite remember words.

         It was known from prior generations that humans communicated through this unnatural sense, but YMsei had never experienced it. The meaning was incomprehensible to even her human mind, and spoken words seemed a poor substitute for the more intimate bonding of ancestral minds and communion of images. Still, something in the shouting signaled a warning. YMsei ran with both bodies out of the field and into the forest, at a pace frustratingly slow because she was unused to her human muscles. The movements of that body were jerky and uncoordinated.

         The other humans dared not follow into the shadows of the forest.

         YMsei let her human body choose their path. She seemed to be seeking something, grasping at vague familiarities in the landscape. YMsei hoped to use her to negotiate with the humans, and the humans most likely to listen would be those who had known her in life. She had to make them understand that the ancestors were not invaders from the West but natives returning home after a long absence, distant descendants of the tengu.

         The girl was often confused, but she walked a road that led away from the capital and into the mountains. If nothing else, YMsei was pleased to escape the humid summer air for the cooler mountain breezes.

* * *

Chrysanthemums

         Suki lay face down on the tatami floor while Mother shaded the koi and chrysanthemums on the back of her right leg. She stared at the finished design on her forearm, a snake that wrapped itself around her arm, the gaps between the coils filled with peonies. Studying the completed design drew her focus away from the burning in her leg and the rhythmic tapping of the needles that seemed to vibrate down into her bones. She counted the scales on the snake, each one shaded in red and bluish black.

         Faery blood ink was pure black at first, but even in the month since Mother had finished her arms, it had taken on a slightly bluish tinge. It was work well done, as Mother’s work always was. She was a master, with decades of practice. The fan of needles at the end of her bamboo handle moved in perfect rhythm, the depth and angle changing to make subtle variations in the shading of the design. Variations in color and variations in pain.

         Eternities of pain, and each day she looked more like Aya. It was the same design, and as the resemblance grew, Mother became pensive and moody. Not as she worked. Those movements were so practiced that her art flowed from her automatically. But when the needles stopped, and the work was finished, it was always the same.

         “Come back in two days,” Mother said. She turned her attention to cleaning her tools, refusing even to look at Suki.

         Sometimes Suki tried to stay, to make conversation. To be something other than a reminder of Aya’s death. She had not complained when Mother left, and she did not complain now, but she wanted to have some part of their relationship back, some sign that her mother had really returned. Instead she was a client, and a reminder.

         Suki slipped into her clothes and secured her sword to the sash around her waist. She slid the door open, but then she froze, unable to make sense of what she saw before her.

         There, outside, was Aya. She was naked despite the cold autumn air. Suki remembered her sister as being taller, stronger, older. The only difference between Suki and this Aya was that the woman outside was finished, her tattoos shaded in red and black from head to toe. Suki had always assumed that Mother had given them identical designs, but now she realized that they were mirror images. This other woman bore the face she saw every morning in the mirror, a face protected with cherry blossoms and clouds, done in delicate lines and only the palest shading of pink. It was meant to be protection.

         It had failed.

         The body that had once held her sister was clearly a puppet, standing several yards away with an odd posture, as though she might fall over at any moment. Movements that should have been smooth—the bowing of her head, a glance at Suki’s face—were done in uncoordinated jerks and fits. A faery stood behind Aya. Suki had never seen one before. It was smaller than she expected, coming only to Aya’s shoulder, with thin, twisted limbs like tree branches. Its wings were not red but gold.

         “And so the war has come to the village,” Mother whispered, tears flowing silently down her face, “brought by my own failure, and wearing the face of my child.”

         There was no end to the horrors of war, no final peace, not when the faeries could take someone even after they had died. She’d spent years tending to the veterans, back from the battlefield with their minds broken, but this was worse. How could Aya free herself from want and sadness in the afterlife if she could not even escape her physical form? Suki did not know if some part of her sister’s consciousness remained, but she was certain of one thing. She could not let the fae desecrate her sister’s body this way. She had to defeat this new evil, or they would never be free of the fae, even in death.

         She approached her sister slowly, arms held wide as though preparing for a hesitant embrace. Before she could reach for her sword, Aya spoke.

         “Return our sacred land.” The voice was wrong. Harsh.

         Suki drew her sword from its sheath. The faery turned to flee, but Suki did not care whether it lived or died. It was the wings she wanted. Golden wings to make new ink and turn the tide of the war.

         “Stop,” Aya cried. Suki did not listen. She swung her sword and sliced off a large section of the faery’s wing.

         Aya collapsed.

         The faery erupted in golden light, blinding and hot. The gold cut through the useless red ink of Suki’s tattoo, and she could feel her energy being sucked away as the faery tried to heal itself. She would not be what Aya was. She tried to slash at the faery, but it danced away from her, too fast for her to catch in her weakened state.

         She could feel the faery at the edges of her mind, in the pulsing of her own blood. The heat of the faery magic burned like needles on her skin. They were merging. She did not have a second, a fellow soldier to grant her a quick and merciful end, but she would not be a puppet to this golden creature. She turned her sword upon herself, slicing through her midsection from left to right, the traditional beginning of an honorable death. The faery realized what she was doing and came forward to stop her. Smiling through her pain, she pulled the blood-covered sword from her own abdomen and sliced the faery in half.

         Blood ran onto the dirt, human red and faery black. The colors of her tattoo echoed in the moment of her death. The autumn air was so very cold, now that the bright heat of faery magic was gone.

         Mother came to her side and cradled Suki’s head in her lap. For the first time since her return, she was not a tattoo master. She was the woman that Suki had missed. She brushed the tears from Suki’s face and held her hand.

         “Mother,” Suki said, her voice soft. There were others out there, she knew. Other gold-winged fae, killing soldiers and raising the dead. Her body shook from the cold and from fear. With her last strength, she held up a section of golden wing. “Please,” she said. “Finish me. Don’t let them take me.”

* * *

Dry Fallen Leaves

         Aya woke empty and lost.

         Time swirled aimlessly around her, pulsing like blood through her veins. She could not see beyond the inside of her eyes, and the gold that had filled the spaces between her fragmented selves had seeped away. She felt tendrils of death seeping in to fill the void, a reassuring emptiness, freedom from the constant longing and need that came with physical form.

         A familiar sound came to her ears. Shakki. Sha sha sha sha, The rhythm brought her back to the slowness of time, the solidity of reality. It was a sound that should have been accompanied by pain, but there was no pain. Distracted by the sound, Aya lost the tendrils of death. She tried to find her lost oblivion, but instead of searching within her mind, she inadvertently opened her eyes.

         She was home. Mother knelt on the tatami mats on the far side of the room, working on a soldier. The soldier was Aya. Time shimmered and broke. There was no pain, so Mother could not be inking her tattoo.

         In another place, she remembered dying, falling into a state of clarity and peace. An army of tattooed soldiers had marched against her, puppets of the fae. If they were not protected, why did Mother still sketch color into skin? Aya opened her mouth to ask, but instead of words her dry throat only croaked.

         Mother set down her tools. She brought tea. It was warm like golden magic, and Aya choked and knocked aside the cup. Heat spilled down her chest, then quickly passed. Cold damp cloth against her skin brought remorse. A sense of loss. A memory of thoughts that did not belong to her. YMsei. The faery had wanted something. Something important.

         She chased the memories in her mind, but reality shattered any time she came too close. The muddled sensations of life were overwhelming. The gold had controlled her, imposed an artificial order and a clear goal. Peace. The faery had brought her back to negotiate a truce. The only peace she’d ever known was death, and she longed to slip back into that unending darkness.

         Mother brought another cup of tea. Aya let it warm her from the inside, longing for the golden magic that she loathed. Anything to help her find a direction. When the cup was empty, she practiced setting it on the table and picking it up. After several repetitions, she heard the sound that called her back to the present moment. Shakki. Sha sha sha sha.

         She stood on wobbly legs and carefully walked across the room. The girl that was not Aya had dried leaves tattooed on the bottoms of her feet, the fallen leaves of winter. Mother had drawn those very leaves onto Aya’s feet, but these were different. Aya’s leaves were red and black. Faery blood and ground red wings, dark-colored protection against dark fae magic.

         These leaves were tinted with gold, as though illuminated by the first light of dawn. Aya picked up a small vial of golden ink. If she drank it, would the gold pulse through her veins and make her whole?

         “I sent most of the golden wings with a runner to the capital, for the Imperial Army,” Mother said, gently taking the vial from Aya’s hand. “I should have sent it all, but I kept enough for Suki, and for you, if you can bear the pain.”

         Pain was nothing, but Aya wanted death, not golden skin.

         She reached down and touched her sister’s face. In broken mirror-shards of time, she remembered the baby she had held so carefully when she was six, the wide-eyed confidant she had whispered to when she had her first kiss, back before the fae had slaughtered most of the men. Suki’s body was cold and hard like winter stone. Her skin did not swell pink or bleed where Mother poked it with her needles. She did not smell like gold, and she made no sound.

         Tears ran down Mother’s face as she worked. “She always wanted to be like you, except in this. I abandoned her when she was alive, but I will grant her final wish. I will finish her tattoo and keep her safe from the fae.”

         Suki had been alive.

         Aya remembered watching through a golden haze as her sister died by her own hand. Suki had wielded the sword, but YMsei had killed her nonetheless, while Mother stood and watched. Was that peace? The fae could remake themselves on a whim, and even if Aya could negotiate peace with the current generation, it would not last.

         She would let Mother tattoo her with gold, and she would continue to fight.

         But gold would not be enough. The fae would retreat for another thousand generations while only a decade passed here, or perhaps just the blink of an eye. Time was always changing, never constant from one swirl to the next. Eventually there would be magics in silver or green or blue. And each time another color would need to be added to the tattoos, until the pictures held all the colors of the world. Only then could the fae be banished for good.

         Shakki. Sha sha sha sha. Layers of color, cycles of war.

         Someday, the dragon on Aya’s back would be richly colored in blues and greens. She would be adorned with pink cherry blossoms and white water lilies, yellow chrysanthemums and brown fallen leaves. The signs of all the seasons, set in human skin. She would fight against faeries with wings of every color, and when the war was truly finished, she and Suki—and all their fellow soldiers—would find peace in the eternal black of death.

Copyright © 2015 Caroline M. Yoachim

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other places. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

STONE PRAYERS

by Kate Marshall

         Mattar comes to the house of Anaharesh in search of a single word; a word to end a war.

         “There are a hundred words for the weight of starlight in a cupped palm,” Anaharesh tells her over a cup of tea, steam patting their cheeks like a distracted auntie. “Only thirty-nine, though, for the smell of frost the morning before a heartbreak.” Anaharesh had not spoken until she was grown; her throat was too full of words not yet born.

         “I only need one word,” Mattar tells her. Her knees ache. She has been sitting too long in this round house with its cedar-wood smell and wind chimes singing spirals in the eaves. Her son’s armies march as she sips bitter tea, carving out an empire mile by mile.

         “The word you want has yet to be spoken,” Anaharesh says. Her teeth click against the rim of her cup; she is watching the herbs settle at the bottom. “I know it, of course. But I cannot give it to you. You must find it when it is formed.”

         “That could be a world away.”

         “Or a thousand years from now,” Anaharesh agrees. She turns her head one way and then the other, eyes lidded. She is listening for something in her own chest, and when she hears it she smiles. “But it is not. It is very soon, this word, if not very close.”

         The splinterman outside stamps his foot, coughs. Mattar knows two words for the impatience of a man obeying orders he does not agree with. In Kilin-kasa, it is spoken with a laugh; the Korondi tongue calls for bared teeth. Neither is quite right for this soldier, assigned to watch an old woman when he wants to march to war.

         “Where do I look?” Mattar asks.

         “You look where the road brings you, Three-Times-Woken,” Anaharesh says. The name is a cat’s tongue against Mattar’s skin. There are thirteen words for what she is, and none of them please her.

         Mattar rises. The splinterman’s feet cuff the planks. He hears her, she hears him, and they both make their backs straight. He conceals his minute disobediences; she conceals her creeping age. When she stoops past the crooked lintel of the round house, the sun falls on her neck like a blade. With the hanging edge of her silk wrap she dabs sweat from her throat, in which there are a thousand words and more but not the one she needs.

         It is a word to end a war, but the war is almost won.

* * *

         It is the nature of empire to calve new words, and Mattar has walked ruined roads and suffocating marketplaces to find them. She knows the word for how a Kilin-kasa woman turns a wax-melon in her hands three times before she asks a price—tsa-tsa-tsa. She knows the name the now-dead Enokoans had for her, diabi-sai, witch-mother. She knows, too, the syllables of the arrows of the Hasha as they fall, tulbuku, on Korondi shields and Korondi flesh.

         The Hasha wield their spears precisely and their words carelessly. She envies their poets for their freedom, that they may laugh at blood or weep over it or exult in it, all with the same sounds, the same calculus of lips-tongue-teeth.

         Her gods are not so generous.

         She walks with the splinterman along roads raised brutishly from the marsh. The needs of empire brought stone and sand to a place loved only by droning insects and fat yellow toads, and now these clean curves lie like ribs across the land.

         “Where will we go?” the splinterman asks. The priests have sewn the bones of lesser gods beneath his skin to make him strong; it very nearly saved him. He died six days ago, but she has not the heart to tell him.

         “We will follow the road,” she says. “And see where it leads.”

         The roads of the Korondi empire are carved with a curse. Take me where I need to be. They are only words to those who still have breath to speak them, but a ghost is subject to instruction. He is a creature of externality and precedent; he is no longer anything of himself. The curse will carry him without concern for the demands of geography or the persistent reality of living flesh.

         She sews him to her skin while he is sleeping, with thread spun from the wind of a lesser god’s wingbeats. The thread is dear, and she is loath to part with it, but she can taste an ending at the root of her tongue. Time is contracting. She has no choice.

         He steps off one road and onto another, eight hundred miles and more. The thread tears furrows in her flesh, but she follows before it breaks.

         They stand between the Arch of the Victorious Tiger and the Arch of the Compassionate Vulture, in the city of Wa Shulen. The structures are called by some the Gate of Life and the Gate of Death. She decides this is auspicious.

         The splinterman, alarmed, clutches the air where his blade should be, but the dead bear no weapons. “Peace,” Mattar says. Ithanay to the Hasha, le-sha here, words she has carved again and again into her temple’s walls, and watched them vanish. Peace is imprecise, and the poetry of divinity demands precision. The prayers of the faithful rise unheard, discarded for their formlessness; the gods refuse to intercede, because they do not understand.

         “Peace,” she says again, and the splinterman’s confusion sheds its anger, turns lost. Everywhere the streets are full of the living, but they do not resent the intrusion of the ghost. In this city, the living keep companionship with the dead. The women with bells on their fourth fingers and the men, their lips bisected by a black stain, touch their thumbs together as they pass, brief welcomes for the ghost, even a ghost so clearly hatched of an enemy’s last breath. They are less content to let her pass without comment.

         Her skin is the darkest they have seen; by birth she is Kilin-kasa, with whom they have no quarrel, but her feet first touched Korondi dust, and her dress reflects the style of her upbringing. She does not wear the folds and drapes of this city’s women, and if she speaks she will not have the music of their tongue. She does not belong here. She will not be tolerated long. She must move swiftly, and so she does, the spirit of the splinterman cleaving close. His feet tread on her hem but have no weight to hold it.

         “Where are we going?” he asks. His voice encloses its own echo, tripling itself. He has been dead seven days; on the eighth his ghost will be gone. “How did we get here?”

         “We were carried by our need,” she says. The streets here are narrow. The buildings jut out until the roofs cluster so tightly they blot out the view of the sky. “And we are going to see a god.” There is no reason for the road to bring them here, except for that.

         Her gods are made of stone, but these people worship a beast of bone and sinew. They keep their god and their emperor in the center of their city. He is an emperor of nothing; his empire was broken before he was born, and the Korondi now seek to suck its marrow. But his palace rises from the shell of a god, and so an emperor he is called.

         She marvels at his people’s trust. They have known war. The Hasha who now defend them have, in other times, swept like brushfire through their principalities; the people of Wa Shulen have three-and-thirty words reserved for the destruction those horse warriors bring. And yet there are no walls to keep her from the garden of the god, no guards, no questions.

         They pass through the gate to the god’s garden, as any pilgrim may. The lowest gutter-child is permitted to walk in the shadow of the great creature, to stand in its footprints. And the creature is great. It stands on legs as thick around as six masts lashed together, and its head could host a rich man’s home. The palace sits at the center of its whorled and weathered shell, and looks small.

         The splinterman mumbles soft-mouthed prayers, ill-defined. “I’d heard the tortoise was the largest,” he says. “The largest of all their false gods. But I didn’t imagine it would be such a brute.”

         “You have the shards of its cousin’s bones within you,” Mattar reminds him. “Do not neglect to be grateful in your approach.”

         “How could we kill a thing like that?” he asks.

         He is imprecise even in his questions. Does he mean How will we kill it, when Korond’s blades break the Hasha line, and my brothers march unimpeded into this garden? Or does he mean How did we kill the others, whose bones and shells and claws seed our soil, with which we bind divinity to our flesh?

         “The king will find a way,” Mattar says without joy.

         The lesser gods that once walked Korond’s fields and forests are generations gone, but Mattar has seen a living god die. She was in the mountains of Enokoa when the vulture fell screaming to the mountain-top and watched villages vanish beneath the avalanche that rose to mourn it. The snow drowned Hasha and Korondi, and drowned the Enokoans too, who tended the peaks where the vulture roosted, breathing the thin air and marking their skin with the words the wind made between the rocks.

         Mattar bends to her knees before the massive tortoise, guilt a sharp pain between her shoulder-blades. If it senses her, if it knows what she has done, it shows no sign. It crops a stand of trees with a snap of its jaws. Its eyes are the color of milk; blind, and old, older than the words to describe it. Stairways trace the wrinkles and ridges of its limbs, and dozens of paths lead across its great shell to the palace. From this distance, Mattar sees the banners of the Hasha Alliance moving toward the palace, their bearers smudges against a setting sun. The Aghan or his envoys must be here to call upon the emperor.

         “I am called,” the splinterman says. He has his orders and he remains beside her, but she can see him straining against the song now rising from near the foot of the creature. They are Hasha words, it is a woman’s voice, and Mattar knows what she will find when they follow it, but she nods her head and lets him help her to her feet, lets him lead. He’s taken her this far; she can let him go, if she must.

         They walk through tenderly kept gardens, over red bridges rubbed dull with use and past waist-high shrines to the ancillary spirits that breed and gather in the god’s shadow. At the foot of the god is a smaller garden, a garden of stones. Beyond the stones lies the last archway before the stairs that lead to the god’s back.

         On the tallest rock sits a boy, bare-chested. Below him rest two women; one of them sings, and when the splinterman reaches them she smiles at him. Her song will lure him to the ghost roads, if she continues.

         “You would rob me of my escort?” Mattar asks.

         The singing woman looks to the other, who holds out a flat hand. The singer shrugs, her song dying. They are both Hasha, both young, but the one who has gestured wears the braid of a blooded warrior. Mattar marks the knots of colored thread in her hair, reading her history. She wears the red of a marriage-bonded woman, the green of a mother, the black—almost unseen against her dark hair—of the Aghan’s own kin. In the heat of the city the women have shed their mail coats and the thick felts that guard them against the bitter wind of the west; this woman wears only soft white leathers, and Mattar knows who she is.

         “I would beg leave of the Aghan’s daughter to let an old woman keep her companion, for one day more,” Mattar says, looking into the eyes of the woman born to kill the Korondi king.

         “It is not our custom to let the dead walk where they will,” the Aghan’s daughter says. But she has already folded her fingers and dropped her hand, a kinetic language the Aghan himself constructed. Leave us to speak alone, the gesture says. The singer unfolds herself from her perch. She takes the splinterman’s hand as she walks away, and the boy scrambles after them.

         Mattar watches after them. The splinterman has been dead for seven days and she never bothered to learn his name, but once he is gone she will be alone. She finds she is not ready to lose him.

         “I know you,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “You should not be here.”

         “And who do you know that I am?” Mattar asks.

         “You are the mother of the wolf who bites at our flanks,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “You stood on the far slope the day the vulture died. You spoke the spell that destroyed Enokoa.”

         “I spoke no spell,” Mattar says. “I spoke a prayer, and etched it in the mountainside. You were there that day as well. I heard them calling up the ranks. The Blooded Stag has sent his daughter, they said. The demon in white.”

         She smiles, a press and twist of her lips that makes her look old. “So they call me.”

         “I know the weight of names,” Mattar says.

         “And I know the weight of old bones. Sit, Grandmother. There is no war in the tortoise’s shadow, or so the emperor assures us.” The Aghan’s daughter gestures to the rock beside her, and Mattar takes the seat with a grateful sigh. “You have come here in the company of a ghost, without weapons and without a host behind you. Why?”

         “I want to end the war,” Mattar says.

         “Everyone wants to end the war,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “I was conceived and born so that it could end.”

         Mattar turns hard eyes on her. The day this girl was born, the priestesses came to tell her. They explained the rites and rituals; the ways the Hasha knew to craft a weapon from a child. “You were made to kill my son.”

         “I was cut from my mother at the dusk of the day the winter and the spring were in perfect balance. I was suckled with the blood of the great stag and the great wolf, and taught to walk the ghost roads. Death is easy among the Hasha, Grandmother. We do not put so much effort into such a simple thing. I was born to bring peace, not death; killing your son is merely the mechanism of my fate.” She speaks it as plain fact and seems to wait for Mattar to object, perhaps to spit at her and curse her.

         “You will not kill him in time,” Mattar says. “The armies of Korond are marching, and your lines cannot hold. He is not with them. He is safe in his palace, safe with his sons who whisper pleas for peace to him, unheard. You may kill him months or years from now, and perhaps then the war will end. But first he will break your clans and burn this city, and claim the nations of the Hasha Alliance for his empire. I believe there is another way.”

         “What way?” the woman asks. The Hasha do not trust as the people of this city do, but she listens. Perhaps it is the shadow of the tortoise. Perhaps it is the knowledge that Mattar is right.

         “A prayer,” Mattar says. “A perfect prayer to catch the ear of the gods.” The word is wrong; they are speaking in the Hasha tongue, and the Hasha do not have gods the way the Korondi do, nor even the way the people of this city do. They have one god, who fills many vessels. But she thinks the Aghan’s daughter understands. “A prayer to ask for peace.”

         “You would not be the first to pray for such things,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “Anyone with breath in their lungs has prayed for them.”

         “I have crafted it,” Mattar says. “I have selected each word so that it cannot be misconstrued or doubted. But I lack one. I lack the word that will tell a being who does not die why this war cannot continue.”

         “Do you believe words have so much power?” the Aghan’s daughter asks. “That a single word could bend the fate of fifty nations?”

         “No,” Mattar says bitterly. If words alone had power, prayers and poets and her own begging would have turned her son’s heart from its course. “Words do not have power. Kings and gods have power. Words are the key with which we unlock their whims.”

         The Aghan’s daughter laughs, a scraped-hollow sound. “Do you see that boy?” she asks.

         The boy is throwing rocks in a pond. The splinterman crouches beside him, enjoying the game. He’s hardly more than a boy himself, hardly old enough to cultivate a scraggly beard. The bone shards make odd patterns beneath his skin, and the wound that killed him is beginning to open at his side.

         “I see him,” Mattar says, fixing her attention on the living child. The dead are beyond her help. “He is a handsome child.”

         “He is my son. I found him in the mountains, when your son’s soldiers were slaughtering his kin. After the avalanche. After the vulture fell. I fled with him through the gray spaces and the ghost roads, and fed him mare’s milk and mare’s blood. He is the last of the Enokoans, the last of those who knew the language of birds, but I cannot teach him his mother-tongue. I know only one word, and it has never been spoken.”

         Mattar looks more closely at her. Her shoulders bend beneath the weight of unseen things, and her eyes watch shadows more than light.

         “What word?” she asks, but the woman does not speak it yet.

         “We will never surrender to your son,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “He is the king who killed a god, the man who slaughtered a nation. They believe he will do the same to the rest of us. To the stag and the wolf, to the tortoise and the eagle. They believe he will dredge the great sea itself to slay the storm-wrack gods. Before Enokoa, we might have made a truce, but we cannot while he still lives. Because they blame him.”

         “And you do not?” Mattar asks. “I was on the mountain, horse-daughter. I know what my son’s soldiers did.”

         “I know you did not cast a spell to kill the vulture,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “I saw the spears of the splintermen strike it. I saw it shriek and dive and rise. I knew that it would die. You conquered the southern kingdoms with the power a few old bones could give you. What would you do with the flesh and blood and organ meat of a fresh-dead god?”

         “You killed it,” Mattar says softly. Guilt slides from her like snowmelt, but the feeling is false. She spoke the prayer. She felt the gods’ understanding. Perhaps the vulture still would have died if she had stayed silent, perhaps this girl would still have killed it, but she thinks not. The gods use humans as their instruments, after all.

         “I rode the ghost-roads to the mountain-top where it paused to rest. I took one of the splintermen’s spears from where it had fallen, and I drove it through the vulture’s skull,” the woman says tonelessly. “On the mountain peak where I could hardly breathe, where no one could ever climb to claim it. And because I slew the vulture-god, we have held this long. Because of what I did, my people will never lay down their spears. We are victorious, or we are destroyed. And I do not believe we can win this war.”

         “But we can end it,” Mattar tells her. “You and I. I need only a single word, and I think that you are the one who knows it.”

         For a long time, the Aghan’s daughter says nothing. The tortoise shifts, a sound like the movement of a mountain.

         Then she nods, once, and speaks again. “When the vulture died, it thrashed, and its wings made such a great wind that the whole sky howled with it, and the rocks shaped the wind into a word.”

         “What was it?” Mattar asks.

         The Aghan’s daughter leans close and whispers in her ear.

* * *

         Mattar rises from the rock with the heat pressing against her with all the stubbornness of a child. The Aghan’s daughter walks her to the poolside and speaks in gestures to the singer, who takes the splinterman’s hand. She joins it to Mattar’s and hums softly until Mattar’s skin prickles.

         “He can take you home,” the Aghan’s daughter tells her.

         “Thank you,” Mattar says. “I promise you, the gods will listen. This war will end without need of further death.”

         The Aghan’s daughter shakes her head. “Grandmother, I was born to end this war. And I was born to kill your son. I have given you the word you need. So our soothsayers are wrong, or you are. Or we are all of us right, and I fear that you will not like the answer to your prayers.”

         Mattar looks away. She looks at the last Enokoan child. “Guard your sons,” she says to the women. “But keep them from your prayers.”

         She tells the splinterman they must go home. The curse still sticks to the soles of his feet and carries them to the outskirts of the city where her son and grandsons have their thrones. But when she takes another step, she is alone. The splinterman has walked on to the ghost roads, the sunset of the seventh day marking his end.

         She walks alone to the temple, the word droning in her mind. It is a word that has no translation—not in the hundred tongues she’s heard, not in the hundred-thousand that Anaharesh could name. It is the sound of a spear driving through bone. It is the sound of last breaths, of mud, of rocks crashing and of the scrape of a crippled foot across a dirt path. It is not war but this war, distilled into a dying scream.

         In the temple, she kneels. She has carved every word of her prayer in the flagstone at the feet of the hooded god, Imrin-ka, the last god who still listens when she prays. The last clear patch of stone lies at the center, waiting to be filled.

         I was born to kill your son, the Aghan’s daughter said. Mattar is mighty in her faith; she does not doubt. She believes her gods of stone can stand against the will of the behemoths the northern nations worship. But she can see no reason why they would.

         A different prayer, perhaps, could shape the gods’ answer to her will. A prayer that would spill over every stone in the temple, precluding loss and sorrow, anticipating every misfortune, with the unflinching vocabulary the gods demand. And perhaps she could find the words for it, if she were Anaharesh, or if she had a hundred years to wait.

         When she was young, and newly with child, she knelt in this place. She carved a prayer, as was her right as first wife to the king, at the feet of Imrin-ka. Make my son strong, she wrote, in the tongue of her mother, the Kilin-kasa, a language she spoke but did not truly understand. She did not know there were as many words for strength as bones in the hand, and the word she chose was drenched in blood.

         She presses her fingertips against that word. Strong. It was not her fault, she has told herself many times before this day. She did not understand then that she was Three-Times-Woken. Woken to life with her first breath, woken to sentience with the accretion of thought, and at last woken to the gods. She prayed as any mother would, and to her grief, the gods answered.

         Or perhaps he would be as he is without her prayer. Perhaps the vulture would have died on the mountain if she were silent. And perhaps the word she carves now in the small smooth space is nothing more than grooves in sandstone, inert and unremarked.

         She kneels, fingers laced, and folds herself to the ground. She whispers the words, again and again, and the stone listens.

         In the palace on the hill, a prince slips a bead of poison into a king’s cup, and prays for peace.

Copyright © 2015 Kate Marshall

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Kate Marshall lives in Seattle with her husband and a slightly demonic cat. She’s written everything from coffee orders to ad copy to supernatural noir video games, and her own work has appeared in a number of venues, including Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, and Crossed Genres. You can find more of her work at katemarshallwrites.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Migration,” by Julie Dillon

Julie Dillon is a freelance science fiction and fantasy artist from Northern California. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from Sacramento State University in 2005, with continued education at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco and Watts Atelier. Her clients include Simon & Schuster, Penguin Books, Wizards of the Coast, and Paizo Publishing. She won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. View more of her work online at www.juliedillonart.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2015 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.