Issue #178 • July 23, 2015

“The Scale-Tree,” by Raphael Ordoñez

“The Insurrectionist and the Empress Who Reigns Over Time,” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

THE SCALE-TREE

by Raphael Ordoñez

        Zeuxis, the flying artist and geometer, and his wife, Helen, lived in Enoch, the world-city that surrounds the sea on three sides like a giant omega. They dwelt alone on a deserted street and had no one to help them.

        Every day they went up to the mossy crown of the tower they lived in, one of thousands of pinnacles and spires comprising the coast-long downtown, and prayed for their long loneliness to end.

        One evening as the sun was sinking toward the molten-gold bosom of the sea, resting its quaking crown on a cloud-wrack, they burned two lumps of resin on the brazier, pale yellow for princes and dusky red for death. The decayed spire loomed over them like a cloaked green goddess, a disheveled dryad with bones of stone and no tree to call home.

        Twice Helen climbed up and dropped down on the smoke-column. Then she said, “Let’s go downstairs.”

        They knew one another, and Helen gave birth to a son. He had golden skin and golden hair and eyes like twin jades. They named him Phoenix.

        They knew one another again, and Helen gave birth to a daughter. Her skin was pale and freckled and for hair she had curling masses of red. They named her Philomena but called her Mena.

        Father, mother, sister, brother: they were a family in Enoch.

* * *

        A strange voice awoke Zeuxis one dawn. He opened his eyes. Pink light filtered through the lace curtains. The crumbling crowns of nearby towers were green-gold flames against a rose-gray sky.

        “Yes? What was it?” he said, not certain he hadn’t been dreaming.

        Helen stirred but said nothing.

        He rolled over. Mena stood in the doorway. Her hair was a subdued aureole in the roseate glow of the room behind her.

        “Was that you, my princess?”

        “Never call me princess,” she said.

        He sat up and slid his feet into his slippers. “May I inquire why not?”

        “They’re afraid of things. I love gorgons and chimeras and everything scary.”

        “Ah.” He rose and began shuffling toward the lavatory. The big four-poster bed took up most of the room; the rest was full of clutter and rickety furniture. The plaster walls were hung with paintings and diagrams and emulsion images. An unwound clock sat atop the dresser.

        “I am a queen,” said Mena, following him. “You may call me queen.”

        “Good morning, queen.”

        “Good morning!”

        The nephridium lamp threw its sickly light against the white-tiled walls of the lavatory. Zeuxis stopped the drain, filled it with a ewer of collected rainwater, and washed his face.

        “I wish I could go with you today,” Mena said.

        “I wish you could, too. But you can’t, little queen.”

        “Why not?”

        He turned and picked her up. “What if they thought you were a pretty little statue and wanted me to sell you?”

        “Well, you would just say no.”

        He knit his brow. “That would depend on what they offered me.”

        “No!” she said, patting his forehead. “Do not say that you would sell me as a statue! Tell me you would just say no!”

        He set her down and ran his fingers through his scraggly beard. “Well, I don’t know. Think of all the paint I could buy.”

        “You’re only joking me.”

        He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “Soon you can come with me. Is your brother awake?”

        “Yes.”

        “He’s very quiet. What’s he doing?”

        “Counting.”

        Together they went into the next room. It was almost bare of furniture. There was a washstand and a big wardrobe. A mattress lay on each side of it.

        Phoenix was sitting cross-legged on top of the wardrobe. His golden face and green eyes were calm, serious, and beautiful. “Babu,” he said.

        “Get down from there,” said Zeuxis.

        “Two gnomons is four, a square. Three gnomons is nine, another square. Four—”

        “Get down from there.”

        “—is sixteen. So, if you keep adding gnomons, you keep getting squares. Is that right?”

        “Down, I say. Off! Off! Right now! But don’t just—”

        But Phoenix had already taken a flying leap. He landed on the mattress, bounced backward, and knocked his head in the corner where the wardrobe met the wall. “Ow!” he shouted.

        “Well, what do you expect?”

        “Was I right?”

        “Get dressed. Yes. Hurry up.”

        “Where are we going?”

        “Out. You’re coming with me.”

        “Hurray!” he shouted, leaping around the room, while Mena tried to tell him the things she was going to do that day. He threw the wardrobe doors open with a bang and began to strip. Suddenly he froze and faced his father. “What are you going to do?”

        “I’m going to try to sell some pictures.”

        A look of betrayal came into the boy’s face. “I hope no one will buy them.”

        “It’s very possible that they may.”

        “Then I won’t see them again!” Angry tears welled up in his eyes.

        “Little boy,” Zeuxis said gently, placing his hand on his son’s head and running his fingers through his hair, “we’ve talked about this. I’m a painter. This is what I do. Our family needs the rods.”

        “What a lovely morning,” a sleepy voice said. The children turned. Helen was standing in the doorway.

        “Today is the day the gods have made,” said Zeuxis. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

* * *

        The steam lift had stopped running ages ago, so Zeuxis and Phoenix took the stairs down from storey to storey. It had once been a beautiful building, with brown and white tile floors, wrought-iron fixtures, wooden wainscots, and cobweb-festooned gas chandeliers. Zeuxis carried his portfolio under his arm; he was wearing a long coat and a black cap.

        “Can we talk some more about what you were telling me last night?” asked Phoenix.

        “What?”

        “That man. The sage.”

        “Oh, yes. Eiron the polyhymnist. Yes. Well, let’s see. So after he left his mountain and went wandering, he met an auraiad atop a sleeping volcano in an inner-city pumice desert. This auraiad told him that the cosmos is like a shell folded in on itself. Each place consists of two leaves that are almost, but not quite, the same.”

        “How can they be almost the same?”

        “What happens in one affects the other. A natural affinity keeps the stars and planets paired.”

        “Then are there two universes?”

        “No, but it’s not easy to explain. You see, if you were to fly to the uttermost antipodes of the cosmos—impossible, of course, but supposing you did it—then you would arrive back where you started, but in the other leaf. If you kept on in the same direction then you’d eventually get home again, in the leaf you started from.

        “The leaves were separated long ago because the nephelim, who were made to guide creation, fought terrible wars against one another instead, spoiling the earth. The seraphim therefore divided the leaves, consigning the bad spirits to this one.”

        “We live in the bad one?”

        “Yes, so the polyhymnist says. Husbandry of life was forsaken here, so it’s been allowed to stagnate, while the other continued to grow and change. The children of men came originally from the other leaf.”

        “How do you mean it grew and changed?”

        “All life is connected. You come from me, and I from my father, though I never knew him, and he from of old. The same is true of every creature. All spring from a common corpuscle in some dim unguessable aeon. Somehow that divine spark contained within it every eft and ammonite, every scale-tree and stinkhorn that has ever been.”

        “Mama calls it the tree of life.”

        Zeuxis nodded. “To me it’s more like a great river, which flows in one direction, yes, but with whorls and eddies, and no lines between the streams and undercurrents and secret springs.”

        They reached the lobby, which was shrouded in dust and greenish gloom, and crossed to the foyer. The huge iron doors were slightly ajar. They slipped between them into the street.

        It was an uninhabited district, but the smell of refuse hung heavy in the humid air. The noise of tramping crowds and steam engines drifted faintly from far away. They went toward it, picking their way around heaps of junk and rotten masonry. The towers’ broken windows watched them like empty eyes.

        “How is it different?” Phoenix asked. “The other leaf, I mean.”

        “In the other leaf there are creatures that fly.”

        “Like dragonflies?”

        “Yes, but red-blooded beasts, too. They are brightly colored, and have long, beautiful scales that are soft like hair. And they sing to wake the dawn. Plants there have lovely delicate organs, a bit like sea anemones.” He raised his hand and opened it, palm upward. “These organs last only a few days, then die.”

        “Why?”

        “To make room for others. Also, in some plants, the organ produces a body that can be plucked and eaten as meat, or pressed for blood more delicious than anything we have in this world.”

        “Do the people there know about us?”

        “No. Why would they? They live in the world made for men. They have everything they need. There’s nothing to make them wonder what’s on the other side. Perhaps some of them don’t even know there is another side.”

        “Why are there men here at all?”

        “Once, long ago, two of the ghulim, beast-men who have no souls, awoke to themselves, and became the first man and the first woman. They had two sons, twins. One of the sons spilled the life-blood of his brother, and was consigned to this leaf, together with his family. But for the love they bore toward their kin, the murdered one’s sons and daughters pled to be allowed to follow them here, and their wish was granted. From the murderer’s children sprang the goblins and the cyclopes, the phylites and the helots.”

        “What about the others?”

        “They are said still to survive in the waste spaces and forgotten corners of this sphere, persecuted and destitute but content with their lot, a sin-offering for their kin.”

        They went on in silence, each lost in his own thoughts, holding hands.

        After a while they reached a more populous neighborhood. The streets there were crowded with phylites, the great ones of Enoch. They were graceful and tall, with limbs swathed in colored silk, skin covered with ornate tattoos or dyed blue or saffron or pink, cheeks pierced by delicate ruby-strung chains.

        Those of the same phyle were almost indistinguishable, while those of different phyles didn’t exist to one another. They walked unhearing, unseeing, eyes shuttered from within. There was no one to notice a tramp leading a boy down the street, weaving in and out of shops, past revolving doors of apartment foyers, markets, dealers of jewelry and machines, theaters, perfumeries, accounting houses, glittering shrines and fanes, all scenes of silent bustling activity.

        One by one, father and son visited the curio shops and junk dealers, trying to sell Zeuxis’ pictures. His most popular offerings were the images he’d captured while soaring over streets and touched up with pigment. No one wanted his paintings or diagrams.

        “Good,” said Phoenix. “I don’t care about those others.”

        “Still,” Zeuxis replied, “I must try. The gods are kind to those who make the most of what they’re given. Who knows but that some poor phylite might see a picture of mine one day and be drawn to it?”

        “But what about when the people who buy them die? They’ll just sit in empty apartments and fall apart.”

        “And what about when I die? Eh? I think of it every day, little boy. Will my pictures be collected and treasured when I’m gone? It’s not likely. But I’ll tell you something.”

        “What?”

        “We’re conduits. When we stop the outflow, no more can flow in, and we stagnate. We die daily to live. It’s the flow that matters, not the possession of what’s not really ours anyway. Remember that.”

        They walked on silence, while the rest of the world whirled around them.

        Their last stop was well back from the street. They had to cross a neglected court and descend a flight of steps to a half-basement. The shop was situated between the phylites’ world of sunny streets, soaring towers, and the high-piled honeycombed foundation, the helots’ world down below.

        It was a musty, suffocating labyrinth. Phoenix wondered who could possibly want so many thousands of porcelain idols, chipped kraters, clocks without pendulums, cracked glass plates iridescent with age, seatless wooden chairs, and faded emulsion portraits of people long dead. Furtive phylites picked through the wares like fallen angels at a discount market.

        The shopkeeper, Granny, glared at the boy from her counter, her pink eyes glittering with malice. She was large, stooped, and flabby, her pallid skin scored by a network of hairline cracks, like a grub that had never gotten around to pupating.

        Her man—too young to be a husband and obviously not a son—sat a little behind on a stool, leaning back on a shelf. He was big and tall and had strong-looking hands. One of his eyes was much larger than the other.

        An overused tone-stick rotated relentlessly in the player, screeching a treacly tune.

        “Take a look at these,” Zeuxis said, opening his portfolio on the counter.

        Granny flipped through the pictures. “No. No. No. Hmmm. No.” She looked up. “The whole thing for a rod.”

        “Thank you for your time,” Zeuxis said, starting to gather them up.

        “That’s all they’re worth,” said Granny.

        Phoenix stamped his foot. “That’s not true!”

        “Quiet, my boy.” As Zeuxis closed the folder, a loose picture slipped out of a pocket and slid down the counter. It was a portrait of Mena, abstracted from nature by the pith of his brain and given form by his hands, a vision of delicate, sensitive beauty.

        The man leaned forward and took it up before Zeuxis could reach it. He wetted his plump lips with his tongue, breathing heavily. “You painted this?”

        “I don’t know how it got in there. Here, I’ll—”

        “Is this—is this from your imagination?”

        “Yes, more or less. Let me—”

        “It’s my sister!” Phoenix shouted.

        “You have a beautiful little sister,” the man said. “I’ll pay ten rods for this.”

        “No, thank you,” said Zeuxis. “It’s not for sale.”

        “Fifteen, then.”

        “This is going to get expensive for me!” Granny chortled.

        “I’m sorry, it’s not for sale.” Zeuxis snatched it back and thrust it in the portfolio. “Come, my boy.”

* * *

        They got back to the apartment in the afternoon. “Any luck?” asked Helen, looking up from the mechanical reading console.

        “Seven rods,” said Zeuxis. He tossed his hat on the bed and dropped the purse on a table.

        “I don’t know how we’re going to survive.”

        He shrugged and walked to the window. “As we always do, I suppose.”

        “That’s very well for you to say! If you would only let us join the Collective...”

        “The divine machine, the headless god with a million eyes and a million hands. Yes, that would solve everything, wouldn’t it? But there’d be nothing to survive for. Anyway, it’s quite impossible, as you well know.”

        “Did you sell any of your paintings?”

        He sighed. “No.”

        “You’re not going to want to hear this, but if you could just do more—”

        “I would, but I can’t. I have to obey the spirit that sustains me. I have to go back and forth. One thing feeds another.”

        She went back to her reader. “I never have understood it. We mortals just aren’t capable of understanding it.”

        He spread his hands hopelessly. “Are we going to argue again?”

        She didn’t reply.

        For a while he stood there, watching her. “All right,” he said. “I’ll try to do more emulsion images. You’re right. I’m out of them now, so I suppose I’ll go take some aerials.”

        “Thank you,” she said quietly.

        He got his camera ready and popped his leather helmet down over his head. A loud thump came from the children’s room. “Ow!” Phoenix cried. He started shouting while Mena calmly tried to explain something. Then she screamed, too.

        Zeuxis went to the door. “What’s going on in here?”

        “Mena just—”

        “But he wouldn’t—”

        All at once they saw that he was wearing his helmet.

        “Are you flying?” asked Mena.

        “Are you flying?” asked Phoenix.

        “Yes.”

        “Can we watch you?” they asked with one voice.

        “I suppose so.”

        They began bounding around the room with glee.

        Zeuxis led them up to the highest storey. There he left them while he went back and forth between darkroom and roof with his camera and the parts to his flying machine, carrying them up to the pavement that surrounded the topmost spire.

        “Come on,” he said from the top of the stairs. Phoenix and Mena ran up and out into the sunshine, capering joyously.

        The tower’s mitered crown was weathered almost to the point of obliteration and overgrown with huge mosses. Its arched openings gaped blackly like clustered mouths overhung with locks of verdure. Zeuxis sat on a carved sailbeast and assembled his flier.

        When he was done he dropped his coat to the pavement, slipped into the harness, and stepped up to the parapet. Two pairs of gauzy wings extended from his shoulders. Spires and terraces rose like islands out of a shadowy sea all around, piles of white and gray stone stained yellow and streaked with orange and black. His face was lit with the golden glow of the rooftops below.

        “Listen, you two,” he said. “Keep away from the parapet. Climb the spire if you want to see. Understand?”

        “Babu,” said Phoenix, “are you—”

        “Understand?”

        “Yes, Babu,” they both said.

        He leaped off the edge and soared along a southbound street. For a few seconds he glided, and was able to take a quick picture with the camera at his breast. Then he wheeled, driving the gearbox with his legs, and made his way back to the spire.

        “Did you take one?” called Mena. She was on the pinnacle with her brother.

        “Yes. A nice one, I think. I’ll be right back.”

        He left them, going down to his darkroom to replace the paper, and returned. The process was repeated several times. He took pictures of streets, turrets, and various inaccessible details.

        By the seventh round the children were getting restless. Phoenix was doing flips to make Mena laugh. Suddenly she screamed and pointed. Phoenix followed her gaze, just in time to see his father dropping from the air, trying frantically to get his wings to work. One of them was broken.

        Phoenix heard someone scream. “Babu!” He was the one screaming. He slithered down to the spire’s base, ran to the parapet, and looked down. His father was a huddled heap on the street, moving feebly.

        The world spun. He felt sick. The sun was a searing eye and the air was still and sultry. “Go tell Mama,” he shouted, then dashed down the stairs.

        When he reached the street he ran to his father, who lay where he had fallen in the middle of an intersection. Zeuxis let out a horrible, high-pitched groan and began wriggling on his side.

        Phoenix hesitated, afraid to get nearer. There was blood on the pavement. One of his father’s legs was broken, with a jagged white bone protruding. The camera lay in pieces all around.

        His father moaned again. Phoenix fell to his knees at his father’s side. “Babu! Oh, Babu, please be well!” he cried. “Gods, let him be well!” He touched his father’s shoulder.

        “Phoenix?” said Zeuxis. “Is that you?”

        “Yes, Babu.”

        “I love you, Phoenix. I’ll always love you. Always be a good boy.”

        “Babu, everything will be all right.”

        “Take care of your sister. Be good to your mother. Let her lean on you a little.” He coughed violently and his body convulsed.

        “Zeuxis!” Phoenix heard his mother scream. She was standing on the apartment balcony high above. “Zeuxis!”

        “Listen,” said his father. “Bury me in the spire. Do you understand?”

        “In the spire?”

        “Yes, up there where we just were. I want to be where we were so happy.”

        A helot wrapped in white gauze came skulking by, casting the pair a sidelong glance. Phoenix called to him and begged for help. Together they were able to get Zeuxis into the building and up the stairs. They met Helen on the way.

        While Helen and their helper got Zeuxis on the bed, and Mena stood there watching, Phoenix went and knelt on his mattress, facing the wall. “O divine spirits of flame,” he whispered, “I’ve never prayed to you before. But please let my Babu be all right. Please let him get well.”

        Zeuxis died before sunset. He was interred as he had asked.

* * *

        The endless stagnant summer dragged on. Phoenix shrank within himself. No more did he leap or shout or sit atop the wardrobe to contemplate the universe. Helen was afraid of provoking a reaction and left him alone. Mena became terribly sensitive, crying at the least rebuke.

        It so happened that Zeuxis’ death drove up the price of his pictures. Soon phylites were more than willing to buy anything they could get. Helen began selling them one at a time, holding some in reserve. Mena often went with her while Phoenix stayed at home.

        One night the children were lying awake on their mattresses. They had their feet pointing toward the wall because they liked to be in the moonbeams.

        “Phoenix,” whispered Mena.

        “Yes?”

        “I miss Babu.”

        “I know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

        After a moment’s silence: “Phoenix?”

        “What?”

        “Why don’t you ever talk to Mama?”

        “I don’t know.”

        “It worries her.”

        “I know.”

        “She said today that what you need is a man in the house.”

        “She’s wrong.”

        “That’s what I said, but she won’t listen. She talks to a man.”

        Phoenix got up on his elbow. “What? A man? Who?”

        “I don’t know. Just someone she met. She likes him. His name is Brontes. He makes me feel strange. He’s always looking at me.”

        Phoenix fell back on his pillow. “Don’t think about it.”

        “I won’t, Phoenix.”

        They drifted off to sleep soon after.

        One day a few days later Phoenix was sitting in his mother’s room, reading at the console, when he heard voices in the corridor. His mother was talking to another adult. He turned around with a sinking heart.

        The door slowly swung open. Helen stepped in out of the darkness. “Hello, Phoenix,” she said. “I have a surprise for you.”

        Phoenix said nothing.

        “Come in, Brontes,” she said.

        The man from Granny’s store, the big man with one eye larger than the other, stepped in beside her. He smiled good-naturedly, but Phoenix could have sworn there was a hint of a smirk behind it. His teeth were large and yellow.

        “Say hello, Phoenix,” his mother said.

        “Hello.”

        She looked nervously from Phoenix to Brontes and back to Phoenix again. “I have wonderful news. Brontes is going to be a new Babu to you and Mena. We’re going to leave this place as soon as we can and start afresh in another part of the city.”

        “He’s not my Babu,” said Phoenix.

        “Phoenix!”

        “It’s quite all right,” said Brontes. “He’s right. We understand one another, eh? Don’t we Phoenix, my boy? We’re going to be friends, aren’t we?”

        “I’m not your boy, and I’m not your friend. We were happy the way we were.”

        “That’s enough of that!” said Helen. “You apologize to Brontes.”

        “You can’t marry him. I won’t let you.”

        “I already have. We just made the sacrifice.”

        “We’ll be good friends, boy,” said Brontes. He put his big arm around Helen’s shoulders and squeezed her.

        Phoenix bolted past them, past his sister, and up the stairs.

* * *

        He found himself in his father’s darkroom. It hadn’t been touched since that day. The emulsion papers were still where his father had stored them. He decided to try developing one.

        For several hours he worked there in the darkness, not thinking about anything else. The results were imperfect, but the picture was legible. It was a carved gargoyle spouting lead that had melted in some forgotten sunstorm long ago.

        When he went back down Brontes was still there. He still refused to acknowledge the man, but his mother was kind and gentle, and they soon settled into an uncomfortable truce.

        Every day Phoenix returned to the darkroom to develop another picture. Brontes was always about. For all the man’s plans, he didn’t seem particularly eager to move. He spoke daily of going to his place to get his things, but never did.

        A scale-tree sprang from the pinnacle of the spire, over Zeuxis’ sepulcher. Its herbaceous trunk was scaly and pale, its head darkly livid with touches of green. It grasped the crumbling masonry with splayed roots. Though it shot up almost overnight, the head refused to open. The children grew fond of sitting beneath it.

        One day Phoenix went back down to the apartment earlier than usual. He found the door locked. He knocked and got no response. It wasn’t the first time he’d been locked out when they went to sell pictures. There were voices inside, though. He knocked again. Still nothing.

        It gave him a bad feeling. He slid the window open at the end of the hall and climbed out to the ledge. Clinging to the ornate masonry, and trying not to think of the dreadful gulf behind him, he inched his way over to his bedroom window and peered in.

        Brontes was there, and Mena was with him.

        Something went off in Phoenix’s brain. He slid the window up. It was noisy, but Brontes didn’t notice. Phoenix slipped across to the other bedroom and got the poker they used to stir the brazier. He returned, lifted it up, and struck Brontes, who was crouching, on the back of the head.

        Brontes let loose a low, angry whine. He rose slowly and turned. “You little maugreth!” he spat.

        “Touch my sister and I’ll kill you,” said Phoenix. He struck a second time, laying the iron alongside Brontes’ jowl. Brontes stepped forward as though not quite comprehending what was happening. The third blow felled him. His fall was tremendous.

        “Let’s go,” said Phoenix. He took his sister’s hand and together they fled. They ran up the stairs without thinking and hid in Zeuxis’ darkroom.

        The velvety darkness embraced them. They sat side by side, hearing one another breathe, listening for the sound of steps on the stairs. But no steps came. The darkness was pregnant, as in the instant that preceded the unfurling of the cosmos.

        They were there for hours, long after the sun must have gone down. They dozed a little, perhaps, but it was hard to tell.

        “Phoenix,” whispered Mena.

        “What is it?”

        “I miss Babu.”

        “I do, too.”

        As time went on they started to get restless but were too afraid to leave the comforting darkness. So Phoenix set about developing the last of the pictures, showing Mena how it was done.

        The picture emerged like a memory from the mists of time. It showed a field of rooftops. A tiny human figure stood at the corner of one, casting a long shadow like a black stiletto. With a magnifying glass Phoenix looked closer.

        He jerked upright and backed against the wall. Mena took the glass and looked for herself. It was Brontes, holding a metal weight on a long chain.

        “We have to get help,” said Phoenix.

        “Where?”

        “We’ll go to the hoplites.”

        Mena shook her head. “They only help members of the Collective.”

        “There’s nothing else to try. If that doesn’t work, we’ll just run away.”

        “We can’t leave Mama,” said Mena.

        Phoenix didn’t reply. He rolled up the picture and took Mena by the hand. They went out into the hallway. Pale dawn showed against the window.

        They went to the back stairs and crept down. On the ground floor they followed a narrow corridor to a side door. But as they neared the rectangle of light, a dark figure stepped out to bar their way.

        “Just where do you think you’re going?”

        “Run!” shouted Phoenix. He dashed toward Brontes while his sister ran the other way. Brontes threw him against the wall, knocking him senseless, and chased after Mena. He grabbed her and thrust her, kicking and screaming, into a closet and wedged the door shut behind her.

        Then he went and helped Phoenix to his feet. An ugly purple and yellow bruise ran along one side of his face. He placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “I was going to start with her,” he said. “But you’ve spoiled things.” His hands inched toward Phoenix’s neck.

        “Oh, no,” said Phoenix. “Please let us go. We’ll just go away and won’t ever bother you again.”

        “And leave Mama? But I don’t want you to go away. I want us to be happy together.” He had his thumbs on Phoenix’s windpipe now.

        Phoenix tried to plead again but he could no longer speak. He was sad but not afraid.

        Brontes squeezed until there was no more to squeeze. Then he looked down at what he had done, and gave a long, drawn-out sob.

        He noticed the paper on the floor and stooped to pick it up. He unrolled it. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, wiping his eyes. He giggled and crumpled it into a ball.

* * *

        Mena crouched in the closet, forgotten. She began to explore the space. It was cluttered with brooms and mops and hardware. At the back she found a little door midway up the wall. She slid it open. There was a tall vertical shaft beyond, with a cord dangling from above. A dumbwaiter.

        As quietly as she could she ran the box down. It was large enough for her to climb into. It slid slowly down with her weight and came to a rest in the basement. Dim light filtered through the grille.

        Brontes was there. He had a white sheet laid out on a table. With a big boning knife he began to work on what lay heaped there. Every so often he went over to stoke the fire he’d started in the old boiler.

        Mena watched him strip the flesh off the bones one piece at a time and throw it in a big pot of water. He stacked the bones to one side as he cleaned them. The organs he heaped in a different pile, with the heart by itself on a platter. Everything was red by then.

        He went out. Mena threw the grille up, dashed over, seized the still-warm heart, and returned to her hiding place. She got the door back down just before Brontes returned.

        For a moment he continued his work without noticing. Then he looked down at the plate and froze. He whirled, peering suspiciously into the shadows. For a moment Mena thought he was going to come open the grille. But in the end he shrugged and went on.

        Mena wrapped the heart in her silk handkerchief and put it in her apron pocket. Once or twice she thought she felt it palpitating, but she knew that that was impossible.

        She thought of the stories her father had told her of cannibal cyclopes living in high mountain valleys, beyond the coal swamps, where they herded behemothim with crooks of black iron. He’d said there were clans of them in the city, too, living in ruined neighborhoods where no men dwelt, and that occasionally they bore off a phylite woman and begot mixed offspring.

        Done with his preparations, Brontes set the pot on the fire. Every so often he stirred it. For hours he came and went at intervals, checking on the stew. Mena stayed where she was, though her limbs ached with crouching.

        The day was far gone when Brontes came in with a platter of sea vegetables and trilobites. He dumped the plate into the pot and stood by, stirring frequently. Half an hour later he took the whole thing off the fire, ladled the steaming contents into a big bowl, and bore it out of the room.

        Mena emerged, shaking. The bones lay in a glistening stack on the table. A clean folded sheet lay on a shelf where Brontes had put it. Mena placed the bones in the sheet, drew up the corners, and tied them.

        She went to the stairs and listened. There was no sound. Quickly she dragged the bundle up to the corridor and from there to the back stairs.

        It took a long time to climb to the top. It was sunset when she stepped onto the pavement. Wind from the west lifted her hair. The sun was setting.

        She spread the sheet out and carried the bones up to the pinnacle one at a time, placing them in a mossy hollow embraced by the scale-tree’s roots. When she was done she discovered that she had lost one bone, the tip of a little finger. She looked for it, but it was nowhere to be found, and there was no going back for it. Last of all she placed the heart in the ribcage, still wrapped in her handkerchief.

        She slid part of the way down and sat there, looking out. Sunset collapsed into dusk, orange to blue-green to indigo. Here and there the descending curtain was pricked by an argent light, a window behind which some actuary or accountant was concluding a day’s work. She hugged herself.

        A rustling noise made her turn. The scale-tree shuddered from the base of its pithy stem to its bulbous head high above. She climbed down and backed against the parapet. The tree’s head glowed from within as though enclosing a gold-white fire.

        There was a tremendous explosion. The crown burst open in a spray of soft boughs and glittering windowpane leaves. A creature of fire and light shot straight up into the starry sky.

        Its form was human, but in place of arms it had broad wings that beat the night air exultantly. It was clothed in silky scales that were long and soft and pearl-white. For feet it had cruel talons, and cruel, too, was its curved beak, with corners curled in a terrifying smile. Its eyes were vast black pools, and a diadem of gold-tipped white scales thrust back from the crown of its head.

        For a moment it beat there, glowing with its own golden light, and then with a vengeful shriek it was gone.

        Mena sank to her knees on the pavement.

* * *

        When she entered the apartment, her mother and Brontes were seated at the sideboard, eating. Brontes looked up in surprise, then flushed, a strange fire dancing in his eyes.

        Helen was angry. “There you are,” she said. “Brontes told me how naughty you and your brother have been.” She took a bite of meat. “This is so good, Brontes. I never knew you cooked.”

        “I’m glad you like it,” said Brontes, smiling at Mena.

        Mena calmly picked up her mother’s bowl and bore it to the windowsill. Her mother was too surprised to stop her. She did the same with Brontes’ bowl. He seemed amused.

        Then she went over and took up a fork. Scorn gave way to suspicion on Brontes’ face. Like lightning she lunged. Brontes jerked back and fell over.

        “Philomena!” Helen shrieked. “What are you doing? Are you mad?”

        Again Mena tried to stab him. He was on his hands and knees now, scrambling to get away from her. On the third try she succeeded in driving the tines into his lower back. He leaped to his feet with a howl, striking his head on the table, the fork still sticking out.

        Just then an unearthly golden light flashed across the window and was gone.

        They all froze. “What was that?” Helen whispered.

        A lovely strain of inhuman song suffused the sudden silence.

        “Whatever could that be?” she went on. “Somehow, it makes me feel... oh, I don’t know!” She held her hand out to Mena.

        Mena went and clasped it. They hugged one another. Brontes cowered in the corner, holding the bloody fork.

        The singing reached a crescendo and ceased. The light fell through the door now. Something was in the children’s bedroom.

        “I’m going to go see it,” said Mena.

        “Perhaps you’d better not,” said Helen. But she made no move to stop her.

        Mena went and soon returned. “Look,” she said. “It gave me this.” She held up a diaphanous infolded shell with a delicate design in gold leaf. Its shape was curiously simple—simpler than a perfect sphere—but it had no edges.

        The creature began to sing again.

        “I’m going now,” said Helen. She went as Mena had, and came back a moment later. “It was so beautiful,” she said. “I’ve never seen scales so snowy soft and golden white.” She opened her hands to reveal a lump of rich resin fit for the thurible. “It gave me this.”

        For the third time the creature sang.

        Brontes drew himself up. “This is madness,” he said, “but I suppose I should go see what it has for me.”

        He stalked past them into the chamber. There was a moment of silence, then a horrific scream cut short, and a fearful inhuman shriek. A succession of strange, unidentifiable noises followed. Then a rustling shudder, and finally a low crackle.

        They crept cautiously to the doorway and peered inside. Of Brontes there was no sign. A pile of what might have been soft, pearly scales lay heaped in the middle of the floor. It was being consumed by a smokeless white fire.

        Phoenix sat cross-legged on top of the wardrobe, watching them serenely. His bare skin was clean and white, as though newly made. Beauty both ancient and new sat in his face. He held up one hand as if to bless them. But Mena looked closely, and saw that his little finger was missing one joint.

Copyright © 2015 Raphael Ordoñez

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Raphael Ordoñez is a mildly autistic writer and circuit-riding college professor living in the Texas hinterlands, eighty miles from the nearest bookstore. His stories have appeared multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and his novel Dragonfly, featuring the same main character as his BCS story “Day of the Dragonfly,” is available from Hythloday House. He blogs sporadically about fantasy, writing, art, and life at raphordo.blogspot.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE INSURRECTIONIST AND THE EMPRESS WHO REIGNS OVER TIME

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

        They captured the insurrectionist Yin Sanhi during the Feast of Twelve Luminous Cranes.

        They found her in Onsakit the Red Capital, which she had helped conquer, where an army led by mathematicians and blade-artists had disemboweled a dynasty five centuries old. It was a baking day, the sun in apex; royal bodies cast to the sand were quick to cook.

        In a palace shaped like bromeliads Yin Sanhi sat sipping a liquor of fermented cactus essence and sand persimmon. The chamber was papered by scrolls of proverbs on statecraft. The mathematicians and artists meant to send her dancers in pale silk and musicians with wrists like flutes, but she had declined, choosing instead silence and solitude. On another day she might have chosen the company of Lenenha, her military arm, or Zheng Husin, her thinker. For now she wanted quiet, wanted only herself as she watched the sky bleed like ink in water. Blots across the clouds, like cranes.

        Until that day, Yin Sanhi had a knack of being absent when harm would find her, of being sideways when an arrow or shell meant for her flew, being elsewhere when a blade inscribed with the intent of beheading her fell. For thirty years her fortune had held; for thirty years she had found the weakest pillars of any state, the frailest link in the chain of any government, and struck. She looked, and found, the common discontent that could be ignited into civil war.

        None knew better than she the ways of dismantling empires.

        When soldiers serving Empress Narasorn of Kaiyakesi came, she was not surprised. Luck such as hers could not last, and though she was a peerless strategist, she was not infallible. Like any elevated leader or general, she knew that each victory merely postponed defeat. Probability is a game which no tactician may, ultimately, win. The most treacherous of all terrain.

        She looked up at the soldiers, expecting death. She considered a game of persuasion. Her words, her voice, were her most potent instruments.

        They put chains on her throat and ears, and thread on her lips. A special needle was used, of a pearlescent alloy hammered to the thinness of a hair. It entered the fat of her lips and exited through the skin around her mouth. When her eyes showed only whites they pricked until she woke again, so she would be conscious through the sealing of her mouth. They held her down while her breast filled with the weight and shape of screams.

        When they had bound her mouth so, and locked her voice in the cage of her lungs, they brought her to Kaiyakesi.

* * *

        The palace of Empress Narasorn was built on an islet as flat as a windowpane, above a lake so immense and deep that great sharks and whales have mistaken it for ocean and made their home there. At all times, regardless of light, a perfect reflection shines beneath. It may waver under the passage of wind or water-striders, but it always keeps a certain solidity. In most respects it is a perfect double of the palace.

        It was into this mirror image that Yin Sanhi was taken and, for twelve months and twelve days, kept. An incision was made in her throat and a tube slipped into it: the surgery was delicate, so as to cause little pain—physical suffering was not the purpose of her incarceration.

        The best liquor was brought for her, distilled in summer nights where the sky washed chartreuse off its skins and turned it pale gold. The finest elephant meat was boiled in broth, the whitest rice beaten into a pulp, for the sustenance of Yin Sanhi. The room in which she was held was a double of the empress’ own suite, furnished with instruments to amuse, windows that looked out to upside-down fish and diverse sights. She was given ink and pigment, paper and canvas. Had she written down a request for the company of temple singers with the voices of birds and the eyes of wild animals caught in a trap, doubtless those would have been sent for, with instructions to entertain her in whatever fashion she preferred as long as it did not involve conversation. But she did not ask for that.

        The flesh of her mouth did not mortify and the stitches did not snap or cut; nevertheless they fettered with the surety of iron. Sanhi’s voice was her weapon; it was the primary tool with which she bound revolutions to her across three nations and five city-states, where she toppled monarchs and magistrates, upended priest-lords and icons-made-flesh. Words and the memory of her voice built up within her stomach, her ribcage, between her teeth. She exhaled them through her nose and eyes and ears, where they calcified into amber echoes: trapped sentences and fragments of speeches which, once, had roused cobblers to arms and turned soldiers from their oaths. Sanhi collected each echo and stored them in a redwood box, where the words rattled half-articulate, calling for justice and liberty, for the destruction of kingly yoke or theocratic fetters. For a new order, a better world.

        Her keepers were commanded to never communicate with her in any way other than to accept her requests for paint, manuscripts, or bees to keep as pets.

* * *

        Twelve months and twelve days passed.

* * *

        They did not prepare Sanhi for the audience. She was not cleaned and perfumed or clothed in the penitent’s robe; her hair was not shorn and her face was not tattooed with the purple scales that would brand her as dynastic property. No iron wasps heated to red incandescence were pressed into her flesh to scar her with the royal alphabet. The empress came to her rather than the more conventional way around.

        Empress Narasorn is not beautiful, and the faith that ruled both her nation and her palace forbids court poets to tell lies. Her bearing-mother had been broad in the shoulder and thick in the neck; her giving-mother had been widely built. She inherited these aspects, and they should have made her breathtaking. But something in her features betrayed this excellent heritage—a sharpness of bone, an angle of jaw—and she was merely plain. Nor did she adorn herself; she dressed as a footsoldier might in times of war and scarcity. A blade was strapped to her thigh, passed down from her bearing-mother, and an arrowhead gleamed around her neck, a keepsake from her giving-mother. Her hair was austere, cropped, dyed iron-gray.

        Sanhi regarded the empress without kneeling, no restraints upon her save the sutures on her lips. She was not a soldier, had never been, but thirty years an insurrectionist—eight civil wars—had taught her enough, should it become necessary to defend herself. But she did not move, yet, though there were many objects at hand she could turn into a weapon: the shards of unmelting ice, the fangs of a blue lion—those and more draped the wall as trophies, and were mere steps from her.

        Instead she unlocked the redwood box, upon whose lid were carved the symbols of Kaiyakesi faith, and arranged the fossils of her voice in a zodiac pattern.

        “I did not capture you,” the empress said, in a voice like snapping banners, “in order to have you perform a charlatan’s duty and tell fortune.”

        Yin Sanhi moved pieces of whispering amber into an outline of a turtle, the animal of wise questions.

        Empress Narasorn smiled. “I captured you for your voice, Yin Sanhi.”

        To this Sanhi made no answer or gesture. The fragments of her speeches had much quieted during her imprisonment; an exceptional listener might still have heard the poetry of her cadence. Narasorn listened well, but did not appreciate verse of any sort.

        The empress had long, blunt fingers callused with the vigor of statecraft. She laid their tips now along the insurrectionist’s lips.

        Her nails pierced, and blood sprang like pearls. The stitches fell away gleaming, each having hardened into shells, to click and roll at the women’s feet.

        Sanhi sipped at the air. Her tongue, cat-rough, scraped the empress’ fingers.

        Narasorn poured tea.

        For the first time in a year, Sanhi tasted the lake’s saltiness, and drank tea through her mouth instead of the feeding tube. When she had had her fill, when the distillation of golden hand-fruits and shark fins had restored some of her voice, Yin Sanhi lifted her head. “Most would’ve kept me silenced for longer than twelve months and twelve days.”

        “Most would have killed you and silenced you forever.”

        “So they would have; why have you not?”

        “I brought you here for a specific purpose.” Narasorn canted her head. “Perhaps you are in want of an explanation. But first, proper food, for I’ll have you strong and whole or you are of no use to me.”

        The empress exited, and the insurrectionist required no instruction to follow her out. Locks loosened where Narasorn walked; doors Sanhi had never seen fell open. A prayer room where jars of ash rattled and candles guttered in still air, a scriptorium smelling of saffron where orange and black books kept the balance of razor wheels. Finally they came to a dining hall fit for two hundred, where tables were arranged not for banquets or grand weddings but as though for the dining of soldiers. Harsh function. Nothing else.

        At the smallest table, food had been laid out. Cuts of bleeding meat and duck tongue lightly cooked, heavily spiced. Broiled stomachs, which the empress opened with a knife from her belt; they spilled glutinous rice and maidenhair nuts sodden with blood, a red treasury.

        Yin Sanhi looked at this fare and said, “I am not an animal.”

        “No,” Narasorn agreed, “but this will nurture your arteries and return flesh to your bones. I’ve tried to have food sent to you that was good for the body’s elements, but broth and drinks can only go so far.”

        The insurrectionist sat and ate. Her jaw remained strong and her teeth sharp, owing perhaps to the rumor that she descended from a line of tiger-demons. The empress watched her closely. But the insurrectionist was only a woman made skeletal on a year of deprivation, and her table manner was immaculate.

        When each bowl was dry of the last drop of blood, each celadon tray cleaned of the last grain of rice, Yin Sanhi pressed a thumb to the feeding tube in the side of her neck and exhaled. Her fingers trembled, minutely, but that did not escape Narasorn’s notice.

        “It pleases me,” the empress said, wielding her words like needles under nails, “that an enforced silence did not break you.”

        “My constitution isn’t so delicate as that. No red iron was pressed into my breast, no black steel slipped between my ribs. I was fed well and received nearly anything I asked for. What is a year of silence?”

        “Nothing at all. Do you know the properties of my palace’s image?”

        Sanhi gazed through a round window. Sharks showed her their bellies. “It is upside down.”

        “It is more than that, but it’s best to let you discover that for yourself.” The empress’ smile, which had been constant as the horizon, widened. “First let us depart from this place.”

* * *

        Twelve months are not so long for anyone. Even for a dog it is merely a fifteenth of its span. But an insurrectionist measures her time by the wax and wane of strife, the success and failure of revolts. To Yin Sanhi a year’s absence severed her from the thread of the blade-artists and mathematicians, the coil of Onsakit’s upturning and its consequences; to her this was a long illness, a grave wound. In a time of discord anything could have happened in a month, let alone twelve. She does not know what goes on there, and this lack of knowing trembles in her like a thorn.

        The empress leads Sanhi up steps of scales and teeth, through doors of water and glass. The empress leads Sanhi as she walks up a wall, then along a ceiling of black nacre and iron wasps.

        They are in the palace above: this Sanhi can tell at once, from the absence of seaweed and fish smells, from the presence of sunlight that has not been sieved through lotus leaves and lake water. It is hot and gold and bright, and the touch of it startles her—searing on the tongue, pricking on the flesh, like the needle that once sewed her lips shut.

        From behind her the empress says, “I know that in thirty years since you began your work you’ve committed three great deeds, at three different sites: Citadel-that-Burns Honghu, Bussaba-Morrakot where facets flourish, and finally Onsakit the Red Capital.”

        The insurrectionist licks her lips; they still taste of thread, a faint iron tang. “You have made a study of me. I’m flattered.”

        “My bearing-mother trained me to make a science of familiarity: to observe, to catalogue, to memorize intimately... and I, much as she was, am uniquely favored for such a discipline. That I will demonstrate to you, in time.”

        “You are open with your secrets.”

        “Revealing them is as much an art as keeping them.” The empress throws open the shutters.

        A shudder knifes through Sanhi as the day blinds her. She does not mean to shame herself, but the strength of it drops her to her knees, where she bows to the summer blaze and gasps into the charring heat. But she turns her face to it, crawls forward onto the veranda, to let the sun brand her, seep into her tendons.

        “I understand,” the empress says, “that you were born on a noon much warmer than this, grew up on the edge of a desert. This must be nothing to you.”

        Sanhi gazes down into the lake that kept her prisoner; it scintillates, much as Bussaba-Morrakot does, or once did. The garden where jeweled fruits bud, where glass flowers converse, the one she helped shatter, that was Bussaba-Morrakot. “In the place of my birth it is taught that fire is the element of the spirit, even if the flesh may not always endure it.”

        “An uncompromising philosophy, but one to which I’m not unsympathetic. When you’re strong enough I will give you currency, rations, clothing and any other supplies you require. You’re free to go where you would.”

        “I don’t believe that.”

        “Your sentence has served its purpose.”

        Yin Sanhi stands, swallowing mouthfuls of air. Perhaps Narasorn means to make a point; perhaps Narasorn believes a year’s incarceration is enough to permanently remove her from the board, her irrelevancy fatal. Her foot is half in a trap. But she says, “I’m strong enough.”

* * *

        When the empress finds the insurrectionist again, a month has fleeted past. Yin Sanhi is standing on the roof of the Rosette, the bromeliad palace where she once led an army to empty its halls of royal bodies. Narasorn rides one of Kaiyakesi’s beasts, bootblack iron and a belly full of thunder-wasps. The insurrectionist does not flinch when it lands for all its terror, its brute reality.

        She is holding two ash-jars sealed and marked with small pictographs: each a woman stylized in harsh brushstrokes. Strings of folded cranes drape her right arm, and chains of miniature blades her left. “First of Blades Lenenha, and the Algebraist of Composites Zheng Husin,” Sanhi says. Sleeplessness has bruised her eyes and grief has hunched her shoulders. “Forty-five and forty-seven years deceased, so I’ve been told.”

        “It is the property of my lake retreat,” the empress says as she dismounts. “My court theoreticians will have the precise numbers; I’ve never found the difference to be exact. But while twelve months passed there for you, fifty years and three months have gone by in the world without. In burning Honghu, in glittering Bussaba-Morrakot, and here, in Onsakit the Red. I meant to tell you as much, but you wouldn’t have believed me without seeing it for yourself. So I let you go.”

        “At the time of my capture you were said to be forty. You do not look a hundred to me.”

        “That is one of my secrets.”

        “What is your purpose?” Yin Sanhi’s throat flexes around the feeding tube. She has not covered it with choker or scarf, nor done much to hide the indentations on her lips. “Perhaps you believe that by making me irrelevant you’ve given me a death worse than strangling or drowning, a torture worse than nails and whips?”

        “I wanted to foster hatred within you,” the empress says, with little feeling. “It would be fierce and total, with a strong hard neck and a jaw that knows no closing. This hate would pump through the chamber of your heart in place of blood, and it would inform each sip of water poured down your feeding tube. It would overtake all else, and it would be for me, for Kaiyakesi.”

        The insurrectionist turns still. “Empress,” she says and her voice is as uninflected as the sky’s hum. “I do not love on command, and neither will I hate on the same.”

        “Are you a child, to be contrarian for the sake of it?” But Narasorn laughs, the sound of a wave striking shore. “What you do requires passion, and hate is easier to instigate than love. I want you to destroy Kaiyakesi.”

        Sanhi touches the folded cranes gently, careful not to crush the beaks or the wings. “I can anticipate why you might wish for this. But I am not one of your beasts and you will not tame me. I am not clay and you will not shape me.”

        “If I cannot motivate you with spite then I will offer you a reward. Do what I ask and I’ll return you to the day my soldiers took you. You’ll have been absent not for a year or fifty, but for at most an hour.”

        The insurrectionist steps forward. The Rosette’s roof is steep and high, built to invite a death of plummet and impact. “What makes you think that is reward for me, recompense enough for what you did? There is a chain called tyranny, and most governments form its links. My life is devoted to destroying that and there’s no shortage of them remaining. I need not return to that time. I can go on, doing as I did before; if I am bereft of my past allies, new ones can be found. I will rebuild. I will become, and I will not be deterred or removed.”

        “Your ideals are noble. But it was all just practice, wasn’t it?” Narasorn pursues the insurrectionist, though her gauntleted hands do not yet reach out to pull Sanhi away from the edge. “Onsakit was the real thing, the city of your birth, the one you wanted to free from its despots above all else. First, though, you had to make a name for yourself, become familiar with the rules of engagement. You got better each time—the first minor domains were disastrous, Honghu was a shambles for a long time, but Bussaba-Morrakot was nearly perfect. You uprooted the theocrats, replaced them with thinkers and those with a mind for truth. Onsakit was going to be your triumph, not only prosperous but just. Zheng Husin at your left, Lenenha at your right, and together you’d have created a system that sustained itself; that would be proof to corruption and avarice. That was your dream, your life’s desire.”

        “What,” Sanhi says quietly, “did they believe happened to me? I see Yenseret magistrates riding high here, Yenseret traders in our prestige markets. Husin’s and Lenenha’s jars are left to beetles and ants in the Rosette, unhonored. Unguarded, for I could remove them as I liked.”

        Narasorn gestures down at the red courtyard, the red streets, the walls of horn and claw. “Yenseret propagated the lie that you sold your own city—found a believable double to act as you, actually. The truth, of course, was that they anticipated the rebellion and thought it the perfect moment to annex Onsakit. Zheng Husin, I hear, cursed your name as they quartered her.”

        Sanhi’s hands shake, clench; this too Narasorn takes note. “And Lenenha?”

        “Who knows? I give you two choices: to return to that day and reroute history, or to avenge Onsakit. Kaiyakesi remains ascendant. Yenseret is most careful to give us excellent trade privileges, but it’s nothing to me to crush them.”

        “What proof do I have that you did not engineer Yenseret’s invasion?”

        “You could ask their governor.” Narasorn’s head sways side to side, the rhythm of a fascinated snake. “She is not obliged to truth. You could find accounts of what happened, if you care to take the time. Everything I have said you may verify, including—doubtless—Zheng Husin’s rage for you as she died.”

        The roof is built to invite that certain urge. That death of plummet and impact. Blood on red pavement, Sanhi thinks. It’ll be all be the same. “Or I could take the third option.” She thinks of nothing at all and takes the final step. Fear vanishes. Falling is easy—

* * *

        This time the empress pins the insurrectionist to the beast, gauntlets on arms delicate from a year of deprivation. The royal face is gray and damp with sweat, the royal breath labored. “I will not allow you the third choice.”

        Sanhi looks into Narasorn’s eyes. “I wasn’t going to jump, Empress. I meant only to suggest that I’ve a way out that you may not control.”

        “In another moment you would have taken the leap. In another trajectory of events, you took that step and you shattered on the courtyard. Don’t.” Narasorn’s voice seems to crack, but it is perhaps more exertion than emotion. “It is pointless. You cannot prove to your satisfaction that I didn’t manipulate Yenseret into invading Onsakit, but be assured that I’ve no love for that nation of hedonistic fools.”

        The insurrectionist does not struggle. She is calm, almost limp, in the empress’ grip. “How old were you when Kaiyakesi’s highest magistrates betrayed their own empress, your giving-mother, and destroyed her?”

        “Old enough to make them repay many times over and purge their families.” Narasorn inhales deeply, lets go of Sanhi by degrees. “They broke many of her bones and burned her face. They took her dignity, her voice, the strength of her limbs. But even then I thought that the fault did not lie with them alone, as individuals. It’s Kaiyakesi that is the rot, Kaiyakesi itself in need of the purge.”

        “Why didn’t you prevent her ruin?”

        “I came to the gift later, and it’s impossible to move backward beyond that point. Forward is painful. The future isn’t always mine.” The empress withdraws but remains between the insurrectionist and the roof’s edge. “Moving outside of time isn’t the panacea you might believe it is.”

        Sanhi slowly gathers up the strings of cranes and blades. Her fingers tighten on Lenenha’s ash jar. “Good enough to found an empire on and keep it mighty. Were this known, even your most loyal subject would slip you the knife while you sleep.”

        “You overestimate the courage of my subjects. They skip and cry at their own shadows, let alone mine.” Narasorn strokes the beast’s flank, metal-clad fingers on metallic muscles thrumming the notes of distant thunder. “What will it be?”

* * *

        Sanhi never learns the name of the palace on the lake, and Narasorn does not reveal it. The insurrectionist is granted the honor of sharing the empress’ wing and is made to spend significant hours in Narasorn’s bedchamber: an impression Narasorn cultivates. “Better that they believe you my concubine than my co-conspirator,” she says as Sanhi studies the census and history of Kaiyakesi. “Those that captured you have long perished in the line of duty; none know who you are. They think I’ve taken a fancy to a foreigner, having long tired of the scented, delicate palace girls.”

        “And have you?” The insurrectionist does not pause in her reading; she makes notes of the bureaucrats of agriculture and infrastructure, the ministers who command supply chains and taxation. She looks for noted orators and inventors, controversial academics. Dissidents put away by aristocrats, soldiers wronged by their commanders. There are as many kinds as there are breeds of cacti and just as many ways to use them to prick open Kaiyakesi’s skin.

        “I’ve done my duty of passing on the gift. One of my daughters will manifest it. But she will not suckle on treachery and come to womanhood on a throne—she’ll use this power elsewhere, in some better, more generous capacity. As for delicate palace girls, I’ve never much enjoyed them. They are more obligation than pleasure.”

        Sanhi looks up, but her interest appears merely polite. She has painted her eyelids gray-green and her lips pale gold, careful to avoid the imperial purple and the Onsakit red. “In your position you may have anyone, or anything. Save perhaps a lover you can trust.”

        “I had one of those once.” Narasorn sits by the window, sampling declawed cacti roasted with banana, puffy sugar-bread, scarabs fried and dipped in syrup. Desert fare. Onsakit dishes. The insurrectionist watches her consume each bite, frowning. “In your position, with your power to sway hearts and direct passion, you could’ve had anyone. Share tales of your conquests, and I’ll share mine.”

        “It’s not how I think of my past affairs. The cartography of my existence isn’t defined by invasion or conquest.” Her fingers alight on the chain of blades she has fastened around her throat. She plays with their edges, which she has kept sharp and brilliant, taking a whetstone to them every couple weeks. They never cut her.

        “Indeed not? Is it true that Lenenha, First of Blades, was more than your master of arms and more than your confidante?”

        “She is dead; she is dust. What matters?”

        Narasorn leaves the delicacies. She might have loomed over Sanhi, but after a pause she kneels so they are face to face. “Which dishes did Lenenha enjoy?”

        The insurrectionist’s glance darts to the plates and bowls by the windowsill. “Are you not satisfied with the hold you already have on me?”

        “The revelation of secrets long clenched in a fist is an art.” Narasorn unstraps the buckles that hold her jacket shut, peels away the cotton underneath and gestures at the tattoo beneath her breasts, inked in white against the deep teak of her skin. Then in quite a different voice, a lower note with the scrape of rusty metal she says, “This is the royal alphabet, the letters that are tattooed on no one save the reigning monarch. It allows me to assume another shape, another voice...”

        An unwilling intake of breath. “No,” Sanhi whispers.

        In place of Narasorn kneels First of Blades Lenenha. She smiles with a mouth much thinner than Narasorn’s, a mouth split by a long scar. “My commander Sanhi, to whom I pledged my life, my voice, my arms.” A hand takes Sanhi’s, brings it to her sternum. “My heart.”

        “I refuse this.” The insurrectionist did not weep when they captured her or bound her mouth; she did not weep when she returned to Onsakit; she did not weep when she found the ash jars. Now the tears fall. “I refuse you.”

        Narasorn—Lenenha—brushes saltwater from Sanhi’s cheek. “You’d seen my body often enough then, run your fingers over my tattoo more times than I can count. You used to ask what it meant and I said, A secret. And so it is. I know you’ve a birthmark on your inner thigh and that you’ll have no one’s tongue in your mouth, citing its resemblance to a snail; I know you prefer goat-hair brushes for your eyes, sable brushes for your cheeks when you’ve the time and means for luxuries. I know what you like to eat, the tea you best prefer for your breakfast, the tisane you favor before going to bed.”

        Sanhi does not resist, does not struggle. She is almost limp in her seat, but she is not calm. “So breaking me was your desire from the start. What is the point? I’m here, I’m doing what you demanded of me.” She makes a small, pained cry.

        “I did not plot your destruction. I meant only to see you work from the inside; getting as close to you as I did wasn’t part of my plan. I was... fond of you.”

        Yin Sanhi thinks of death. Falling is easy. The empress’ chamber is the highest point of the palace and the lake is home to sharks. Blood in black waters. It is all the same. “You can say this, after what you did to me?”

        “You would not have come to Kaiyakesi on request or command, on promise of reward or under threat. That’s your nature.” The empress, who remains in the form and face of Lenenha, lowers her hand. A minute tremble, which does not escape Sanhi’s notice. “I’ve bound myself to your time, your path of events and possibility. So firm is this hold that now I may not travel backward past the day I had you captured in Onsakit. I’ve told you—it is no panacea to have this gift; I’m fettered by the universe’s laws, and the universe is more rigid than justice, more uncompromising than vengeance.”

        “Am I to offer you my sympathies? My admiration? My forgiveness?” Sanhi has mastered herself; her voice is steady. “Will you threaten to go back on your word, Empress, and leave me stranded here?”

        “I wanted,” the empress starts, stops. “I wanted your acknowledgment, perhaps. No. I won’t go back on my word. Once you’ve set in motion the process that breaks down Kaiyakesi, I’ll return you to your moment of triumph. We’ll part, and I’ll come back here to free myself from this burden called empire.”

        The tears continue but they are on their own: Sanhi does not shake or gasp and they do not move her. “Leave me to my work then. You must want your liberty as much as I do.”

        Narasorn returns to the window, doing up her jacket. She is herself, again. “What will you do once you’re in your proper time?”

        “Is it not obvious?”

* * *

        That night Narasorn wakes to a change in light and shadow. She does not sleep heavily and never has—she has long adopted a soldier’s habit, passed to her by both mothers. But she pretends unawareness as Sanhi’s shadow falls upon her. The empress does not reach for any of her weapons; her bare hands alone suffice, should it come to that.

        When Sanhi straddles her hips, Narasorn reaches to touch the insurrectionist’s jaw, her thumb light across the insurrectionist’s lips. The texture of those sewing scars, the texture of a year beneath the lake. “Shall I be Lenenha for you? Her words, her voice. Her flesh.”

        “Secrets once revealed can’t be taken back, Empress.” Sanhi is a blot in the moonlight. She bends close and her teeth scrape, not gently, across Narasorn’s mouth. “Your tools and subjects may be malleable as doubt. I am not.”

        The insurrectionist comes back the next night, and the night after that.

* * *

        An empire is built like a wall: it protects itself from outside intrusion. A strong empire is built like a prison: it keeps those inside within, and those outside without.

        This stronghold of stone corridors and black glass is marked by nothing save Narasorn’s color and a terrible quiet. Sanhi has helped dismantle prisons full of filth and defeat. This is silent and clean, the dignity and finality of mausoleums.

        Beside her the empress becomes Lenenha—a distortion of sight, a passage of shadow; Sanhi does not look.

        They free an astronomer whose eyes have been sutured shut, the lids punctured in fine pinpricks so she’d always see stars unmoving and unreal; a lieutenant who has been hamstrung at ankles and elbows so she may never wield weapons again; a musician whose fingers have been ground down, left to knit crooked and useless. Each recognizes Sanhi and the First of Blades. The art of revealing secrets has presaged her, a sowing of rumors like seeds. A murmur here that Yin Sanhi lives; a whisper there that she will come and do what she does best.

        The words are acid in her mouth, but Sanhi’s voice is her instrument and her weapon. She wields it, telling the prisoners, “Give me the name of the one who wronged you.” She holds their gaze. “Give me the name of their weakness and their terror.” She carries them in her arms, though she is not strong. “Give me the names of those they trust, and I’ll bring you their ruin: a gift I shall put in your lap, and it will be as rich and sweet as stars.”

        The musician asks, “Where is Zheng Husin?”

        Yin Sanhi says only, “She is not here, though she could have been.”

        The astronomer demands, “Where have you been all these decades, why did you not come for us before?”

        Yin Sanhi answers only, “All things have their own time.”

        The lieutenant exhales, “Will you bring us to victory?”

        Yin Sanhi breathes simply, “Yes.”

        The empress kills her own soldiers as easily as she might kill any other; their cries are drunk by the stone, their blood by the glass. Lenenha’s wheel-blades remain pure and clean as they leave the prison behind, the way they always do, never stained by viscera. It is not a Kaiyakesi weapon, and they do not ride Narasorn’s beast to escape. The illusion must be maintained.

        It is easy to destroy an empire when one is given all the keys.

* * *

        Yin Sanhi makes her web, raises her army, fosters her factions. It is faster than any other revolt she has raised. The northern administration wages civil war within itself; the southern and western provinces battle each other over farming and fishing rights. In the eighth month she says to Narasorn, “You won’t be able to salvage your empire, even if you try to, unless you turn back time.”

        “I will do so,” the empress says, “as many times as it takes if the provinces ally and turn back into Kaiyakesi. Too much centralized power, and despotism is inevitable. Too great a state, and inertia becomes inherent. That must not happen again.”

        Twelve months and twelve days pass.

        They watch from the empress’ chamber over the lake, listening to the sound of fire and heavy feet, of blades meeting one another. Narasorn takes Sanhi’s hand. “Your task is done and I’ll be true to my word. I’ll return you to that day, though your scars will remain.”

        “Once I’m gone, wouldn’t my deeds here undo themselves?”

        “Our paths will diverge. I’m the constant—my presence will enforce your events.”

        Sanhi gazes down at the lake. “This is not how I would’ve chosen to do it.”

        “It is done, and was done quickly. I’m satisfied, and you can hardly wish to prolong it.”

        The insurrectionist strokes the chain of miniature blades that she gave back to Narasorn. It stretches across Narasorn’s breast now, and Sanhi winds the length of it around her fist. “After Onsakit I could have moved on to Kaiyakesi.”

        The empress could have stepped away, torn the chain out of Sanhi’s hand and blood out of Sanhi’s palms. “What are you saying?”

        “I’ll take Kaiyakesi apart my own way, not at your instruction or through the methods you’ve dictated. Don’t you want to see that, Empress? Come back with me. Join my path, and be Lenenha again.”

        “I am not a beast,” the empress murmurs.

        “Yet I will tame you.”

        “I am not clay,” the empress insists.

        “Yet I will shape you.”

        Narasorn laughs, the sound of wave striking shore. “Perhaps.”

        Their hands tighten around one another’s, and they take a final step.

Copyright © 2015 Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Benjanun Sriduangkaew enjoys writing love letters to cities real and speculative. Her work can be found in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy.

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.