Issue #179 • Aug. 6, 2015

“The Grace of Turning Back,” by Therese Arkenberg

“The Exile of the Eldest Son of the Family Ysanne,” by Kendra Leigh Speedling

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THE GRACE OF TURNING BACK

by Therese Arkenberg

        The Tynesi merchants, who traded everything from the silver rice of Timru and perfume leaves from Simrandu to chips of ivory off the Keld’s temples, had a term for a particular sort of improvidence: to throw money, time, or strength into seeing to completion a bargain they had already got the worse end of. It’s all After-Bad, they’d say.

        A useful phrase. Aniver vaguely remembered his clearheaded pleasure at first learning it.

        That pleasure blossoming within his soul had been sacrificed to fuel a magelight to chase away Semira’s nightmares as they approached the edge of the world. It hadn’t meant much to him, had not made up more than a candlelight’s worth of his being, but Aniver was down to the dregs of his power now. And he was draining those dregs, perhaps After-Bad, but he didn’t think they would do much good where he was going.

        They had no road to follow anymore; instead, they trudged over trackless hills where jagged spears of rock rent the thin soil. As they came down the far side of one, one misplaced foot sent Aniver and Semira stumbling into each other, uprooting half the spindly grass on the slope as its tufts tangled around their heels. Semira laughed, and Aniver tried to join her, but it turned to coughing instead. She thumped his back as they waited for the dust to clear.

        It didn’t.

        It was more than dust, it was haze; it was shadow permeable to vision, but not light, darkness they could see through. Only nothing was there to see, except darkness.

        “Does any of this look... familiar?” Semira asked.

        Aniver shook his head; at least they could distinguish each other. “The last time, I was dying,” he pointed out.

        “That’s how most people come to the Kingdom of the Dead.”

        He wished she hadn’t named it. Which made him a coward, but then so was everyone when it came to this. The Queen Herself feared death. Though not everyone took the twists and turns Aniver had attempted—he’d tested death in Simrandu; and they’d come to Simrandu by way of cursed, Storm-racked Arisbat, which they’d reached after a long pursuit that had begun in the Tindalo pass. And before that, he and Semira had faced the Queen of Yesterday, and before Her lost Damartis submerged beneath the Glass-Clear Sea. All those lesser horrors, to put off this.

        Aniver stood, brushing dust from his jacket. Kahzakutri couldn’t be used to receiving men into Her realm who looked their best; perhaps it would throw Her off.

        “I think I’m expected,” he said.

        “Does that ease the way for us?”

        “I’m permitting myself to hope.”

        Hope was nourishment for the soul; of course he encouraged it.

        Semira smiled weakly at him, and together they strode forward. Between one step and the next, they reached the borderland.

        The gray wastes they had crossed before were only a warning, the sign before a threshold. Beyond the trackless hills was shadow, and beyond the shadow, the world vanished. And the darkness in its place was hungry.

        It swallowed him, whole. Without knowing where he was, without being anywhere, Aniver found himself disappearing. Lost without perspective or proportion, without sense or logic.

        “This feels... somewhat familiar.” He spoke without knowing whether Semira could hear him. If she could, he wanted to comfort her.

        There was something like a sensation, then; something like falling.

        Forward, slowly.

        Then down and very fast.

        The Northern edge of the world was both accessed and guarded by the Great North Road. To walk it took twelve years of focused preparation, and one misplaced step would send the walker plummeting—much like this, Aniver supposed. In the South the world ended at an ocean, azure waves slowly becoming thinner, heavier, darker. The world’s eastern border was the River of Rebirth, teeming with the new souls that crawled up onto its banks: an exhilarating, frightful and uncertain sight.

        Kahzakutri’s realm was also bordered by a river.

        It splashed around him as he landed, although it wasn’t water. As it closed over his head, Aniver felt his clothing soak in the liquid (he still had the clothes he had come here wearing, and the body), but at least it didn’t permeate his flesh.

        He thrashed until he broke the surface with his head and shoulders. He heard Semira sputtering beside him.

        “Don’t drink any of it!” he shouted. “It’s either Alteration or Unmaking!”

        Those two together, plus the River that made Growth, created Time; a few drops too many of Unmaking had passed over Nurathaipolis and destroyed it. Semira’s sputtering quieted, although he heard her snort to clear her nose and then breathe heavily through it.

        The not-water was agitated, but he couldn’t sense a current. Yet, if it was Unmaking— He remembered the ice of its anti-substance that formed the Tenebrous Throne. If it was Unmaking, it might already be too late for them. But it meant they had come close.

        “Head for shore,” he told Semira.

        “Funnily,” she gasped, her arms paddling to keep her above the surface, “I’d had the same idea. I think it’s this way.”

        She, having been raised around Timru harbor in a family of captains and sailors, swam better than and soon outpaced him. Dark waves churned in her wake, twisting to one side, and he began to reconsider the lack of a current. Yet all he could do was swim after her and hope to catch up.

        He found the shore first.

        Touching something more unyielding than liquid, he grasped it and pulled himself up. He lay gasping in air that stank of nothing. Only when the lids of Aniver’s eyes fluttered did he realize they had closed. Before he could doubt the wisdom of it, he opened them.

        His first impression was darkness, but that was only a translation. Nor was there any source of light. But it wasn’t a hungry darkness, didn’t want to draw him anywhere or devour him, and he could sense in it, almost as if he could see. The river surged at his feet, and instinctively he stepped further up the uneven bank of hard-packed, dustlike stuff that simply couldn’t bother to be flat.

        He looked across the river and saw...

        Whatever they were, they weren’t living. They teemed in the thousands, the millions. They stood shoulder to shoulder, or perhaps even shoulder in shoulder. Transparent, like mist, like crystal. As gray light caught their faces, they glittered like tears or diamonds. Like diamonds, they were precious. These uniquely shaped, painstakingly formed, lifelong works: these treasured, dead, immortal souls.

        If the dead were not beautiful, it was because they were gems in a poor setting. And the setting was very poor. Its tarnish lingered along their edges. And they were so transparent—they could be seen, grasped as a wondrous whole, but their details were impossible to make out.

        Not so Semira, where she stood among them—a violence of color, defiantly opaque. She wrung unwater from her braid and tossed it over her shoulder. Her fingers rubbed her eyesockets, he assumed to clear more drops from her eyelashes. Only then did she look around.

        Aniver waved desperately from the opposite shore.

        “Oh, don’t worry about her,” a voice said in the silence above him. “The Dead are good company.”

        His shoulders stiffened as the speaker made a sound like a parody of laughter.

        “Well, they’re harmless, at least. And don’t fear the river, either. This is Alteration, not Unmaking. And I think making this journey would have changed you anyway.”

        He turned around. Kahzakutri reclined, seemingly at ease on the solid nothingness of the Tenebrous Throne overlooking the riverbank. As he stepped before Her, Her gaze flicked over him from head to foot. “Aniver,” She said at last. “Of Nurathaipolis-That-Was.”

        “Your memory is very good, Majesty.”

        “I have nothing to do but remember.” She pursed Her lips. “You were nearer dead when I last saw you.”

        In light of how She’d spoken of the dead, he wasn’t sure whether She meant that as a compliment or insult. Aniver bowed graciously anyway, just at the honor of being addressed.

        “They are not all as unhappy as you might think,” She continued. “Memory preoccupies many of us. And dreams. We can do that more easily now; our minds, such as they are, prove clearer... less distracted. Free of everything that plagues us in life. Here, we are as whole as we can ever be.” She snorted.

        He followed Her gesture as She pointed across the river. At first he thought She meant Semira, but then he saw the figure beside her. Less... faded than the others, Aniver thought. Dead, perhaps, but not—mortal.

        The being was armored, dark-skinned, with a cap of thick shining black hair. He could not make out its face. Graceful, it stood slighter than he was yet taller than Semira—and bore four black wings curving from its straight shoulders. A Grace. He’d never seen one before.

        “Cassiel,” Kahzakutri said, “Grace of the Death of Kings.”

        Aniver frowned. “There are no kings anymore.”

        “No, not on your side of the world. Cassiel is a very accomplished Grace.”

        “Was, surely, your Majesty?”

        Now Kahzakutri scowled, and Aniver realized it was a mistake to attempt courtier’s flattery. The fact that he had no skill at it only made it more insulting.

        “No, Aniver,” She murmured. “Is. Cassiel had the chance—as all Graces do, when their time is done—to be reborn as something new, a more relevant power. Enzukai of the First Fires became Haveia of the Hearths. Cassiel could take other Deaths... but no more Kings. And so Cassiel chose to remain here, with the last king.” Her pointing finger drifted to another figure, one of the transparent dead.

        Aniver frowned, pondering. It was a habit of his—the habit of a wizard, breaking facts and implications down to their essence. And it was essences he noticed here. Enzukai-Haveia remained a Grace of fires. Identities shifted, yet remained essentially themselves. He, too, had a core—one unfaltering aspect, which even in all his sorcery and experience had not altered and had not been sacrificed. Nurathaipolis. His home.

        The last time he stood before Kahakutri, he had been dying, and She had known his thoughts as her own, as She knew everything the dead knew. Now he was hidden from Her.

        He wondered if She, too, had a core that remained.

        “Your Majesty, would you encourage that? A spent Grace’s return to the land of the living?”

        “For a time. All things return to me in the end.” Her gaze, and the deathly cold blade of Her attention, pricked him. “I should warn you, however—Graces are not buildings and streets. Is this some disguised plea for me to restore the Polean cities?”

        Aniver looked past Kahzakutri to Semira. She’d risen to her feet and now was pacing, looking up at her companions. When she turned—not towards Aniver himself, but in the direction of Cassiel—he saw her face light up with wonder.

        Relief encouraged him. “Your Majesty, why would you refuse to restore the Polean Cities to their rightful state in Time? Why permit them to languish in premature decay when you know that regardless, everything within them will come to you in the end? Your Majesty, why not be generous? You are so much more than mortal—why not be patient?”

        “I’m no more than mortal. I am dead.”

        Despite Her bitter words, She looked at him with something other than cool regard or disgust at his impertinence. She was almost wary.

        Aniver voiced again his hard-won discovery. The last time he had spoken of it She had thrown him from her realm. He didn’t think that would be possible now. “Not dead, your Majesty. Your transformation kept you from dying utterly—you became Queen, not a corpse. But you are dying. Always dying.” He had also lain dying, not so long before; he stepped close, lowering his voice even though there was no one else to hear. “What do you want, as death approaches?”

        She snorted. “Do you propose to give it to me?”

        “Wouldn’t it... interest you, if I could?”

        It will unmake you as surely as if you swam in my river, She had said. I may perpetually be dying, but you will forever be even more nothing than the dead.

        Only that knowledge—that he was lost already—had given him the courage to ask the question. And even She looked taken aback by it. Her dark eyes widened, and the bones beneath Her gray skin seemed suddenly more prominent.

        She all but spat, “I want to live!”

        “But you know you cannot have that,” Aniver said. “Past some line—some borderland—there is no power strong enough to return the dying to life. There is no cure for a death rattle. No end—” he bowed “—to ultimate mortality. But what else?”

        Kahzakutri shook her head. “Riddles bore me. They’re pretentious.”

        “I don’t presume to riddle, your Maj—”

        “And yet you do presume.”

        “Yes. I presume that you and I are, or have been... similar. That what you wanted, I also wanted, not so long ago. After our... previous audience.”

        “You wanted to live.”

        “Yes, your Majesty, desperately. And I was fortunate enough to be able to. But... if not that... I wanted life, your Majesty. Any of it. If not for me, for others.”

        He glanced again at Semira, and at Cassiel, who remained in death for the sake of a king. “No one loves the living like the dying.”

        “A singular love indeed. We envy to the point of detesting them.”

        “There are many I might prefer to see the gift of life less squandered on,” he admitted dryly. Now that he had impeached Her inviolable dignity, it seemed easier to see past the immensity of the Queen of the Dead—even to tease Her. “You mustn’t think me a philanthropist.”

        “No.” Her lips quirked in a gray smile. “I have seen your thoughts. There has been love in you, yes, but less and less as time passed by.”

        There had been less and less of everything in him as time passed by. He had lost some things to love, and lost love itself. Cut family and friends from his soul as he cut all else, making his sacrifices. In the end, as he lay dying, he had wanted to live not so much for the sake of life—too much of its savor had been given away—but because he knew that only while living would he have the chance to regain any of his soul, to love and learn again, to experience anything, know anything. He had wanted to live so that he could be alive.

        He had no hope of that now. And any philanthropy left in him was only because he wanted to see his task through. After-Bad or not. “You have also seen my hatred, your Majesty. My anger, my defiance. Of loss, of death—”

        Her nostrils flared—not with breath, surely.

        “How much we love life, when we’re dying,” Aniver said. “How much we would do to turn death back.”

        “If I hate loss so much,” Kahzakutri said, “Then your arguments cannot convince me—look what you would have me give up.”

        He suspected that letting Unmaking’s blight remain over the Polean Cities gave Her no real pleasure. Frankly, he was unsure if any dead thing gave Her pleasure. But restoring them from decay would be admitting an exception to Her rule, and that might pain her worse.

        “That’s too bad,” Aniver said, “because you know I will not stop arguing. Not even in death.”

        Her smile returned, and might have spread a little wider.

        “If I do die without seeing the Polean Cities restored,” he told Her, “I will never be silent about it. And while I live, I will never stop seeking a way to save them.”

        She shook Her head at his last words. “How much you will give, though. If you save them.”

        “Yes.” The word cracked like thawing ice on his lips.

        “I warned you,” said the Queen of the Dead.

        She had. This was what he had feared, more than death—what had left him dragging his steps all this long journey.

        What would it take to bring back Nurathaipolis-That-Was and her sisters?

        “And you know,” Kahzakutri said, “all this rot and dust that chokes the Polean Cities will return sooner or later. In time.”

        “Surely that only makes it more important to evade the inevitable while we can.”

        “You’re a fool, Aniver.”

        His eyes stung, though not at what She said. “Yes. I am. Perhaps I’ll learn better... in time.”

        For a moment, Kahzakutri’s expression seemed to soften into something gentler than bitterness, but no brighter. “I don’t think you’ll have the chance.” Then She stood beside him, and four stonelike fingers circled his wrist. Almost gently. “I have an idea for what might clear away the Unmaking that stains your precious Cities—and yes, I will test it—but it requires fuel I cannot offer. Only a living soul... “

        “I understand, your Majesty. Thank you.”

        They approached the river. “And anyway, the shape of this particular construct would be beyond my nature.”

        “What is it?” Aniver asked.

        “We are going to build a Grace.”

* * *

        Semira watched Aniver hold audience with the Queen of the Dead, nerving herself to cross the river to them.

        It was not dread of gray Kahzakutri that held her back so much as the oddly comforting presence of her companions on this side. The crystalline ghosts who whispered kindnesses to her, assuring her the river of Alteration would do no harm; that as a living spirit she would not be imprisoned here long. That when her time came to return, she would find it was not so terrible as it seemed. All these old souls, with their cargoes and memories of life, shared them out sweetly. Stories were whispered in her ears, so thick with detail they were hard to keep track of, spoken so gently they were hard to hear. She’d be sorry to leave them.

        Just as she felt ready to do it, though, the two figures from the other side of the river rejoined her.

        The dissonance of their presence—Aniver’s, so very living and mortal, and Hers nearly indescribable—startled a curse from Semira. “Bloody hell!”

        Kahzakutri glanced at her. “Not here.”

        Semira swallowed hard, then dipped into the lowest bow she could manage. “Your Majesty.”

        “Don’t scrape as if you owe me allegiance. You’re the least ideal subject I’ve ever met.”

        Beside Her, Aniver smiled wanly. The smile vanished as Kahzakutri turned to him.

        “Though I permit this thing, that does not mean it will be easy.”

        “You’ve already made that clear, Your Majesty.”

        “Has She?” If Semira’s homage would not be accepted, she felt oddly secure in dispensing with it.

        “You had better tell your friend.” Kahzakutri turned to Aniver and added, as if in explanation, “You don’t have much left, wizard. Not enough for creating a Grace.”

        Maybe Semira should have gasped at that, but she did not. Perhaps it was because a Grace and its beloved king had murmured stories in her ears the past quarter-hour. At best she was puzzled. Beyond surprise, she stood listening to every immense, hollow word the Queen said.

        “And what remains, Aniver? What can you use?”

        Semira couldn’t make out Kahzakutri’s expression. But she saw Aniver’s expression become a rictus of denial. “Not her.”

        “Well, there’s hardly any you—”

        “Not. Her.”

        The Queen drew Herself up. “Then you rely too much on my generosity.”

        “I would think, in your generosity—” he all but pulled the word through his teeth “—you would understand. Nobody loves the liv—”

        “Is that envious love the only reason you won’t use her?”

        Semira’s gaping stopped. “Don’t you think ‘she’ might have a say in this?”

        “Of course you do,” Aniver said. “That’s why I’m refusing to use you.”

        “To bring Nurathaipolis back.” She half waited for him to disagree, to tell her she was misunderstanding. “That’s been the goal all along, hasn’t it? And that’s what you’re refusing now.”

        “If it means giving you up.”

        “Why, what does it matter to you?” Turning away, she found only the rush of the river. The dead had retreated, leaving her with Aniver in strange, vacant space. “You won’t be around to bear the consequences.”

        “But I want you to be.” Aniver came to stand before her, so they had no choice but to face each other.

        “Yes,” she said. “That’s just it.” He had tried to protect her sometimes, a wizard mindful of his companion’s vulnerabilities, but that was never his role, and she would rather he not take it on now if this was what he would leave her with.

        “I’m sorry. In Arisbat—”

        “It’s not about Arisbat, you fool! It never was! You’re forgiven—I forgave you even before you returned to me. Gods and Graces—” The irony of the oath struck her and she laughed, almost sobbing.

        He laughed along with her, a low and ragged chuckle.

        She reached out for him then. They held each other, laughing, beyond the westernmost edge of the world. Touch—mortal flesh to flesh—seemed more fluent than words now, and surer than anything else. And it was comforting, in a simple and childlike way, to press her face to his chest and hear her friend’s heartbeat.

        “What’s going to happen?” she asked.

        He rested his chin on her hair. “I’m not quite sure.”

        “You aren’t?”

        “We’re going to summon a Grace. It’ll take all of my... power.” The pulse at her ear stammered. “And when that’s gone—well, I don’t know.”

        “Don’t you?”

        “We’re only taught not to expend all of our souls. Not the details of what happens if we go against that lesson.”

        “Maybe there’s more of your soul left than you bargained on.”

        “Semira—I have to think long and hard to remember the name of my mother.”

        She felt a jolt to their embrace that she realized came from his shoulders shaking. She reached out, put her hand to his back, and rubbed small circles until the trembling stopped.

        “And it means nothing,” he continued. “Do you understand? There is nothing left that means anything to me anymore. Except this.” He stepped back, taking her hands. Red touched his pale cheeks and the rims of his hazel eyes. But nothing could offer a semblance of life in this ash-cold twilight.

        Aniver took the hourglass pendant from around his neck and offered it to her. Semira accepted it without protest.

        The sands within still fell at an unvarying pace, eternally in one direction. She braced her fingers at the point where both narrow bulbs met.

        “You’ll need my help, then,” she said.

        “I can’t demand it.”

        “If there’s not enough left of you—” She tried to be cool. “Well, it will just take the rest of the power that it needs from me. That’s what you were suggesting, Your Majesty?” She met Kahzakutri’s stare and saw nothing, but felt better for having done it. “Even though I’m not a wizard, I can do this much? And something of me will remain?”

        “Yes. To both.”

        “There,” she said to Aniver. “The consequences. I’ll live with them.”

        “Are you agreed, then?” Kahzakutri turned to Aniver. “You’re the one who will drive it.”

        He nodded. “Only— I’m not sure how.”

        “I’ve never made a Grace before, either.” At that the Queen of the Dead formed a smile that might have been called rueful. “But I’ve seen it done. I’ll guide you as much as possible.” She closed Her eyes. “Once started—it goes on its own from there. It is not easily stopped.”

        “I understand,” Aniver said.

        Semira lowered the chain of the hourglass pendant over her head and let it settle against her chest.

* * *

        Wizards lost their souls to spells every day, in tiny scraps and pieces, like flames gradually guttering, coals burning out one by one, stars that fell and vanished with barely a glimpse in the night; drops of water sucked away in a growing desert. No one drop could increase his thirst.

        Aniver had awakened one day to realize he was not the same man he’d been three months before. That he was less of a person, worn to a shadow of himself. It didn’t hurt.

        He knew it was the cost of magic. If he resented how much of the cost he’d had to pay, over these mad adventures —well, he shouldn’t, it was simply his bad luck.

        He was the one who decided to stretch those adventures out, preferring to leach drops than spill the entire flask at once.

        It was hard, even for him, to say what made up his soul. A hundred thousand small experiences, five or six great ones. Lessons, adventures, smiles from strangers, the contents of books and stories, placid afternoons. Twenty eight years of life. Lost as rapidly as he’d gained them these past months, and faster. The less important bits first, when he could direct the expenditure.

        No use doing that now. It was all going to go.

        “This is a miracle.” Kazhakutri could be whispering in his ear, Her voice intimate and hushed at once. “You cannot expect there to be no price.”

        The Queen of the Dead raised... not Her hand—it was not a true physical gesture—but the idea of Her raising Her hand reverberated across space. Beckoning. A command. An invitation.

        For an instant, they stood among the dead again—in the midst of an unbroken mass of indistinct figures.

        Indistinct only because the living could not see into them—into those forms made up of memories and dreams. Dead but whole. A flash of envy passed through Aniver, marking his soul with ache for one moment.

        He’d need as much of such substance as he could get. Never mind if possessing it, and being made up of it, was unpleasant; it wouldn’t remain for long.

        Kahzakutri’s hands, or the idea of them, made a shifting gesture, and the plains cleared, ghost-shadows melting away, until it was just the three of them—and one other, not yet come.

        Aniver had expected to be taken moment by moment, the same way that, not long ago, he had nearly bled to death drop by drop. Instead, the losses were much more abrupt.

        The first thing to vanish was his... boundary seemed the best word. He was limitless.

        It was clear, then, why Kahzakutri had sent the dead away: to be clear of their interference.

        ...boundless, Aniver’s soul tangled with the others around him...

        Kahzakutri’s—now that was barely a soul. Ages, not of loss but of awareness of loss, had left Her to shrink upon Herself. That first knowledge of dying—the shock of fear and grief and dread that had made Her more than mortal—twisted Her shape without adding to it. She knew everything the dead knew. Most especially, She knew the end of things. It meant nothing to Her anymore; it was Her everything.

        The sheer force of Her emptiness shaped something, a mold to be filled. Fashioned, it seemed, after Cassiel—Kahzakutri could not create a Grace from whole cloth—but on a greater scale. Was She even being grandiose? Sabotaging them by creating something impossible to finish?

        Of course it was impossible. They were shaping impossibility here: a miracle so great it approached blasphemy. And Kahzakutri was not vandalizing this creation. If anything, She was generous. She gave it a core of Herself. The essence of loss, of grief—the urge to undo.

        As its contours deepened, Aniver felt the power fueling it seep out of himself.

        And Semira—for once he could see Semira. All of her. From childhood to a young woman striding the salt-wet decks of her uncle’s ship. And afterwards, these months with him. She had wanted to become an adventurer, a hero. That was why she came along with him. It made up so much of her now: courage, triumph, survival, joy.

        Please don’t take that, he begged. Not unless it’s all she can offer—the first thing she can part with, and the least important.

        It was not the least important. He could see that.

        She’s become so much, she’s become what she wanted to be. Please don’t undo that.

        IT SHALL NOT BE UNDONE. The answer came from the form slowly taking shape, the indistinct vessel Aniver was pouring into. I WILL ENSURE THAT.

        The spell began to ravel through Semira, as if it were thread and she was the eye of a needle. It passed through her, not from her. But the corrosive magic tore small shards away, pulled them towards the creation. Tiny shards. The least significant.

        And the growing thing smiled.

        Cassiel, the Grace who had left the world with the death of the last King, would not become anything else. Semira had stood before that Grace—had they spoken together? Yes, he saw that now, whispered fond memories of crowned heads, thrones now vacant, lords now dead—Semira had let that pass into her soul. It was gone now. She would not miss it as much as other things. Perhaps it was better, safer that she lose these tokens from the gray place beyond the western edge of the world.

        And the thing, the Grace of Turning Back, now had a face.

        It looked, Aniver thought, rather like Semira’s.

        Semira who?

        Aniver who?

* * *

        The Grace of Turning Back had six wings: three pairs unfolding from a slender back. The pinions glimmered azure on top, gray-green like old copper underneath. The Grace’s limbs could have been cast from bronze and stretched as long as the span of the wings, a little longer than might have been expected from the overall human form. The eyes were brown, and only they were warm.

        The wings beat, a pair at a time, carrying the still-half-formed Grace and the two mortal souls shaping it into the world. Out of the west, leaving Kahzakutri and her realm behind. Over the rivers of Alteration and Unmaking, over all the ancient kingdoms. Past Simrandu’s sparkling gemlike estates that mimicked the Polean cities so well they were called Nurathaipolis-in-Exile. Over Arisbat, with its terrible library, and little else that was terrible anymore.

        By the time the Grace landed in Nurathaipolis-That-Was, It had fingers and long dark hair and small, bare bronze feet. Its landing stirred up dust for the better part of a square mile.

        Semira, landing with it, coughed on the enveloping dust and looked around, bewildered to the depths of her soul.

        Aniver did not.

        Dust rose into the air—evaporated. All around them, vines crumbled from green-choked towers; leaves furled and roots pulled away from crumbling mortar; crumbling mortar sealed smooth. Canals ran clean, detritus washing downstream. The city was revivifying, starting with the streets closest to the Grace. It stood as tall as the towers, wings broad as a plaza. A soft breeze stirred the fine down on Its six wings.

        For the first time, Semira began to appreciate the scale of what they had created. And she boggled.

        Aniver did not.

        The wizards of the Polean Cities had tried and failed to affect this change: to wash away the stain of the River of Unmaking. It seems so simple now. With each beat of the Grace’s wings a gust drives away corruption, and with each beat...

        Each wingbeat beat took more of Aniver away; gone to fuel the magic, to fuel miracles, to fuel impossibility, to fuel the Grace.

        Nurthaipolis, the City lost to time, was returning. He saw it—he was not losing consciousness—but he was losing all else, the ability to do anything but witness. He was fast losing the reason why Nurathaipolis’s return was worth watching.

        Semira was happy to see it, though; Aniver sensed that much, and was glad.   

        Semira who?

        HER!

        It was as if his shout had attracted the attention of the Grace of Turning Back. SEMIRA IS THE ADVENTURER, It said, indicating with bronze fingers.

        Still Its wings beat. They were in the midst of a storm, a storm that rebuilt.

        You have her face. Aniver made the observation rapidly, scrabbling for it as though with broken nails. An observer was someone; as long as he saw, he existed. You have a lot of her, actually—

        —and a lot of me.

        I HAVE ALL OF YOU, said the Grace of Turning Back. Was It making an observation, or conversation?

        The impression was unsettling; hearing intelligible, ordinary sentences from a creature so massive—not only in physical size but in gravity, in significance, in effect. Aniver had no room anymore for paradoxes.

        A bridge over sweet-flowing water rebuilt itself with the grinding of stone against climbing, piling stone.

        The wind of those wings buffeted his face, almost uprooted him.

        LOOK, It said.

        He looked. A city, empty but whole. Clear water gleaming in canals, waves bobbing abandoned barges and knocking them against clean docks and the piers of marble bridges. A young woman, an adventurer, stood in the midst of it, staring wide-eyed. Alone.

        (There were men and women deep asleep, lying in the largest and steadiest of the buildings, where they had been moved for safety before the rotting city was abandoned, before they were abandoned. Now they began to wake up. Semira couldn’t see this, didn’t know to be glad of it. But they woke.)

        The Grace of Turning Back departed Nurathaipolis.

        It had returned all that It could. All that had been lost, cursed by mistake.

        What had been given freely, It must take. Like any good thing in this curse-strewn world (any miracle, any impossibility), It had to be created, not by accident; not merely occurring but shaped through sacrifice.

        Still, with one last smooth downbeat of Its wings, an azure feather slipped loose. Falling, it brushed someone’s cheek. Someone who, for a moment, became Aniver again.

* * *

        Sunlight, falling in a long angle from left to right. Birdsong. Human songs. Coarser voices, far away. The scent of flowers, not many but close by. The scent of herbs and savory broth, from even closer.

        Eyelids, heavy and a little dry, lifted higher. Sun glowed over stone walls from a window beside him. Its light gilded white cloth, linen bedclothes, not very substantial or weighty on his chest and legs. Comfortable.

        The wealth of new information almost overwhelmed him. He shut his eyes but couldn’t close his ears, couldn’t stop feeling his skin.

        Silence to the right of him, so sudden and complete that he knew, instinctively, it was produced through conscious decision. A person sat there.

        He looked towards her. A woman with dark hair, pale eyes, and a complexion somewhat in between, neither dark nor light, marked with lines that were heavier around her eyes than her mouth. Her lips pulled in a small smile.

        “Good morning,” she said.

        “Good morning.” More taxing to remember the words than it should have been—somehow he remembered that, the ease which with things could be said.

        “Good afternoon, properly,” the woman added.

        “Oh.”

        She seemed to wait for something. Her smile changed—becoming flatter, while still resembling a smile. “What, no ‘Who am I’?”

        “No... .Why should I ask that?”

        She snorted violently. “Are you completely incurious?”

        “I don’t think there is an answer.”

        She sat back, regarding him as he observed her. “It is one thing to awaken not knowing who you are. Quite another to awaken and know you are no one.”

        There was a mirror on one wall; he saw himself in it. Similar to her—somewhat darker hair, paler skin, taller and thinner body in a soft white shirt. A mark stood out against his high forehead: a circle.

        Seeing his face should have been inherently interesting, he supposed, but all he felt was a vague disquiet at how very uninteresting everything was.

        And he realized he was being rude. He turned back to the woman. “Who are you?”

        Her grave expression became softer. “Lisandra. A teacher... to someone you once were. A wizard’s tutor.” Leaning close, she reached out and traced the circle marked on his skin. It was a solemn, tender gesture—and a brief one, as she pulled away and said briskly, “How are you feeling?”

        Like nothing. “All right, actually.” He pushed back the covers and felt a wash of cooler air over his body. “How should I feel?” He frowned. “What happened to me?”

        “That story starts with what happened to all of us here.”

        She told him of the curse that swept through the city, bringing ages of ruin and rot in an instant. He had gone on a quest to save them. Here details became scarcer. He had given everything. He had succeeded.

        “The wizards returned from their exile, and everyone else awakened from the sleep we’d fallen into.”

        “You have no circle,” he said. “So you’re a scholar of magic, not a wizard.”

        She laughed. “Exactly.”

        “I’m sorry, should I not have said that?”

        “You wouldn’t have, before.” She sniffed. “Then again, Aniver, as you were before, you probably wouldn’t have noticed.”

        Aniver. The name didn’t sound bad. “I do feel... observant.” Not by any choice. He couldn’t help noticing things, the new facts and ideas that came with each moment.

        All new—as if he had never felt or thought their like before.

        “And you’re not at all self-absorbed.” Partway through the sentence, Lisandra’s laughter broke. By the end, it turned to tears.

        “Then you’re mourning for him.” He voiced another observation. “The person I used to be.”

        “I’m sorry.”

        “You’re mourning... me. Mourning my loss, even though I don’t feel it myself?”

        Lisandra sniffed harder, then laughed at the sharp sound. He smiled, too.

        Another woman came in, touched Lisandra’s shoulder with easy intimacy, and offered her a handkerchief. Lisandra thanked her and accepted her kiss on the forehead.

        Elona. It came into Aniver’s head unbidden—as if his own name had unlocked others. Elona was Lisandra’s friend, lover, partner, companion. He had known that once, along with many other things. He had cared about it, perhaps not deeply; he found no memory of being someone who cared deeply about his own relationships or others’. But he’d been vaguely happy to see his teacher glad. Now he saw two people being happy, two people he had given much to make that way. He felt nothing, not even regret.

        “Soon,” Lisandra murmured to Elona, who nodded and left them alone.

        She dabbed her eyes. “You know, at the time you mourned for me, I was sleeping—not aware of it either.”

        He could not say for certain. If the memory of that mourning remained in him, it was too vague and unimportant to grasp. Like remembering the shape of one particular leaf on a tree he’d walked past years ago. Or a tree someone else had walked past.

        “So this is what it feels like to lose one’s soul,” he said. Observing again.

        Lisandra reached for his hand, and he let her take it. “You washed away the stain from the River of Unmaking—waters from the Kingdom of the Dead itself. It’s a grace that any of you is left at all.”

        “A Grace.”

        Her hand clutched his tighter. “She told us what happened.”

        Of course, that’s how Lisandra knew despite sleeping through everything. But... “She?”

        He remembered the name even as she said it: “Semira.”

* * *

        He asked them not to let her visit anymore. She had come when he was sleeping, they told him; watched over him a while and then left, not revealing any worry, only perhaps some impatience. He felt glad—as much as he felt anything—that Lisandra, and not Semira, had seen him wake.

        He wanted to meet Semira as much under his own power as possible. He felt it was important that he be the one to come to her.

        Lisandra had given him her description: a woman a little younger than he, brown-skinned with long, deep brown hair. Brown eyes, often rather bright, in face a little long, made more so by strain. But she smiled and laughed easily. She stood moderately tall yet seemed taller.

        “She looks as you’d expect a heroine too,” Elona had added.

        Easy to find.

        She sat on the steps above the Thurian docks, watching the crew of a pleasure barge preparing to embark. She wore a Nurathaipolean gown, silver with a long pleated skirt and a yoke collar that left her shoulders bare. A necklace dangled nearly to her waist, an hourglass hanging at the end of the long golden chain. It was empty, he saw as he came closer.

        “At a guess—” Aniver had picked up the habit of thinking aloud with Lisandra; it helped bring up wells of information—”the spell inside that pendent was devoured. Sucked up into some greater magic.”

        “No points for guessing which it was,” Semira said. She turned to him and made as if to stand—yet in the end she seemed unable to. She only looked at him.

        “Do you remember it?” she asked.

        “No. Do you?”

        She laughed. He wondered why he’d made so many people laugh recently. He suspected he hadn’t, before. “Nobody’s thought to ask me that.”

        “Do you?”

        “Yes,” she said. “I remember us standing in the Kingdom of the Dead. Before the Queen—Kahzakutri. I’m not afraid of Her name anymore. We unleashed a whirlwind then.”

        “A Grace, they tell me.”

        “It was beautiful.” Semira smiled at some memory. “Such wings—and the face was strangely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.”

        Aniver sat down beside her.

        “I remember all of that,” she said. “I remember the adventure. Being a hero. It’s all I remember clearly.”

        “You don’t remember anything before that?”

        “Oh, I suppose I do—facts of it. I miss my family, a little, and I expect I’ll go back to them in Timru. In time.” She frowned. “But it all feels washed-out, compared to these last few months. I... I think I’ve been made so conscious of being a hero that I’ve lost the sense of what it’s like to be a real person anymore.”

        “Not lost,” Aniver said, so quickly Semira startled. “Sorry,” he said then—which seemed to startle her even more. “These memories and feelings—they’re not forever lost, or it’s not helpful to think of them that way, Lisandra says.” Semira nodded; she must remember meeting Lisandra at his bedside. “They’re more... misplaced. Although we feel empty right now, or washed-out, it will come back. Not quite as it was, of course. But something will replace everything lost... or so they tell me. The most important things, those will come back, or something new will come in their place, in time.”

        Semira nodded. And now it was his turn to sit looking at her.

        She was—there were no words. She was Semira. He not only knew her, he felt her. Felt something to be near her.

        Just a glimmer. But it was something.

        “You were very important to me,” he said.

        Her cheeks took on a glow, a brightness suffusing her skin and eyes. And Aniver felt the same—as if he were much younger, a child even. A child’s excitement, and pride at finding something he did not need to be told. He hadn’t even needed to share his discovery aloud. But he had, so she would hear. Because she must have thoughts to untangle, too.

        “It’s not so hard to figure out, though,” she said, her blush fading. “I obviously wouldn’t have left Timru for nothing.”

        “That only proves that I was important to you— Oh. Sorry.”

        That brought another laugh, and she looked down as she had when she blushed. “So keep going,” she said. “No apologies necessary. Why can you tell I’m important?”

        Slowly, one hand went to the pendant. Had he given her that? Did she think he remembered?

        And in an instant, he did.

        “There’s no reason why,” Aniver said. “I just can. It’s... a grace.”

        A small miracle, with little more meaning than the fall of a blue feather. Yet it was.

        “A Grace,” she breathed. “Like the one we made, between the two of us.”

        “I know.”

        “Even if you don’t remember.”

        “Even if I don’t remember, I know. It’s... like a story. A story that no one told me—Lisandra didn’t have all of it to tell... Maybe if I heard it, really heard it, that would help bring it back.”

        “I’ve told the story to a lot of people,” Semira said. “But maybe, with the right audience, I might finally make sense of it. As if I wasn’t the hero.”

        “But perhaps you are,” he said.

        “I’m more than that. Or at least I’d like to be.”

        “Yes.” He nodded, and for a moment there was silence. Companionable. But he didn’t feel bad breaking it, asking, “Where does it begin?”

        “Your part?”

        “Our part.”

        Semira closed her eyes. “In the east, there’s a stretch of water they call the Glass-Clear Sea. It’s haunted by the ghosts of an old city, Damartis, that lies beneath it. After the Polean Cities fell, an oracle told you to seek answers from the dead—”

        “But that was the wrong place to go.”

        She shrugged, smiling. “Not entirely. Because that’s how we met, you and I, in a boat sailing east from Timru harbor...”

        The pleasure barge had cast off, and another was sailing by, continuing downriver, perhaps all the way to Merenthaipolis. It was a beautiful day for long travel. Pennants fluttered in a crisp breeze, and Aniver almost recognized the standard embroidered on them. Might have recognized, too, the figures aboard, a raven-haired lady and a harpist whose hand went still on the strings as he looked up at them.

        Semira waved. Aniver joined her.

        “Are they friends?” he asked.

        “They could be.” She waved harder, with exuberant enthusiasm.

        He nodded. And as their greeting was returned, he smiled. After a moment, she continued speaking, telling him their story as the notes of a tune, unfamiliar yet beautiful, carried across the water.

Copyright © 2015 Therese Arkenberg

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Therese Arkenberg writes and runs a freelance editing business from her home in Wisconsin. Her fiction has recently appeared in Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and a forthcoming issue of Ares Magazine, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She blogs sporadically at ThereseArkenberg.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE EXILE OF THE ELDEST SON OF THE FAMILY YSANNE

by Kendra Leigh Speedling

        My brother seemed smaller in his cell, empty, as if the soul within him had already fled the city. He had folded himself into the corner where his bed met the wall, knees tucked up to his chest like a child.

        I slid the viewing-window shut and pushed open the door.

        “Sister,” he said, looking up as I entered. He gestured Friendly Greeting, but there was a hint of mockery in the movement. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

        “Hello, Tien,” I said, then cursed my tongue. I should not have called him by final-name; we were no longer family in the eyes of the law. Custom did not provide a way to address a relation-turned-exile—the assumption being, naturally, that such interactions would not take place at all.

        He caught it, of course; his hands shifted to Subtle Wryness. “Still claiming me?”

        “No.” I shut the door, moving to stand in front of it.

        “Then why are you here?” He unfolded his legs, straightening his posture. Imprisonment had not agreed with Tien; his clothes were rumpled and his hair was a mess, and not in his usual fashionably disheveled way. “Have the Quiet realized their mistake?”

        I fought my flash of anger. Tien always had excelled at being aggravating. This conversation was futile, and I had been a fool to hope otherwise.

        “The Quiet do not make mistakes,” I said. “I’m giving you a chance to explain.”

        “Explain?” His face showed no expression, as was proper, but his tone had fangs.

        I took a deep breath, stopping myself from gesturing Irritation. “Father trusts there may have been circumstances that were not brought to light at the trial—”

        “I didn’t kill her!” His voice cracked on the last word; he turned his face to the wall while he composed himself. His hands, which had been nearing Fury, clenched into fists instead.

        Still he insisted on this charade?

        “This is ridiculous.” I realized that my hand had strayed to my sword hilt and forced it to relax. “I won’t waste time asking how you could shame our name like this. You cannot think that anyone will believe—”

        “Do you?” He strode across the room, halting in front of me. “Do you believe I’m a murderer?”

        “Of course I do!” Unbecoming, my voice was too close to a snarl. An official of the Quiet had to remain composed at all times; how else could the City trust that laws would be enforced fairly? I let a moment pass before continuing. “I believe my eyes. I believe the mages who plucked that poor girl’s last memories from her!”

        Tien rocked back on his heels, hissing in a faint breath. For a moment, I thought he was actually going to cry, which would have been the height of humiliation for both of us. This was bad enough without an adult showing emotion on his face like a toddler.

        “I can’t explain that,” he said. “Somehow—” He broke off, glancing down at the floor. His left hand was gesturing Deep Grief. “Somehow, the memories are wrong. I didn’t kill Irune.”

        Irune? I remembered her full name; it had been read off at the trial. I’d known that she and Tien had been involved—but he was a flirt, ever since he was a teenager. He spoke of someone new every month. But if he was on seventh-name with her—

        Vexing though Tien was, I hadn’t wanted to think that he was capable of killing a lover, or anyone, for that matter. He’d been in plenty of duels, but they’d been first-blood or to-the-floor, not deadly. Tien was an indolent dandy who—infuriatingly—managed to be a good swordsman anyway, but he wasn’t a killer.

        Except he was. I could still hear her screams echoing through the courtroom as the memory was displayed. Tien hadn’t watched them; he’d buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

        “That’s not possible,” I said.

        “I know,” he snapped. “And no, before you ask, I wasn’t drinking; I don’t take anything, and I didn’t even see Irune that night. The first I heard of her death was when the Quiet hauled me in for questioning.” He glanced down at the floor, fighting to control his expression. One hand had gone to his belt where his fan would ordinarily be. “Imagine that, Aika, if you can imagine caring for anything that isn’t cold steel.”

        I had hold of his collar before I could stop myself, yanking him up so that his toes just brushed the floor. He didn’t flinch, simply sagged in my grip.

        “I care for our family,” I said. “I care for the City, and you still dare to call me by final-name?”

        He gestured Sardonicism, his gaze an empty, lifeless thing. “You did it first.”

        I dropped him.

        How could he? He could admit his fault, salvage some shred of honor, but no, he had to cling to his foolish vanity. The memory had shown his guilt; the court had decreed his guilt, and there was no use in discussing it further.

        “Are you going to come see me off?” his voice sliced through the air as I flung open the cell door.

        “Enjoy your exile,” I said, and slammed the door behind me.

* * *

        I did see him off; Ward Chief Satia assigned me to the guard standing at the walls as they opened the gates. I could tell that she expected me to protest.

        I did not protest. An Aster-rank didn’t argue with an Azalea-rank, and I knew she was testing my loyalty. The Quiet were responsible for holding the City together when the fractious bonds of familial loyalties and obligations among the Council families threatened its stability. Any hint of weakness on my part would not have been forgiven.

        I stood on the walls as the gates swung open below. Tien looked impossibly small as he walked out of them, a bowed speck of a figure crossing the steppes. He had a bag with him—Father must have appealed to the others of the Council for that dispensation. He and Mother stood further down the wall, heads held high, my remaining siblings ranged between them. Their hands were still, betraying no emotion.

        The Jieha family stood on the other side of the ranks of the Quiet, bearing witness to the exile of their daughter’s killer. Her younger brother, an Iris-rank, stood with his family. He was the eldest and the heir now; he would have to leave the Quiet. Father had been furious with me when I’d joined, for the converse reason—you are the Ysanne heir, he’d said, your loyalty belongs here—but he’d accepted my decision.

        The Council Speaker, standing on the watchtower, unrolled the decree. “Sonam Juin Lajos Andreu Roel Shen Santxo Tien da Ysanne,” he intoned, the sound echoing over the walls, “has been found guilty of willful murder—”

        My mother’s hand clenched against her robes.

        “—by the courts of Our Most Serene City of Xiuvri. He is therefore cast out to the judgment of the gods. Henceforth, he shall not be as one dead, but as one never born; his names shall not be spoken within these walls.”

        Father’s hands were shaking. He’d defended Tien until he saw the memories, and even then could not quite believe it. It had fallen to Mother to convince him that it was hopeless. Our family had held a seat on the Council since my great-grandfather was a child; respect for the Ysanne name went back further still. We could not shackle ourselves to Tien’s actions.

        “May justice always have a voice within these walls,” the Speaker said.

        “Justice has a voice,” the ranks of the Quiet chorused.

        I stood straight, between two other Asters, and watched my former brother until he disappeared over the horizon.

* * *

        I looked over the records again at my desk at headquarters that night, wondering if they might contain a hint as to why Tien had so stubbornly clung to his story. It should have made no difference—his reasons were irrelevant in the eyes of the law—but I would not be able to let it rest until I knew.

        The records contained nothing that I hadn’t seen before; the evidence spoke for itself. Tien, for all his faults, was neither heartless nor conscienceless, or so I’d believed. When we were children, he had always been the one to confess to indiscretions first, though he generally charmed his way out of consequences. I would have thought he would break when faced with her memory, at the latest.

        I activated the spell that had been cast on the third page and called up the image of Osera’s body, frozen in place as the Quiet had discovered it. She’d been a mage; the embroidery on her sash indicated Chalcedony-rank. The Quiet’s ranks were named for flowers, to remind us that our every movement should be graceful, but the mages...they were named for stone.

        Her hand was outstretched on the floor at my feet. I stepped around it as I circled her, though it was only an illusion. She was lovely, even in death, her dark hair fanned out beneath her. She must have been talented, too, to make Chalcedony-rank so young—twenty-four, the records said, several years younger than myself and three ranks higher among the mages than I was in the Quiet. No wonder Tien had liked her.

        I dismissed the illusion and closed my hand around the memory-stone instead, its edges chafing at my palm. Her bedroom appeared in front of me, as if I were standing in her place. The door opened, and the view shifted as she/I rose from the dressing table, setting down the fan she’d been holding.

        “Shen,” her voice echoed from where I was standing. The ghost-hands in front of mine gestured Affectionate Greeting.

        My former brother strode forward, the knife in his hand flashing.

        I stopped the memory spell, my stomach churning. Sixth-name. She’d called him by sixth-name, whereas he’d called her by seventh in his cell. Forward Tien might have been, but he wouldn’t have persisted with that level of familiarity if she hadn’t been willing to match it.

        This was pointless. The quality of the memory was perfect, as they always were. Recalling memories of the dead was a task only Topaz-rank mages could perform, and Topazes did not make errors—or if they did, they were not the survivable kind.

        I looked out the window next to my desk. The headquarters of the Quiet were in the Nightshade Tower, from which our highest rank took its name. The entire city was stretched out before me, from the estates of the Council families in the east to the spires of the university in the west. The gates that had discharged Tien earlier were shut once more, gleaming silver in the moonlight.

        “Late night, Aster Nuria?”

        The voice made me jump, though I knew who it was. Ward Chief Satia was the only one in our unit who persisted in calling me by my second-name, though she used third with everyone else. A legacy of her family’s distrust of mine; the Dastris and the Ysannes had a longstanding rivalry, and though such divisions weren’t supposed to persist in the ranks of the Quiet, we were all only human.

        I closed the file quickly, though I hadn’t technically been doing anything wrong. “Good evening,” I said, gesturing Neutral Welcome. “May I be of assistance?”

        “Not at all,” she said. Her hands glided over one another, returning my greeting with Benevolence to Inferior. “Merely an observation.”

        I bowed my head as she passed me on the way into her office, feeling like a schoolgirl caught at sneaking sweets. Did she think I held familial sympathy for Tien, despite his conviction? Of everyone in our unit, she would forgive my lapses least.

        Her doubt was unnecessary. I knew where my loyalties belonged.

* * *

        It stayed with me, the name incongruity. I tried not to think about it, but my mind kept returning to it, worrying at it like a loose tooth.

        On the fourth day, Ieyeran, the new Jieha heir, formally submitted his resignation from the Quiet. I watched him as he entered the Ward Chief’s office, his silhouette visible through the frosted glass walls. He bowed and set his Iris insignia on her desk, along with the necessary paperwork.

        I averted my gaze to my desk as the Ward Chief’s door opened, feeling as though the eyes of everyone in the office were upon me, the Ysanne. I cast a sideways glance at Ieyeran as he passed. His cloak was now trimmed with silver, the mark of the heir of a Council family.

        Ieyeran met my eyes, gesturing Inquiry.

        I quickly looked away, responding with Faint Embarrassment. After a second’s consideration, I added Humble Apology. I wasn’t sure whether I was apologizing for my actions or Tien’s.

        Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him motion Acceptance. Whether he thought of my staring as impolite or not, he didn’t seem inclined to press the issue.

        I watched him leave, his cloak trailing behind him. Before the memory had exonerated him, Ieyeran had been a preliminary suspect, despite his status as an official of the Quiet. From the reports in the file, his quarrels with his sister had put mine and Tien’s to shame. But the memory had proven that it was Tien, and that line of inquiry had been dismissed.

        I realized I was thinking of Tien’s guilt as a matter of ‘if,’ and rebuked myself. This was what I had joined the Quiet to do, to punish wrongdoing in the City and protect its peace. Family loyalty had no place in the ranks. There was no reason to suspect anyone else, other than a feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

        I knew what Ward Chief Satia would have to say on the subject of feelings.

* * *

        I stayed late in the office that evening. After everyone had departed—including the Ward Chief and her wary gaze—I called up the memory again. I would not have been able to explain my actions if challenged. The case was settled. Solving serious crimes was the job of the six detectives anyway, Rose-rank and viewed warily; their job was necessary, but prying into others’ private lives as they did was outside the bounds of decorum. But I couldn’t rid my mind of the way Tien’s fists had clenched, the bite in his voice as he’d told me he didn’t kill Osera. I knew Tien, or I thought I had, and his grief had seemed genuine. If I hadn’t seen that memory, I would have sworn on my own honor that he was telling the truth.

        I activated the spell, not sure what I was hoping to find. Again I saw Tien enter the room, wielding the knife; again I saw him stabbing the place where I stood, the place she’d been standing. Her screams faded toward the end, dying away as her life drained onto the floor. She took a vase with her as she fell, the porcelain shattering in shards around her. The attack had been sudden; she’d had no time to cast something to defend herself.

        I played it again, steeling myself as her bedroom formed around me once more. I looked around the room instead of the image of Tien. The dressing table, the window at the other side looking out over the gardens, the silk paintings on the walls and the vase Osera was destined to knock over in her last moments—

        The image tilted sideways as she fell, blurring before fading black.

        Wait.

        “Stop,” I told it, my voice jarringly loud in the empty office. “Go back four seconds.”

        There it was, the fall, the vase shattering...

        Where was the vase?

        In the image the Quiet had taken when they found her body, the shards had been next to her, scattered among the folds of her sleeves. They should have been visible in the memory, but the carpet was bare.

        “Go back again,” I said. “Half-pace.”

        At the slower pace, I could see the vase tip and shatter on the floor and then—vanish. The pieces were gone as if they had never been.

        I played the memory three more times. On the last time, slowed down to a fourth of the normal speed, I saw a hand reach down and take something from her belt, in the final moment before the memory blackened.

        Her fan.

        But she’d set her fan on the table when the door opened.

        It was no surprise that the court had missed it. The memory had seemed so conclusive that no one had examined it this thoroughly. Tien was in the memory, and a memory couldn’t be altered; the solution was obvious.

        Then how could the vase shards in the memory vanish, and the fan move on its own?

        It was impossible. And yet...

        I believe my eyes, I had told Tien.

        Memory evidence was irrefutable—or it was supposed to be. If it was true that it was possible to alter one, then the resolution of every case, for the last gods’-knew-how-many years, was in question. The prospects were...dizzying. Sickening. Even if this was the first time this had happened—if it had happened—memories would no longer be something the Quiet could rely on. And if it was harder for the Quiet to punish the perpetrators of crimes, then the peace of the City would be in serious trouble.

        I took a deep breath. Gods give me strength.

        There was no point asking the mages if memories could be altered. I knew what they’d say. Whoever had done this hadn’t shared their discovery with anyone; you couldn’t tell people about something like this without word getting out.

        I opened the file again and read through everything, not skipping a word. One name jumped out at me.

        Ieyeran’s wife, a member of the Dastri family by birth, was a Carnelian-rank mage, outmatched only by Topazes. She hadn’t been part of the team that retrieved Osera’s memory, of course. But memories were placed in holding for a few hours before they were viewed, to give the spell time to weave its final threads together. If someone had gotten to them during that time—

        I had no proof, only suspicion. The oddities in the memory would be enough to raise questions, certainly, but not enough to overturn Tien’s conviction. Particularly since I had no evidence that altering a memory was even possible.

        I closed my eyes.

        Osera’s fan. I’d seen it before. It had been at Ieyeran’s belt when he’d come to the office to resign his post. It was engraved with the family name, most likely an heirloom. And the memory showed Osera’s killer taking it from her belt.

        How could he be so foolish as to wear it in public—ah, of course. He didn’t realize the memory showed him taking it. The most noticeable action with the fan in the memory had been Osera setting it on her dressing table, where presumably it could have been found by anyone.

        I collected the materials in the file. After a moment’s consideration, I slipped the memory-stone into my pocket. The proper thing to do was to report my discovery to my Ward Chief, but...she was a Dastri, too. It shouldn’t have mattered—didn’t matter; we dedicated ourselves to the City above all else—but for something this important, I had to be certain.

        But if I told her, and I was right, then the system the Quiet relied upon to keep order would be called into question. The damage to Tien, to Osera, had been done already. Pursuing this meant that people would lose faith in the Quiet, and in the courts. Once it was known that memories could be altered, others would take advantage of that. The peace I’d sworn to uphold would be damaged—perhaps irreparably. Was it worth the consequences?

        Justice has a voice.

        I stayed at the window until the sun set, watching the sky streak red and gold and blue over the roofs of the City.

* * *

        As I finished my explanation, Ward Chief Satia regarded me silently, her hands motionless. Outside the walls of her office, the ordinary business of the day carried on, but inside, the spells on the walls imposed a deathly hush. Nothing said within this room would be overheard.

        “You realize,” she said, hands still showing no emotion, “that you accuse a member of our own ranks.”

        I bowed my head. “I do, Ward Chief.”

        “You have thought, I am sure, of the repercussions. As ordinary citizens are one with their families, so are we one with each other. Trust in the Quiet, and therefore peace in the City, depends on the respect and honor that citizens hold for us.”

        I gestured Polite Inquiry. “Surely false honor is not worth having.”

        “You swore an oath to this City, Aster Nuria.” She turned to the window. “You swore to set aside personal considerations.”

        “With respect,” I said, shifting my hands to Civil Dialogue With Superior, “It is not the name of Ysanne with which I am concerned. If it’s true that this memory has been tampered with, then an innocent man has been sentenced to exile, and the integrity of the City is in danger.”

        “In danger?” She looked back at me, gesturing for the first time since I’d begun speaking. It was Rebuke. My hands nearly formed Humble Apology automatically, but I stopped myself.

        “No, Aster,” she went on. “What would endanger the City is if it became known that a foolish member of the Quiet committed an indiscretion. What would endanger the City is if it became known that it was possible for an unscrupulous mage to change the memories of our honored dead and call our investigative methods into question.”

        I held very still, not allowing my hands to betray my shock, as ice rushed through my blood to the bone. I felt the stone in my pocket, my last resort, condemning my faith.

        “You knew.”

        “Of course I knew.” She gestured Irritation.

        “You chose to preserve the Dastri name,” I said, through numb lips. “To protect your relation.”

        “No.” She met my eyes, her hands stilling. “You joined the Quiet against your father’s reluctance, if I recall. Why did you insist?”

        Why was she asking now? “Because I believed in the importance of peace and order in the City. I still do.”

        “You’re a good official, Aster Nuria,” she said, unexpectedly. “You have a good eye for detail and an excellent hand with a sword.”

        “Thank you,” I said, my hands unmoving. If she wasn’t going to show emotion, neither was I.

        “The Dastri name is not my concern,” she said. “This organization is. I will not see the Quiet dishonored because of the rash actions of two fools with an overabundance of ambition.”

        “A man was exiled for a crime he didn’t commit,” I said, my voice rising slightly above a courteous level of volume. “Does that not dishonor the Quiet?”

        “I do not wish to speak ill of your family,” she said, the standard preface given by one who intended to do exactly that. “But think. Your former brother was always getting himself into trouble of one sort or another; his talents chiefly extended to talking himself out of it.” She gestured Mild Distaste. “His exile has cost the City nothing; indeed, it’s likely saved us a great many headaches in the future. But one of the Quiet, one who has sworn a sacred oath to uphold laws, brought up on charges?”

        “We also swore an oath to the truth,” I said, though she was right—mostly—about Tien.

        “No stability comes without cost,” she said, punctuating it with Benevolent Explanation. “Would you jeopardize the peace of the City over one feckless playboy? We no longer even know his whereabouts to invite him home.”

        I remained silent, the stone heavy in my pocket.

        It would have been so much easier if she were only trying to protect the Dastri name. Neutrality, we swore. Find the truth, protect the City. And if one damaged the other?

        She was right; letting matters stand as they were would have far fewer consequences. His exile has cost the City nothing, except in the minds of those who knew.

        “If you honor the reputation of the Quiet and the work we do,” she said, “you’ll leave the memory-stone with me and dismiss this from your mind.”

        I hesitated for a moment, then withdrew the stone from my pocket and set it on her desk.

        “I knew you would choose well,” she said. She plucked it from the polished surface.

        “Thank you,” I said, looking her in the eye. “I believe I have.”

* * *

        The Council was surprised to be called together on such short notice; this was not a meeting-week. But Father was still well respected, even given recent events, and so they agreed to his request, as he’d agreed to mine.

        They sat arrayed in their rows in the circular chamber, all thirty-one representatives of the Council families, their gazes drilling small holes into me in the middle of the room. I wondered if they’d constructed it that way on purpose to intimidate those speaking.

        I wouldn’t let it work on me. I was oath-sworn to many things, and while Tien would have argued that those oaths were chains, I saw it differently. They were my strength; they were my spine.

        Ward Chief Satia was a member of the guard inside the room. I had asked Father to request her presence specially. She was regarding me intently, her hands frozen half between Inquiry and Amusement. Ieyeran was there too, seated next to his father—by tradition, a new heir attended the first Council meeting following his or her selection.

        I took a deep breath, and began.

        “Good day,” I said, gesturing Gratitude for Attention. “I am honored you have chosen to hear my petition.” It was customary to recite one’s full name on such occasions, but mine was not important, not today. My role here was as an Aster, not an Ysanne.

        The Ward Chief tilted her head slightly. I ignored her gaze and turned my attention to the representatives.

        “You are all familiar, of course, with the former Jieha heir’s murder,” I said. “Certain information has been brought to the attention of the Quiet regarding this investigation.”

        Ieyeran’s hands twitched in his lap, then were still.

        “With respect, Aster,” the Speaker said, gesturing Faint Skepticism, “the case has been settled most conclusively.”

        “Apologies,” I said, replying with Humble Rebuttal, “but I fear that it may have been settled less conclusively than befits our City.”

        A murmur stirred through the representatives like wind over grass. The Ward Chief’s hand had gone to her sword hilt, but she could not challenge me in front of everyone.

        “I took the opportunity of re-examining the memory,” I admitted, adding Apology for Presumption. “Certain incongruities made themselves known to me in the process. If I may...”

        I pulled the memory-stone out of my pocket, the real one, not the empty one I had left with Ward Chief Satia. I had been hoping that that last resort would not have been necessary. But I had known that there was a possibility I could be wrong. So I had taken precautions.

        We were taught, after all, to be deliberate in all our deeds.

        The Ward Chief had gone very, very still.

        “This is the memory shown before the court?” the Speaker asked.

        “It is,” I said. “I would ask leave to display it once more.”

        The murmur rose again. Ieyeran’s right hand had curled into a fist.

        “Courtesy to the petitioner,” the Speaker cautioned the chamber. “Permission granted, Aster.”

        I played them the memory as I had seen it, slowed down. I pointed out the vanishing vase shards, how the altered memory showed Osera calling Tien by his sixth-name when he’d called her to me by her seventh.

        “If the memory were truly hers, whole and unchanged, she would have called him by seventh-name,” I said. “However, if a shift in relationship had only just occurred, others would not yet know of it. Whoever altered the memory altered it according to the most recent name she had called him publicly.”

        The murmurings had stopped; the entire chamber was now deathly silent. I had to keep myself from jumping when the Speaker cleared his throat.

        “It is curious, to be sure,” he said, “but it is not conclusive. We do not even know if altering memories is possible. Your concerns are valid, Aster, but they are suspicions only.”

        I looked up at Father, who had frozen in his seat. His hands—unconsciously, I thought—had formed Hope.

        “If I may direct the Council’s attention to the end of the memory,” I said. I stopped it at the moment the hand took the fan from Osera’s belt. I did not look at Ward Chief Satia to see her reaction. This was the part of my discovery I had not shared with her.

        “Previously, we saw this fan placed on the dressing table,” I said. “That is the part of the memory that has been altered. This part, I believe, is the original; it has not been tampered with because no one realized it was visible. It shows someone taking her fan from her belt. Her killer.” I looked straight at Ieyeran. “If you would turn your attention to the new Jieha heir, you will see the one he wears at his.”

        Ieyeran darted out a hand to cover the fan, but it was too late. The entire chamber had turned to stare at him.

        His father, seated next to him, had gone statue-still. His throat worked once as he swallowed, staring at Ieyeran, almost visibly pleading.

        “Father,” Ieyeran said, reaching out a hand.

        “Ieyeran?” The word cracked through the air like a whip; Ieyeran recoiled. First-name, the name of a near-stranger. Not a name used with family, ever, unless you meant to irrevocably cast them off.

        “Attention,” the Speaker called. The guards at the far doors had moved to Ieyeran’s row, standing on either side of him.

        “You have made quite the discovery, Aster,” the Speaker went on, as the representatives subsided. “I wonder, however, that you did not choose to share it with your Ward Chief.”

        I closed my eyes for a moment, no more than the space of a breath, and took the other stone out of my pocket. A sound-capture stone, purchased from a Topaz-rank mage of a family linked to none of the parties involved. My final precaution.

        “I did, Honored Speaker,” I said, and activated the spell.

* * *

        After, Ward Chief Satia stared at me while the guards bound her hands, shock actually showing—if faintly—on her face.

        “I thought we had an agreement,” she said, her tone chipped ice.

        “I did not promise that,” I told her. Father had risen to his feet. He was speaking in quiet tones with the Jieha representative, who had not so much as looked in Ieyeran’s direction as he was taken away. Finding Tien, if it were still possible, would have to wait until the charges were formally overturned, which would take the support of everyone on the Council. Somehow, I didn’t think the Jieha representative would argue.

        “The Quiet’s shame is on your head.” Her bound hands were free just enough for her to gesture Contempt. “You must possess an overabundance of family loyalty after all; it certainly can’t be due to any good opinion of your brother.”

        “You’re right,” I said. “He is feckless. But he is not a murderer.” I gestured Devotion to Duty. “I swore an oath to set aside personal considerations. My opinion of my brother is irrelevant to the question of his guilt.”

        “I hope you’re happy,” she spat. “The damage to this City’s peace may be irreparable.”

        “Perhaps,” I said, adding Polite Disagreement. “But I believe that damage gone unseen is worse.”

        From the way some of the guards avoided my eyes as they led her off, not everyone agreed.

* * *

        Commissioner Nazarui looked up as I entered her office. I motioned Apology For Intrusion, even though she’d invited me in, and stood at attention. I’d never been called to meet with the Commissioner herself before. I’d never imagined I would be.

        “You’ve caused quite a stir, Aster Jiae,” she said, using my first-name.

        “I apologize,” I said, resisting the urge to shift my feet like a child.

        “You should.” She replaced her pen in its inkwell, the snap of her wrist more akin to someone throwing a dart. “Six challenges to resolved cases have crossed my desk already this morning. The university mages have been clamoring to speak with the Carnelian-rank who altered the memory—they want to do further research, if you can believe that. And I have a formal order from the Council to examine whether anyone else in our ranks has been...unruly.”

        I was silent.

        “Are you prepared to bear responsibility for your actions?”

        I looked up, meeting her eyes. If the loss of my position was the price I had to pay, then I would pay it.

        “Yes, ma’am.”

        “Good.” She stood up, setting an insignia on her desk. “The Quiet will need to put more effort into investigations from now on. Since it was your discovery that caused this, it seems fitting that you receive a caseload of your own.”

        I stared down at the insignia in front of me: a small gold rose. A detective. She was making me a detective. My work would not be that of a respectable guard of the City but that of one who was obliged to trespass into others’ affairs.

        “As you’ve proven yourself so adept at noticing memory incongruities,” she added, a trace of wryness in her voice. “Warranted or not, your actions have damaged the peace of this City. You can accept responsibility and dedicate yourself to repairing it, or you can leave the Quiet. Which is it?”

        Her words were stern, but her hands were forming Respect for Task Accomplished. I tore my gaze away from the insignia and bowed my head. She was correct. This was my responsibility. If shouldering it would help safeguard the City, then I would do it.

        “I accept,” I said, and picked up the rose.

        You never do anything halfway, do you? Tien’s voice, rueful and amused, came to me as clearly as if he were standing in the room.

        He was not, of course. There was nothing there but memory, the sort that can’t be captured in a stone.

Copyright © 2015 Kendra Leigh Speedling

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Kendra Leigh Speedling is a writer and copyeditor with a master’s in library science from City University London. Her fiction has appeared in Vitality Magazine and Penumbra and earned an honorable mention in the 2011 Dell Awards. She will soon be moving to Boston with her partner and their extremely large cat. Follow her Twitter, @KendraLS, for general musings, tales of tabletop gaming shenanigans, and the occasional burst of wit.

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COVER ART

“Kodran Migrant Fleet,” by Tyler Edlin

Tyler Edlin is a freelance illustrator and concept artist for the entertainment industry, creating epic fantasy and science fiction worlds. He gives back to the community providing regular classes and tutorials on such popular subjects as the fundamentals of character and environment design. View more of his work online at tyleredlinart.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

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