Issue #205 • Aug. 4, 2016

“Salt and Sorcery,” by Raphael Ordoñez

“A Deeper Green,” by Samantha Murray

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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SALT AND SORCERY

by Raphael Ordoñez

         The two glassy knobs that protruded from her pale pink hair flashed with inner fire, resonating with the storm that was tossing the airship like a drifting spore.

         There were sounds in the passageway outside. She busied herself over the hinged wooden compact, which was open like a clamshell on a cushion before her. Her eyes were weary and wise, belying her youthful, almost nymphean looks.

         She heard voices conversing lowly, then a final goodnight. A sallow, hawk-faced man stepped through the hatch into the cabin. His skull’s joints were bold lines on his shaven crown. He had never looked old because he had never looked young.

         “I thought I told you not to take your hair down,” he said.

         “I didn’t plan to go back out.”

         “I don’t care what you were planning. Look at those things. It’s as though you want people to know what you are.”

         She put her hands up to rearrange her coiffure. Her hair, the color of dawn-tinted clouds, was long and luxuriously heavy. She met his eyes in the mirror and saw that they sparkled. She shuddered inwardly. “Are we far off course?”

         As if to emphasize the question, the ship dropped suddenly and then soared upward.

         “We’re off every map they’ve got,” the man said. “There’s no way to set down in this gale, so we’ll just have to coast along with it until it decides to give out. We may never get back to Enoch. How about that?”

         She returned to the compact, using tweezers to adjust the black, beanlike ova in their rotating ring of cavities. Only four remained to her. “Do the others know?”

         “Those fools?” He ran a finger down the edge of a design on the bulkhead. “You were very free with them tonight.”

         She snapped the compact shut. “I didn’t mean—”

         “Not at all! I prefer it when you speak your mind. I don’t like all this skulking about. And if what you say reflects rather badly on me, well, that’s not your fault is it?”

         She turned to face him. “Darden, you know I—”

         “Please,” he said, putting up one hand. “How long has it been since I found you? There’s nothing you have to apologize for. Not to me. We’ve been through high times and low together, haven’t we?”

         “Yes, Darden.” She thought of the story he’d told her again and again, of his finding her, a puling babe, exposed in the pumice desert of Lund.

         He laughed. “Oh, I remember one low time. What would the others think if they ever knew what you’d done with those seeds of yours? Eh? Do you remember the look on old—”

         “I never use them except when you ask me to!” she cried.

         “So it’s my fault! You think the chimeras come out of nowhere!” He laughed again. “Why, if I didn’t keep those little beans of yours under lock and key...! Speaking of which...” He put his hand out. “Finished?”

         Orana gave him the case. He placed it in a metal-bound wooden chest and locked the lid. She winced at the sound.

         “Don’t delude yourself,” he said. “We’re both rotten.” He slid his arm around her waist and crushed his lips against hers. He moved to her neck. His hot breath filled her ear: “You’re just a little more rotten.”

         There was a loud pop, and Darden flew back against the bulkhead. His eyes glittered with malice. The scar on his cheek turned white.

         Lightning stabbed at the embrasures, seeking the source of power. An explosion rocked the craft. Night swept black-winged into the cabin. Gravity loosed its hold, turning the contents into swirling flotsam. Orana drifted up out of Darden’s reach as though in an ecstasy of divine rapture.

         Then a giant’s hand came down, and the bulkhead crashed against them. Stunned, Orana found herself whirled back into space. She had a glimpse of Darden’s face streaked with blood. A rent opened in the hull like a black mouth, and icy fingers yanked her into darkness.

         A mote in a howling maelstrom, she tumbled for what seemed an eternity through elemental anarchy. Orientation and polarity lost all meaning. Mad choirs of daemons shrieked in her ears, driving her in a harsh zigzag across the face of chaos.

         Something struck her a resounding blow, bounded away, and struck her again. And then, suddenly, miraculously, she found herself pressed against a flat surface. Her senses righted themselves, and she knew that she was on the ground.

         The wind blasted her with tiny pellets that stung her eyes and filled her mouth with the taste of salt. She rolled over to put her face in the lee. Lights whirled like meteors across her vision. The airship was turning somersaults into darkness. Then the gale picked it up like a toy, and it was gone.

* * *

         A vision of pink and pale blue greeted her open eyes, a perfectly smooth plane of sparkling rose receding to the line at infinity, vertical in her vision, to meet the cosmic sapphire dome.

         She got up on one elbow. The sun was a pink ball peering over the world’s rim. Her shadow was a blue finger stretched out behind her.

         For a confused moment she thought she lay in a snow field. But the surface was hard and gritty. Also, it was not cold. By bits and pieces she recalled her advent upon the plain, the taste of salt on her lips.

         Her heart leaped. The salt flats were so remote that some doubted their very existence. The last nameless range west of Enoch, far past the great karst plateau, was known as the Edge of Beyond. And its twisted pinnacles merely overlooked the beginning of the flats.

         She was alone in the heart of Beyond.

         The breeze was cool and dry. There was no other sound and no sign of any living thing. The sky was cloudless. The sun waxed incandescent as it rose.

         To the south she descried a trail of wreckage across the glittering expanse. She got to her feet, stretched her sore muscles, and began walking. The scattered objects were the only things upon which her eyes could fix. The flats were utterly featureless. No hills or mountains were visible at the circle of the horizon.

         Halfway to the nearest piece she passed a place where the ship had struck the salt. The crust had cracked, revealing a pool of muddy blue-green brine, placid under a sheet of floating crystals. The ship itself was nowhere in sight. Perhaps it had righted itself and flown on. If that were the case, it might soon return, and find her there on the plain.

         Many of the things were from her cabin. She found some clothes, now woefully inadequate. She was wearing a tight pink blouse and loose, flowing black pants. There was a pair of sandals among the wreckage, which she slipped on, but Darden had liked to keep her looking her best, and the gowns strewn over the salt were no better than what she had on.

         Taking up the trail again, she came across more mementos: jewelry, artifacts, rare cylinders. Darden specialized in organizing acts of larceny and tomb-plundering—they’d been on such a mission when the storm struck—but lately he’d come to rely almost exclusively on her talents in evading both the guards of the modern world-city and the cunning traps of the ancients.

         The trail petered out. There was one last object in the distance. Squinting—the sun was a glaring white ball in the east now and the flats shimmered brilliantly—she descried a shattered rectangle. She bounded forward with a cry of joy.

         It was the chest.

         She reached it and fell to her knees. The lock had been broken but the contents remained. Trembling, she drew out the compact. The seeds were intact. She sat cross-legged on the salt and positioned them more carefully, as a mother might shift her sleeping infants.

         The world was a shining white disk beneath a clear blue dome. Sunlight pounded inexorably on her back and skull. She had no water, no food, and no shelter. She wouldn’t last more than a few hours if she didn’t find a way of protecting herself from the onslaught.

         She rose to her knees went through the chest more carefully. Most of the contents were oddments that Darden had considered important. Among them was his chain-sword, his most prized possession.

         She drew it out carefully. She’d never been allowed to touch it but had watched Darden handle it many times. With one flick of her wrist, the links locked into place, forming a razor-sharp rapier. She drove the pommel against her hip, and the blade collapsed into a chain again.

         The chest held nothing else of value. She got to her feet with her finds and returned to her clothes. Among them were two white bed sheets. Using the chain-sword, she cut a hole in the middle of one and slipped it over her head. A silken cord served to cincture it around her waist. The other she used as a hood.

         The glare of the salt was blinding now. Her vision was already blurred. She recalled that a silken sleeping mask lay among her scattered clothing. She took it up, cut two slits in it, and slipped it on after completing her toilet, unconsciously arranging her hair as Darden had liked it, with the knobs of her antennae hidden.

         There was little more to be done. She filled a satchel with anything that seemed likely to be useful, including a paring knife, a cup, a bottle of liquor, and extra pins for her hair. Into the bag also went the compact and chain-sword. With that she set out.

         East lay Enoch the world-city. South lay the wreck of the airship. North and west lay lands empty and unknown. She headed northwest. She knew she would probably die, but still her heart was light.

* * *

         As the trail of jetsam receded Orana began to feel strangely exposed. The plain went on, and on, and on, without the slightest variation in any direction. It proved difficult to keep up a good pace. With no goal to make toward, her steps wove back and forth. The earth was a treadmill, the sun a lidless eye transfixing her with its stare.

         The white expanse rebuked her soul. It whispered that the world of color and form existed in the eye alone, a broken impression of a vast blank cosmos whirling toward tepid surcease. And in that final unalterable uniformity, time and existence would cease to have meaning, and all would be one, and nothing.

         The sun climbed overhead. Her feet lagged and her head lolled on her shoulders. Clouds of sparks assailed her vision. She sank to the glittering plane, rolled on the salt for a moment, and lay still.

         Her half-open eyes seized upon the tiny crystalline cubes whose complex configurations stretched away in nightmare boundlessness.

         Deliriously, she got up on her hands and knees. It seemed all one whether she walked or crawled. The latter proved more irksome, though, so she rose unsteadily to her feet and kept walking.

         Soon she began passing patches of pale blue-green. A measure of sanity returned to her mind. She felt the gnawing of thirst, and her lips were dry and cracked, but she remembered who she was.

         Clouds started to coalesce in the north. She prayed silently to all the gods she knew. There were still no landmarks, but the plain was broken into big polygons like tiles mortared with crystalline ridges.

         Bastions of clouds bore down on her, hung with curtains of pearl. The storm-wall reached from horizon to horizon, a soaring range with slanting lines pushing ahead of its broad foundations.

         Advance towers surged around her. Delicious shadow enveloped her. Cool wind tugged at her raiment. Thunder rolled. And then the blessed rain came down.

         She stopped and opened her mouth to the heavens. That did nothing to slake her thirst, but it washed the salt from her lips. She set her cup out on the crust. Once her raiment was soaked she sucked at the sheets and let them grow sodden again.

         The rain slackened after all too brief a downpour. Ragged rents exposed the blue sky. Water lay in a thin sheet on the ground. She tasted it, but, as she’d expected, it was already too salty to drink.

         She swallowed what had gathered in her cup, took off her sheets, and wrung them out in it. This, too, she drank, then repeated the process. She downed three cupfuls that way. The fourth and last she kept in the cup.

         Puffy white cumuli scudded over the flats now beneath high cirrus banners. Rainwater lay in a perfect sheet across the plain, an inch deep in every direction, reflecting the sky like a mirror. It was as though she floated between two heavens, one above and one below.

         She went her way exultantly, walking on water, sole to sole with an upside-down second self, dancing between twin layers of clouds.

* * *

         The shallow ocean lifted into haze and vanished as the sun declined. Her legs grew weary. She felt the need of rest. But every spot was the same as every other.

         As the ruddy disk touched the horizon, her feet started breaking through into sun-warmed quagmires. She backtracked, halted, and peered forward. In the uncertain light it was hard to tell where solid ground lay. This, then, was the place to sleep. She lay down, wrapped in her two sheets.

         The sun sank out of sight. Twilight swept over the earth. Stars appeared in the desolate gulf, waxing in darkness, gathering into glittering swarms. They bore down on her like a volley of flaming arrows.

         She felt as though pressed against a spinning ball from which she might drop into the abyss at any moment. In the west, Saant hung low like a flickering red candle. Staring into it, she fell asleep, and dreamed of temples with empty tabernacles.

* * *

         In the morning she skirted the thin crust by veering to the north. The plain continued as before. Her water was gone. She hoped for another afternoon shower, but no shower came. The featureless flats rolled on and on. She was achingly thirsty again and light-headed with hunger.

         Dark spots came and went in her sun-touched vision. One spot refused to vanish. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. A long, low eminence lay in the dancing distance.

         It was an outcrop like an island in the sea of salt, an upturned keel of brown stone clothed in varicolored vegetation. She started forward convulsively, half stumbling, half running, thinking of the rainwater that must have pooled in its hollows.

         As a girl, she’d once been aboard a steamer with Darden when an earthquake struck. Their craft had settled to the exposed reef. She’d been entranced with the loveliness of the coral landscape that rose up before her. Then the waves had returned, and they’d barely escaped with their lives.

         The salt-island reminded her of that reef. The great mosses and lichens that crowned it looked as though carved by elfin jewelers. There were golden heliodor stalks with exploding cinnabar heads, and beds of blue-green beryl, and creeping carpets of amethyst orbs, and forests of ruby-tipped olivine spears, and towering onyx pagodas and toadstools, and rolling lichen-mats like landscapes carved of jade in arches and hollows and orange-velvet cups. Dragonflies darted hither and thither like winged brooches, crimson, bronzy green, and black-banded yellow.

         She had almost reached the shoreline, where soft breakers of blue-green salt rolled against the black rocks, when a shrill whistle brought her up short. She froze. A figure stood silhouetted against the sky at the island’s brow, then vanished.

         “Hello?” she called.

         For a moment there was no answer. Then, suddenly, a score or more of tiny brown warriors materialized out of nowhere, brandishing spears and bows. She thought at first that they were pygmies, then realized that they were merely children. They wore scaly animal skins and bits of tattered cloth and scrap metal. Some were almost naked.

         Orana stepped forward and lowered her hood and mask. A dart whizzed past her ear. It had been shot by an older youth, lanky and large-eared, who stood head and shoulders over the others. He strode to the fore and held his hand out menacingly.

         “I missed you on purpose,” he said. “I could’ve killed you if I’d wanted to. That was just a warning. This is our place!”

         “Where are your parents?” asked Orana.

         “Dead!” a little girl yelled. The other children took up the chorus: “Dead! They’re all dead! Our parents loved us but they’re dead!”

         The boy held his hand up for silence. “We’re all orphans here. I am the phylarch. We don’t allow big people. Go away!”

         “I won’t harm you,” said Orana. “I’m just thirsty.”

         “It’s against our rules.”

         “Oh, Arrow,” said the girl who had spoken, “can’t we break the rules just this once? She seems nice, and she’s so pretty.”

         Arrow shook his head. “You’re too young, and don’t understand. You don’t remember the time before.”

         “I do too. But that’s not the reason you’re keeping her off!”

         The other children shouted her down.

         “And anyway,” said a warrior boy, “it’s stupid to talk about breaking a rule, when we’ve never even gotten the chance to follow it.”

         “If we don’t follow our rules,” another boy said, “Tiamat will think we don’t love her. Then we’ll never go to Pureland.”

         “Maybe I don’t want to go to Pureland,” said the girl. “We’ll be big people someday. You’ll be first, Arrow.”

         “That’s different.”

         “I don’t see how.”

         “Please,” said Orana, “I just need water and something to eat.”

         The boy phylarch hesitated. The other children looked expectantly at him. But stone set in his eyes. “Newt! Cubit! Ray!” Three warrior boys gathered around him. “You stay here, and make sure she stays off the island. The rest of you, come with me.”

         The children melted into the mossy crevices, leaving the guards behind, two with spears and one with a nocked arrow. They watched Orana placidly, like crafty animals.

         She began walking north, parallel to the shoreline. The boys kept up with her, leaping from stone to stone. They didn’t call to her or talk to one another.

         The island was a mile long. At its northern extremity it rose into precipices crowned with big lichened boulders and pillars and what appeared to be a ruined temple. An isolated outcrop stood in the salt to the north. She set out toward it, crossing the glittering expanse. The boys remained in the shadow of the cliffs.

         The outcrop was a cluster of natural pillars. A staircase led her up to a cave entrance between two shoulders of stone. Placing her hand on one side, she leaned as far forward as she dared. The air wafting out of the hole was cool and moist.

         Her hand slipped, and she tumbled down into darkness, rolling from step to step to the bottom. For a moment she just lay there, stunned. A sensation of wetness spread up her arm, bringing her swiftly to her knees.

         A pool of water glimmered in the gloom. It was too shallow for her cup, so she dipped her hands in and lifted it to her lips. It was fresh. Once her thirst was slaked she bathed her face and her arms.

         The cave was the tomb of some time-forgotten chieftain, with carved pilasters and a groined ceiling. There was movement toward the back. Termites as big as her thumb were tending a fungus garden that carpeted the floor and walls. Guards twice their size, with orange heads and long pincers, patrolled the perimeter.

         Desperately hungry, Orana stole forward, broke off a morsel of fungus, and placed it her mouth. It seemed edible. She tore out a handful. The guards came at her, snapping viciously. She beat a hasty retreat.

         In a comfortable nook near the stairs she ate her ill-gotten meal. Her eyes grew heavy as her stomach grew full, and she dropped into a deep sleep.

* * *

         Morning light streamed down the steps when Orana awoke. Her antennae throbbed. She sensed someone’s presence.

         A small, lithe figure leaped to the stairs and bounded toward the opening.

         “Wait!” called Orana. “I won’t hurt you!”

         The figure froze and turned. It was the girl who had spoken the day before. She looked to be about nine. Her brown hair lay in a loose braid down her back. She had large eyes and expressive features.

         Orana smiled, seeing an opportunity to get on good terms with the children. “My name is Orana. What’s yours?”

         “Eloina. But never call me that. Everyone calls me Fish.” She spoke loudly and slowly, carefully articulating each syllable.

         “Why do they call you that?”

         “Because there’s no fish around here!”

         That made no sense to Orana. “How long have you all lived here?”

         “Oh, about five years,” said the girl. She came down a few steps. “What are you doing here?”

         “I was on an airship that was blown off course. There was an accident. I woke up in the flats and started walking. That was two days ago.”

         “Why’d you come this way? Do you know about Tiamat?”

         “Who is Tiamat?”

         “The Queen of Pureland,” said Fish. “How’d you get your hair so pink?”

         “I was born with it, Fish.”

         “What? I never heard of someone born with pink hair!”

         Orana laughed. “I’ve never met anyone else with pink hair myself.”

         “Didn’t your parents have pink hair?”

         “I don’t know. I’m an orphan, too.”

         Fish’s mouth opened, then closed. She came the rest of the way down.

         “How did you all come to be here, Fish?”

         “Same as you,” she said expansively. “Airship crash.”

         “Did your—I mean, when you crashed, were you—”

         “Is that when our parents died? Listen, lady, we were all wards of the city. You know what that means, don’t you?”

         “But you said they were dead.”

         The girl rolled her eyes. “That’s just what we tell the little ones.”

         “I see.”

         Without warning, Fish stepped over, sat in her lap, and began stroking her pink hair. Orana took the girl’s hands and held them gently in her own, but Fish disentangled them and touched her hair again. Her hand brushed a knob, and she jerked back. “Ow!”

         “I’m sorry,” said Orana. “Did you get a shock?”

         “Did I! What do you have in there, anyway?”

         “Just my antennae.”

         Fish drew back, her dark eyes wide open. “Antennae? What are you, an insect?”

         Orana laughed again. “No, I’m a daughter of Anûn.”

         “You mean you’re from the moon? I never heard of people living on the moon.”

         “They do. You can see their cities at night, if you look closely when its face is dark. I don’t know if I was born there.”

         “Are you a ward of the city, too?”

         “N-no. I had a guardian.”

         “Wait. How old are you?”

         “Twenty-two.”

         “I thought so. I told my brother you weren’t that old.”

         “Is your brother...Arrow?”

         “Uh-huh. I think you’re nice. He thinks you’ll try to control us.”

         “I don’t want to control you. I only want to leave this place. I might be able to help you, in exchange for your assistance. What would Arrow think of that?”

         Fish shrugged. “It’s not just up to Arrow.”

         “What happened to the adults on your ship, Fish?”

         “I’m not supposed to talk about it.” She looked down at Orana’s satchel. The compact had slipped out. She took it up curiously. “What’s this?”

         Orana tugged it out of the girl’s hands, embarrassed. “It’s nothing.”

         “Fish, are you in there?” A boy was peering down from the entrance. His hair was a sun-bleached white and his freckled face was tan. He was small, but Orana knew that he must be Fish’s age, or older.

         “I’m here, Cubit,” said Fish with a sigh.

         “Arrow would be mad if he knew.”

         “He wouldn’t know, if you sneaks wouldn’t tell him.”

         “You want us to?” the boy threatened.

         “Well, I’ve got to go,” said Fish. “Bye!” Before Orana could say another word, the girl ran up the steps and disappeared.

         Orana pondered all she’d just learned. Again and again her thoughts returned to Tiamat, the mysterious ‘queen’ whose name she’d heard twice so far. She might be an imaginary friend conjured by the children in their loneliness. Orana shuddered at the thought of what such a figment might make them do.

         She climbed up to the entrance and peered out. The golden sunlight of early morning lay over the flats. Fish was halfway to the island, her braid swinging as she ran. Cubit was struggling to keep up.

* * *

         After a breakfast of fungus and water Orana set out toward the island. She wore her mask, for the sun was bright, and so she didn’t see the flying drone until it was almost upon her.

         It was about the size of a human torso, a chassis of pale chitin suspended from four whirling rotors, with a single great eye on a stalk twisting down from the base, swiveling this way and that as it circled her.

         Surreptitiously, she drew the coiled chain-sword and let it click into place beside her leg. The watcher appeared not to notice. It continued to dart around like a gnat.

         Her antennae flashed briefly as she raised the rapier. She waved it around awkwardly, chasing the drone. As it swooped low she was able to bring the blade down between its rotors. It fell in two wriggling halves to the salt.

         She peered at its exposed insides. They were of the same substance as its shell, yellowish white and papery thin, with intricate moving parts and pumping bellows and tubes but no moisture. It seemed neither animal nor machine. She crushed it flat on the salt. The way it crackled under her sandal made her shudder.

         She continued on toward the cliffs. Cubit and the other two boys were sitting in the shadows, watching her. She veered to the right to resume her circumnavigation. The cliffs dwindled to shelves planted like garden terraces. The boys followed as before.

         The western shoreline was gently concave. The wreck of an airship stood in the flats opposite the bay, a glittering white skeleton frosted with layers of salt like an ice-cased derelict in an arctic sea. A cleft high up on the island opened toward it.

         As she neared the spot, children poured out of the crack, joining the boys on the shore. Arrow emerged last of all and leaped from stone to stone to the salt, spear in hand. “Our rules haven’t changed,” he said.

         “Will you come out to talk to me?” asked Orana. “I have something to say.”

         “We don’t keep secrets,” said Arrow. “Say it where everyone can hear.”

         “Why won’t you let me on your island?”

         “As I said, it’s our rule. And it’s a good rule.” He looked around at the others. “Big people only want to use us.”

         “But I don’t want to use you. I don’t even want to know you. I just want to strike a deal. Once I can gather some supplies, I’ll be off. It will take months to do that on my own. I’m asking for your help. In exchange, I can perform some service for you.”

         Once again, the boy hesitated. “Such as what?”

         “What do you need done?”

         He opened his mouth to speak. The other children looked at him. But he shook his head. “No. I’m sorry. We’re not making any deals.”

         “Because of Tiamat? Is that it?”

         “Just go away,” he said. “You’ll only bring us trouble. Please just go away.”

         He turned and strode up to the cleft, his back stiff with pride. The others trailed behind more dejectedly.

         Orana continued her exploration.

         As she rounded the low southern cape she became aware that Fish was arguing with the boy sentries. The discussion went back and forth, and then Fish broke away, running toward her over the salt. The boys pretended not to notice.

         “Hello,” said Fish, falling in beside her.

         “Hello, Fish,” said Orana.

         “I came to talk to you because I know you can help us.”

         “I’m not so sure of that, Fish.” Orana’s voice was tinged with bitterness.

         “You’re right about Tiamat,” said Fish.

         “She’s the one who doesn’t like adults on your island?”

         “Yes. And she always finds out what we do.”

         Orana thought of the watcher she’d destroyed. “Where does she live?”

         Fish waved toward the west. “In a tall tower on its own in the salt. Arrow once saw it from far away.”

         “Is she...human?”

         “We’ve never seen her. Once I heard Arrow say that he thought she might be one of the nephelim or seraphim, or perhaps a giantess.”

         “She doesn’t sound like a good queen to me,” said Orana. “What do you think?”

         “I don’t know. Arrow says she helped us when we first came here.”

         “Helped you how?”

         “Our wardens were sneaking us away to sell us when a storm blew us off course. Tiamat made the big people go away. She said she wanted to take us all to Pureland. But she could only take one at a time. So once a month her toys come to carry someone off. Arrow started to get suspicious—”

         “Good for Arrow,” said Orana.

         “—and told Tiamat that no more would go until someone came back to tell us what it was like. That month Tiamat sent bigger toys and took three of us. So now we don’t argue.

         “Some of the others still believe in Tiamat. She sends us lots of presents. They fall to bits after a few days, but everyone likes them just the same. She always reminds us how much we owe her. Arrow repeats the things she says, but I think deep down he’s afraid, and doesn’t know what to do.”

         “And what about you?” asked Orana.

         Fish shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

         “I’ll tell you something, Fish. Any time a person—man or woman, daemon or god—tells you to keep a secret or makes you afraid, know that the smiling face hides a ravenous gullet.”

         “Will you help us?”

         Orana blushed and clutched unconsciously at the compact hidden in her satchel. “No,” she said. “I can’t. I...I can’t.”

         “I saw how you cut down that toy this morning,” said Fish. “Not even Arrow has done a thing like that.”

         “I wouldn’t have done it either, if I’d understood your situation. And it required no special skill. If that’s the best Tiamat can do, she’s no very competent toy-maker.”

         “But you can do other things. I know you can. You’re from the moon.”

         Orana stopped and took the girl by the shoulders. “No. I can’t. I’m a reprobate, Fish. Do you understand?”

         “No,” the girl said, looking confused and hurt and a little afraid.

         “I’ve made my peace with the powers of this world,” said Orana. “You must do as seems best to you. I’d be in the way in either case. I’ll just gather my supplies and head out.”

         “But—”

         “Go back to the island, Fish. You’re a good girl. Keep away from me from now on.”

         Fish turned and ran.

         “Damn,” Orana whispered.

* * *

         As twilight descended Orana looked despondently over the flats from her tomb. A figure was making its way from the island. Assuming at first that it was Fish, she rose to send her away. But then she saw that it was Arrow.

         The boy drew up to the foot of the stairs and peered at her as though trying to read her.

         “Yes?” said Orana at last.

         “I did something bad,” said Arrow.

         “What do you mean? Just now?”

         The boy shook his head. “I didn’t mean to, and I didn’t know this would happen. I...I need help.”

         “You need...my help?”

         Arrow nodded.

         “This morning you didn’t seem very interested in my help.”

         Arrow glanced westward, scanned the sky nervously. Now that he was alone with her, he seemed less a young warrior and more a frightened boy. “Something’s happened,” he said in a small voice. “Please?”

         “Let me get my bag,” said Orana.

         She tried to pry whatever it was out of him as they crossed to the island. He answered evasively. They circled toward the airship and climbed to the cleft from which the children had emerged before.

         A small hollow lay within. Stone huts were built into the cracks around the sides. The children were gathered in two groups, making a path to the largest.

         Orana followed Arrow inside, ducking under the low lintel. A pallet of old blankets and skins covered the floor at the back. A girl Arrow’s age lay against the wall. Two other girls sat beside her, holding her hands. Her face was pale and sweaty. Her breath came in gasps.

         “Yours?” asked Orana, understanding and pity suddenly flooding her heart.

         Arrow nodded.

         “I’m his wife!” the girl cried through clenched teeth. “Go away. We don’t need you!”

         “What’s your name?” asked Orana.

         “Skate.”

         “Well, Skate, I’m all you’ve got.”

         “What are you, a midwife?”

         “She’s a daughter of Anûn!” shouted Fish, who had appeared at her elbow.

         Orana’s cheeks burned. “Everything will be all right,” she said. “I trust nature, and you should, too. Let’s follow where she leads.”

         “I know!” cried Fish, her face suddenly brightening. She vanished through the door.

         “Arrow,” said Orana, “get someone to build a fire outside. You have something we can boil water in?”

         “Yes.”

         “Have them get it ready. You two girls stay with me. I’ll need your help.”

         Fish reappeared, pulling Cubit along behind her. He saw Skate and froze, his eyes wide open.

         “Tell her!” cried Fish.

         Cubit said nothing. His face expressed terror and fascination.

         “What is it?” Orana asked.

         “Tell her!” repeated Fish.

         Without taking his eyes off the groaning girl, Cubit mechanically said, “Once when we were wards of the world-city I read a book and it was about how babies come and it had pictures.”

         “You know how babies are born, Cubit?” asked Orana.

         He nodded.

         “Did you know that out of all the land animals in the world, maugrethim and people are the only ones that don’t lay eggs?” asked Fish.

         “No, I didn’t,” said Orana. “Cubit, I need you to stay here. You can sit outside the door if you prefer. But I’ll need you to describe exactly what you remember.”

         He nodded and sat down on the floor. “She’s having a baby,” he mumbled. He shook himself, then looked at Orana for the first time. “When it comes, it’ll still be attached to this long tube from its belly. It doesn’t hurt to cut it off. But you have to tie it shut or something.”

         Orana nodded. “Fish,” she said, “go find a good, sharp knife. Put it in that water. Then come back here. I may need you later.”

         Orana didn’t tell them that she knew less about childbirth than she did about handling a chain-sword. Fish darted out. Orana and the two girls got Skate into a sitting position, leaning back against a stone slab that they had covered with padding. Arrow came back in unnoticed.

         Only vaguely was Orana aware of the passage of time. Once, after many hours, she happened to glance out the door as she sent Fish on an errand, and was surprised to see that darkness had fallen. Every so often she consulted with Cubit. He hadn’t actually read the book, it seemed, but did remember the pictures quite clearly.

         Arrow continued to lurk miserably in the shadows. The contractions came faster and stronger. Skate shouted every imprecation she knew.

         At last the crown of the head was visible, as white and as round as an egg, and streaked with wet black hairs. “Here she comes!” Orana cried.

         The girl reached down and felt it. “Is that my baby?” she screamed.

         “Yes. Breathe. Keep pushing.”

         “What’s wrong with it?” Arrow shrieked. “Why is it white?”

         “Shut up and get over here,” Orana growled. “Hold your wife’s hand and keep your mouth shut if you can’t say something sensible. Fish: water, knife, cloths. Go.”

         Fish vanished without a word. Arrow relieved a girl at Skate’s side.

         “I’m so tired,” Skate panted.

         “Almost there,” said Orana. “Keep bearing down.”

         It wasn’t long before a thin wail filled the air. Skate slumped down on the pallet, looking at the frail creature in Orana’s arms, so lately parted from her body. “Is my baby deformed?”

         “She’s beautiful. Come here, Arrow.” Orana put the child in his arms. He stared down at it blankly, wide-eyed. Fish and Cubit darted out with the news. The children started cheering.

         “That’s your daughter,” said Orana, a little harshly, as she toweled the baby off. “Don’t you care?”

         He looked up at her, and she saw that his eyes were wet and red-rimmed. “All these months I’d been afraid that she would come and it wouldn’t mean anything,” he said, seeming not to have heard her. “I felt nothing. Nothing at all! And now—” His voice broke, and he sobbed.

         Orana looked away. Her eyes also were wet.

         “I want my baby,” said Skate.

         Orana nodded to Arrow. “Best let her nurse. She’ll be wanting to sleep soon.”

         Just then the group became aware that the cheering had turned into screaming. Fish put her head in the door. “Tiamat took Cubit!”

         Orana rushed to the cleft, followed by Arrow. Day was dawning. Away in the west several black specks showed against the luminous sky.

         “She never comes off schedule,” said Arrow, “except—”

         “Good morning!” said a strange voice. It was ebullient but affectless, almost mechanical, as though an animal were imitating human speech.

         Orana turned to see a drone hovering near at hand. “With whom am I speaking?”

         “Little ones,” said the voice. “I saved you. I protected you. One by one I have borne you to my bosom. All I have asked in return is your trust. And how have you repaid me?”

         “Listen to me, children,” said Orana. “Would someone who really loved you make you afraid? Would they threaten to take away their love? Would they remind you that you’re in debt to them?”

         “Little ones,” said the voice, “look at your new friend. What is different about her? Look at her head!” The children all turned, and Orana became aware that her hair had fallen to her shoulders. “She is a witch and an alien!” said the voice. “She is your enemy!”

         “Is that true?” a boy asked.

         “I am a witch of the moon,” said Orana, “but if I can bring back Cubit, I will.”

         “Little ones,” the voice began. It was cut off by a spear ripping through its shell. Arrow lowered his hand as the drone dropped to the earth.

         “We’ve had enough of queens,” he said. “We’ll take witches for a change.” He looked at Orana. “Are you ready? I’m coming with you, you know.”

         “No, you’re not,” said Orana. “Skate needs you. And I may not make it back. If worst comes to worst, you’ll need to make some kind of defense.”

         She didn’t tell Arrow that his “help” would be more trouble than it was worth.

         “I suppose you’re right,” he said, hanging his head.

         “Now, tell me about this tower. Am I likely to miss it?”

         “Miss it!” he said. “On the flats?”

* * *

         An hour later she was walking westward, swathed in her sheets again. In one hand she carried a borrowed mattock. A bundle of dun, black-headed stalks was slung over her shoulder. Her satchel hung at her side.

         She was threading her way between salt-cones. Each spike stood a few feet high in the otherwise level flats. Their sharp shadows shrank as the sun rose higher, becoming blue circles at noon. Hard-looking white clouds materialized in the sky.

         The sound of a light footfall brought her up short. She spun, mattock uplifted. But it was only Fish.

         “Why are you here?” hissed Orana.

         “I just wanted to see what you’re doing. Please don’t send me away.”

         “I would if I thought you’d obey. Don’t you know I probably won’t return?”

         “If you don’t, what difference will it make where I am? We can’t fight Tiamat without you.”

         “Well, time’s too short to take you back,” said Orana, glad of the company in spite of herself. “Just do as I say.”

         Fish slipped her hand into Orana’s, and they went on.

         They emerged from the cone field. The sun sank before them. When it touched the horizon they decided to stop for the night.

         Under Fish’s guidance, Orana used the mattock to break through the crust, revealing a pool of brine. Fish slid one of the stalks into the sludge, taking care that the black head should rest on the edge.

         They then made two pallets from Orana’s sheets. Sitting cross-legged on hers, Orana spread a handkerchief on the salt. She took out her compact, selected three of the four seeds, and laid them side by side on the cloth. They were like polyhedra with tufted stalks protruding from their vertices.

         She began singing an unearthly lullaby. The light in her antennae waxed and waned with the rise and fall of her voice. The stalks writhed. Their cilia waved.

         When her song came to a close, she folded the cloth over them and lay back beside Fish.

         “What were you doing?” asked Fish.

         “Growing my seeds.”

         “I didn’t see them grow.”

         “Wait until morning.”

         “Is it magic?” asked Fish.

         “No more than that stalk over there.”

         “But you didn’t even touch them.”

         “Didn’t I? Distance and space aren’t the same thing. Those seeds are the germs of unlife. With my brain-elements I cause them to unfurl.”

         “Where did they come from?” asked Fish.

         “They were made by the powers of the air. But a hundred thousand chiliads rendered the daemons too weak-willed to handle them. Then man came and learned their secret. Because man is mortal, his youth springs ever anew. The daemons can act in concert with the will of one whose faculties permit it. That’s how I shape my seeds. I can’t make them myself. They were with me when I was found as an infant.”

         “What if you run out?”

         “Then my antennae will atrophy, and I’ll be just another woman in the world.”

         “Will you run out?”

         “I have only one in reserve now. All my life I’ve been saving them, Fish, using them only...when necessary. Today seems as good a time as any to spend them.”

         They bedded down then, wrapped in their sheets, but talked late into the night, watching meteors streak across the sky.

* * *

         By the morning the ova had swelled into strange shapes. Orana wrapped up the wriggling forms and put them her satchel.

         The stalk had also developed. It was as limp as a wet noodle, and its black head had become a red fruiting body nearly bursting along its seams. Orana and Fish each took a piece for their breakfast, sucking out the fresh water it held, and put the rest away for later.

         It was late morning when they first spied the tower. The structure stood like a white giant over the flats, watching them from afar while they were still miles away. No doubt the island was visible from its crown.

         Orana was reminded of a refinery as they came within hailing distance. Its base was mostly hidden behind the thicket of pipes that rose vertically from the salt. Round windows of various sizes protruded above. A bricolage of machinery comprised its hull.

         Here and there hinged valves released jets of steam. The warm clouds that wafted toward them had the sickening smell of a brewery. The irregular crown shimmered uncertainly in the bright sunlight.

         There were no openings at the level of the salt that Orana could see. She wondered if Tiamat actually lived in the tower. Perhaps they had caught her unawares, while away from home. Or perhaps she didn’t even exist.

         A sphincter at the tower’s base hissed open, revealing a tube of clacking machinery, a miniature assembly line. Some of the jointed arms sprayed a white fluid that dried into papery sheets and tubes; others joined the pieces together. A rolling belt conveyed the product, an insectile missile, into the open air.

         Instinctively, Orana swung the chain-sword erect and raised it. The missile shot straight at her with an angry whine. It was like a robber fly with a drill bit for its head. At the last instant she slashed downward, cleaving it in two halves. Fish crushed the pieces into fragments.

         Sphincters all over the tower began opening and closing, sending out drone after drone. Orana threw off her sheets. The chain-sword flashed as she whirled this way and that, cutting the attackers down from the air. Her pink tresses swung freely now, and her knobs pulsed with inner fire, taking up the rhythm of her dance. The wriggling parts rained down on the salt to be crushed beneath Fish’s heel.

         And then, all at once, the onslaught ceased. A circle of fragments surrounded the two fighters. The tower stood silent. Perhaps it had to rest; perhaps it had run out of material.

         Now was Orana’s chance. She placed a chimera on the salt. It had grown even larger and continued to develop as she concentrated, drawing air in through stoma and converting it into tissue. Soon it was like a great sea cucumber, with rugose crimson skin, a cluster of glowing tentacles at its tip, and thousands of tiny tube feet below.

         “What will you do with it?” Fish asked.

         Orana didn’t hear her. Her senses flowed through the chimera’s feelers. She drove it to the tower’s base, used its feet to pry open a sphincter, and crawled down the tube to the central shaft.

         It was dark, but her scout’s senses functioned on a broad spectrum. She climbed a spiraling groove to a high chamber. There, instead of the windows she’d expected, she saw only bundles of tubes joining the outer wall to a nexus, which in turn hung from a stem through an opening in the ceiling.

         Gingerly, she transferred her tube feet from the floor to the suspended mass and squirmed past the cables. Then came a moment of fearful disorientation, and she found herself sprawled out on the salt.

         “What’s the matter?” Fish cried. “Orana? Are you all right?”

         Orana sat up. “That’s never happened before,” she said. “I lost contact.” She looked at the round windows. “She’s watching us through those. And I’m certain she can see the island as clearly as she can see you and me.”

         She took out her second chimera and set to work on it, forming it into a thing like a brittle star. Its five feathered arms radiated from a ridged stalk with tube feet for its base. She sent it along the same route.

         This time, when she reached the upper chamber, she wrapped her delicate arms around the cables and shore through them with tiny, razor-sharp pennules. The tower set up a strange whining hum. She worked through bundle after bundle.

         Then, once again, she found herself thrown out on the salt, this time violently. A queer sobbing met her ears.

         “I’m going in,” she said. “She won’t be able to see you here now. Don’t come after me. Understand?”

         “I’ll stay here,” said Fish.

         Orana went to the opening and wormed her way to the central shaft, which was warm and humid and dark. From there she climbed to the upper chamber.

         Feeble light filtered in past the rims of the window-eyes. Cables dangled loosely from several, oozing black fluid. One bundle had been only partially severed, and her chimera’s body lay beneath it, crushed to a pulp. There was a smear of its white ichor on a section of wall.

         She looked around uneasily. There was no sign of an enemy. But she couldn’t keep climbing with an invisible foe at her back.

         Her gaze returned to the mess on the wall. The ichor was spattered over an arrangement of projecting shapes. One of these moved slightly, settling into a recess.

         So that was it: a trap had crushed her scout. The same could happen to her at any moment. But there was no sense in staying where she was.

         She scaled the nexus using the bundles as a ladder and wriggled her way up the stem. The sides of the shaft were honeycombed with open tubes. Her first chimera lay in one, useless to her now. Shreds of clothing suggested that this was how the children were brought in. The stem was fluted, but she saw no mechanism by which a body could be drawn higher.

         Her quandary was answered when hundreds of papery myriapods swarmed down from above. She crushed a dozen with a single swipe, but that was only a fraction of the horde. They took hold of her clothing and pulled her up.

         Nausea washed over her in a moment of apparent weightlessness. Then gravity reasserted itself, but from the opposite direction. She found herself plunging head-foremost through the top of an orbicular chamber.

         At the last instant she seized hold of the opening, swung her feet down, and threw herself to the side. She landed lightly beside a vat of tarry ooze.

         Dim, desolate light filled the chamber. The stem branched overhead into cables that lost themselves amongst the conduits, valves, bellows, and bladders that made up the domed ceiling. Myriapods poured out of the openings between them.

         Cautiously, she threaded her way to a window and peered out. A starry black sky met her gaze. The stars were brighter than she could remember ever having seen them. They did not twinkle. She recognized the constellations, but the celestial sphere had been spun out of place, as though she were at a different latitude.

         One star only was new. It was smaller than the full moon but much brighter. It hovered down near the horizon, framed by needle-sharp peaks. A plain of ice stretched toward her from their shadows, glittering bleakly.

         And then, somehow, she knew that the great star was the sun, and that she had climbed to a planetoid beyond the farthest wanderers known to Enoch. She was looking out of a tower whose crown was the base of Tiamat’s tower on earth. It was in truth a column between two worlds.

         Shuddering, she turned toward the vat again. Cubit’s face protruded from the oozy surface. His body was invisible. His eyes were open but vacuous.

         “You have no right to be here,” the boy said. The voice was his own, but the tone was Tiamat’s, ebullient and artificial.

         “Why don’t you show yourself?” said Orana.

         “I am as you have seen me,” the voice said.

         As you have seen me. Suddenly she understood: the tower was Tiamat. It was alive, but with a life not native to earth, nor even to earth’s dimension, and of an order of intelligence alien to man.

         “Why do you take the children?” she demanded.

         “I desire only to love them. Why will they not let me love them?”

         “Because you devour them.”

         “I clasp them to my bosom and shower them with all I have to give.”

         “You envy their happiness,” said Orana. “And when they want a little less of your ‘love’ you retaliate.”

         “But they know not how I need them. Oh, I stepped down to the blue planet for Id, and sojourned there alone for long ages, drawing my sustenance up from the plain. But then they came, and gave me purpose. If they go now, I shall die.”

         Orana wondered if Tiamat were dissipated like the spirits of the sublunary sphere, drained of will through aeonic ennui. Love, she had been told, was the perfection of the will. But she knew that Tiamat was parasitizing Cubit’s mind in speaking, and that her humanity was illusory. She shuddered to think what embryo of dark conception corresponded to “love” in her vocabulary.

         “I am sorry for your sufferings,” she said. “But I’m not leaving without the boy.”

         “Take him, then, and break his mind,” said the voice. There was a note of hateful gloating that had not been audible in its self-pity.

         Orana guessed that the black ooze represented Tiamat’s brain and that she was feeding on the boy’s soul. If she yanked Cubit out of that embrace, she might save his body, but his mind would be torn to shreds. Could there be a way of loosening Tiamat’s hold?

         She recalled the bottle of liquor she still carried in her satchel. She drew it out and unstopped it. Mescat fumes filled the chamber. With a silent prayer she up-ended it over the vat, draining it down to its last drop. The clear fluid vanished without a trace into the viscous mass. Bubbles began forming on the surface.

         “What are you doing?” the boy’s voice screamed. “What—I—my—mind—I—oh—”

         The ooze exploded in a shower of stinking globules. Cubit’s body was thrown into Orana’s arms. The vat continued to bubble and squeak, sending up streams of black ichor and bits of rotten bones and teeth. Lifeless myriapods rained down from the walls. The tower rocked on its foundations.

         “What’s happening?” the boy mumbled.

         “Be still,” said Orana. “I’ll get us out of here.”

         Already she was developing the last chimera. It grew into a segmented worm with short legs at the tip of its tail and a pair of ridiculously tiny wings close behind its head. She sent it slithering onto the edge of the vat. With its powerful feet she gripped the rim, then fluttered its wings to elevate its head to the opening above. There she seized hold with its mouth.

         “Put your arms around my neck,” she told Cubit.

         With him hanging down her back she wriggled up the worm, using its segments as handholds. Within the shaft the going became easier. Gravity reversed itself. They dropped into the upper chamber.

         Here, too, the tower was reeling. Orana kicked an eye out of its socket. She held Cubit up so he could crawl through to the pipes. She followed, and they climbed down to the base and ran, hand in hand.

         Fish was where she had been told to wait. They made toward her as fast as their legs would carry them. Without a word Orana seized the girl’s hand and kept going.

         A sickening groan went out over the flats. Sanity-threatening colors played over the salt despite the fierce sunlight.

         “Don’t look back, children,” panted Orana.

         They obeyed. Before long they were back amongst the pillars of salt.

* * *

         As they neared the island the next day, Orana sensed that something was wrong. A hush lay over the mosses. She ascended to the cleft with Fish and Cubit and found that the huts were all empty.

         All but Arrow’s, where the boy phylarch was laid out on his pallet, his face pale, his bloody hands crossed over his breast. Skate was beside him, holding their baby and rocking.

         Orana dropped to her knees. “What happened?”

         “After you left a man came,” said Skate, speaking lowly. “The others let him on the island because he said he was your friend. Arrow tried to make him leave.”

         Orana took the boy’s hand. He was dead. Her antennae throbbed. “Where is he?”

         A short time later she was climbing the serried stone pillars to the temple ruins. From their rounded heads she could see clear to the Edge of Beyond. She passed under a colonnade of fat, banded pillars.

         Darden was lolling in a shady portico.

         “What have we here?” he said, grinning sardonically at her appearance. “Half a week without me to look after you, and see what happens.”

         Orana tried to smile. “I thought you were dead.”

         “No! The other fools are probably done for. I left them at the wreck. I found where you must have landed. And knowing how contrary you are it was easy to take up your trail.” His eyes flashed, and she shifted uneasily. “You took good care of your seeds and my sword, I hope.”

         “They’re at the village. You met the children?”

         “I taught one little fool a lesson. The rest were too stupid to get me something to eat, so I came up here to wait for you.”

         “Are you hungry?” Orana asked softly. “I’ll get you something, Darden.”

         “Do that. Bring those items.”

         She returned an hour later with a repast prepared from the children’s stores.

         “Is it edible?” he asked, sneering. He took up a fruiting body and bit into it, frowning. Parts of it were curiously lumpy and stringy. “The ova, love.”

         She handed him the compact. He opened it, then snapped it shut. “I must be seeing things,” he said, taking another bite. “It looks empty to me.”

         “It is empty.”

         The scar on the side of his face turned white. “Where are they?”

         “I used them up.”

         “All of them? Out here?”

         “The children needed my help,” she said.

         He smiled, but his eyes danced with malice. “And my sword?” he asked. “Did you bring that, too?”

         “Here,” she said, handing it to him.

         Quite calmly, he shook it straight. “You’ve been using it,” he said. “Interesting.” He got to his feet, standing over her. “You shouldn’t have wasted them. You realize that.”

         She took three steps backward, but her eyes met his without fear. Her antennae were pulsing. “I brought your food up here instead of bringing you down to the village,” she said, “because I didn’t want the children to see.”

         “See what?” he asked, looking slightly confused, as though he were forgetting something. He winced and put his hands to his head.

         “I had a flash of insight yesterday,” she said. “All these years I’ve been preserving the ova because they meant I was something special. They meant I was still worthy of your protection. It’s fitting that I devote the last one to you. You may not have noticed, but you just swallowed it. Let it unfurl now, and prove that even your mind, Darden, can give birth to beauty.”

         A hard lump was forming on Darden’s brow. Orana began singing. Darden stumbled into the center of the court and fell to his knees. Tendrils snaked out of his mouth and nostrils and the ducts beside his eyes. Roots descended from his breeches to feel over the paving stones. Tentacles exploded from his skull.

         Orana turned her back on him and descended to the village.

         There the children gathered around her, touching her, calling her name. Some of the littler ones confused it with “Mama,” and she did not correct them.

         At the summit of the island an anemone had grown up to overshadow the temple. Seraphim went back and forth among its tendrils, and it waved like a sea-flower of glass and gold.

Copyright © 2016 Raphael Ordoñez

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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 novels, the first two in a planned tetralogy, are available from Hythloday House. He blogs sporadically about fantasy, writing, art, and life at raphordo.blogspot.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

A DEEPER GREEN

by Samantha Murray

         Summers in the colony were bright and brief, like a taste of the light golden sap of the maka-tree, burning the lips with its searing sweetness. Children splashed gaily in the green, green Odaay river, their mothers staying to chat with each other as they warmed their skin outside.

         Inside her uncle’s mind, Juvianna could not feel the sun.

         There, it was dank and fetid, with a pervasive smell that reminded her of a wet swim-tunic sitting too long in a pile in the corner of her hut. The dim shapes of memories and emotions writhed and coalesced at her periphery, like vegetation moving in slow water. She brushed through them, drawn by the instinct that was her gift. There. A tight hard new memory, which smelt like rot. She felt a shudder in her chest as she touched the memory with her mind, feeling the heat within it, and plucked it away.

         It flailed where she had ripped it loose, but it was already dying and disintegrating, dripping away, gel-like, till it was gone.

         That was the easy part.

         Juvianna moved again lightly through the flotsam of emotions. The memory she had pulled out had not formed in isolation. There, a root stemming from her uncle’s need to look good in the eyes of the elders of the colony; there, a tendril of envy over his neighbor’s hut, and there, her uncle’s rage, inflamed and pulsing and curling in on itself. Juvianna soothed and smoothed, paring and pruning back those emotions, plunging deeper into the murk of her uncle’s fear and spite.

         Even when she was done, it took a while to come back. It took longer now than when she had started more than a year ago; it was easier to get in, easier to see the way and shape what she found, but harder, harder each time get back and see the world again. The streets, caked with red-brown mud; the laughter the sun brought to the colony for a short time every year; children darting and dripping from their swim. Sights and sounds of these wafted in through her aunt’s window, but they only dimly intruded at the very edges of Juvianna’s awareness, even though her eyes were open.

         A pressure at her right hand, squeezing. Juvianna blinked. She felt a trickle of sweat run down between her shoulder blades, she heard the high-pitched squeal of children outside and could smell ravberries and roasted quintbeast drying in the sun.

         “Ju,” a voice said softly at her side.

         It was Davvi of course. The sight of him prickled her because she knew he didn’t want to be there. And as always, when she returned she felt exposed and naked, and like she needed to plunge herself in the Odaay river to feel clean again.

         “Leave me alone,” she muttered.

         Davvi released her hand and winced slightly. He hesitated, and she thought he was going to speak, but then he left without a look.

         He’d be back. Often she thought she had pushed against him so hard that he would find a way out of this duty he detested, and be gone for good. But he was always there, the next time.

         Juvianna’s aunt looked into the room and entered hesitantly. “How is he?” she asked.

         Juvianna looked at her uncle, slumped in his carved wooden chair. He would sleep for a while, she knew. She also knew that when he woke he wouldn’t be quite the same man.

         He’d be calmer, more peaceful, purged of the resentment that had layered and layered over itself creating twisted spirals of spite. He’d be a little vague and absentminded for a while too, but that was only temporary.

         “He’ll be fine,” she said.

         Her aunt still looked worried. “I didn’t know he had it in him. He had a bit of a temper when he was younger you know, but... oh and Rinaald, he’s always been the most bothersome of neighbors but he’s harmless he is, and you should see his poor face.” Juvianna had not been there when her uncle had bashed Rinaald with the chair leg, but she had a vivid picture from his mind of Rinaald’s nose and the left side of his face, red and pulpy like overripe varmelon. “Oh, and what will I say to Silveena in the marketplace? I can’t show my face!”

         “Hush,” Juvianna said gently. “It’s diaforra now,” she reminded her.

         Diaforra—it didn’t exist anymore. The perpetrator had been wiped of the event and its precursors, and was no longer to blame. Diaforra, it was a ghost word, belonging to no-one, nothing.

         “Yes,” her aunt murmured, straightening. She moved forward as if to touch Juvianna’s cheek but let her hand drop. No one touched Juvianna. Davvi was the only one who dared, but he was also the one who dared disapprove of her, and the only one who dared to get cross with her and treat her like a child.

         Juvianna had to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun as she left the hut and stepped back into the street. She could feel the heat of the path under her bare feet, the hardness of the cracking mud. It felt like she had spent hours inside the hut, but the red sun had barely moved across the sky.

         Her aunt had not thanked her. It was not the done thing to thank her, not that the word seemed to spring to many lips. It was her maka, her duty. Juvianna had been declared attitra of the colony two years ago, after her father’s accident. Her father had been attitra before her, and her grandfather before that. The colony was small, too small—it was devastating to lose a member, both for the breeding pool and for the essential functions that each carried out. Losing one diminished them all. Before this the punishment for violence against another colonist had been death. Since the gift of attitra there was an alternative.

         “Excuse me, Juvianna,” said a middle-aged man on the path, stepping out of her way.

         “It’s ok,” said Juvianna shortly. Everyone was so polite to her that they didn’t seem to notice if she wasn’t all that polite back. Davvi always noticed, but then he would. Then he’d be disapproving. They can’t help it, Ju, he’d say, with his irritating habit of shortening her name. Of course he’d take their side, he was one of them after all.

         When she was closer to the river someone called her name. She recognized Staal, the mair’s youngest son. He dropped his eyes before her as most people did, but then he raised them halfway up with something in them that made her feel clammy and hemmed in.

         “You’re requested at Council. Hour next,” Staal said.

         “Council, why?”

         “Is it for you to question, Attitra?” he said with an odd little smirk at his lips. “The mair wants you to be there.” Juvianna could not argue the mair’s wishes.

         “All right,” she said ungraciously, and turned on her heel.

         After trekking in the heat following the Odaay further upstream Juvianna reached her destination: a rocky outcrop that overhung the river, shaded by the broad leaves of the maka-trees. She let out her breath in a puff of annoyance when she saw Davvi there already. He stood, body poised, and Juvianna saw the arc of the stone he had just thrown against the bright blue of the sky, before it sent up a splash and disappeared into the green. He looked fit, hunt-ready, she hardly ever noticed his limp these days.

         “What are you doing here?” Juvianna said.

         He turned at her approach. “This is my favorite place,” he snapped.

         “Mine too,” she said shortly. Both of them already knew this. Davvi reached down for another stone.

         It was too hot to argue. At least Davvi wasn’t afraid of her, and at least he wasn’t polite; even her own family were killingly polite. Juvianna sat down on the ledge, dangling her legs over the side and watched the sparkle of the river a meter below her feet. She picked up a stone, smooth and cool to her fingertips, and tossed it out towards the water. It didn’t even go half as far as the one Davvi had thrown.

         Davvi’s maka was as her minder. She knew he would rather be hunting with most of the other young men his age, but his leg made it hard for him to keep up. Juvianna resented that she was the first attitra to have a minder. It’s because I’m a girl, she often grumbled to herself. But she knew that wasn’t true, or not completely. It was because of how her father had died.

         “I’m called to Council, hour next,” she threw her words to the side, a peace-offering.

         Davvi looked at her. The peevishness left his face and was replaced by a faintly worried look. “Why?”

         “I don’t know,” Juvianna admitted. “I guess I’ll find out.” In the colony gossip ran like wildfire through tall grass. Juvianna was always officially summoned to Council if her gift was needed, but she usually had a pretty good idea who had done what and why she was required. And it was so soon after her last call. In summer, the colonists were usually more relaxed. It was the long, cold winters, when the colony moved to the underground caves, that patience chipped and shattered like thin ice, and little things stewed and brewed large in the darkness, like the shadows cast on the walls of the caves.

* * *

         Staal was there to usher her into the Council. She hoped he would leave once she was inside, but he made his way to the back of the room.

         It was dim inside as the Council hut had no windows, and Juvianna stood in the entry, waiting for her eyes to adjust after the bright sunshine outside.

         “For our next order of business we welcome our attitra Juvianna,” she recognized the precise, moderated tones of the mair. As the shadows began to make sense she saw him sitting there, a short man, but bulky. He looked directly at her with eyes that didn’t waver.

         “My maka for the good of all,” Juvianna said the traditional words. She recognized all six council members, but it was the mair she addressed.

         “Your call, this morning?” queried Javv, the Council member she liked the most.

         “It is done.”

         “Rinaald will need some weeks to recover.” Luperrt, a wiry, graying Council member said.

         Juvianna nodded. She was not surprised.

         “His skills in making the traps will be sorely missed in that time.”

         “Yes.” She knew that. Where were they going with this?

         “We still have Bennart to work on the food storage preparation which is useful,” Luperrt added. Juvianna was not expecting this. To mention her uncle in connection with Rinaald’s injuries skirted on the edge of the forbidden. It was diaforra. “But we are still left lacking. Losing one, even for a time, diminishes us all. Do you understand?”

         Juvianna nodded again. Of course she understood; it was in part why her calling was so important to the colony.

         “What if we could save not just one, but both?” It was the mair speaking now, in his soft, even voice that could somehow cut right through a crowd.

         Now Juvianna did not understand. She could do nothing for Rinaald’s face; she was not a healer, that was not her maka.

         “Your maka benefits us all,” the mair continued. It was more acknowledgment than she usually received. “But perhaps you could do more.”

         “More?” The word tumbled from Juvianna’s lips in her surprise.

         Then they told her how her maka was to grow, and what they wanted her to do.

* * *

         Davvi was not happy. Juvianna could read it in the tension in his stride, the small crease lodged between his brows.

         “This does not feel right,” he said finally, as they neared Hensson’s hut, way down close to the shore of the Odaay.

         Juvianna kept walking. “Oh really?” she said, glaring at him.

         “No, it doesn’t. Ju—” He grabbed her arm and stopped her. “There are a lot of people who are not too happy about this.”

         She had been at the public audience. She had heard the rumble of concern, of dissent, passing through the crowd, like low-key thunder grumbling on the horizon, when the mair had spoken of Juvianna using her gift as a preventative measure rather than just a reactive one. But the mair, by pure force of personality coming through his cool and persuasive words, had led the colony back around, gentled their protests before they could build into a storm. He had spoken to their need to feel safe. At the back of their minds, they all knew winter would return. How the darkness would worm its way into the minds of people they knew as their neighbors and friends when they were too long without a glimpse of the sun.

         “They listened to the mair,” she said. “If I could save someone... Losing one—”

         “—diminishes us all. Yes, yes we all know that, Ju. These people haven’t done anything. Going hunting in their minds...”

         “They haven’t done anything—yet,” countered Juvianna. “If you could have felt what it was like in my uncle’s mind, what I find in any of their minds... it is better with it gone, believe me.”

         “You are not a god, Juvianna.”

         Against her will, she felt herself start to shake. “I never said I was a god. I never asked to do this—they asked this of me... it is my maka, this is my call. You can’t deny your maka, you know that. It is banishment, or death. This is who I am.” And then, because she felt like her stomach was rolling and dragging her like the currents of the Odaay, the heat left her voice and she knew she was truly asking, “What do you want me to do?”

         Davvi softened then. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

         Juvianna looked at him a long moment. “We all have our maka, even if we find it disagreeable,” she shot at him. Davvi of all people should understand that.

         She stalked into Hensson’s hut, not particularly expecting him to follow. He did though.

         Hensson was a middle-aged man, timid, yet with a history of being aggressive and antagonistic under the effects of varmelon wine, or any other summer-brewed intoxicant. He had never in the past crossed the line that would have had Juvianna called to him, but the Council considered him at risk, and not an asset to the colony. His maka was as fisherman, not that he was particularly good at it.

         He reacted to Juvianna with politeness that had a tremble underneath it, and his nervousness did not seem allayed by the presence of Davvi.

         Juvianna spoke the new words, “I offer you banishment or release of the darkness.” Usually she said death or release, but as he had not committed a crime, death was not on the table here. It did not matter—banishment and death were essentially the same thing. Where would he go, how would he survive if cast out? There were stories of another colony, far, far to the west. But stories wouldn’t save him when winter hit.

         “I didn’t do anything,” Hensson said, not looking at either of them.

         “Do you choose banishment, or release of the darkness?” Juvianna repeated, her voice gentle.

         And Hensson looked up. “I choose release,” he said.

         Davvi directed him to a chair in the front part of his hut. Juvianna took his hands and pressed her palms against his. Skin was necessary.

         “Look at me,” she said, more softly than usual, and when he did, lightly, lightly, she melted into his mind.

         Hensson was a mishmash of conflicting emotion. He felt inadequate, and impotent, and at the same time like he should be ruling the colony, because of his sheer magnificence. His mind was unkempt, full of snags and snarls, growths that headed one way but aborted abruptly and withered, leaving fraying stumps. Juvianna neatened as she went, as if she were clearing mud-caked windows to let in the sun.

         When she came back to herself she felt Davvi, gripping her fingers so hard he was almost cutting off the circulation. She had told him many times that she didn’t need him to hold her hand. She yanked her fingers free. They hurt. She opened her mouth to snap at him.

         “Ju, I’ve got to go.” She noticed then how white his face was. “It’s Navvan.” Davvi took off, virtually running from the hut. She could see him favoring his left leg as he went.

         Navvan was Davvi’s sister’s only child. He was only five, and idolized Davvi, she knew. His sister had lost her wedded two winters ago in a hunting accident. She was very close to Davvi even though he was quite a few years younger.

         Juvianna paused to check on Hansson. She felt weary, and slightly sick. Then she rushed out to the street, the sun making her eyes water. She didn’t know how long it had been since she entered the hut, it felt like an age, it always did.

         A woman Juvianna didn’t recognize was moving quickly past her, and Juvianna grabbed hold of her bare arm. The woman was browned by the sun, her hair mussed untidily behind her ears. She looked up at Juvianna and her eyes widened with recognition, and then she looked at Juvianna’s hand on her arm with something that might have been horror. She recoiled.

         “What’s happening? What’s going on?” Juvianna said harshly.

         “I’m sorry, um, Attitra. I don’t know what you mean. I’ve just come out,” the woman said with her words flittering around like tiny birds. “Can I help you?”

         Juvianna ignored her and stumbled into the path of an older woman, her basket full of pungent cheese and bright purple ravberries, obviously fresh from the market.

         “What’s going on?” Juvianna asked again, “Navvan, he’s a young boy, do you know?”

         The older woman’s eyes became gleeful with the importance of having gossip. “A young boy you say? There was the poor young lad that was found drowned in the river, just this hour past. Terrible, it is, Attitra. So young. The mother wailed and wailed on the shore, they said. You could hear her all along the banks of the Odaay.”

         It was usually on the cusp of the seasons changing that the Odaay became most treacherous, but even in the heart of summer the currents could claim a victim. She knew Navvan as a quiet child, who Davvi seemed to bring out some inner mischief in.

         Davvi. He had stayed there with her, when he must have wanted to rush away to be with his sister. He had stayed there so she could find the way back.

         Juvianna walked back to her hut, grateful for once that no one tried to talk to her, that they cleared a space for her as she passed.

* * *

         “Ju,” came Davvi’s voice out of the darkness. Juvianna had not been sleeping, she had just extinguished her torch. Neither moon had lit the sky yet.

         “Yes?” She whispered, although she didn’t know why she was whispering. Since her father had died she had the whole hut to herself.

         “Ju, I need your help.”

         She was up and tying a tunic around her waist in moments. She followed Davvi down the street, people were just shapes and mumurs, not many carried torches.

         “How’s Slyvvi?” She had not seen much of Davvi in the last three weeks. She’d only had one call in that time, and he’d been quiet and distracted. She’d heard though, that Davvi’s sister had been seen just a few days ago, down by the Odaay, lying in the mud screaming and crying, and refusing to move. When they had carried her away she had scratched and bitten those trying to help her.

         “She’s not good, Ju. That’s why I need your help.” Davvi didn’t say anything more, and Juvianna lapsed into silence herself, watching her feet on the uneven path.

         Sylvvi also had a hut to herself now, although Juvianna saw evidence that Davvi had been camping out in the first room. Sylvvi was pale and far too skinny. Her hair was lank and matted, and her eyes wandered around like they were looking for a place to rest, and finding nowhere.

         “Oh, Sylvvi,” she said. She had not known Davvi’s sister well, but Sylvvi had always seemed gracious, and lovely, if a little sad. Now she looked like a ghost, and one that was haunting herself.

         Sylvvi’s eyes stopped on Juvianna. She looked confused for a moment, and then lunged towards Juvianna abruptly.

         “Please, please help me, please.” She clutched Juvianna’s hands. Juvianna swallowed; it had been a long time since anyone had touched her voluntarily, apart from Davvi.

         “I don’t know... I don’t know how I can help you,” Juvianna said, caught by the woman’s pain.

         “Davvi has told me about you. He says you are gentle, he says you are kind.” Juvianna looked at Davvi, who seemed not to be meeting her eye. “Not like your father was.” Juvianna’s father’s touch had been more brutal. His work in minds was done heavy-handedly; it had taken some people a long time to recover. Some of them were never really the same again. “He says you help people.”

         This is not my maka, thought Juvianna.

         “Please,” said Sylvvi, her eyes were adrift again, and tears were pouring down her face, although she did not seem aware of them. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this anymore.” The last sounded more like a whisper to herself.

         “I’ll try,” Juvianna said.

         Sylvvi’s mind was a vast wave of sadness; continually breaking and reforming, pounding Juvianna from side to side. There was nothing to grab hold of.  All of Sylvvi’s emotion crashed on her, dumping her to tumble over and over. Juvianna plunged deeper, down and down until she found memories of Navvan, like formations in rock. But she couldn’t bring herself to take these away—Navvan should not be diaforra.

         There. A formation that stuck out from the others, all jagged cutting edges. It was Navvan being brought in from the water, his eyes open, his arms hanging down and back. The memory pulsed in and out, like it was half sea-creature.

         Juvianna left the memory there, but she rubbed and scraped at its edges. It stung, but she kept going, over and over. Eventually the memory was rounded and eroded, as if it had been rubbed smooth by many tides.

* * *

         “Juvianna. Ju. Ju.” Someone was calling her name. It sounded urgent, desperate. But she was floating. It would have been peaceful if someone didn’t keep dragging on her hand, it was throwing off her balance. “Ju. Come back. Ju.”

         Juvianna came back to herself with a huge inward breath.

         “Ju,” said someone. Davvi, it was Davvi of course, he had an odd note in his voice. “How do you feel?”

         How did she feel? She felt half-drowned and shaky. “I’m fine,” she said. Why was Davvi asking her how she felt, he never did that. “Why?”

         “You took a long time, Ju, you took a long time to come back...” He still sounded funny, and it was like he had been going to keep going and say something else. She was too tired to try and think about it.

         Juvianna looked sideways at Sylvvi, who was asleep. She looked peaceful.

         “Is she...” began Davvi.

         The wave had dissipated, Juvianna knew. And she had broken up the guilt and let it wash away.

         “She’ll be all right,” she said. “She’ll still be sad, she’ll still remember. But she’ll be all right. I only did for her what time would have done.”

         “I don’t know that she had time,” said Davvi.

         Juvianna looked down and saw that her fingers were still entwined with Davvi’s. She disentangled hers, and a totally unexpected thought occurred to her.

         “How do you know?” she said, “How do you know when I’m done and I need to come back?” It was not something she had considered before.

         The crease appeared in Davvi’s brow. “I don’t know,” he said, sounding a bit confused. “I think your eyes must flicker.” But he did not sound overly convinced of that point.

         Juvianna yawned suddenly. It felt like the middle of the night, maybe it was. She could see light outside the window, at least one of the moons must be up. Probably both with that brightness. She nodded towards Sylvvi. “You stay with her. I’ll go get some sleep.”

         Davvi’s face was tender as he looked at his sister. “She won’t wake for ages. I’ll walk you back.” Juvianna didn’t protest; she knew it was true.

         There were many more people around on the walk back to her hut. The moons brought them out; Livvn was waxing, Raa waning, but both were not far off full, and the light was that of a muted, delicate daytime, tipping the edges of the maka-trees with silver.

         Juvianna found herself noticing that the people they passed reacted to Davvi with a watered-down version of their response to her. In the past she had seen people stop talking as he walked by, but she had never really thought about it, she had been too focused on herself. Now she watched a man she recognized as a baker subtly startle and slide to the side as he saw Davvi, before he even registered that Juvianna was with him. She wondered if it ever bothered Davvi, having her taint on him. It didn’t seem to, his face never closed down.

         Juvianna had fallen a step behind Davvi, and when he reached down for her hand and tugged her along she was about to bristle at him treating her like a child, before belatedly hearing the sound of something ugly in the air.

         “Come here, little witch-girl,” came another voice, louder than the first, slurred with varmelon wine and something darker that made her shiver. There were four of them, perched on the low mud-brick wall outside the empty market, drinking.

         “It’s not right, to see into a man’s mind,” the closest one said. “It’s not right.”

         Juvianna’s initial shock was burned up by the quick flare of her anger. She took a step towards the men, only halted because Davvi had her hand in an iron hold.

         “Come on Juvianna, let’s go,” he said, forcibly dragging her down the street. “Do I have to carry you?” he said, as she vainly tried to wrench her hand free. She looked back at the wall, one of the men stood and spat to the side of the path. He was the only one she recognized, the same one who had made the witch comment. It was Staal.

         They were nearly at her hut before Juvianna was able to speak again. Underneath her anger was bewilderment and disbelief. No one spoke to her that way. No one dared. She was angry at Davvi too, for not letting her look after herself. But like always, her anger was quick to kindle, but also quick to dissipate.

         “I don’t understand,” she said.

         Davvi’s face was still grim. “I told you, there are some people who are not very happy over how your maka has changed.”

         “But it wasn’t my idea.”

         “It doesn’t matter.”

         “But that was Staal. He is the mair’s son, he’s the last person I’d get called to.” She hadn’t thought of it this way, she’d always believed the calls sprung fairly for the good of the colony, but as she said it she realized it was probably true.

         “I know. He... watches you,” Davvi added, somewhat reluctantly, giving Juvianna a sidelong glance.

         “Yes.” She didn’t know that Davvi had noticed too.

         “Come on, let’s worry about it in the morning. The moons are almost double-full, and you know that makes everyone crazy.” Davvi’s sudden joviality felt forced.

         But because she had not been thinking until now how lame Davvi would handle himself in a fight against three drunken men if it came to that, and because before that happened she had been enjoying the walk in the moonlight, she said, “You couldn’t anyway.”

         “Couldn’t what?”

         “Carry me.”

         Davvi, usually so serious, startled her with a grin, “Wanna bet?”

* * *

         It was morning, but the ghost of Raa still rode in the sky, when Juvianna was called.

         It was a member of the Council, Luperrt, who came to fetch her, which was unusual in itself, usually they delegated to someone less important.

         Juvianna stifled a yawn. What happened to summer being time to rejuvenate and relax? She knew there were many more people on the mair’s list now that her maka had expanded to encompass them. But it would have been nice if they had let her sleep in.

         “Who is it today, Luperrt?” she asked, keeping her tone respectful, but he only hurried her along. She would have to swing by and get Davvi on the way back from Council if they hadn’t sent someone for him too, which sometimes they didn’t. He’d probably be grumpy being woken up early after last night.

         When she saw the mair’s face Juvianna became very, very still. The word she would have said usually best described the mair was contained. This morning something raw and disturbing played over his features, and he looked as if he was holding himself together only with great effort.

         “Attitra,” he said formally, his voice thick.

         “My maka for the good of all,” Juvianna said.

         “Attitra, our summer has been marred by the worst kind of crime. A man lies dead, by another’s hand.” A murder. It happened rarely in the colony, but she had been called for one once before, and she knew her father had seen a handful. She was watching the mair though, there was something else coming.

         “Staal is the man who has been lost. His maka was the builder of huts, and he was learning the way of the Council.” The mair paused, his eyes glittering. “His loss diminishes us all.”

         Juvianna could not prevent her quick indrawn breath of shock and surprise. Staal. She had seen him, mere hours ago. He had spat as she’d left. She could still hear his voice, slick and slimy, as it had played out in her head before she had managed to sleep, Come here, little witch-girl.

         “Who... who am I called for?” Juvianna said, her heart beating fast in her chest, so loud she thought they all must hear it.

         Unbelievably, the mair smiled at her. It was the most ghastly smile Juvianna had ever seen. “Come and see,” he said.

         They led her to the small hut adjacent to the Council. With every step Juvianna felt increasing dread, although she couldn’t have said why. The structure didn’t have windows, and was one of the only places that could be locked, with a heavy wooden plank barring the door. It was usually used for storage, but had been used this way in the past, it was the only form of jail the colony had.

         He was sitting in the corner, and raised his head as she approached on soft feet. His face was smeared with dirt and blood, the face she had last seen brightened by an unexpected grin that lit up his eyes. Davvi.

         “Davvi?” her voice spiraled high and she fought to control it. It didn’t make any sense. How could Davvi, be a murderer?

         “Attitra, you are called to this man,” the mair said.

         “But, this can’t be right,” Juvianna stammered.

         “Attitra, it is not for you to question a call,” the mair said quietly.

         “We have two witnesses to the death of Staal, and Davvi has confessed,” it was Luperrt, with his own grimness.

         She looked at her huddled and grimy minder, and saw him give the slightest nod. “It was me, Ju.”

         She didn’t understand, and she felt like something sharp was jabbing her stomach, but the sooner all of this was diaforra, the better. “Davvi?” she said, kneeling and holding out her hand, palm upwards. “Do you choose death, or release of the darkness?”

         At that, she saw something frantic on his face. “No,” he said, pushing himself backwards. She’d had this reaction before, but Davvi, being repulsed by her? Underneath everything she was conscious of a tight ball of hurt. “No, Ju, this is not for you,” he said. Not for her? Who else was there? “I followed Staal and his friends to the river. We fought. I hit Staal, and when he fell he hit his head on a rock. I did this, Ju. Me. This is not for you.”

         But the alternative was death.

         “What do you choose?” It was the mair.

         “Davvi, you can’t die. Sylvvi needs you. I... please, Davvi.” They were not the formal words. She could feel the mair’s eyes on her. “Do you choose death, or release of the darkness?”

         For a moment she thought Davvi wasn’t going to answer. “Release. But wait—she needs a minder, you have to have someone here to look after her.” What was Davvi doing still thinking of her now? She waved it off, but saw the mair gesture to Luperrt and guessed he would stay.

         She took Davvi’s hand. It was warm. She looked into his eyes, which were green like the Odaay river, and she went to him.

         Davvi’s mind had a sharp, fresh smell, like the air before the rain begins in a summer storm. Juvianna found what she was looking for almost immediately. The memory felt hard and glassy, and when she held it she knew what had happened.

         She knew Davvi had followed them down to the river, to listen to them, to see what they were up to. And she knew they had heard him behind them, and that part of him had wanted that to happen.

         Through Davvi’s eyes she saw Staal. She saw him pick up a rock twice the size of his fist. I hope you don’t mind, minder boy, but if your little girlie is so fond of peering at people’s brains, I think it’s time we had a look at her brain. He’d hefted the rock from hand to hand, while his friends hooted. Root around looking at her secrets, hmm? And maybe while we’re there we’ll do a little rearranging of our own? You can still mind her all right, he’d purred, eyeing Davvi with his weak leg, don’t worry about that, she’ll be needing someone to wipe her drool. She saw Staal smile.

         Then Davvi had thrown a punch at Staal, and Staal had bashed at Davvi with the rock, glancing a blow off the side of his head. And just as Staal’s friends had stopped swigging and laughing and come to join in, Davvi had landed his second punch under Staal’s chin, falling against him with his full weight. And Staal had gone down, and his head had hit the very same rock.

         Juvianna beat at the memory, kicked it until she had pummeled it out of existence. Her breath was coming in short, quick, odd little gasps.

         And there was something else; she couldn’t help but see it. One of the precursors to the hard black memory that she had just destroyed. Nothing forms in isolation; that was one of the first things she had learnt. It was a shell-like thing, spiraling out with curved segments within, creating many chambers. It looked like it was opening and breaking at the same time.

         She knew what this was. She had pretended not to notice, and even convinced herself, but she had always, always known.

         Juvianna had seen what people were like inside. She knew how ugly and twisted and thwarted things could become, even when they’d grown from something fine. If she could look inside herself, what would she find? Sharp broken things? Hidden things she hadn’t named, wouldn’t name?

         It was softer than a shell as she held it. The spirals radiated outwards, til they touched almost everything.

         She’d suspected it, deep down, but she didn’t know it would be like this. Not anything like this. It was beautiful.

         It was Davvi’s love. For her.

* * *

         Juvianna’s father had not had a minder. One winter day, he had been called to the mind of a young man called Trell. No one knew what happened. He and Trell had been alone in the cave, and people had waited and waited, before entering and finding them both on the floor. Trell was asleep. He woke up a while afterwards, a little clouded, and never as sharp and devious as he had been, but cheerful. Her father was dead.

         When Juvianna stayed in her kneeling position, unresponsive, for many hours longer than was usual for a call, Luperrt grabbed her hands, and called her name. He snapped his fingers before her open eyes, and pleaded with her to come back. Later, he yelled at her, and later still he doused her with a bucket of water.

         It was only after a full day, when Davvi woke from his long sleep, saw Juvianna, and took back her hand, that she came back.

         “Hi Ju,” he said. She saw a sleepy bewilderment in his eyes, but it was still Davvi. She had left the shell-like thing there in his mind, even though it was connected to his crime.

         She looked down at his fingers mixed with hers. “Hi.”

* * *

         The mair was at his persuasive best at the next audience. “I lost my son,” he told the crowd, his voice low and controlled. “I lost my son because people carry the darkness inside them and we never know when it might be unleashed. It could be your son next time, or your daughter.” Juvianna stood to the side with her hands gripping the edge of her tunic as the mair explained about the sweep—Attitra Juvianna would be called to everybody, one by one. The size of the colony made this impossible—there was no way she could get to everybody—but she would start with the young men. They would all have a choice, banishment or release.

         Later he told them, “It is those with the most darkness who will protest,” which stilled the whispering and had people looking suspiciously at each other. “Those protestors will be the first to be offered the choice.”

         Juvianna caught Davvi’s eye across the square. She read dismay, surprise, and something sterner on his face. She looked at the amassed crowd, mind after mind after mind, and all of them afraid of her.

         When people started to dissipate, Juvianna broke and ran, her feet slapping against the red mud path. She ran without intention, but ended up at her favorite place, the rocky ledge overhanging the Odaay.

         A leaf had fallen from one of the maka-trees shading the outcrop. Maka-trees, named for meaning, named for purpose. They didn’t drop leaves often. She laid her hand on top, the leaf was much broader and bigger, against it her hand looked small. It knew its design. It knew when it was time to fall.

         Juvianna stood, then threw her arms forward and dived, arcing through the air down, down to the river below. The green got darker and darker the deeper she went.

* * *

         When Juvianna told the Council she was refusing to take part in the sweep, she saw something flicker in the mair’s eyes.

         “Do you deny your maka?” he said, low and steady.

         “I don’t think... I don’t think this is my maka,” she stammered. “This is not what I am meant to do.”

         “Denying your maka is death,” he continued.

         “Banishment or death,” Juvianna said, although in truth, this was seldom enforced, and people were encouraged to find a new maka, or find their way back to their old one.

         The mair paused. “A maka as strong as yours, as vital to the colony, cannot be denied without the harshest of consequence.”

         Then they took her to the small hut they used as a prison, and barred the door against her.

         It was hours later, and she knew it was dark, even though the hut was windowless, that Davvi opened the door.

         “Davvi, what are you doing here?” she said, alarmed and yet warmed somehow by seeing him.

         “I had to see what trouble you were getting yourself into,” he said lightly, reaching to push the hair from her forehead.

         “But Davvi, they can’t see you here, they’ll—”

         “Hush. They won’t find me. I’m stealthy.” Incredibly, he almost made her laugh.

         “I can’t do it Davvi. All those people, I can’t. It’s not right.”

         “I know. Ju—let’s go. There’s another colony, if we go west, it’s got to be better than here. You can’t stay here Ju.” That had been her half-formed plan when she had met with the Council. Accept banishment, take a canoe, and set off down the Odaay, find the second colony that rumor and story mentioned. It sounded naïve and ridiculous when Davvi said it.

         “Davvi, you can’t go. Sylvvi needs you, you have a life here.”

         “I killed Staal.”

         “No, Davvi. It is diaforra. You are blameless, you are free.”

         “I don’t remember it, but I know I did it, Ju. And I am not blameless anymore either.” He gestured to the door.

         Juvianna looked out. A tall man—Taav, one of the Council lackeys—sprawled motionless in the dirt. Of course, she’d had a guard.

         “Davvi, what did you do?” She’d wiped him clean of one crime and he’d gone and committed another. More violence. For her. Because it all came from the same place, and she’d let it be. “Bring him in here.”

         Davvi dragged Taav’s still form inside the hut and Juvianna closed the door. She put her hand on Taav’s forehead. He was unconscious, which meant he could not fight her. She barged into his mind, quickly locating and snipping his last memory, of Davvi’s face. Now he would sleep.

         “How long?” was the first thing she said to Davvi when the world came back to her.

         “Not too long, Ju, half an hour maybe.”

         She looked at him. “What about Sylvvi?”

         “She’s okay now, Ju, thanks to you. I wish I could be there for her, but I’m not letting you go alone.” She knew that was true.

         “All right.” She thought rapidly. “Let’s go to your hut, it’s less obvious. We can find provisions.” They could get to Davvi’s hut by skirting around the main part of town. Fewer people would see them, not that one person wasn’t as bad as twenty the way the gossip trails ran. It was still dark, that was good.

         They entered the hut via Davvi’s back window, and he searched for something sturdy that she could wear.

         “You’ll look good in this, Ju,” he said, turning with a smile. And then stopped and looked at her. He knew her way too well.

         “Davvi,” she said, taking his hand.

         He wrenched his hand from her grasp. “No.” His voice was fierce and cracked. “That’s mine.”

         “It’s okay Davvi,” Juvianna said, her voice falling. He would never let her go alone. He would kill for her, he would die for her, he would go down with her. She leaned in and kissed him, and slipped into the green of his eyes.

         She found his love for her, it was shining and almost iridescent, opening and breaking, both together. Cradling it, she felt it become softer and softer, until it slipped away like mist and was gone, leaving her hands empty. She brought them to her face as if there was some remnant still clinging to them.

         “Davvi,” she said.

* * *

         Juvianna could see the faintest swirl of red at the edge of the sky after she’d stuffed all the food she had into her sack. Morning. She hadn’t known if she would be able to come back to the world, but she had woken with her cheek pressing against the sleeping Davvi’s face, the whole night gone.

         She clutched her hands together, willing herself to be able to enter her own mind, to pluck out her gift, to stomp on the emotions that were filling her eyes with water. It didn’t work.

         They caught her by the river, attempting to untie a canoe. Handling her somewhat tentatively they brought her back to the small hut. Juvianna didn’t protest. Mid-morning, the mair came.

         “Death, or the fulfillment of your maka,” he said, as if they had never been interrupted. “It is the only choice you have, Attitra. And maybe you would like to tell me what caused the injuries our Taav has sustained.”

         “It was me,” she said quickly. “I called him in, and I hit him.”

         “With what, exactly, did you hit him?” the mair asked, his eyes scanning the empty hut.

         Juvianna made her hand into a fist and held it forward.

         “Such a small fist, Juvianna.” He knew. Of course he knew.

         She slumped her head forward. “Please, not death,” she whispered.

         “What was that, Attitra?” His eyes gleamed. He leaned towards her.

         “Please, banish me, I can’t do what you want, let me go.” She clutched his hand in entreaty.

         Most everyone else was afraid of her.

         He was not afraid of her.

         He should be.

* * *

         She left him sleeping. They would find her, or not. It depended on how much the rest of the Council felt like looking. She had rooted out all memory of Davvi from the mair’s mind and had shredded all plans for his sweep, just in case. She had felt the grief he carried for his son, she was sorry for that, but she left it there. She had not been gentle. Juvianna didn’t know what he would be like when he woke up, if he woke up. She had propelled herself out of his mind at the end, kicking her way free. Coming back to herself much sooner than she had expected. That may have done some damage as well.

         No one bothered her on her way to the river. Juvianna was used to that. She felt an ache to see Davvi, but their love was diaforra. It was no one. It was a non-thing. A sudden shadow over her face made her look up. Clouds were rolling in. She felt a chill that was nothing to do with the drop in temperature.

         Summer was over.

Copyright © 2016 Samantha Murray

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Samantha Murray is a writer, actor, mathematician, and mother. Not particularly in that order. Her fiction has been seen in publications such as Lightspeed‘s ‘Women Destroy Science Fiction!’, Flash Fiction Online, Writers of the Future Vol. 31, and Escape Pod. You can find her at www.mailbysea.wordpress.com. Samantha lives in Western Australia in a household of unruly boys.

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COVER ART

“Tortoise Caravan,” by Marek Hlavaty

Marek Hlavaty is passionate illustrator who has been working as a freelance 2D artist since 2002, including illustrations, in-game and animation backgrounds, covers, and visualizations. Most of his artwork is in the game-developing and publishing industries. He believes that good painting should pull your mind into another world. View more of his work online at DeviantArt or on his website at www.prasart.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press

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