Issue #257 • Aug. 2, 2018

“A Legacy of Shadows,” by Christopher M. Cevasco

“Old No-Eyes,” by Christopher Mahon

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A LEGACY OF SHADOWS

by Christopher M. Cevasco

         Rallos Defilsson wipes his brow, then tucks the handkerchief into his belt. The rain stopped just before dawn, and the air is pregnant with the earthy-sweet scent of mycenoid spores. Moving on, he watches his steps to avoid crushing any of the fat round mushroom caps littering the loam. Cold light limns the fog-shrouded village in the vale below the slope. Thatched rooftops emerge and then vanish behind shifting mist. Rallos catches the whiff of woodsmoke, and a single clang as from a smithy’s hammer tells him the village is shaking itself awake.

         “So there will be folk here,” he whispers, patting Himo’s long nose. The mare tosses her head and whickers, eyes rolling; she is as loathe as Rallos to go among people but does not resist his gentle tug on her lead.

         The last village they visited, some two months earlier, was a place of the dead. Bodies littered the streets and fields, rancid and bloated; victims of some raider band or worse. Mostly the place was picked clean, but Rallos found enough provisions to allow him to drift back into the mountain wilds for another long stretch. He stopped to stare into several of the dead’s vacant eyes, examining their bodies despite the disconcertingly floral stench to make sure the slaughter had not been the work of Defilers or their ilk. But the wounds were all of the mundane variety—axe and sword blows, crushed heads, gutted bellies. Nowhere did he see the telltale blistered scorch marks or gaunt blue-hued faces beneath cracked skulls sucked clean of brain matter. Then he moved on, glad enough not to have to converse with the living.

         From a distance, this new village projects the dwimmer of prosperity—stone houses rather than wood or turf. But as he steps in among them, Rallos sees the houses are ancient, likely hundreds of years old, the stones cracked and mortar long since crumbled to dust beneath moss and vines, roofs overdue for re-thatching. Straightaway, suspicious eyes behind half-open shutters and in shadowed doorways mark his presence. Two men and a woman step out into an open square, waiting for him to approach.

         He sees no weapons, senses no outward hostility. Only wariness, a thing he understands.

         Approaching this welcome committee, Rallos senses without needing to turn that others have emerged from houses to follow him and Himo down the muddy lane. “Easy, girl,” he whispers, patting Himo’s neck.

         When he stops some twenty feet before them, he feels their gazes roam his face, lingering on his lobeless ears and long neck, the ruddy-gold hue on his high cheekbones, the quicksilver sheen to his lank brown hair—all those telltale signs that essentially shout the Woodwere side of his heritage. Pretending not to notice their scrutiny, he forces what he hopes is a warm smile; such things do not come naturally to him.

         “Good morning, friends,” he says. “I’m in need of supplies. Feed for my horse, boots for myself, a new bowstring if you have any. Some of my armor is in need of mending, as is my horses’s tack and harness. And if you keep hives, a pot of honey suitable for making a wound poultice. I’ve some small coins, or if you prefer, I’ve a harvest of deep-wood truffles I could trade.”

         “You’re a long way from home, ain’t ye,” the oldest of the three—a man with skin the color of curdled milk and a scruff of gray whiskers—answers him just before their continued silence would have proven uncomfortable. “No Woodwere anywhere round these parts, leastwise not for generations.”

         Rallos nods, struggling to keep the smile fixed. “I’m from a small village much like this, in the Allontair region.”

         “Never heard of it,” the old man grunts, then spits noisily.

         Rallos lets his smile drop. “Yes, well, it’s more than a thousand leagues to the south, beyond the warring lands.”

         The woman sucks a breath, rheumy bloodshot eyes going wide. “And how did you pass through the war lands?” Her dark skin has a grayish hue that speaks of illness, and Rallos offers a silent prayer to his ancestors that he has not exposed himself to some contagion by coming here.

         “I didn’t. I left home a long time ago, before the war began. So if you do have any goods I might—”

         The third one clears his throat. “We’ve not heard of your Allontair.” He scratches at a pink scar puckering the sallow skin below his left eye. “But we have heard tales of the half-breed who wanders the wilds and who might be willing to hire himself out for the right price...”

         Himo snorts through flared nostrils and shakes her mane, sensing Rallos’s discomfort with the direction the conversation has taken. “I could do a spot of work for you,” he says, keeping his face impassive. “Mend some roofs. Repair a wall. I’m a passable carpenter, if you—”

         Scar-face lets out another throaty grunt. “Might be we need a different sort of work. The kind calling for a sword rather than a hammer and saw.” He points at the weapon sheathed at Rallos’s hip.

         Rallos stifles a sigh. “I’m no mercenary.” It is not entirely true, but it is closer to the truth than what these folk likely mean. He has no interest in involving himself in some local squabble.

         “But you’ve helped others when—” the younger man persists.

         “I have helped others when it has allowed me to stamp Defiler taint from this world.” The familiar rage rises within him at the mere use of the word. He forces his hand back down to his side when he finds it straying toward Halefire’s hilt. “I’m not interested in bounty hunting or revenge killings.”

         All three villagers smile; oily smiles Rallos doesn’t like. “Oh, I think ye’ll be interested in this.” The old man laughs, inclining his head sideways. “D’ye see that keep on the horizon?”

         Rallos looks eastward where the man’s liver-spotted head points. A sinister-looking fortress stands upon a low hill, half hidden in the dissipating mists. Rallos chides himself for not noticing it before it was pointed out to him. Already his wild-honed awareness is slipping now that he has come among so-called civilized folk.

         “What of it?” he says through a sigh, hiding his embarrassment behind feigned boredom.

         “We’ve a half-breed of our own here,” the woman answers.

         “Woodwere kin?” Rallos hasn’t seen one of his mother’s people in nearly thirty years, and has never met another like himself who carries a mixed heritage.

         But the woman is shaking her head. “Defiler kin.”

         “A dreadlyng?” Rallos growls before he can stop himself. “Living out in the open?”

         The woman shrugs. “No law against it, is there?”

         “There should be.” He has encountered their like before—men and women who carry some taint of Defiler blood in their veins. Such a mix is unfortunately more common than his own, owing to the rapacious nature of Defiler-kind.

         “On that we agree, friend,” the old man says. “This particular dreadlyng calls himself Morthos. Since he took up residence in yon keep seven years back, he’s taken all our meager bounty, and withers what crops he don’t take. He’s even stolen away some of our children for his wicked rites. And there’ve been other, strange creatures drawn to our surrounds. Nightmare steeds that frighten off the game, a ban síde on the moors whose wails keep us awake at all hours. There’ve even been winged—”

         Rallos raises a hand, cutting off the man’s rising voice. “Enough. I know what their kind do. What they’re capable of.”

         “Well then,” the younger man says, taking an eager step closer. “If you deal with this wretch for us... slay him or drive him off, it’s all the same to us... we’ll give you those things you asked for, and we’ll pay you good coin besides. Ten silver marks. What say you?”

         Rallos doesn’t even need to think about it. “I say you have yourself a deal.”

         Once re-provisioned, he could again vanish from the world of men, while at the same time leaving that wider world with a little less of the very sort of evil that orphaned him mere weeks after his birth...

         #

         The closer Rallos draws to the keep on the low hill, the less he likes it. As the village behind him, the building is old, ancient even. But whereas the decay he observed among the hovels was a natural thing, this looming edifice seems somehow corrupted, an oppressive presence whose very stones look... diseased, unwholesome. It sits like a squat blight upon the hill, a crenelated wall surrounding five or six tall towers, all of dark stone that absorbs the day’s wan sunlight.

         Once he’s beneath the wall’s shadow, Himo tethered at the treeline behind him, he stops to listen, but the entire hilltop is silent and still as the grave. No birds call from nearby trees; no insects buzz about his head. Even his own footsteps upon the rocky soil seem muffled. There is a wide iron portcullis in the keep’s eastern wall, but beyond it the structure looks to have caved in upon itself, leaving an impassable rubble mound within the sally port. Rallos circles the entire structure, seeking some other doorway or even a low window, but he finds none, the only openings several dark arrowslits high overhead that stare reproachfully down at him.

         But it isn’t the building’s imagined scrutiny that causes Rallos’s hackles to rise. No... there is something else—something within. He feels the dreadlyng’s foul presence, his sixth hunter’s sense marking nearby prey. He puts a hand out to touch the nearest wall and draws back at the stone’s icy cold. That brief touch leaves an oily gray smear upon his fingertips that he wipes with distaste on his cloak.

         Many of the stones have crumbled to give the wall a pockmarked surface. Some are deep enough to provide hand and footholds. Before he can talk himself out of it, he shoves his toe in a likely crevice and hoists himself up with his fingertips in a long crack in the masonry. It takes all his will not to release his grip, as the cold stones are like nothing so much as some dead reptile’s scaly hide.

         Up and up he goes, scrabbling toward a mist he would swear was not there when he began his ascent but which now obscures the wall’s crenelated top. His fingers begin to numb from the cold as he fixates on the pearly white nothingness above him. Anyone or anything could lurk in that haze... The dreadlyng himself, with a heavy rock poised to knock him toward a backbreaking reunion with the ground...

         Refusing to let his unhelpful fancies get the better of him, Rallos climbs, hand over hand, muscles burning. Before long he has his arms around a crenel, and then he is up and over the parapet, dropping onto a narrow wall-walk.

         Crouching, he moves along the walk until he comes to a wide tower. He enters through a doorway in which little more than a few bits of worm-eaten wood cling to rusted hinges. All is dark within but for a hint of light beyond a long passage. He slows his breaths as he leans out beyond another open doorway’s frame, just enough to see into the brightness beyond.

         A great room, some fifty or more feet in length.

         At the far end, behind a wooden table, stands the dreadlyng the villagers named Morthos.

         The dreadlyng faces away, toward something at the side of the room still obscured from Rallos’s view, but the fiend’s profile tells Rallos all he needs to know. A deep depression splits the man’s chalky white forehead, and where his ears should be are little more than vestigial puckers of flesh around tiny holes. Just above the brow depression, a ridge of bony spines begins, growing rougher and blacker as they run back to part the hair along his skull’s crest before disappearing behind a high collar.

         A moment longer, Rallos watches in disgusted fascination as the vile man-beast’s body twitches and lurches as he puts his muscles into grinding something in a large mortar and pestle before him. Reagents, no doubt, for some rite or malicious magick.

         Rallos, even as he keeps his breathing shallow and silent, feels the mounting bloodrush of hatred, a pulsing pressure at his temples and a steady whoosh in his ears that, as ever, becomes the whispered voices of the dead crying out for vengeance. The Defiler Lord that slaughtered his own parents might well have been an ancestor in this dreadlyng’s own tainted bloodline...

         For you, mother.

         Rallos leaps into the room, drawing Halefire from her sheath as he rushes across the open space separating him from his prey... With the room’s far side coming into sight, he has a brief impression of impossible vistas: a dozen or more doorways that must be magicked portals into other lands, other realms... Snow-capped mountains, roiling green seas, bright figures that might be human...

         “No! Stop!” the dreadlyng shouts, turning toward him. Fear fills his eyes, and Rallos lets the creature’s terror drive him forward. He breathes those words that call to life the power imbued into the runes carved along his sword’s blade...

         For a heartbeat it is as though Rallos is outside his own body, looking down upon the room. He stands poised, blade ascending. The dreadlyng’s hands are up, palms out. An instant, frozen in time.

         Then the floor gives way, crumbling around him. For the space of a breath, he is actually skipping along stones that have already broken off into midair. With a last, desperate leap, he flings Halefire aside and grips the edge of what has now become a pit in the chamber’s center. His fingernails split as he fights for purchase, but he slides inexorably back, dangling above a drop that will surely mean his death.

         In a flash, Rallos sees a fall of silvery hair over bright green eyes: his mother, or at least the vision of his mother that sometimes comes to him in dreams and nightmares. There is love in those eyes, a nurturing protectiveness that tells him—that lies—how nothing bad will ever happen to him...

         I should not have left Himo tied... He prays someone will find her, so she won’t starve among the oaks.

         His fingers slide closer to the edge... Just at the moment he would have lost his grip and fallen, a hand grabs his right forearm, strong hold digging into his muscle and sinew. He looks up, and it is the dreadlyng, Morthos, staring down at him, eyes wide and mouth set in a grim line as he strains to drag Rallos up and out of the pit to safety.

         “You have good reflexes,” Morthos gasps, waving a long-fingered hand to fan away the stone dust that billows into the chamber from below. “I’ve been meaning to repair that weakened section for years, but I never seem to get to it.”

         Rallos pushes himself to his feet, straightens, and meets Morthos’s gaze without speaking. What can he possibly say? His sword lies on the floor several feet away.

         He lunges toward it, but Morthos is quicker. Halefire is well beyond the dreadlyng’s reach, and yet he seems to push it with only a wave of a hand so it goes skittering several more feet across the stone floor. His other hand comes up, a cruel-looking dagger whose blade undulates snakelike in his grip as if summoned from shadows. Rallos finds himself on the ground again, the dagger at his throat.

         “Please don’t make me have saved you for nothing,” Morthos grunts.

         Rallos gives a curt nod. He knows when he’s beaten, although it is a rare enough sensation and one that tastes like gall.

         “I’ll let you up,” Morthos says, “but no more nonsense.”

         Rallos nods again, and in due course he gets to his feet for a second time.

         “I don’t take kindly to visitors,” Morthos says, eyes narrowing. “Certainly not ones who suddenly appear in the middle of my studio.”

         “I...” Rallos begins, then stops to gather his scattered wits. “The villagers—”

         Morthos rolls his eyes with an exaggerated sigh. “I see. You are not the first person they’ve sent here, though it has been some months now since they’ve done so. What have they been telling you? Tales of wickedness and depravity? Have I been consuming their young? Or was it that I demand a virgin be delivered to me upon the solstices and equinoxes? My, but they do have quite the impressive imagination, even if it does tend toward the salacious and the macabre.”

         This dreadlyng does not sound at all like any of the other ones Rallos has encountered. He speaks in a warm, almost melodious voice, and were Rallos to close his eyes he might think himself merely in the presence of a gregarious gentleman. It is obviously a false veneer meant to lull him into complacency—much like the dreadlyng’s having saved him from the fall—preserving him, perhaps, for some worse fate...

         “They accuse you of oppressing them. Of taking all they—”

         “Oh my! I dare say I don’t think about them long enough to oppress them. They merely want me gone because they want my good farmland, which I must admit, for the most part, I allow to lie fallow.”

         “Farmland?” Rallos parrots, irritated at how dimwitted he sounds and finding his irritation unaccountably directed more at the villagers than at the figure before him. Why must he sound so damnably reasonable?

         “Doubtless,” the dreadlyng answers. “I grant, word of my presence might tend to keep outsiders away from their monthly market, which shrinks the village coin purse. But my presence also keeps them safe. Only once since I have taken up residence here has a renegade band from the warlands thought to come and plunder, and I took care of that nuisance.

         “I’m sure the villagers found some way to blame me for those raiders coming in the first place. But oppress them? No friend, that I have not done, unless they find my artwork oppressive, which they’ve every right to do.” He sweeps an arm back at the canvasses scattered about the room behind him. “All the world’s a critic.”

         Rallos gapes. Not portals. Paintings. There are dozens of them. Bright, lovely scenes. And not only landscapes but portraits, some so lifelike Rallos half-expects the figures to wink at him. One small canvass depicts a brown-skinned mother with her arm wrapped protectively around a little boy’s chest as the boy leans forward to peer at an oversized toad perched on a plug of gray stone.

         “You painted all of these?”

         Morthos nods. “This room has the best light, so it’s where I do most of my work, and I only have to remember not to walk on the far side where the wooden undergirdings are rotted away. I suppose I should thank you for your... er... renovation, as it will now be far easier to remember where not to walk.” He gives Rallos a smile that comes easily to his blue-black lips.

         Rallos looks more carefully at the mortar and pestle and the piles of pebbles and leaves and dried berries upon the nearby table. “Pigments. For your paint. I thought... That is, I thought...”

         Morthos claps his hands in something like glee. “You thought they were reagents for some nefarious potion or wicked ritual. To summon a Defiler relative perhaps?” Another loud laugh. “Friend, even if I were misguided enough to do such a thing, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

         Rallos blinks at him, wondering at the fact that his gut tells him to believe the man. He stifles the instinct, reasoning that his wits are still addled from his near-fatal fall. “Pretty words, but I don’t believe you.”

         Morthos cocks his head. “Don’t? Or don’t want to?”

         “Defilers are living embodiments of evil,” Rallos rebuts. “A corruption of all that’s good and pure, a remnant of the chaotic energy released at the world’s creation. They are single-mindedly driven to multiply and achieve greater influence beyond their own dark, otherworldly realm. It is in your nature.”

         Morthos shakes his head, almost sadly. “I had no say in the circumstances of my birth. None of us do. I was born into a family whose bloodline carries an ancient trace of evil, it is true. But one’s birth need not dictate the course of one’s life. Over that I do have a say, as do we all.”

         How many times has Rallos made a similar argument when confronted with superstitious preconceptions about his own Woodwere traits? More times than he cares to remember. “Maybe, only...”

         “Yes?” Morthos arches one thick eyebrow.

         “I have encountered your kind before,” Rallos says, “and always those men and women had given in fully to the demands of their bloodline. I have seen... great evil. Never once in my two-score and ten years have I met any able to overcome heredity such as yours. Perhaps I’ve fallen prey this day to the fool’s trap of assuming something cannot exist merely because I’ve not yet seen it. But I’d be an equal fool to revise my opinion—an opinion formed from experience—based solely on some honeyed words.”

         “Fifty years! Ah yes, of course, your... Woodwere heritage, is it? Which would confer upon you some of their longevity. I, on the other hand...”

         Rallos drops his eyes awkwardly, knowing what Morthos speaks of. Defilers themselves are all but immortal unless slain, but somehow the taint of their blood in a mortal does not prolong life. Quite the opposite. Most dreadlyngs do not live past fifty years; many for only a fraction of that span.

         “I like to think it makes my life like a flame that burns brighter while it lasts.” Morthos gives a small laugh, again mirthful rather than bitter.

         He is lifting a hand, long fingers twitching, and the telltale mark of Defiler sorcery causes afterimages of those fingers to bend and blur in the space through which they move. Something leaps from a smaller table on the room’s far side, and Rallos curses himself for letting his guard down. I should have known better!

         He lunges past Morthos for his sword, then rises to his feet so the blade moves to the dreadlyng’s throat in one fluid motion. Only then does he see the object the dreadlyng has summoned: a limp cloth, dripping with soapy water...

         Morthos extends his hand, offering the cloth. “Your head is bleeding,” he says, unable to prevent a disdainful curl from overtaking his lips. “From the falling masonry.”

         A deep well of shame abruptly opens in Rallos’s breast. He came here ready to snuff the flame of this man’s life merely because it existed, never once stopping to consider the flame itself is not necessarily an evil thing unless used for evil purposes or if permitted to burn out of control. But Morthos strikes him as anything but reckless or uncontrolled, and certainly not wicked. And Rallos knows flames can also be beneficent; fire cooks meat, cauterizes wounds, gives new life to decrepit woodland... In contrast, his own actions have been those of a man lacking control. Impetuous. Overzealous.

         Rallos draws a deep breath and removes Halefire from the dreadlyng’s throat.

         “I have wronged you, sir,” he says, meeting the dreadlyng’s gaze once more. He takes the offered cloth and touches it to his forehead, wincing.

         Morthos merely waves a dismissive hand. “You are not the first. Superstitions about my kind are rampant, and in truth, the reputation is not wholly unearned.”

         But Rallos is shaking his head, staring at his own blood that now stains the cloth. “No. I am not one to lap up rumor and gossip and think it fact. Rather than take those villagers’ word, I should have made my own findings before deciding on a course. Only... when it comes to your kind... I do not always find it easy to be objective. You should understand, though, it is not a bias born of hearsay but of a more personal nature. It is a bias nonetheless.”

         Morthos peers intently at Rallos, a hard stare of reproach bordering upon anger, the first hint of it Rallos has seen in him. “As for your actions here today, they are easy enough to forgive, and I have already forgotten them. But if you seek some wider redemption for your past deeds, I’m afraid those are neither mine to forgive nor to forget.”

         It is as if he has slapped Rallos. “Forgive?” he splutters. “I seek no forgiveness for my past. Those... those creatures were... That is, whatever you may be, they were something else altogether. What they... their kind... did to...” In a day filled with surprises, Rallos all at once confronts the greatest shock of all when he feels tears well up in his eyes. He cannot remember ever having wept; not since his earliest childhood. Not in the privacy of the wilds, and certainly not before another.

         “My mother...” he tries, but fails to continue, swallowing against a lump in his throat. “She—”

         “It’s fine,” Morthos whispers, the anger melting from his features. “No need to explain yourself.”

         But Rallos shakes his head. “No, I want to. I need to.” And perhaps because of some perverse kinship he suddenly feels with this “half-breed,” or perhaps merely because he believes he owes Morthos a debt for having possibly misjudged him, Rallos finds himself beginning to tell this man, a stranger, the story that has never once passed his lips.

         “My mother,” he intones, the words leaden, his mind hazy, “was cast out by her Woodwere kin when she wed my father, who was human. They lived with his people in a small farming village. Unbeknownst to my father, his brother was among those misguided folk secretly pursuing the way of vile sorcery.” He falls silent, wondering as ever what could have driven his long-lost uncle to have been so stupid. How different his life would have been had the man only... only...

         “This uncle of mine...” Rallos sucks a deep breath to clear his head. Every word comes as if wrested from a clinging mire, and at the back of his mind he wonders if the dreadlyng is casting some spell upon him, compelling him to speak, or is it only his imagination?

         “My uncle sought to summon a Defiler Lord far more powerful than he could control. When it manifested, it slew him. Slew all in the family household, including my parents, along with half the inhabitants of the village. By some wonder, I survived, for I had been suckling at my mother’s breast beneath her cloak, or so I have been told, and I thus escaped the Defiler’s notice.

         “Word of the disaster got back to the nearby Woodwere settlement, and my forest kin agreed to take me in and raise me. None of the surviving humans had any interest in raising a half-breed infant from the family that had all but destroyed their village. For a time, I was happy among the Woodwere. But there were... nightmares. And some of my Woodwere companions saddled me with the byname Defilsson, which in the local human dialect translates to ‘Defiler’s son,’ or ‘dæmon-spawn’.”

         Morthos nods and lets out a heavy sigh. “Children can be cruel.”

         “I find cruelty a most common trait among folk of all ages and breeds. But I tell you, as time went on, I came to cherish the byname that was meant to hurt me. Rallos Defilsson. I use it still as a... well, a sort of badge of defiance. But that was not always the case. In my fourteenth summer, when I began to notice even the adults among the Woodwere could not hide their distaste from me, I ran away. And I kept running, until I reached the farthest uninhabited wilds and wastelands I could find.”

         “Let me guess,” Morthos interrupts. “Since then, you have kept yourself on the outskirts of civilization—something of a hermit, if I don’t miss my mark.”

         Rallos stares at the dreadlyng, at the self-satisfied smile. Had the Defiler Lord worn a similar grin as he tore the throat from Rallos’s mother? As he devoured the contents of Rallos’s father’s skull? The rage fills him again, rising through his body like cold floodwaters. I could still kill this half-man...

         “I know something of the hermit’s life myself.” Morthos’s eyes soften, the smile all at once less mocking and more...

         Rallos takes a half step back. “A hermit?” he snaps back. Then his voice grows hard, each utterance a dagger thrust. “I move from place to place, chasing whispers, seeking out all tales of Defiler taint. They draw me like moth to flame. When I am not alone in the wilderness, I am in remote libraries. Ancient ruins. Or scenes of more recent slaughter. Always studying the Defiler-kind’s brutal ways so as to learn how I might thwart them. Once I broke up a cult of men and women like my dead uncle, and... as you have doubtless guessed, I do not hesitate whenever the opportunity presents itself to dispatch a... well, a dreadlying.”

         “Like me,” Morthos says, his smile now becoming wistful.

         Rallos nods, forcing himself not to look away in shame as some part of him unaccountably feels inclined to do. “For thirty years, that has been my life...” He trails off as Morthos begins laughing. “You... you find this amusing?”

         “All that study! I’d wager you know more about my own kind than I do myself. I would dearly like to pick your brain.” He closes his eyes with a self-deprecating grimace. “Poor choice of words. Indeed, my own eating habits are rather ascetic—no meat at all, only greens and grains and cheese.”

         “My brain and I are both glad to hear it,” Rallos answers, the rising tension all at once broken by the ridiculousness of their exchange. He marvels at what a strange and unexpected world it is as the two of them actually find themselves laughing together. “Well and good, then. I’m glad enough to answer any questions you have. Let’s call it recompense for breaking your floor. But I can’t promise all I’ve learned is accurate. As you say, there is also a great deal of rumor and misinformation bandied about.”

         “Then we’ll discuss it at our leisure on the road,” Morthos says. “Separate the wheat from the chaff, eh?”

         “On the road?”

         Morthos nods, eyes narrowing. “Yes. I think your coming here is a sign of sorts, and I’ve decided I’m departing with you. Among other things, my presence might keep you from precipitously slaughtering the next of my kind whose path you happen to cross. That alone seems a good enough reason for me to leave this place.”

         Rallos is speechless.

         “You look as though you’ve been poleaxed,” Morthos goes on. “Listen to me, Rallos Defilsson. I think you’ve been too long by yourself. While there is much to be said for seclusion and solitary contemplation, I venture to say there is also value and satisfaction to be found in the company of others. It is long past time we both remember that. If nothing else, my paintbrushes need new inspirations—the sorts of vistas I’m more likely to find traversing the world than cooped up in a prison of my own making.”

         Rallos opens his mouth to protest, but for a wonder he finds he does not wish to do so. In yet another discovery that shakes him to his core, he acknowledges a part of him would actually welcome this man’s company on the road. Maybe he is right, and I’ve become stuck in a rut. Maybe it’s time for a change.

         He turns slowly to take in the ruin of Morthos’s studio. “But what of your—?”

         “This place? As the floor behind you attests, it’s hardly a princely palace. Let the townsfolk have it. It’s what they want anyway, and I tire of their constant scheming to wrest it from me.”

         “And your paintings?” Rallos asks.

         “Those I will keep.” Morthos gestures with his left hand, and the canvases appear to fold in upon themselves, vanishing with a whisper.

         Rallos shudders in spite of himself at this brazen display of what must be Defiler-based magick, but he composes his features as Morthos turns back toward him and even forces a shaky half-grin. “Neat trick, that.”

         “Quite,” Morthos says. “Now then, I’ll just slip out unseen and await you in the hills, and you can tell those down in the village how you dispatched me to the nether-realms’ deepest pits. That way you can still claim whatever price they promised you.” He gives Rallos a wry look. “How much did they promise you, by the by?”

         Rallos snorts. “Bugger their price. Let them keep it.”

         #

         Having followed Morthos down a narrow, spiraled staircase, Rallos waits as he puts a hand to the bare wall at ground level. A stone shifts, opening a hidden door on the keep’s east face not far from the collapsed portcullis.

         The fog has mostly burned off beneath a noonday sun, and Rallos welcomes the bright warmth upon his skin. “My horse is this way.”

         “Sounds as though she has company,” Morthos says, even as Rallos hears voices drifting from among the oaks.

         He dashes ahead. Several of the villagers, including the young man with the puckered scar, are in the process of rifling through his saddlebags.

         “What’s this?” he demands.

         The villagers all but jump out of their skins, and scar-face turns toward him with a look of wide-eyed shock. Obviously they’d believed he would not survive his encounter with Morthos.

         “My... good friend!” the man stammers, visibly working to compose himself. “We heard a great crashing din from the keep! So then... you’ve slain the evil one?”

         Rallos steps forward, snatching one of his own cook pots from the fellow’s hands. “I found no evil in the keep. Indeed, it seems the only evil here is what I left at my back.”

         The man flushes scarlet, which makes the white scar stand out all the more plainly. “I see how it is! You are in league with that disgusting ridge-head.”

         Scar-face lunges, a dagger flashing in the dappled sunlight. Rallos draws Halefire and easily knocks it aside with a flick of his own blade. Undaunted, the man keeps coming. As Rallos lifts his blade to strike him down, there comes a touch upon his arm, strong fingers holding him back...

         Morthos steps up alongside him, eyes now glowing a deep amethyst. Only then does Rallos notice that the villager stands frozen in mid-lunge. “You don’t want this man’s death on your conscience, Rallos. Leave him be. These shackles will wear off in a short while, but by then we’ll be long gone.”

         The rest of the thieving villagers back away in terror, making signs of warding against evil. Then they are sprinting back toward their village, discarding Rallos’s belongings as they go.

         Rallos shoves his sword back into its sheath and spits at the frozen villager’s feet. “You’re a better man than I, Morthos.”

         But Morthos shakes his head. “No better or worse than most. Even this man here does what he does out of desperation, to feed his kith and kin. The village has seen hard times in the years since the war broke out to the south.”

         Rallos gives a grudging hum of agreement.

         “Now then, are you ready, my friend?” Morthos asks. “Unless, that is, my little display has changed your mind about traveling with me.” He points to his eyes, which are no longer luminous.

         “It has not.” On an impulse, Rallos extends a hand, and Morthos clasps it in his own. For a long moment, Rallos stares down at his own brown fingers enclosed by the dreadlyng’s longer, chalky-hued ones, a sight he’d never thought to see. “The world is full of wonders,” he whispers.

         “On that we agree. So let’s go find some of them.” Morthos turns over his shoulder to give a shrill whistle, and a heartbeat later a great elk with wide velvety antlers steps into the clearing, nuzzling at the dreadlyng.

         Both men mount, Morthos without the benefit of saddle or bridle. The birds have taken to calling again, and from the east comes the distant lowing of wild cattle.

         Side by side, in companionable silence, Rallos and Morthos ride northward toward the forested hills.

Copyright © 2018 Christopher M. Cevasco

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Christopher M. Cevasco is a 2006 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and a 2007 graduate of Taos Toolbox. Chris was also the founding editor of the award-winning Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction from 2003 to 2009. His own short fiction has appeared in such venues as Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Space and Time, and the Prime Books anthologies Shades of Blue and Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War and Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages. He lives in Myrtle Beach, SC, with his wife and two children, where he’s currently hard at work writing more adventures featuring Rallos and Morthos.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

OLD NO-EYES

by Christopher Mahon

         The ceramic cup was hot enough to burn his hands, but Yute sucked the tea through his teeth anyway, letting the steam fill his throat. There was a phrase he’d heard, “lying through your teeth,” which meant lying while you grinned. It made him smile to think of that. Most of the teeth in his jaw didn’t belong to him—after one-hundred and eighty years and a small mountain of corpses, he lied through other people’s teeth. He’d pulled them out of the mouths of other mages, mostly dead ones.

         He was seated in the Ozamashi, the most famous tea house in Senkaku if not the northern world. The main room was only eighty square feet, with wooden walls decorated with old yellowed ink paintings and a low weathered table in the center. The only light came from two windows whose openings were covered in white cloth, and one stick of incense burned on the table, tracking ash on a long dish. The whole room was dim, silent, and small, like the womb.

         Folded in his pocket was a three-year-old letter, badly spotted by water. It was six pages long, written by Tenza, the former colleague who had systematically slandered, sabotaged, and backstabbed Yute out of their shared tutelage in the art of immortality over a century ago. Among its very eloquent pleasantries and subtle apologies was a reference to a little black book that undermined everything they had learned. According to Tenza, it contained deep, old mathematics, and Yute, despite being an unfashionable disgraced hermit with no title, was now regarded by his old peers as one of the only people alive who might be able to understand it.

         He had purposefully waited three years to answer.

         He had been living in a yurt in the far North for almost two decades now, studying old books on blood, mathematics, and immortality. He had found a reference to the Ozamashi in a book of poetry from five hundred years ago and was pleased to learn that the original teahouse had been excavated and refurbished since then. It even had the original dishes and tea kettle. Everything in the little house bore the marks of time: the table was gouged and scratched, the tea cup had a chip in the rim, and the walls were spiderwebbed with cracks. He had written back to Tenza saying he’d meet him here.

         Yute sipped his tea. He was a tall man, with black bangs over his face and the rest pulled back in a messy knot. He had a short bristly beard and smelled of snow, sweat, and ash. He looked to be in his early forties, but the tight, leathery sheen of his skin betrayed his age—his tea of choice was boiled from the sap of a rare tree, the urushi, and it slowly mummified anyone who drank it. He knew Tenza would come. After three years of poring over that little black book in vain, Tenza would be desperate.

         Yute raised his head at the sound of footsteps outside the house and the noise of a crowd of people. Tenza had arrived.

         At the sound of a small gong from outside, an attendant appeared from one of the tiny side rooms of the tea house with folded black robes in her hands. She knelt near the doorway, which was low enough to make most guests duck their heads, and set the robes on a small bench. A man entered through the door, doubled over and dressed in huge flowing white robes with sleeves that touched the floor. The edges were trimmed with black velvet, and at least a half-dozen necklaces of round silver beads hung from his neck.

         The man bowed to the attendant, then to Yute, then to the room, and gracefully shed his outer robes so the attendant could hang them on the wall. Silently, he put on the black robes, tied the sash, and seated himself across from Yute. The man had giant silver gauges in his ears and piercings in his eyebrows and lips. He seemed to relish running his eyes over Yute, drinking in the details while the attendant fastidiously bustled back into the kitchen to get the tea ready.

         “You haven’t aged a day,” Tenza said, smiling with teeth capped in silver.

         Yute looked over his old colleague’s robes, frowning. “When I want attention, I just talk louder. But you...” He traced Tenza’s face in the air. “You’ve made it into an art.” He bared his stolen, mismatched teeth and ran one finger along the gum line, comparing them to the silver ones in Tenza’s mouth.

         Tenza chuckled. “I know it seems gaudy, but I enjoy it. I’m opening my own school soon, and I need to dress the part of a master. Speaking of fashion, where did you find this place?” he said, picking up his empty chipped cup and looking around bemusedly. “I appreciate you agreeing to meet with me, but this place seems a little shabby, even for someone as frugal as you.”

         Yute decided not to tell him the obscene amount of money that chipped cup was worth, or that the Ozamashi was booked at least nine months in advance. Tenza had never studied history, like Yute had. He had been busy dressing the part.

         “This place suits me,” Yute replied, sipping his tea. “They don’t let idiots in, unless I invite them.”

         Tenza broke into a grin. He seemed to think that everything had been forgotten between them. He nodded toward Yute’s cup. “Still drinking that urushi? Have your organs shut down yet?”

         “Oh, yes, almost all of them,” Yute said, his eyes locked on Tenza’s. “Except my tongue. And one other thing, which is still in working order.”

         Tenza shook his head and looked around to see if anyone had been around to hear that, laughing incredulously. “Charming.”

         Yute grinned at Tenza’s discomfort. He’d removed his heart, kidneys, and spleen one by one, filling the empty spaces with resin and sawdust, keeping his muscles alive with oil. He was more or less hollowed out now, with a lacquered shell of skin stretched over his bones. “I’ve asked for thick tea. I hope that suits your taste.”

         “As long as it’s not your urushi.”

         At that moment, the attendant came in and knelt by the table, setting out the plates and cups. The ceremony began, with each plate and cup placed according to the old patterns. The attendant had immaculately clean black hair that hung like two curtains around her face, and her movements were so practiced that Yute could both see the geometry in the way her hands moved and measure the angles in her wrists as she poured the tea. She set a third place apart from he and Tenza, which would remain empty until later in the afternoon, then bowed, stood up gracefully, and went away again. After the attendant had left, he and Tenza bowed toward the empty place and drank a little from their new cups.

         The Ozamashi was one of the only tea houses that retained its original function: allowing a small group of educated people to summon a ghost and speak to it in private. There was always one empty place set aside for the ghost, and after the living drank their tea, they would discuss who should be summoned. After offering drops of blood to the empty cup and pleading to grace them with its presence, the ghost would come.

         “You’ve been keeping busy, I trust? How is your work?” Tenza asked.

         Yute sighed, letting a cloud of steam rise from his mouth. He hadn’t spoken about his work to a fellow immortality-seeker in years. Even if it was Tenza, he couldn’t resist giving him a taste. “A lot of history. A lot of mathematics. Strange things. But interesting.”

         “What kind of things have you learned?”

         Yute chewed on his lip for a moment. “Lift your arm.”

         Tenza set down his tea and raised his right arm obediently. Yute ran his index finger from the tip of Tenza’s middle finger to his wrist.

         “Six and four-fifths inches, correct?”

         “Correct.”

         Every necromantic student of Togorun had a table with all the proportions of their bodies memorized.

         “And the distance from the bend of your inner arm to your wrist—eleven inches?”

         “Spot-on.”

         “The ratio between those is roughly one and six hundred eighteen thousandths, same as almost all humans.”

         “I’m very familiar with that ratio.”

         “I’m sure you are. Could I use your stylus?”

         Tenza drew out a thin metal rod about four inches long and a few centimeters thick. Yute took it with a nod and a mouthed “thank you,” brought out a battered leather journal, and began drawing on a blank page. He drew a tiny square, then an identical one next to it, then a third one that was twice their size, connected to both. From there, he added more squares in a clockwise sequence, growing in size until he had a rectangle about the size of his hand. Then, starting in a corner of the original square, he drew a spiral that curled outward, stretching larger as the boundaries of the squares grew.

         “This...” he said, tapping on the spiral, “...is a graph with a growth pattern of one and six hundred eighteen thousandths, the golden ratio. For every quarter-turn it makes, it moves farther away from the center. The pattern can be used to plot the growth and decay of all kinds of living things. Plants. Animals. Human skin.”

         Tenza frowned, his curiosity piqued. “I see.”

         “Look at the floor.”

         Tenza glanced down. The planks of the tea house were cut into squares that mirrored the drawing, arranged in a grand spiral that centered on the stone hearth, where the tea was kept warm. The entire room was built upon the pattern of growth and decay, the very shape of it.

         As Yute watched Tenza look over, he glimpsed a small hole in the wall. Even in the dim light, he could spot a shadowed ear pressed against the other side. Yute smiled a little at the tea attendant’s boldness. Eavesdropping could very easily get her dismissed from her post.

         When Tenza brought his eyes back up, they were filled with admiration and a hint of wonder. Yute felt satisfaction trickle down his body.

         “I knew I’d made the right decision,” Tenza said. “Your mind is...inimitable. I came here to talk to you about this sort of thing. Mathematics.”

         “I won’t help with your accountancy.”

         “No, I wouldn’t expect you to.”   Tenza leaned in. “Everything is falling apart, very quietly. It’s already begun. All the old masters...their acolytes are defecting to form their own schools. No one has faith in the old ways. Not after what happened.”

         Yute obligingly raised his eyebrows and leaned in too.

         Tenza began to whisper. “Thirty-two years ago, a man came to the masters’ courts, asking them to anoint him as a new master. He said he had found a novel way to immortality, enlightenment, everything. They’re still trying to understand what he told them. But he said one thing that everyone understood: the end of the world was coming, and when everyone was either dead or mad, he’d be the last one left standing.”

         Yute rested his chin on his hand, more a gesture of boredom than contemplation.

         “After everyone threw him out, he wrote a manifesto,” Tenza said quietly.

         Tenza reached into his robes and pulled out a weathered little book with a black cover, bound with knots along the spine. It was thin, only about eighty pages. There were no words or images on the cover, just bookcloth. Tenza set it on the table carefully, making sure it was far away from the dishes.

         “Have you ever heard of the Nokizi?”

         A moment of silence passed between them. Yute stared back at Tenza, his fingers resting around the warm rim of his tea cup. With one hand, he opened the book and turned the pages.

         Of course he’d heard of the Nokizi. He’d written it.

         Slowly, Yute closed the cover of the book. He knew that, from the outside, he appeared completely relaxed. “Never heard of it.”

         “I didn’t think so. You fell off the face of the earth before it surfaced. The author, this person, he writes very clearly, very easily, but what he’s saying is...bizarre, insane. He says time is an illusion, that change is impossible. He says there’s another way to immortality—he calls it ‘slipping through the cracks in time’s teeth.’ It’s all mathematics, deep mathematics, but no one can understand it.”

         Yute shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get a copy of it for myself.”

         “No, you don’t understand.” Tenza held up the book. “This is only a loan from a friend. No one will sell their copy, not for love or money. I’ve been copying out of it on my own.”

         Yute raised his eyebrows. “It’s popular.”

         “It’s banned. Togorun and Amassad have been collecting and burning these things.”

         The room seemed to darken with the names of two of the greatest masters of immortality. Those were the secret names, the ones never spoken outside of the circles of necromancy. A hundred years ago, Togorun had taught Yute and Tenza together, before Yute had been turned out of his school. Tenza kept talking.

         “Only ghosts can make sense out of the patterns and mathematics he’s dealing with. I was never strong in that suit, you know that, but even the patterners are going insane trying to replicate what he’s describing. All of his spells make sense on paper, but they’re impossible in practice—he’s doing something strange with the concept of infinity. Then he claims the only way to his immortality is the annihilation of the self. He says our personal identities are lies, and you have to kill those lies to see the truth. He says you have to kill the mind. Turn to chapter four.”

         Yute turned to the chapter and found an underlined passage. He read it aloud so the tea attendant at the peephole could hear it, too:

         ...the sensation of seeing eternity is that of seeing infinite mirrors, and looking back at oneself from a thousand different angles. But there is no person at the center of it all. The mirrors reflect nothing. And so you become eternity.

         Yute laughed a little, calibrating it so it sounded like amused indifference. “Cryptic, isn’t he?”

         “That’s just the beginning. The last chapter of the book is on his methodology, how he’s doing all this. The diagrams are there, but the text is all encrypted. No one, and I mean no one, can figure out the cipher.”

         Yute started thumbing through the book, smiling to himself. “Who is this person?”

         “He goes by the name ‘Old No-Eyes’. That’s what he calls himself in his introduction. The scholars just call him ‘that Madman in the North’. Turn to the commentaries—Part Six.”

         Yute turned to the page in question and found a commentary by the scholar Uden, written in Cozu, a language he hated translating. He passed the book to Tenza. “Read it for me.”

         Tenza took the book and began reading in a low voice:

         “I was in the court of the White Architect when a man with no eyes in his sockets approached the Architect’s throne and demanded an audience... Despite the temperate climate of the Immaculate Palace, he wore a scarf and gloves and dripped meltwater on the floor, as if he had just come in from the snow... He spoke of grand, nested circles spiraling down forever and a kind of pyramid whose dimensions could not be measured, except in larger and smaller infinities. He was a very learned man, shockingly well-versed in texts that I had thought were highly secret... Indeed, the Master seemed to become agitated after some time and interrupted the man with a challenge: to give a succinct summary of his Way. The man stopped short and smiled widely... He then said ‘Here is no, there is no. That which can be expressed in speech is not the eternal.’

         The Master became angry and asked if the man intended to speak in absurdities and gibberish, or if he was a scholar, as he claimed... the Master asked the man his name and title, so that he might know who would dare disrespect him in his own court.

         ‘It is the wrong question,’ the man replied, still smiling, though more uncertainly. The Master was furious at this point, and asked if the man did not know his own name or if he was afraid to speak it. To this, the man appeared angry in turn, and said ‘There is no name, and no one to speak it. There is only eternity.’

         The Master asked again ‘Who stands before me?’

         And the man seemed ready to speak, but stopped himself, frustrated and upset. Finally, he said ‘No one.’

         At those words, the man left the hall as quickly as he had come.

         There is no doubt that ‘Old No-Eyes’ is that madman from the North... This manifesto, the ‘Nokizi,’ is his attempt to save face, to make up for the humiliation that he brought upon himself.”

         Yute smiled at the memory of Uden. He’d seen him there in Amassad’s court, kneeling at the throne. Mealy-mouthed, always cultivating appearances. Amassad was worse—he was an unabashed hedonist, surrounded by fashionable sycophants.

         Tenza handed back the book and Yute thumbed through the other chapters, skimming the familiar passages he’d written three decades ago.

         He’d crafted it carefully, so that anyone could grasp it, then he’d put it into the right hands and watched it spread. He had given his peers just a glimpse of the truth, and the sheer awful weight of it was already unravelling their world from the inside out. The entire edifice of necromancy was built upon the promise that its practitioners could live forever as they lived now—with fame to their names and silver in their mouths. The Nokizi had revealed the flaw in the masters’ teachings: the mind. If his peers knew that he was behind the book, the game would be over. He was a known malcontent, and anything he was known to have written would be discredited, but everyone respected the mysterious writer Old No-Eyes, who came from no one knew where. He had shown them that immortality wasn’t enough—the decay of the mind wasn’t a risk, he said, it was an inevitability when you aimed to live forever.

         That’s what he’d told Amassad, and Togorun, and Banasail, the masters of his art. Whether it took a thousand years or ten thousand, the mind and the ego would strain under the weight of eternity until they cracked—it was like staring at the sun. You had to unhinge your jaw and vomit out the mind, the ego, the self, until you were an empty cup. Then eternity would flood in and fill you up to the brim, until you were the infinite in the shape of a man. But Amassad had decided to call him a liar to keep hold on his mean little empire of acolytes. Togorun did the same. Then Banasail, a master who knew better than anyone how time decayed the self. They’d thrown him out again to keep their grand façade intact.

         Now the word was out that the emperor had no clothes and his empire was built upon sand. There was no escape from madness in the face of eternity, except through the Nokizi. It made Yute smile, because no matter how many interpretations or translations gained prominence, no matter how much money, time, and blood his peers poured into understanding his words or cracking the cipher, it would all amount to nothing. The Nokizi was never meant to save anybody. It was his little joke; a brick wall he’d built for his peers to bang their heads against until the day eternity caught up with them.

         Yute looked up, the light refracted through the glass eyes in both of his desiccated sockets. He didn’t need eyes anymore. He operated in a world that was lightless, above flesh and time. He saw eternity gaping in every pore of the wooden table, and at the bottom of those deep black holes, he could see himself looking back.

         Tenza, meanwhile, hadn’t even noticed that his eyes were fake.

         Immediately, Yute slipped back into character. He looked up from the book. “I’m guessing you want me to help you sort through this,” he said, taking a deep, reluctant breath.

         “Just the last chapter. The encrypted part.”

         Yute perused the last chapter, which was encoded in a cryptographic style built on base-sixteen counting; an obscure form of encryption that no one living understood, apart from him. He’d known from the letter that Tenza had found the book and what he’d want from it. “You think I can make some kind of dent in this?”

         Tenza looked at Yute plaintively and tried to make a conciliatory smile. Yute knew this was going to be the big request, what Tenza had been leading up to all this time.

         “A little whisper in my ear told me you have the tooth of a dead cryptographer called Old Roku in your jaw.”

         Yute felt the mirth drain from his body and a tiny bubble of rage rise up, but he kept looking back at Tenza steadily. Old Roku was the same person he’d used to help create the cipher. Tenza, or someone else smarter than him, had figured that much out. He hadn’t expected that. He rested his elbows on the table and cradled his chin in his hands, looking at Tenza. Inside his mouth, his mismatched teeth clenched hard enough to loosen one of the bottom canines. The rage subsided a little as he realized that it didn’t matter if Tenza knew about Roku.

         Yute took a sip from his cup and swallowed. “As the graverobbers say, “what’s in this for me?”

         “Remember how I said neither love nor money nor power could make anyone part with a copy of this?”

         “I’ve got no need of the first two, if you’re offering. Always could use more of the third one.”

         Tenza leaned forward, excited. “If you help me decode that last chapter, you and I will be the first people besides Old No-Eyes to understand his work. People will be coming to both of us on their knees. And that’s always an advantageous position for people like us.”

         “People like us,” Yute repeated casually.

         He took a sip of his urushi tea and looked over at the hole in the wall. The ear was still there, and so was the young woman attached to it. He sighed, looking at Tenza with a smile. His eyes narrowed, but his smile stayed.

         “I remember a time when you wouldn’t be seen with me.”

         Tenza replied immediately: “That was back when we were pupils. Everyone was trying to save face in front of the master, everyone was trying to climb the ladder. I apologized, in my letter, for being so callous towards you.”

         “I remember,” Yute said, swirling his tea absentmindedly. “that you called me an illiterate grave digger who wore sandals because I couldn’t tie my own shoes.”

         “I don’t remember that, but I may have said it. I may have.”

         “You said...” Yute drew it out. “I was a skinny little lunatic who sold organs for my books.”

                   Tenza sighed deeply. “I said some terrible things about you, you’re right. And I apologize. Sincerely.”

         Yute sipped his tea. “You told Togorun I was eating people.”

         Tenza’s face drained of color in an instant. Yute could see that he hadn’t realized Yute knew about that one. That was the lie that had finally gotten him on Togorun’s blacklist. Everyone’s blacklist.

         “I...know you—” Tenza started.

         “You spread that one as far as you could. I had to go by a number of different names after I left tutelage.” Yute widened his eyes to let the light gleam off the glass orbs in his sockets, but Tenza didn’t catch the hint. That was all right. ‘Old No-Eyes’ was just the latest in a long string of pseudonyms and identities. In the past century, he’d gone through so many that he’d all but forgotten his real name. ‘Yute’ was just the one he’d grown familiar with—Tenza and the rest of the former pupils under Togorun knew him as ‘Zini.’ Judging by the table of contents, even some of the commentaries included in Tenza’s edition of the Nokizi were ones submitted by him under different names, mostly for his own amusement. There was no such thing as the self. The self was a convenient fabrication, just like this conversation.

         Yute leaned back from the table. “We could go on and on with this. I remember everything you said, everything everyone said. But let’s forget all of that. What matters is now,” Yute said, picking up the Nokizi. “This book is just what I’ve been looking for. I’ll help you.”

         Tenza shook his head slowly, his eyes locked on Yute. “I know it’s not that easy...not with you,” he said, desperation finally breaking through. “I know you hate me. Whatever you want me to do, name it. I’ll apologize. I’ll help you repair your reputation. I have influence with—”

         Yute stopped listening and just watched Tenza’s silver teeth flash as he talked. Tenza didn’t understand. It wasn’t about reputation or his standing; it was about the truth. The world was made up of illusions, layers and layers of appearances and lies. While Tenza and the rest of their peers built their careers on whispering in the right people’s ears and learning the fashions of the hour, Yute was in the North, gouging out his eyes to see the truth. That was the infinite gulf between them, one that could never be crossed, until Tenza understood eternity.

         Yute interrupted. “Just give me your clothes. And all the silver. Then we’ll be even.”

         Tenza fell silent. “Are you joking? You’re robbing me in a tea house?”

         “I’m not robbing you, we’re making a bargain. I told you I want all the clothes and silver you’ve got on.”

         “I... can give them to you after we’re done here, if that’s what you want.”

         “I’d like them now. Teeth and ears, too.”

         “You want me to tear them out, right here?”

         “We’re discussing the terms for unlocking the secrets that ‘neither money—’”

         “Zini, you—”

         “—nor love, nor power—”

         “We don’t need to do this!”

         Yute slammed the book onto the table. “My terms include your clothes, your robes, and all the jewelry you’ve shoved into your head! I’ll take the piercings now, the teeth and robes afterwards! That’s my best offer!”

         Yute sat there, shaking for a moment, before breaking into giddy laughter. He knew Tenza would do it. He’d give up his dignity for a chance at power.

         Tenza whispered again. “We don’t need to do this.”

         Yute leaned forward, his voice low and calm. “We really, really do.”

         One by one, Tenza removed his silver jewelry and handed it to Yute, who collected each piece and inspected it. Finally, only the studs in Tenza’s eyebrows were left.

         “I don’t have my tools. I don’t have the right spells prepared—”

         “Those, too,” Yute said. “In my hand. Right here.” He tapped his palm.

         Tenza reached up, grasped one of the studs between his thumb and forefinger, and dug into the skin with his thumbnail. The skin began to lift and then tear, and a streak of blood went down his face. There was a wet ripping sound, then the stud was in his bloody fingers. Tenza cleaned it with a cloth and handed it to Yute.

         “Now summon him,” Tenza said. “Old Roku.”

         Yute held the stud in his fingers, turning it in the light. Watching Tenza in pain had brought a wave of calm over him. “Are you sure?”

         “Yes. Summon him.”

         “Fine.”

         Yute rang a little bell and the attendant came out again. She knelt by the table. Yute reached into his mouth and pulled out one of the back molars. He cupped it in his palm, admiring it. The tooth was seven hundred years old, pulled from the skull of Roku Zhu Gi. Yute looked at the attendant and bowed his head, offering the tooth.

         The attendant bowed in turn and took it. She opened her mouth and revealed empty scarred gums—all of her teeth had been pulled out years ago. She slotted the molar into her jaw and sat up straight, waiting. Her face was calm, but Yute could see the tension in her eyes. He whispered Old Roku’s name.

         “Roku Zhu Gi...come here.”

         The light changed in the room and time seemed to stop for a moment. Then the attendant took a sharp, sudden breath.

         “Get her some paper,” Tenza whispered.

         Yute set his leather journal and Tenza’s stylus in front of the attendant and bowed his head again. “Thank you for coming, Roku.”

         Tenza leaned over the table and let a droplet of blood from his eyebrow fall into the cup in front of the attendant. “Old Roku, I bid you to translate pages seventy through eighty of this book, the Nokizi, into common Carzi, so that I may read it and comprehend it.”

         The attendant’s arms jerked as she picked up the stylus, moving like a puppet on strings. The possessed hand began to write furiously, translating the cipher smoothly into sentences:

         Id rather have six fingers than six toes Id rather have good ears than a nose And as for my hair Im glad its all there But Ill be awfully sad when it goes

         There was an enchanting young bride Who ate many green apples and died The apples fermented within the lamented And made delicious apple cider inside.

         Yute smiled as he saw the little poems in Carzi again. He had imagined the decades his peers would spend, all the effort and money and frustration, on trying to decode the last chapter of his little manifesto. All along, there had been no great secret contained in the cipher, just dirty limericks. They’d laughed him out of their world, but now he was in his own, laughing at them from beyond time. When the end of the world came, he would be the only one left to see it.

         One after another the poems came out on the page, and with each one Tenza’s face crumpled a little more. Now that he knew the truth, he would undoubtedly go out and tell others. He would spoil the whole joke. But they weren’t done, not yet. Tenza didn’t fully understand the truth.

         Finally, when the attendant’s hand stopped moving, Yute spat a bit of blood in the ghost’s cup and spoke. “Show Tenza who Old No-Eyes is.”

         The possessed hand of the attendant began again on a new sheet, sketching the outline of a rectangle—a table. Then came the tea kettle, the cups, and a person sitting on the other side. It was a rough silhouette, but what mattered were the eyes: two circles of eyes, meeting on the figure’s face, forming a mobius strip whose crux was the two empty sockets in their head. The person’s hand gripped a cup on the table. Tenza looked up from the drawing to find Yute staring back at him, gripping his cup of urushi tea.

         “Who am I?” Yute asked quietly. His glass eyes glinted in the light, and he could see Tenza finally notice them.

         “Oh, god,” Tenza muttered, the blood still dripping down his face from the gouge in his eyebrow. “You’re Old—”

         Yute lunged across the table, scattering the dishware, and wrapped his hands around Tenza’s neck. Tenza made a strangled yell. He twisted around and started to crawl toward the door on his hands and knees, but Yute bent him backwards. He dragged Tenza across the table on his back until Tenza’s head was looking at him upside-down. Yute pinned Tenza’s arms and tilted his own head forward so that Tenza was staring directly into his glass eyes.

         Tenza struggled for a few seconds, gasping as Yute’s hands clenched around his carotid, then he caught a glimpse of his reflection in Yute’s eyes. Yute knew he could see his own distorted, terrified face refracted in the glass, his own frightened eyes looking back from a thousand different angles, like a thousand mirrors. Yute plucked out each of his glass eyes with shaking fingers, dropping them one at a time on the table. Tenza kept staring into the empty spaces in Yute’s skull, searching for something human.

         “Who am I?” Yute asked under his breath, again and again, holding Tenza’s windpipe tight.

         Yute could see it all falling into place in Tenza’s mind: it had all been a plan. It had all been a façade. But now all the lies were stripped away. Now he could see that the man he’d ruined decades ago was gone, and in his place was the vast, gaping maw of eternity.

         This was what no-self looked like.

         These were the stakes of living forever.

         He could see the epiphany unfolding in Tenza’s eyes and the idea forming on his lips. Yute released Tenza’s windpipe so he could speak the words Yute had been waiting for.

         Instead, Tenza began to scream.

         Yute lifted Tenza’s head with both palms and slammed it down on the table, his thumbs digging into Tenza’s forehead. Again and again he brought Tenza’s skull down, each blow making the broken dishes clatter. He could feel his oiled, half-preserved muscles tense and release with each blow, and one by one, he felt the strain snap the delicate tendons in his shoulders. He kept his gaze on Tenza’s face, staring into his glazed eyes. Finally he felt the cranial suture at the back of Tenza’s skull split open and the lake of blood pour out, and the eyes went dead. Yute let go of Tenza’s head and looked at him for a few moments, breathing steadily.

         Tenza hadn’t understood.

         He straightened slowly and picked up a cloth napkin to wipe his hands, making sure to get between his fingers, then picked up both of his glass eyes and slid them back into their sockets. There was no satisfaction. There was no catharsis.

         He turned to find the tea attendant sitting frozen in place, her possession-trance gone. She was breathing hard, eyes wide. Yute regarded her for a moment, then stepped over to her, his feet crunching on the broken dishware. He knelt down close to her, so she could smell the deadly urushi sap on his breath.

         “Who am I?”

         The attendant didn’t speak. Yute straightened her robes and patiently wiped some of the blood off her face with his sleeve. He gave her a moment to calm herself, then asked again.

         “Who am I? Who did all this? Who was here? Who is it before you?”

         The attendant took a deep breath and said “No one.”

         She understood.

         Yute smiled wide and gently opened her mouth, plucking Old Roku’s molar out of the gum. He stood up, took the copy of the Nokizi off the table, and knelt over Tenza’s corpse. One by one, he popped the teeth out of Tenza’s mouth, then with the care of an experienced tailor, he split Tenza’s clothing up the seams and left him naked on the floor. Near the door, Yute shed his black outer robes, folded them up, and left them in their place on the little bench.

         Finally, he took Tenza’s outer robes off the hook, folded them over his arm, and bowed to the room, to the attendant, and to the empty space at the table. He had ducked his head to leave when a thought occurred to him. He walked back to the attendant, crouched down, and put the little black Nokizi in her shaking hands.

         “You deserve this, more than he did,” he said. “Read it. Once you’re finished, sell it to someone just like him. And make sure they give you everything they have.”

         He flashed a grin at her, stepped over the pools of blood, then left through the small door.

Copyright © 2018 Christopher Mahon

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Chris Mahon is a fantasy writer, speaker, and worldbuilder living in Brooklyn, New York. His non-fiction work has appeared in Clarkesworld, SyFy WIRE, Outer Places, The Portalist, and others. He’s also spoken at New York Comic-Con, Columbia University, and the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention. In his free time he runs The Occult Triangle Lab, a blog on trigonometry, fantasy, and ungodly amounts of milk. You can contact him on Twitter @DeadmanMu or at christophmahon [at] gmail [dot] com.

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COVER ART

“Swamp Relic,” by Piotr Dura

Piotr Dura is a self-taught, freelance 2D artist from Poland, specializing in environment illustration and design. His journey with art started in 2013 and quickly became both a main hobby and a living. He finds inspiration mostly in fantasy and science-fiction novels, movies, and nature. See more of his work at www.artstation.com/artist/threedee and threedeee.deviantart.com/.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2018 Firkin Press

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