Issue #263 • Oct. 25, 2018

“The Oracle and the Sea,” by Megan Arkenberg

“The Bodice, The Hem, The Woman, Death,” by Karen Osborne

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THE ORACLE AND THE SEA

by Megan Arkenberg

Prelude: Alla marcia

         Kashmai hates the sea. For a long time, she thought it was the only thing she hated.

* * *

         The seals wake her every morning before sunrise. They nest on the other side of the island, wriggling their slabs of muscle and blubber onto the soot-colored sand around the natural harbor, but their voices carry—their sharp stupid barking, never resolving into anything but noise. She can’t bear it, lying there and listening to their yapping, so she forces herself out of bed even though it makes the days unendurably long. She walks barefoot down to the water, where the sand is green and foul with some plant that thrives in the cold, and breathes in the stink of it, the plant and the salt and the musk of distant seals. Breathes in her hatred and her enemy’s cruel approximation of mercy, this torture disguised as a reprieve.

         A kinder President would have killed her—at least, a less selfish one would have. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. She knows, in her own relentless way, that she will die here.

         Perhaps she’ll do it herself. Some day soon, she thinks, I will let the sea do what the noose should have done. The thought calms her. She splashes her face and neck with frigid seawater and wipes it away before the salt can dry on her lips.

* * *

         The President’s men built the cottage for her, low on the beach and barely past the line of the high tide. Its floors are black wood, its walls the dirty white of salt. When she unshutters the windows, the wind tangles itself in blue calico curtains that smell faintly of lye soap. In a small room at the back of the cottage, as far as possible from the surf and the seals’ dumb barking, the President’s men placed a piano. It is Kashmai’s own piano, the white grand from her studio on Zebulon Street. She cannot decide if that was meant to be a kindness or added cruelty.

         When she plays, it’s the old songs—not her heavy concertos but brisk two-fingered melodies, folk tunes and old hymns, the first songs her youngest students would master. Every month when the soldiers bring her supply of flour and milk, they also bring waterproofed parcels of manuscript paper and cool bricks of ink. She always refuses them.

         One month she asked them to shoot her, but they had been warned to expect it.

         The sea is loudest at night. Kashmai lies awake with her face to the gritty white wall, her bedsheets damp with sweat, and listens to it gnawing on the sand. Some nights it is so loud that she can barely hear herself think.

         She cannot decide if this is a kindness or added cruelty.

* * *

The First Thing about Oracles

         An Oracle is like pain. Like pain, she has two meanings: something is growing, or something is about to die. Despite this, the Oracle herself is inevitably content with the world she was born into—its vices and virtues equally comfortable to her, like old cotton against the skin. Some might call this cowardice. Kashmai wouldn’t disagree.

         A corollary: every Oracle outlives her era.

* * * * *

First Movement: Largamente

         Before the President’s men brought Kashmai to the island, they had kept her at the new prison on the marshes of the Varcobis river, three or four miles outside the capitol city. On clear nights, the city’s gas lights skipped across the flat water like coins aimed at her window; she could see, or imagined she could see, the bell-shaped spire of the Parliament hall, the dome of the opera house silhouetted by the stars. Most nights there was fog, and she couldn’t make out anything farther than the marsh wren’s half-finished nests in the brushes some thirty feet below her window. The fat little wren would come by every few days, sputter and bubble his irritating song, then melt back into the mist. No female ever appeared to finish the nests. Then the season turned, and the fog thickened, and Kashmai couldn’t see anything at all.

         It was a month or two after her arrest—hard to track time there, harder once she lost the moon—that she noticed one of the guards had taken an interest to her. The realization came slowly, which was strange in itself. In Varcobis, surrounded by colleagues and students, she had assumed that she interested people, that they liked and admired her. Or it was simply that she knew in advance which of her acquaintances would find her interesting, and those were the only ones she bothered to cultivate. Later, in the midst of the coup, she’d been disoriented to find herself brushing shoulders with people who weren’t familiar with her music, who eyed her university pedigree with distrust, who didn’t like her and wouldn’t grow to. And no one had shown her any kindness since she fired at the sergeant in Israfel Square.

         It stuck with her, that wounded suspicion, so that she didn’t know at first what to make of the guard’s quick smiles, the little nods when he brought her coffee and bread. He was a thin man, with a closely cropped beard and large eyes that looked almost childish in his hard face. She often saw him pacing the corridor outside her cell, his uniform sleeves rolled above his elbows and one hand in his pocket, humming repetitive melodies. He would have a beautiful singing voice. She wondered if he ever used it, and what he had been before becoming her jailor.

         Then one afternoon, as she lay on the floor beneath her window and counted bricks in the wall to distract herself from the sounds of a beating somewhere down the corridor, he let himself into her cell. He carried something long and flat under his arm, which she recognized after a moment as a chessboard.

         “What makes you think I play?” she asked, raising herself on one arm. He settled on the foot of her cot and smoothed the undyed blanket, and she watched his fingers as he unfolded the board and began to withdraw the flat wooden pieces from his pockets. He had long fingernails, thick as a guitarist’s but round and clean.

         When he looked up and saw her watching him, he smiled—a real smile, white and handsome, but with a sureness that turned her stomach.

         “I don’t want your pity,” she said warily.

         “It isn’t pity.” His voice was as deep as his humming. “I knew about you, before. The genius of Zebulon Street. You could say I’m an admirer.”

         “You and the President. I’ve been badly served by my admirers.”

         The smile flitted away like the marsh wren abandoning his stalk. He studied her more closely, eyes wide and wounded—realizing, perhaps, that he had misjudged her loneliness.

         “He’ll make me disappear,” she said. Brutal honesty: that was a handle that rested comfortably in her hand. “He admires me now, but one day he’ll make it so that the genius of Zebulon Street never existed. Strike me from the textbooks and the lecture rolls. Melt me down with the wax cylinders. What do you think of that?”

         The guard hesitated. Then he began to arrange the pieces again; he was preparing the white side for her, centering each disk in its grid, as though such precision mattered. “He’ll find it harder than he expects, changing the past,” he said.

         Kashmai scoffed, pushing herself to her feet. Almost immediately she was overcome with vertigo. A roaring filled her ears, then withdrew, then advanced again. She steadied herself with one hand against the wall, blinking away the cloud of prescience that had settled across her vision like the marsh fog.

         She looked at the cot. The guard looked back at her with childish uncomprehending eyes. It was a miracle, she thought, that he couldn’t feel his own significance hanging like a weight around his neck.

         “Only the future is immutable,” she said through gritted teeth.

* * *

         Of course, now that she is dying, the future has nothing to say to her. And like a bankrupt widow whose horses have been auctioned off, like a bachelor whose songbirds have slipped their cages, Kashmai realizes how much she had counted on its presence to fill her days.

         She had never been bored or lonesome in Varcobis. Indeed, she prided herself on her self-sufficiency—the way she moved through students and lovers and friends like some violent harmony, overturning settled lives and routines but demanding little in return. Now that the Oracle is quiet, she knows what it’s like to have little demanded of her.

         It is remarkably lonely.

         On the island, lulled by the waves’ hungry complaining, her brain makes patchwork companions for her. Her dreams stitch the guard from the prison with some of the men who were her students; she loved all of them in her way, all the young people with their clumsy fingers and tense forearms, their heavy footsteps clumping up the stairs to her studio in the theatre district. Zebulon Street housed a row of cafés that served absinthe at eight in the morning and coffee until well after midnight. There, she would stake out a table for days at a time, putting the finishing touches on a program or lecture series, or flirting with the actresses who came by to nurse a hangover and run lines, or watching the ships on the river. At night, when she was composing, she’d open the windows above her bed—a wide set, through which they’d had to lift her piano with a crane—and let the varied rush of human voices, breaking glass, music, carriage wheels, someone’s sobbing, weave through her work.

         But in the dreams, the dreams about the guard who is somehow a student and somehow one of those devotees whose admiration she had instantly known to expect, the windows in her studio open onto black sand and barking seals. The man kneels on her bed, a violin curving its shadow over his bare shoulder, playing an unfamiliar song. The wind dries in his hair and leaves it crusted with salt.

         Then the seals wake her and all of it is gone—the young people, the studio, the river, the cafés. She sees them swallowed up by bloodied water and boarded windows, bullets in dark alleys, fires lit on cold afternoons. The ships, she remembers, had burned long into the night.

* * *

         She knows her disappearance has already begun. By now, the professors at the university where she used to lecture will have started to speak of her as though she is dead. She was known, they’ll be saying, for this or that, a common theme, a signature, all of it bookended between two dates: the day she came to Varcobis, and that day in Israfel Square. The past tense makes everything tidy. They wouldn’t know what to make of her otherwise, a radical and would-be assassin whose music the President adores. They’ll stop playing her work at the university, or if they must, they’ll tap out only a bar or two on the ancient classroom pianos.

         The students won’t be listening anyway. They’ll be watching the sky, the smoke above the river, or worrying about lost ration cards, or contemplating missing friends. Or sketching plans in their notebooks, quick maps and equations in the margins, and their friends will be contemplating them in a week or two.

         Life will go on in the capitol, but thinner.

         Kashmai wonders if the President can feel it in his stately house on Lancaster Street, far enough from the boarded cafés and the stink of ash on the water. Stupid, shallow thing that he is, he thinks he can kill her city, slaughter her students and imprison her on the sea, and still expect new music from her—as though the cottage, the piano, the weekly deliveries of paper and ink, the guards who have been warned not to kill her, are a gift and not a torment.

         Some mornings, as she washes her face in the sea and lifts her eyes to the horizon, she finds herself daring him to cross it. For she does have a gift for him, the only one she has ever had. But she knows, in her way, he isn’t brave enough to collect it.

* * * * *

Second Movement: Piu mosso

The Second Thing about Oracles

         An Oracle always knows the truth; it is impossible for her to lie to herself. And so hope is a foreign country to her—one she hears of in stories but will never see. The psychologists in the capitol, a dour group prone to dissecting operas and filling the balconies with bitter pipe smoke, say that all happiness is anticipation; the joy is in the planning, not the victory. If this is true, Kashmai supposes she has never been happy.

         But some consolation: if it is true, the President has tasted his victory and will never be happy again.

* * *

         The second time the guard came to her with his board and his pockets full of chessmen, they had played two games in amiable silence. He won easily, as he had before, but seemed not to take any pleasure in the fact. His eyes were never far from whatever part of her was in motion—her hands on the pieces, her feet shifting on the stone floor, her own eyes trailing over his face.

         At last, as she folded the board in surrender for the second time that afternoon, he pressed his hands to his chin. “Is it true that you can see the future?” he asked.

         Kashmai ran her hand down the side of the board, swirling her fingers around its tarnished hinges. They made her think of instrument cases, the lids protecting ivory or steel or gut.

         “You spoke to a former lover,” she guessed. “Or the officer who questioned me about Israfel Square.”

         “The latter.” He lowered his voice. It occurred to her that most of her lovers must be dead.

         She sat back on her heels. “There’s a question you want to ask me,” she realized. That explained some of it—the opacity of him, the mingled senses of friendliness and threat, which had made it hard to judge his interest in her. “But not about the future. You’re angry about something, not afraid.”

         He nodded slowly. “You knew—” Still nodding, he waved one hand, as though clearing the air of smoke. “You knew this was coming. The militia. The coup. This.” Gesturing now at the walls, the rough, sweating stone. “Why didn’t you stop it?”

         “A drowning man knows when his lungs are bursting,” she said, “but that’s no use to him if he’s forty feet below the surface. Some things are too big to alter, or too far away. Or too close.”

         “So what’s the good of it, then?”

         “Does it have to be good?”

         The guard scoffed.

         Kashmai rested her hands on her knees. The heels of her palms dug into soft flesh, bruising, as she weighed her next words.

         “Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like the Oracle is something outside of me. Something that plucks on my brain like an instrument. I think it might exist even if I didn’t—the way my music will exist without me, someday soon.”

         “What do you see for yourself?”

         “He will make me disappear.” She pronounced each word distinctly, imagined it falling like a pebble into an open grave. “He wants to press a new song out of me and throw away the skin.”

         “And before that?”

         “Black sand. I see black sand, sometimes.”

         A spasm crossed his face—a flare in the narrow nostrils, a tightening of the cheeks above his beard. “There’s an island.” He raised his hand again, as though to gesture at something, then let it fall uselessly into his lap. “North of here, miles and miles off the coast. It’s nothing but sand and wind. Months ago, when they brought you here, they had one of the builders look at the charts—”

         Kashmai silenced him with a short, inward laugh.

         “I hate the sea.” She shook her head, laughing again, although the sound felt like something rotten clinging to her teeth. “I used to think it was the only thing I hated.”

* * *

         She has hated the ocean from childhood—a childhood spent far from Varcobis, far from universities and theaters and politics. But not so far, it seems, that the President couldn’t rifle through that rubbish heap and emerge with precisely the bone he needed. Like a cat with a mouse, he plays with history before he devours it. He’s playing with her now, her past and her hate, though to what end, she can hardly imagine.

         Or maybe, fool that he is, he doesn’t know he’s playing. Somehow that seems worse.

         There must have been Oracles who found beautiful patterns in the shape of past and future, Oracles for whom even tragedy appeared lovely in its completion. Kashmai finds it ugly. Sick jokes played by time and circumstance. How often the worst that can be imagined is precisely what comes to pass.

         In a café on Zebulon Street, in the early days of the coup, an actress friend folded herself into Kashmai’s arms, stole sips from her glass of absinthe, and loudly lamented the President’s stupidity and incompetence. Another interjected with complaints about the cost of the army. Both of them were convinced it couldn’t last. And how unlikely it all seemed then—how like a nightmare, a sick farce. This is the part, Kashmai remembers thinking, slipping from the actress’s embrace, when a woman who is not an Oracle would lie to herself.

         The vertigo came, the sound like raging and withdrawing waves. She could smell ships burning, could feel the kickback of a fired bullet jolt through her wrist.

         After that, she read the newspapers in the café a bit more closely. When the petitions circulated, she signed her name with a flourish. A few days before the soldiers gathered in Israfel Square, she bought a small pistol and taught herself how to fire it.

* * *

         This too is a consolation: regret is as foreign as hope. She has done what she knew she would do. The past tense makes everything tidy.

* * * * *

Third Movement: Rubato

         Before dawn, she wakes to the barking of the seals.

         The day is bright and damp, the sun like a flame seen through thick glass. Kashmai wraps herself in a shawl of fog-colored wool, washes her face in the ocean, and wipes nightmare away with the salt. When she returns to the cottage, she puts the kettle on the stove and takes the tin tea cannister down from its self. On impulse, she sets out two cups. Today is a delivery day.

         When the boat arrives, she is not surprised to find her guard, sleeves rolled to his elbows, humming a low, repetitive melody.

         “You expected me?” he asks, nodding at the second cup on the table. He has set the crate of dry goods on the only chair, the sheaf of manuscript paper laid uppermost, slightly damp from the spray.

         “I expected something. Why are you here?”

         He shrugs at the crate, but that isn’t what she’s asking.

         “I want you to write the song,” he says. “I know you’ve refused him, and I think I understand why. But if you’re going to die here, I want something of you to survive.”

         “The genius of Zebulon Street.” She wants to mock the sentiment, but it comes out with greater weight than she intends. She pushes her hands through her hair, pointedly staring at his face—his beard grayer, his cheeks, if possible, even more hollow than they were at the prison—staring at anything but the paper he’s come to deliver. “Do they still call me that?”

         “No.”

         “Pity.”

         She lifts the crate with one hand and slings it to a corner of the room. It lands in a puff of sand and dust; a black, spiderlike crab scuttles out of the way. She seizes the paper and, after some rummaging, the block of dry ink, and throws the both of them through the open doorway, into the black sand.

         Turning, she gestures for her guest to sit. She pushes a teacup towards him and takes the other for herself.

         “It won’t matter,” she says. “Whether I do it or not, he’ll wipe me away. I will never leave this fucking island.”

         “Then tell me.” Settling into the chair—heavily, like a man twice his age—he lays one hand on the table, almost reaching for her. Then he presses his fingertips into the wood as though rooting himself in place. “I know the President never asked you; he’s not brave enough. But tell me what’s coming.”

         Kashmai takes a slow slip of tea. It’s bitter, and it stinks like the seaplant that washes up on her beach. She wants to tell him that the thing he’s asking is impossible, but the pair of teacups would give away the lie. Yes, it’s still there—a soft buzzing in her ear, so soft it seems to come from outside of herself—some tiny scrap of the Oracle her tired mind has cast off, lost in the constant roar of the sea.

         All this time, Kashmai had believed her heart already broken. Or perhaps she thought she had no heart to begin with; never, not as a child spinning thread between calloused fingers, not as a lecturer on the echoing stage or a teacher in her studio, not with her lips on a man’s neck or her hands on an ivory keyboard or her finger on a trigger. Why should this man change that? She sets the tea aside and tightens the shawl around her neck, tugs on it so sharply that the wool creaks. Why should her body ache, why should her eyes prickle as though some lingering seawater has dried on the lashes? What is one more travesty in a list of crimes as long as a war?

         What’s one more mouthful of water when you’re miles below the surface?

         “The President will die,” she says. “But not for some time. The country will fracture—too many wars on too many fronts, and too many schmeers greedy for what no one can buy or steal. One by one, the people he trusts will betray him. He’ll run at first, but not far enough. In the end, they’ll shoot him in the back.”

         The guard nods. He is gazing at her as he’s always gazed at her: not with pity, she sees now, but with trust. “And me, Kashmai?”

         “You’ll die before I do.”

         He makes a sharp sound in his throat, half laugh, half cry of pain. For the first time since she’s known him, he looks away before she does—past her, out the open door, to the discarded paper and the sand and the cold waves.

         She leans against the kitchen wall. Her limbs feel heavy, but her head is clear.

         The Oracle, the last of it, is gone.

* * *

The Third Thing about Oracles

         Sometimes, when a body is dying and knows that it is dying, when pain no longer serves its purpose, the bloodstream floods itself with chemicals to blunt the perception and dull the brain with pleasure. She begins to suspect that this is why she could write such beautiful music. For the rush of bliss and forgetfulness, when knowing doesn’t do any good.

         Kashmai knows what she is without the Oracle. A passion in passing. A rage that shook settled lives like some violent storm, then dissipated with the change of seasons. A game of chess, a cup of tea. She’s nothing permanent. Her house is built on sand.

         As it has always been.

* * *

         She has never in her life watched a man as he walked away from her for the last time. She doesn’t now. But after he goes, she retrieves the sheaf of manuscript paper from the sand. Opening it with a bit of driftwood—the men who built her house didn’t trust her with a knife—she shakes the sheets out one by one. They’ve captured the scent of miles between them, all the distance they were transported: dust of dungeons, sulfurous marsh water, the brine of the sea. She hangs the sheets to dry in her windows, clipped between the calico curtains.

         All afternoon, Kashmai thinks of the man she will outlive.

         And in the end, it’s pity that brings her to the piano.

Copyright © 2018 Megan Arkenberg

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Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008. She currently lives in Northern California, where she’s pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at www.meganarkenberg.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE BODICE, THE HEM, THE WOMAN, DEATH

by Karen Osborne

         A few days before the end of our world, my mother took me to her favorite tailor to be fit for a dress I would never wear.

         She swept through Amaurel’s opulent central gallery like a dragon made of merlot and diamond, her chin high, her tongue cavalier. She wore her best shopping-gown: ruby-red silk, cut close around her neck, with the opinionated souls of our best-dressed relations running back five hundred years trapped inside the diamonds sewn into the bodice.

         I let her dart and fuss and agree with the souls, all of them whispering aloud about my boy-broad shoulders, my pallid complexion, my nails like the claws of ghosts. My mother approached shopping the way my father took to war, and the souls of our long-lost would not let her rest until my tomboy nature was conquered. She was thorough, surgical, with her coins tossed like aetherfire off an airship in her never-ending battle to make me a lady.

         Outside, other women traversed the graceful marble halls of the gallery, ivory-boned fans snapping open, gliding into shops like the swans I would never resemble.

         My mother pressed a length of coral silk against the angry flush of my cheek. “I think we’ll pair this with your grandmother’s diamond for your debut,” she said. “She’ll keep you from slouching.”

         She was wearing my grandmother’s soul in the diamond around her neck, as she always did. It lay in the hollow of her throat, whispering about my graceless rebellion.

         “Grandmother didn’t even like this color,” I said, poking at the rubies under her collarbone, at my great-aunts and third-cousins, just to make the souls inside angry. “She would have thought it gauche.”

         “Lia, dear,” my mother said, swatting away my hand, “fashions change, but the reasons we wear them do not. A gown is a political statement. A gown is language. If you’re going to rise in society, you’re going to have to start wearing decent souls on a decent dress.”

         I had long since tired of my mother’s lessons: these polite assaults, this bastard corsetry. But what was I supposed to do? Tell her no? I was her only daughter. My mother would have fought her little war for my appearance, her weapons silk and silver and the voices of our family’s dead, even if we’d known that our world was already over, that the armies of the underworld were slipping through our walls through broaches and hatpins, necklaces and bangles, boxes and bags, using Amaurel’s favorite things against her.

         She still would have tried, even if she’d known she’d go to her death in sackcloth and cotton, lying outside her strangecoach on the broken boulevard, the string on her felt hat swaying in the ashen breeze.

         I believe that she would have approved of her corpse.

         I suppose there’s that, at least.

* * *

         The other great families fled to the country as soon as it was clear that our city was at war. We should have gone with them, but my father was an experienced brigade commander and believed we would win, and my mother believed my father.

         We had no reason to think otherwise. We were rich in the way particular to Amaurel: Mother and Father and I, guarding a thousand souls living inside a thousand precious gems stacked in a vault at the heart of our house on the hill. The art of the soul-gem has faded with the death of Amaurel’s way of life, and no-one outside the city has been able to replicate the ritual: the human soul, severed from the body at the moment of death with the right kind of knife and inscribed inside a precious stone. The human soul, diverted from its passage to the underworld, fashioned to serve the living in homes and strangecoaches and airships and weapons and clothing. This was our destiny.

         My father thought Mother and I could defend our family’s soul-gems. He had also banked on the war being easy to win and over by midsummer.

         But the city guard began to arrive at our manse on a regular, terrifying schedule, in their scarlet coats, their faces streaked with ghost-soot. The airships needed souls, they said, to power the great reactors in their bellies; to keep the forces of the underworld at bay. A hundred soul-gems every day, burned to oblivion to save the living. The poor had given all they could. Our vaults held what was left. They came and they came until eventually every soul in our vault went to the airships; every lord of our family who had come before, every lowly second son, every dead infant and childless aunt and the emeralds, rubies, and diamonds in which they slept.

         But one day, my mother refused to let the guards in the house. She blocked the door in a torn powder-blue dressing-gown, her legs splayed wide, a thin pastel bulwark against an avalanche of wide men with exhausted faces. The guards pushed her aside, against the wall, the largest of them crushing his hand against my mother’s neck, just above where my grandmother’s soul lay in a pendant, cold against her skin. Even then, the soul was still whispering to be kind, be gracious, be quiet, be sweet, tend to your appearance so they spare you.

         “Please,” my mother whispered. “You’ve taken everything else. Please leave us something.”

         The guard gave his answer by closing his hand around the diamond that had once been my grandmother, yanking the ribbon away from Mama’s neck. The others pushed inside, tracking mud up the stairs.

         Enraged, I grabbed a broom and gave chase. I did not think it would stop them, but my mother was crying, and I had to do something. They wrested the broom from my hand, hit me across the face, and sent me tumbling down the stairs. My shoulder cracked against the marble floor, sending pain shuddering down my spine, but I pulled myself up and followed them anyway.

         I was far too late. The guards had found where we’d hidden the dresses.

         Theirs was a lurid business. They needed silk to fly the airships and souls to feed the reactors. They took out their soulknives and started cutting. They cast aside the art of it all: the delicate boning, the embroidery, the fabric flowers fashioned to encircle my mother’s delicate throat. They abducted the garden skirts and the blue cape and the rose-gold ballgown she’d bought me in the gallery a month before. They yanked the soul-gems from the bodices, my aunts and cousins, one by one, leaving the dresses silent and broken. My mother watched this from the door as if she were watching a murder.

         I tried to stop them. “Please,” I said. “You’re breaking her heart.”

         They left the boning on the ground like unburied skeletons.

* * *

         The loss of the souls could have been managed. It was the loss of their voices that broke my mother.

         This is one of the things I mean when I speak about the struggles of the women of Amaurel. My mother no longer knew what to do. She wandered the manse like one of the underworld ghosts herself, drawing the curtains tight against the swirling smoke of the lower city. She had been listening to her own mother for so long, following the ancient voices and the false certainty they provided, that now in the silence of our shattered house, she found she had no words of her own.

         So, without a debut, without a talent for dresses and tea, I found myself taking up the tasks of lady of the house while my mother reclined on the divan in the conservatory, full of wine and tears, desperate to stay, to wait for Father.

         I realized that this was the way our life was now, that she was no longer the woman who ruled the gallery, and that she could no longer be trusted to make the decisions that needed to be made. I paid the staff until they left for the last time, and then I scrubbed the dishes and the floors once they were gone. I made my mother breakfast and I made her dinner and I chose her clothes. She hated that the most of everything, I think.

         When the deliveries stopped coming, and I started cutting mold off the last few crusts of bread, I knew we would starve if we stayed. I poured her the last of the southern black tea like a bribe, stirring a final spoonful of sugar with a practiced hand. I would not lose one grain to carelessness. “We need to leave town, Mama.”

         “We need to wait for your father,” she responded. Her voice had lost volume and heft. She would not scare shopgirls now.

         I kept my voice sweet and kind, even though my grandmother’s soul was no longer there to chide me. “We have three days of food left. That’s enough to see us through until we get to the country house if we take the strangecoach and leave tonight. If we wait for Father, we die of hunger.”

         “No.” She raised her right hand, cutting me off. The left clawed at the bathrobe she was wearing; her fingers were bony and bare. The guard had even taken her wedding ring. The ring, inhabited by one of my father’s relations from the previous century, known for his chivalry, had spoken only of love and loyalty and care.

         “We don’t have a choice.”

         “We have every choice,” she snapped.

         “We go, Mama, or we die.”

         The old edge scraped back into her voice. She pointed to our ragged dressing-gowns. “There are worse things than death, Lia. I am the lady of this house, and you are the daughter of a thousand souls. We cannot go outside like this. We cannot be seen like this. We may as well be among the soulless.”

         “We will be,” I said, “if we stay here.”

         “I have made my decision,” she said, looking back down at her embroidery.

         I pushed up and away from the table, saying nothing more. The lady of the house had spoken. What else could I do? I was little Lia, who could not dress herself properly; mat-haired, rebellious Lia, who could not keep even the barest of grooming standards. How could dirty Lia have the strength to leave everything she’d ever known?

         I was halfway to my room when I realized that if my mother needed a proper visiting gown to leave the city, then I would have to find her one.

* * *

         The next day, I drugged my mother’s wine so she would sleep the afternoon away and not notice my absence. Once she was dozing on the divan, I went to Papa’s office. I opened the guard-broken cabinet where he used to keep his own father’s soul in the ancient dark sword he had taken to war, and I chose the blank soulknife that remained. This was the knife that would have held his soul after he died, would have whispered advice to my future husband and hastened him through the world of politics, just as my mother would have lain at my chest and guided me through the gallery. It was set with a quiet, dead emerald, ready for an occupant soul.

         I was more interested in its nasty blade.

         I packed a bag with the family silver, in case I could use it for trade, and went to the stable. The family strangecoach was inhabited by a soul so old it was no longer human. It trembled, frightened of the sounds of war, and needed to be gently cajoled, to be fed the last of the good oil, to have its dead leather flank patted—but it acquiesced to my intentions, and I stepped inside and we set out from the house for the first time in weeks.

         I don’t know what I expected to see. I hoped, like my mother hoped, that the city would have been carrying on like our house had carried on. I hoped to see lanterns in the windows, to see people moving in and out of the farmer’s market and the chandlery, perhaps even sitting in the sidewalk cafes.

         Stunned at my own naivete, I could hardly breathe as the strangecoach careened through blank, broken streets. This was not the bright city I remembered. This city had buildings scorched to the ground by aetherfire. This city had skinny human bodies hiding in houses that were less than façades, with bricks that crumbled down front stairs as dull and cracked as peasants’ teeth. I felt a scrambling disappointment; there would be no help here.

         Near the shopping district, the men and women and children in their black and ash saw our coat of arms and swarmed the strangecoach. I yelled at the coach to go faster, frightened and ashamed of my fear. The coach lurched forward, trailing a chain of terrified hands; they had the shaking, starving look of those who had already sold their souls for hope or for money, of those who walked in their bodies but had no future.

         We pushed on towards the gallery. I tightened my hand on the soulknife and reassured myself that I’d only have to be there for a few minutes. I knew the shops my mother liked and the colors she favored. There had to be something left.

         There had to be.

         The bright glass windows of the gallery had once been housed in stone arches stretching in sequence down the most beautiful street of the city, reflecting the fountains that surrounded it. I tied the strangecoach to a dead lantern so the poor thing wouldn’t run off or hide, and it cowered away from the street, as spooked and scared as I was.

         When I passed through the broken gallery gate, I realized my mistake. ‘Looted’ was too pleasant a word for the destruction I saw. The row of smart tailors’ shops were smashed. Their ivory doors hung off broken hinges, and their windows were shattered; dirt swirled into their blank spaces on dark winds. I picked up a bolt of braided silver trim unbound from its roll. I was completely alone. I should have run right then, but I still needed to find something to help my mother leave the house.

         The air changed. It tasted wrong. Broken. The wind rushed in, and a figure coalesced in front of me. In that moment, I smelled ash and oil, and understood that Amaurel was truly dead.

         I knew this because I was staring at my father.

         I had never seen a soul alive outside of a jewel—but this was no happy memory, singing in diamond-bound light. This soul had been dragged to the underworld, had been whirled into the great singing quiet and twisted into a tool for the darkness. This soul was smoke-grey, hanging in swirling embers a foot from my face, tracing the barest line of shoulder and neck and torso, dark mouth a downturned line, stinking of the grave.

         I always hated you, it whispered. I should have killed you when you were born.

         I stumbled backwards. So this was what had happened to my father’s brigade. “Papa, no.”

         In answer, the soul slipped around my neck like a vise, like a noose, then forced open my mouth, reached down into the soft, sour range of my palate, and spoke of the soulknife I did not deserve, the disappointment I had been since birth, the death that faces all rebellious women. In a moment of grainy, greying despair, I stopped struggling.

         Death seized my heart, then, and I knew I had but one choice. I tore at my shirt, shaking my shoulders, throwing myself against the wall, clanging sense into my head with the painful impact of my skull against the brick. My father loved me. He loved me, and I would not let this ghostly parody turn me into the thing he had become. I ran, my footsteps chiming bright against the broken glass. My throat was on fire. I stumbled and fell, then pulled myself up from the gutter, my clothes streaked with dirt and char, my father’s ghost clutching at the back of my neck with icy, sharp tendrils. I kept running until I was outside and could see the sky, sucking down the dirty city air like anesthetic.

         The dying gallery was close enough to the airship fields that I could feel the screams of the souls in their reactors like shapeless earthquakes under my feet. My father’s ghost must have felt them, too, because he stopped at the gate and huddled in the shadow, giving me enough time to hop back in the strangecoach and tear away for home.

* * *

         My mother was awake when I arrived. She screamed with anger at my deception, but her fury dissolved into broken sobs as soon as she threw her arms around me. I held her tight, still tasting ash and oil on my tongue.

         “I thought you were gone,” she whispered into my ear. “I thought I was alone. Don’t you dare do that to me ever again.”

         I trembled, feeling the fear hover at the back of my throat. I pushed the bag with the silver into her hands. “Pack,” I said.

         She pushed the bag back against my breastbone. “Pack? For what? I don’t have a decent dress. I can’t go anywhere. And if we get to the country house and we’re not dressed, we’ll be —”

         This again. The curse of the women of Amaurel. “None of that matters anymore,” I said.

         She hesitated. “It’s the only thing that matters.”

         “Your life matters! We have to go!”

         “I won’t leave,” she said. “Your father might come home.”

         And I thought of his ghost in my throat, of the underworld curses he might tell my mother as she died. I could not leave her to that. I shivered down to my bones.

         “It’s all right, Mama. I know what you need. I’ll have you ready to leave. I promise.”

         I left her silent in the hall, the bag still at her feet.

* * *

         In the highest room of our tower over the empty vault of souls, I sewed. I salvaged towels from the bathroom, scraps from a cloth bag the housekeeper left behind, the remains of my father’s undershirts. I took my white sheets and dyed them using a few near-rancid beets I found in the root cellar. I had but one night, not the three days it would take for a project of this caliber. I could not let that stop me.

         The needle felt thin and cold in my hand. I listened to the wind howl, heard my mother cry, slipped all my sadness and my regret and my anger into each stitch. I had sewn before—we were women from Amaurel, we all sewed—but never like this. Never so fast.

         I cut sleeves and laid them out, tracing the outline of my mother in arms and legs and belly and neck, as if I were creating a diorama of her body, an outline of everything she was. I used my father’s soulknife to cut the spread that became the skirt. I drew up ruching along the main seams and rolled old whalebone into the bodice. I stitched flowers—roses, her favorite, in red and yellow and blue, with bright green stems. I sewed in everything I was: all my dreams, all the things I never told her. I sewed in all the things I would have been if not for my mother’s blood, if not for Amaurel. A gown is language, she liked to say. A gown is a story.

         And there was only one story left to tell.

         I picked up the knife that was to go to the husband I would never have, the knife that was intended to house my father’s soul. It was a quiet, searing thing to slide it down my arm in the old ritual. To say the words that parted my soul from my body.

         I felt a terrible rush, a pop under my breastbone, a quiet twirling under my skin, a growing, tearing pain like my heart was breaking, like my blood was boiling. The room went hot and bright, and then I was empty, calm, shaking, staring at the emerald in the hilt of the knife alive and swirling with the gold expanse of my soul.

         Get your mother, said the knife with my own voice. Get out of here.

* * *

         My mother knew immediately what had happened, as I descended the tower stairs the next morning with the dress on one arm and the knife in the other.

         Her green eyes filled with tears when she saw the dress. She pressed her fingers to her mouth, then took it in her hands, running her palm up and down the bedroom-curtain bodice, the bedsheet sleeves, the haphazard seams. I expected her to criticize the color choices, to turn it over and note the mismatched buttons, the crooked hem, the place where I hurried the cut at the waist because we were simply out of time.

         “It’s beautiful, Lia,” she whispered, even though it was not, even though it was a hurried, disgusting mismatch, even though I felt no pride and no shame. There was a blank place in my heart where I would have once been desperate for her praise, and maybe the moment itself would have been beautiful had I still the ability to care.

         I helped her into the dress, placing an old felt hat on her head, tying the string under her chin. I popped the emerald with my entangled soul into the housing of her favorite broach, then pinned it right above her breast, near her heart.

         If she needed a soul to speak to her, she would have one.

         She wept. Her breath hitched. “Oh, Lia,” she said. “No.”

         “Can you go outside now?” I asked.

         She closed her mouth. I imagined her saying something about proper shoes, about how a winter hat needs a whiter feather, but sometimes she did love me, and sometimes she showed it. She touched the swirling emerald, her hands trembling. Her eyes went wide as she heard the whispers of my voice. They were low. Quiet.

         Mine was a new soul, unaccustomed to speaking on its own. But it would do the trick, I imagined.

         You can, Mama, it whispered to the both of us.

         You can.

* * *

         The strangecoach sat cowering in the stable, lapping up the last of the lamp oil. We asked it for one more favor, and the ancient soul wobbled when we entered and closed its door to shade us in darkness but skittered into motion, heading around the manse and down the back hill towards the southern gate. It was sunset and the light came through the window in thick, guttering chunks of orange and red, breaking through the shattered roofs and smashed facades of merchants’ townhouses, dancing around the people in the road.

         The city shuddered in its death throes. We saw dozens of families, men and women and bedraggled, war-worn children, ensouled and soulless alike, carrying bags and boxes. We were leaving Amaurel to the dead, heading to the safety of the country. This was before we knew, of course, that the country wasn’t safe, either, before we realized just how far we would have to walk to feel safe again.

         As we arrived in the south end, the strangecoach slowed. I smelled ash and slippery oil—the same shocking, dangerous scent I’d tasted in the galleria before the encounter with the ghost that had been my father. My mother smelled it, too; she had a rattled, terrified look on her face, even as she smoothed out the folds of her dress and checked the pins holding back the curls in her hair.

         My own body felt settled and unconcerned, while my soul pleaded with us to live, to move, that we had to. “We’ll be fine,” I said.

         Mother craned her neck. “What’s going on?”

         I took a gulp of ash and oil. My body still needed air. I had to remind myself of this. “Ghosts.”

         “What do we do?” She grabbed my hand and flinched at the chill.

         I grabbed her by the wrist in response and kicked open the door to the strangecoach, which jerked to the side then lifted from below with the force of aetherfire, throwing my mother howling against the ground.

         The door yawned open against the darkling sky. I felt the pain of rocks digging into my shoulder from far away. Ghosts, silky-grey, blotted out the colors and hovered just inside the coach. I recognized one, of course; my father had found us, as he had promised. He would always find us.

         My soul told me what to do: I scrambled for the knife, as though that would help against an enemy as substantial as the morning mist, and threw myself over my mother’s body. The ghosts hissed, scratched, and the noise itched around my mouth, my nose, my ears.

         They would kill my body first, giving my mother enough time to get away.

         I looked at my mother. I felt a great peace; she was terrified but lucid and bright. She stared at me with a kindness she hadn’t given me since I was a child, since before the dresses and the ribbons and the curls destroyed what was real between us. She did not run. She reached out and took me in her arms. Her voice rolled against my chest, as sure and as strong as I had ever heard it.

         “I love you, Lia,” she said.

         I started to speak, to tell her it was all right, that it was already all over for me, that I could not love her back and that I was going to protect her and that she needed to run and that if she ran, if she just ran—but she twisted, pushing me away, throwing herself between the ghosts and my body. Even though she knew it would be futile, she still tried to save me.

         The ghosts came in on an incandescent, grave-strong wind. They took my mother’s soul with them, white against their grey, and her body shuddered into peace, too tight against me as I tried to drive them away from her, as I waved my knife, my hands, felt nothing but the absence of air. As she was borne away into the darkness, I caught the whisper of her perfume on the wind—and she told me what she saw earlier that morning, when I descended the staircase with the knife and the dress: beautiful.

         A last cold breath slipped against my neck as my enemy—my father—tasted my soulless skin and found me wanting.

* * *

         I left her body cooling in the twilight.

         I had to. It was the end of our world.

         My mother’s dead hand lay over the bodice I had sewn, the cotton and linen and sackcloth and horse blankets, her fingers a cage around the broach that held my soul. It screamed at me to stay. To bury her. I plucked it from her too-still chest and popped the emerald back into the hilt of the knife. My soul no longer lived in my body, but I could still hear my old dreams speak, and I would need them now.

         When I ran for the gate, many of the soulless followed me. They recognized the voice in my knife and wanted—no, needed—to follow. I told them I couldn’t help them. I told them I was no leader. I told them that I wasn’t good enough for my own family, so I couldn’t be good enough for them. I told them that I did not want to lead. But this is Amaurel. Even the patterns that destroyed us are hard to break.

         I find it ironic that I became the thing I’ve hated my entire life: a noblething, listening blank and emotionless to the whispers of my lost conscience.

         On the road, under the blinding sun, I find myself thinking about what my mother should have had, if Amaurel had not taught her to hide her heart in fabric and fear. We did love each other, in our own way. We did our best in the darkness that ended our world. This is not objective truth. It is her truth, and to carry it with me is a great blessing.

         I have people that rely on me now. We are refugees. I would do anything to go back, to ask my mother what I should do. How I can protect these people. Where we should go. What we should do. And sometimes when my soul is whispering to me, I stop listening. I tilt my blank head at the sky, and I listen to what should have been. I listen for my mother.

         I wait and wait and wait, but the only voice I can hear is my own.

Copyright © 2018 Karen Osborne

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Karen Osborne lives in Baltimore, MD, with two violins, an autoharp, a theremin, three cameras, a husband, and a bonkers orange cat. Her short fiction appears in Escape Pod, Robot Dinosaurs, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and is forthcoming in Fireside. Her debut novel, Architects of Memory, will be published in 2020 by Tor. She emcees the Charm City Spec reading series, plays the fiddle in a ceilidh band, and once won a major-event filmmaking award for shooting and editing a Klingon wedding trailer. You can find her on Twitter at @karenthology.

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COVER ART

“Monument of the Warrior King,” by Veli Nyström

Veli Nyström is an illustrator and concept artist mostly in the games industry. He currently works as a freelancer and resides in Tampere, Finland. View more of his art online at www.artstation.com/vablo and velinystrom.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2018 Firkin Press

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