Issue #287, Eleventh Anniversary Double-Issue • Sept. 26, 2019

“Portrait Of The Artist,” by K.J. Parker

“Sankalpa,” by Marie Brennan

“One Found in a World of the Lost,” by Shweta Adhyam

“The Witch of the Will,” by Aaron Perry

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

by K.J. Parker

         He was sweating. “What’ve you got for me?” he said.

         I smiled at him. “One archduke,” I said, quickly glancing round to make sure no-one could hear. “Four marquises, two first cousins of an earl, six wealthy silk merchants, a field marshal, an admiral, a brevet major of dragoons, and a small brown dog.”

         He picked up the bag, as though he could tell if I was lying just by the weight. It clinked softly. “What’s with the dog?” he said.

         “I felt like it.”

         He was a tall man, about forty, bald patch like a monk’s tonsure, big nose. Ugly but interesting face. Expensive, sombre clothes in shades of dark brown and dove grey. I’d have enjoyed painting him, for several reasons. Sorry, private joke. “Two hundred gulden.”

         “Very funny.”

         He was staring at the bag, like he could see through the cloth. For all I know, he could. But that sort of thing doesn’t impress me any more. “Aristocrats,” he said disdainfully. “Soldiers. All I ever get from you is blue-bloods. What I need is intellectuals.”

         “Some of them are quite bright.”

         “Fox-hunters,” he said, with a faint curl of the upper lip. Bet he practised it in the mirror.

         “Well-educated,” I pointed out. “Finest education money can buy.”

         “What I want,” he said, glaring at me, “is philosophers. Scientists. Poets.”

         I was hungry. I’d skipped breakfast again. “Poets and philosophers can’t afford to have their portraits painted,” I told him. “And on what you pay me I can’t afford to do work for free.”

         “Right. So that explains the dog?”

         “Like I told you. I felt like it.” I waggled the bag under his nose. He winced.

         “Three hundred,” he said. “Don’t shake it around like that, for crying out loud.”

         The urge to draw him was overpowering. Just a quick charcoal sketch, on the tablecloth? But he’d see me. “Besides,” I pointed out, “you’re forgetting or being wilfully blind to the tradition of the noble dilettante. The archduke’s one of the leading authorities on the later dialogues of Saloninus.”

         He tried not to show it, but I could see the frisson of lust slide over him. “The archduke—”

         I grinned. “No names,” I said. “No names, no indictable complicity. But yes, him. And one of the silk merchants is a notable alchemist.”

         He looked up sharply. “Porphyrius?”

         I clicked my tongue. “I said, no names.”

         “You killed Porphyrius.”

         Silly me. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might be friends. “Of course not. Go round and call on him this minute. He’s perfectly healthy.”

         “You know what I mean,” he growled. “Still—”

         That old academic curiosity, it wins out every time. I saw where my mistake could now be useful. “Five hundred and fifty gulden,” I said.

         “For pity’s sake, woman. I haven’t got that sort of—”

         “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take my merchandise elsewhere.”

         Got him. The thought of someone else, one of his rivals, getting his friend— Really, I should’ve asked for the round six hundred. Six-fifty, even. “This is the very last time,” he said, “that I do business with you.”

         I relaxed. “We’ll see,” I said, and beckoned the waiter. “Let’s celebrate the deal,” I said. “A bottle of the ‘46 and a plate of honeycakes, please.”

         The waiter withdrew, visibly shaken. “You’re buying,” I said.

         “No I’m not.”

         “Yes you are. A lady never pays.”

* * *

         Alas, not true. Five hundred and fifty gulden sounds like an absolute fortune, probably because it is. But— The nearest comparison is a heavy fall of snow. You wake up and the whole world is buried in white. You could fill a million carts and barely touch the surface. Noon and bright sunlight, all gone, as though it had never been. By the time I got home, having made various business calls, I was left with thirty-seven gulden seventy-five. Still a huge amount of money, by one of my sets of standards; enough to buy a farm, or a half-share in a small merchant ship. But not enough. Never enough.

* * *

         “I don’t need you here all the time,” I told him.

         “Oh.” He looked disconcerted; disappointed, even. “I thought—”

         “It’s not how I work.” Understatement of the century. “How I go about it is, I make a series of sketches from life, charcoal mostly, some pen and ink, and then I do the actual painting from them.”

         “That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

         I smiled. “Very,” I said. “But it means a busy man like you doesn’t have to spend hours of his valuable time sitting perfectly still in a chair.”

         He shrugged. The light fell across his face like a birthmark. “Actually,” he said, “I was looking forward to it. I don’t get many chances to sit perfectly still and stare into space.”

         My hand was starting to shake as I adjusted my grip on the charcoal. It usually does. I like to pretend it’s guilt, the last vestiges of decent feeling. But I have a nasty suspicion it’s the excitement of the—kill? Oh, let’s not mince words. “Up to you,” I said. “If you’d like to come here and sit, please, feel free. I can always work in the other room.”

         “Surely it’s south-facing.” He frowned. “Don’t you need the light?”

         “I paint by the inner light,” I said. I tried to make it sound like I was being facetious.

* * *

         The point is, I’m an exceptionally good artist. If there’s a tragedy here, that’s it. The things I could’ve done, the work I could’ve produced, if only—

         But.

         I’d have been perfectly happy staying at home in the country and painting cows, and waterfalls, and meadows of spring flowers, and cheerful, contented country people going about their appointed tasks. Mid-morning, after a leisurely breakfast (with my husband, before he set off for hunting or inspecting the spring wheat or meeting the tenants, whatever the hell it is that men of my class do all day), my maids would pack my paints and easel onto the dog-cart, and the coachman would drive me to some idyllic spot; I’d paint for an hour or so, until it was time to get back to supervise lunch. And people would complement me on my work; it really is very good, they’d say, every bit as good as the professionals. And I would be, would have been, perfectly happy.

         Didn’t work out like that. Ah well; no use moping after what you could never have had, even if it was always so close, all through my childhood—I always felt that if I tried I could reach out with my arm and with just a little bit more effort I could pull it down off the tree and have it. I grew out of that, in due course. It made me sullen and sharp-tongued, qualities that didn’t actually help the issue very much.

         Or I could, in spite of being plain and just a bit too poor, have grabbed life by the scruff of the neck, forced the world to acknowledge me; the finest artist of her age, just look at—(insert here a list of the masterpieces I could have painted, would have painted if things had turned out just a little bit different; the thickness of a sheet of paper is all that divides me from those unattained possibilities). It all comes down to such tiny differences; if I was one inch taller, then by standing on tiptoe and really, really straining, I could reach the apple on the branch. But when you lack it, one inch, half-inch, quarter-inch is the same as a mile. Depends where you’re standing. In my line of work, we call it perspective.

         So I do this instead. A quarter of an inch is all it takes to separate heaven from hell.

* * *

         My clients don’t negotiate with me direct, face to face. They send people. The Patriarch Sighvat sent an archdeacon. I think His Grace the archdeacon was nervous at the prospect of having to spend time alone with, you know, a woman. One look at me and he relaxed visibly.

         “His Grace will wish to be seen three-quarter face,” he said. “He will of course wear the divitision and formal dalmatic.”

         “Naturally.”

         He peered at me down far more nose than any contingency could ever justify. “You know what a dalmatic is?”

         I smiled. “It’s a wide, long-sleeved tunic with a broad strip of embroidery down the front,” I said. “A formal dalmatic is blood red, knee-length. I have a book,” I explained. “With pictures.”

         Eventually he had no choice but to address the question of money. “His Grace feels that a fee of fifty gulden will be satisfactory.”

         I tried to look sad. “That’s a shame,” I said. “I would’ve liked to paint His Grace. He has interesting bone structure.”

         There was a moment of dead silence. I kept perfectly still, smiling sweetly.

         “Fifty-five.”

         “Am I right in thinking,” I asked, “that His Grace has written a series of exegitical commentaries on Carchedonius’ Metaphysics?”

         He didn’t know. Look at faces all day, you learn to read them. “His Grace is a pre-eminent scholar.”

         Translates as; always got his head stuck in a book. My mother said the same about me. “Seventy gulden.”

         “Sixty-five.”

         “It’ll be an honour to paint His Grace. When will it be convenient for him to sit for me?”

         Well, I’d been specifically asked for intellectuals, so I could afford to be beaten out of five gulden. “His Grace feels it would be more appropriate for you to call on him.”

         It’s the light, I explained. It’s technical. He didn’t like it, but he was even less keen on jeopardising the mission. “His Grace will be pleased to sit for you at noon tomorrow.”

         I shook my head. Noon light very bad. Early morning much better. He agreed, reluctantly. I specified one hour after sunrise; just because I could, I guess. (Another thing my mother used to say: don’t play with your food.)

         He stood up to go, paused to admire the icon on my wall. “Is that—?”

         “Genuine?” I did my silvery laugh. “Sadly, no. It’s a copy. I painted it.”

         “Remarkable.”

         “Thank you.”

         Actually, it’s genuine, cost me a fortune. My one indulgence. “His Grace would be pleased to buy it,” he said.

         Would he now. “I’m afraid it’s not for sale.”

         “His Grace would be prepared to offer forty gulden.”

         I winced. I paid ten. Still. “It’s not for sale,” I repeated. “It wouldn’t be right, selling a copy. Besides, I did it for my own devotional use, as an act of penance. Taking money for it would undo all the good work, don’t you think?”

         “His Grace would grant you absolution.”

         Sorry, but I don’t take absolution from strange men. “Let me think about it,” I said.

         He pulled a grumpy face. “As you wish. Peace be upon you.”

         “Thank you,” I said politely. Always say thank you, even for presents you didn’t want.

* * *

         This matter of a quarter-inch, and the difference it makes.

         I refer you to Saloninus, On Beauty, chapter twenty-six, paragraph four. You’ll recall that Saloninus proves, mathematically and by examples drawn from great art, that the divide between beautiful and ugly is almost exactly a quarter of an inch—fifteen sixty-fourths of an inch, to be precise. Take the most beautiful nose you can think of, and shorten it, or lengthen it, one quarter inch. Result; ugliness. Same goes for lips, chins, distance between eyes, all the geometrical relationships that make up the human face. Seven thirty-seconds longer or shorter you can get away with, but fifteen sixty-fourths is the killer. It’s an absolute rule, infallible, inflexible.

         It’s also true. I proved it once. I did a series of self-portraits—possibly the best work, the second best work I’ve ever done, certainly the most lifelike—and when they were finished, I moved the various features about, to scale, in proportion. A quarter of an inch here and there made me into a goddess.

         Well, I exaggerate slightly. Nice-looking, anyhow; nice enough looking to get a husband, have my choice of two or three. Cross-reference with a mirror, measure carefully with calipers. Saloninus was right. A quarter inch separates warthog-ugly from beauty, what I am from what I should have been, hell from heaven. I soaked a rag in turpentine and wiped my face off the panels, leaving a neck, hair and a gap in between. Now that’s what I call a portrait.

* * *

         To paint the Patriarch Sighvat I made myself a brush.

         To make a brush fit to paint the Vice-regent of the Earth, brother of the Invincible Sun, first of all you need a woodcock. You probably know more about birds than I do; apparently a woodcock is a little fluttery thing, lives by pecking worms out of the mud with its ridiculously long beak. Anyway, they’re notoriously hard to catch, which makes them expensive. Also, they don’t live around here—don’t ask me why; we have worms, we have mud, but apparently not the right sort—so they have to be fetched down from the North at vast expense, packed in crates of ice. People eat them, so I’m told; rich people, naturally. Takes three of the little buggers to make a snack. Tastes like chicken. Why bother?

         But the pin feathers of a woodcock make the very best paint-brushes. They’re tiny, about as long as a fingernail, and you have to know what to look for. You find them on the outside of the crook of the wing—where the index finger would be, if a wing was a hand. Be very careful pulling them out; use tweezers and extreme care, or you’ll crumple them up and they’ll be useless. I have a tiny little pair of silver tweezers, which I use for this purpose only.

         Consider the feather. Consider the various categories of its usefulness. The Invincible Sun designed them to make possible the unimaginable miracle of flight, something a bird can do and we brilliant, resourceful, educated humans can’t. So we kill the stupid, magically gifted birds and pull out their amazing feathers, stuff pillows with them, fletch arrows, or throw them away. The birds, you see, have a talent, an ability that supercedes anything we can do in godlike proportion—them up there, us down here, utterly divided and distinct from each other; except that birds are too thick to figure out that the white sticky stuff daubed all over the branches is birdlime, and all the divine grace and engineering of their wings won’t save them once they touch their claws to it.

         I assume the Invincible Sun intended it to be that way. Otherwise, why did He equip the woodcock with a feather that makes the best possible paintbrush?

* * *

         My father was an idiot. He once told me, in all seriousness, that he was without question the most intelligent man I would ever meet in my entire life. On one level, I’m sure he was right. He was a scholar by inclination and training. What he didn’t know about history, literature, and art wasn’t worth knowing. He was so smart, he was able to throw up a thriving law practice in his early forties and retire to his library and his study. He was clever enough to predict the Scherian war five years before anyone else, shrewd enough to invest the family fortune in shipyards (having foreseen that the war would be mostly at sea), wise enough to sell out of shipbuilding six months before war was declared and the shipyards were appropriated by the Crown; smart and clever and shrewd and wise enough to reinvest the substantial profit he made, along with the original capital, in the Neumis goldfields, literally weeks before the gold price shot up tenfold overnight.

         His only mistake, if you can call it that, was assuming the Cure Hardy would ally with us, rather than the Scherians. That was unfortunate, because as soon as the Cure Hardy joined up with Scheria, they occupied the goldfields and our investment was wiped out in a fingersnap. To be fair to him, it was a pretty close-run thing—most of the tribespeople wanted to join us, but the tribal chiefs liked the Scherians’ gifts slightly more than ours. It was one of those balanced-on-a-razor things, you see; a quarter of an inch, maybe, certainly no more.

         Pity and despise the poor bird, who can fly (on wings of paper, soaring above the heads of pedestrian, mundane humans) but who’s too dumb to suspect the white-smeared branch may not be all it seems. All right; idiot may be a trifle harsh. Unfortunate and foolish; is that better? But the division between getting it right and getting it wrong—fifteen sixty-fourths, give or take—might as well be the width of the Eastern Sea, when the bailiff’s men come to take your furniture away. And his books; they took all his books, loaded them on a cart and wheeled it round to a dealer, who glanced at them, pointed out that there wasn’t much call for that sort of thing, and gave them ninety trachy for the lot.

         I was the one who found him, hanging in the coach house. Thanks, dad.

* * *

         I make no excuses for what I do. On that day, my thirteenth birthday, I learnt an essential lesson about the value of money. Money, I suddenly realised (sort of a revelation, but without angels and sunbeams) is life; absence of money brings death. And we—my mother, my brothers and I—had no money at all. What to do?

* * *

         Do you know the City at all? Maybe you don’t. My studio was at the junction of Goosefair and Foregate, right at the top of the South Hill, highest and most expensive district south of the River. Also the only place in Town where you can get decent light more than five hours a day; everywhere else, the buildings are so close together that everyone is in everyone else’s shade. The rent on that place was unbelievable, but my clients liked it because it was walking distance from home—not that they walked; they arrived in chairs and carriages. I was up two flights of stairs (they moaned about that) for the same reason that I lived on top of the hill. The very best light. And nobody could see in through the window. I also had the floor below and the cellar, but that wasn’t common knowledge.

         The Patriarch turned out to be rather a nice old man. He’d have been quite distinguished-looking, if it wasn’t for the way his nose ended in a distinct knob. He had a full head of snow-white hair, fine and rather lifeless, which for some reason he saw fit to part down the middle. The trimmed moustache and tiny chin-tuft beard were the pinnacle of style fifty years ago (study portraiture and you get a working knowledge of men’s fashions through the ages, absolutely free). Pale blue eyes, but not watery-pale. His lips were thin and moist. Rumour had it that he kept six mistresses, including a mother-daughter pair; but you know what? Half the time, I think Rumour makes stuff up.

         Anyway, I was perfectly safe. Like Senoebis; six hundred years of peace, because the Senoebites have nothing anybody could possibly want to take away from them. “This portrait,” I said. “Where’s it going to hang?”

         He did something with his mouth that expressed mild embarrassment extremely well. “In the chapter-house at the Silver Wing,” he said. “They insisted. One doesn’t want to cause offence by refusing too often.”

         I paused for a moment and pictured the place in my mind. Bare golden stone, high vaulted roof, sidelit, the glass mostly red and blue. “Would you mind standing up for just a moment?”

         He raised an eyebrow and stood up. I rotated his chair forty degrees north-east. “Ah,” he said, “the light.”

         “I paint by the inner light,” I told him. “But sometimes it needs a little prompting.”

         That got me a little smile; I squiggled it down in coarse charcoal sweeps before it got away. Naturally I wouldn’t paint him smiling, but it helps to understand the mechanism of the face, if that makes any sense; where the various bits go to when they move. “I’m going to sketch you from lots of different angles,” I said. “Otherwise you’ll come out looking all flat. Please just carry on looking straight ahead, and try and pretend I’m not here.”

         “I was very taken with your portrait of the Marchioness Svangerd,” he said to the wall, as I snuck round the side of him like an outflanking army.

         “Thank you,” I said. “Though I have to say, I don’t think it was terribly like her, somehow.”

         “I think that was why I liked it.”

         Ecclesiastical wit. I was honoured. I looked round to see if there was a clerk hovering in the shadows to write it all down. “I do try not to improve people,” I said.

         “Ah. Pity. So many people could do with improvement.”

         “True. But I prefer to bring out the best of what’s actually there.”

         “Indeed. Which aspect of me will you be focussing on?”

         “Your compassion.”

         “Oh.” Bewilderment, probably, rather than disappointment. “Oh well, carry on.”

         Most painters establish proportions by variants on the rule-of-thumb principle—you’ve seen them hold a brush upright at arm’s length and squint at it. What they’re thinking is: his head’s from the tip of the bristles to the top of the ferrule. Then, once you’ve got the head, you can go by the rules—from the collar-bone to the ankles is eight heads, and so on. I pretend to do all that, because it’s expected, but really I work entirely by eye. I guess perspectives and proportions just come intuitively to me; like there are people who can add up columns of figures at a glance, or catch a ball with their eyes shut. It’s another way of saying: I know what’s right without having to think. And what’s wrong, naturally.

         Most of what I do is wrong. I don’t think about it.

         It helps if you make conversation. “Can I ask your professional opinion?”

         Again I’d surprised him. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested.”

         “My father was a scholar,” I said. Men find that an acceptable explanation.

         “What did you want to—?”

         “Ah, right,” I said. I confined his forehead, nose and jaw inside a rather cavalier sweep of the charcoal. “What do you make of the doctrine of the dual procession of the Divine Aura?”

         Naughty of me, I guess, to lead with something like that. “The dual procession—?”

         “Only,” I went on, “it seems a bit over-complicated, to a layman like me. To say that the Aura proceeds simultaneously and equally from the Body Spiritual and the Body Material; how would you reconcile that with the economy principle and Saloninus’s Razor?”

         He blinked. “Well,” he said.

         I waited. I filled in the time outlining the bags under his eyes.

         “It may seem complicated on a simplistic level,” he said eventually. “Considered ontologically, it’s in fact a sublime example of the overarching unity of Form. What I mean by that is—”

         “I see,” I said. “But in that case, what about the implications for the material transmigration of the soul? I’m assuming you’re going to tell me that the Aura transubstantiates in the same way as the soul transmigrates, through grace into essence, from essence into affirmation.”

         “Yes.”

         “I’m with you so far,” I said. “I think. But in that case, surely you’re implying that the soul is capable of reduction into physical form.”

         I had an idea I was beginning to annoy him. “I don’t think so.”

         “Well, it follows, doesn’t it? If the Aura can proceed from the physical, then so can the soul. And, by the same token, it can also proceed to the physical.” I did my silvery laugh again. “Which means in theory you could, I don’t know, distil it in an alembic and bottle it. Which is—”

         “Not possible,” he said firmly.

         “No, of course not. Though I gather there’s a sort of fringe group of alchemists—”

         “Heretics,” he said. “Heretics and blasphemers. I do hope you haven’t been filling your mind with that sort of nonsense.”

         “Of course not,” I said primly. “It’s impossible, like you said. All I was wondering was, why is it impossible? It’s just me being stupid, I know, but I can’t seem to grasp the theory.”

         “Read Pacatian,” he snapped. “It’s all in there, everything you need to know.”

         “Pacatian.” I did a dumb-show of making a note of the name on the back of my hand in charcoal. Let the record show, however, that I first read Pacatian when I was nine, and a dozen times since then, and he’s about as convincing as a one-sided coin. “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve set my mind at rest.” Which, poor devil, he had.

* * *

         My brothers, let it be said, are nothing like my father, or my mother, or me. They’ve got energy, drive, a sort of restless vitality that’s practically irresistible—rest a kettle on their heads, my mother used to say, it’ll boil before you can count to ten. Add to that charm, good looks, and a moderate amount of brains; look out, world, here they come.

         My father’s death and our complete and utter ruin did slow them down just a little. They were away at the time, at the University. Bohemund was in his final year, Amalric in his third, Juifrez had only been there three months when the news reached them. Naturally, they came straight back, riding through the night (completely unnecessary; a man who’s dead today will almost certainly still be dead tomorrow, and the next day, worse luck; I guess they were so fired up with tormented energy, it was either some dramatic feat of endurance or spontaneous combustion), and practically their first words were; it’s all right, mum, don’t worry, sis, we’ll get it all back, and more, you’ll see. It, you’ll have observed, not him. They’re wired, but not stupid. They know the dead don’t return, and that if anything is to be done, it must be with the living. They were determined to do something. They always are.

         Among the few assets remaining to us was a tiny patch of barren rock up in the Crowfoot Mountains. We still owned it because nobody was prepared to buy it, or even give my father fifty gulden on it as security. Understandable. Mondelice (the Delectable Mountain; cartographers’ humour) sits on the flat Crow plains like a scab on smooth skin, with the Redwater curling round it like a cat’s tail. Generations of my mother’s family have been unable to sell it. They call it the Redwater because the river runs red; there’s some sort of poisonous salt in the rocks, which the snow-melt dissolves and washes down off the mountain. There are no fish in the Redwater, no grass grows on its banks. There are a few spindly willows; they last about ten years and then die. You can’t graze livestock anywhere near there; sheep just die, even goats. It’s two days across the plains in a cart to the nearest town, so quarrying would be prohibitively expensive. Besides, the rock is crumbly red sandstone, not much good, and there’s dozens of better sites much closer to civilisation, with better access and drinking water that doesn’t kill you. Also, bear in mind that we owned the mountain, not the plain, and there’s no public road; to get there, you cross about seven different owners’ land. Add to all that the fact that it’s searingly hot in summer and lethally cold in winter. Did I say tiny, by the way? Actually, it’s twice the size of the City, and you can see it from miles away. Anyway; we had that, and the town house, and a back-sun vineyard in the Mesoge, and that was it.

         My brothers called Mother and me into Father’s study. On the desk was a big sheaf of old parchment. The title deeds, they said, to Mondelice.

         Mother pulled a sad face. “Put them away,” she said. “You know as well as I do. It’s useless.”

         Bohemund did his big smile. “Agreed,” he said. “But did you ever stop and ask yourself, why is it useless?”

         Mother’s lived with Mondelice all her life. She grew up with her father moaning about it. He included it in her dowry as a joke. “Well,” she said, icy patient, “it’s poisonous.”

         “Mphm. Why is it poisonous?”

         When Bohemund dies, they’ll carve why? on his headstone. “Because it is,” Mother said. “There’s something nasty in the rocks. You know that.”

         But all three of them were grinning. “Iron,” Bohemund said.

         “You what?”

         “That’s what turns the river red,” Amalric said. He had one finger inserted in between the pages of a book. He flipped it open, spun it round and pointed. “It’s rust. Got to be. Look, it says, in Sulpicius’s Minerals. There’s a river in Aelia, just like the Redwater. Right next to the biggest iron ore mine in the world.”

         Mother frowned. “What’s he talking about?”

         “Don’t you get it?” Bohemund was starting to fizz. “We’re rich.”

         “Iron,” Amalric said. “You know how much the price of iron’s gone up since the war? Two hundred per cent. Since we lost Scheria, every scrap of iron we use has to come on a ship to Lonazep and then overland in a cart two hundred miles just to reach the border.”

         “And here we are,” put in Juifrez, “most likely sitting on the biggest deposit of iron in the world. A whole mountain made of the stuff. No wonder it kills all the fish.”

         For some reason I’ve never understood, Mother listened to Juifrez. The other two she was more or less immune to, had been since they were toddlers, but she had some weird notion Juifrez is smart. “That can’t be right,” she said. “My father—”

         “He thought it was just a heap of toxic rock,” Amalric said. “It’s understandable. We’ve all been taught that for generations; Mondelice is useless, don’t even think about it.”

         “Maybe,” I put in, “for a good reason.”

         Nobody heard me. “It can’t hurt to find out,” Juifrez said. “I mean, if we’re wrong, we’re wrong. And if we’re right—”

         So off they went to Mondelice. Forget the word went, it’s hopelessly inadequate. They wore out six horses galloping to Mondelice up the Great North Road, no nonsense about stopping to sleep or eat. My father always reckoned his sons moved at the speed of narrative; they could cover a thousand miles in the space of some time later they arrived at their destination. Distance is meaningless to people like that. And, almost before anyone had noticed they’d gone, they were back. It’s iron, they yelled (stumbling in through the door, riding-coats caked in dust and mud, faces ash-white with exhaustion). It’s iron all right. We brought back samples. Look!

         So that was it. In the nick of time, my brothers had found the treasure that had been there right under our noses all along; curtain, applause, house lights, all bow. But there was one small problem.

* * *

         One of the reasons my work is so expensive (though the clients don’t know this, of course) is that I do everything twice. One canvas, one exact copy. When they’re both finished, I stand back and look at them—because no exact copy is ever exact—and decide which one’s best; qualify that, which one’s most lifelike. That one I keep. The other one goes to the client.

         The Patriarch was delighted; he sent a clerk to tell me so. I even got a bonus, which I confess I hadn’t been expecting, and which made me feel bad. I consoled myself by thinking of the tenant farmers in the Mesoge whose rents make it possible for the Patriarchs to have their portraits painted by the likes of me.

         The other copy, the one I kept, I hung in my cellar. I was incredibly lucky there. Of course, everybody knows how the City was rebuilt after the Fire, a quarter of a mile to the east of the old site; and how, when they were digging the foundations, they literally fell into the ruins of a much, much older city, so old that nobody knows who the builders were or what became of them. Slightly less well known is the extent to which the forgotten ancients were cleverer and more advanced than us—for example, they had a huge network of underground cisterns and sewers (just think of it; all the yucky stuff was flushed away down tunnels into an underground river, instead of being slung out the window into the street). One tiny portion of that network lies directly under the building where I live, and I have the use of it, for an extra ninety trachy a week. My gallery.

         You’d never think it had once been a watercourse. It’s bone dry, with a high vaulted roof supported by a dozen fluted granite columns, crowned with Archaic capitals. I went to a great deal of trouble to get the lighting right. I installed forty-seven large oil lamps and six chandeliers—you can adjust the height by an ingenious system of ratchets and pulleys, which I designed myself. Excuse me for boasting, but it really is the finest art display in the world (I’m talking about the room, not its contents). I’ve got fifty yards of wall space. I’m rapidly running out of room. Soon I’ll have to have a gallery built round the walls, and a staircase, to give me a second storey.

         In the middle of the floor, I have this drawing-table. It’s lit by a dozen lamps backed with mirrors, to close in the light. That’s where I do my best work.

         I had my specialist instruments made by a clockmaker. I didn’t tell him what they were for, and he didn’t ask. I gave him the drawings, which were so detailed as to be entirely unambiguous, and told him they were a present for my father. He looked at me and suggested a price. I didn’t argue.

         Among the things he made me was a magnifying glass. It’s a wonderful thing. Basically, take an inch-thick circle of clear glass, grind the edges thin, leaving the centre thick. I read about it in a book. The writer said such a thing ought to be theoretically possible, though he never tried to make one himself. The clockmaker told me it was the most amazing thing he’d ever come across in all his life. I ought to—correction, we ought to go into business making the things, we’d be rich, it was the sort of opportunity that only comes along once in a lifetime. I smiled at him. You’ve got ever such an interesting face, I told him; would you mind terribly much if I did your portrait? For free, naturally. He jumped at the chance, and now he’s seventeenth from the doorway on the right as you come in.

         With my wonderful glass, I can read the calibrations on the unbelievably precise calipers the clockmaker made for me. He had to use the glass to engrave them. To the naked eye, they’re invisible. Precision, it goes without saying, is the very essence of what I do. Seven thirty-seconds, remember? Only, with my wonderful instruments, I can be ever so more precise than that. I work in ten-thousands of an inch, to a margin of error of plus or minus two ten-thousandths.

         I measured up the Patriarch, reducing the intervals between the features of his face to absolute numbers. For measuring the angles, I had the clockmaker make me a protractor. It’s two sheets of thin glass with single threads of spider’s web silk sandwiched between them. If you know of anything thinner, please let me know. It’s the crudest instrument in the box, and one of these days I’ll make a mistake with it, and God only knows what’ll happen.

         Once you’ve got the numbers, the rest is just melodrama. I find it tedious and rather distasteful. I’m a scientist and an artist, after all, not a witch. Still, it works.

         I’m as jumpy as a cat when I’m working. The slightest noise, and—

         “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

         Luckily I’d just managed to grab hold of the tiny bottle before it tipped over. “Who the hell are you?”

         “I knocked,” he said, “and called out, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

         I scowled at him, trying my best to look furious rather than terrified. Just as well I’ve got the face for it. “So you barged in anyway. All right, what do you want?”

         “Just a minute or two of your time.”

         Not everyone in this town who dresses like a priest is one, so he could have been a lawyer or one of the high-up administrative grades, except people like that don’t make house calls. “You’re collecting for something.”

         Little smile. “No,” he said. Then he told me my name (which, as it happens, I already knew) and asked if I was the famous society artist.

         “You want your portrait painted.”

         “No.” Shake of the head. “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

         I looked at him. He was making me very nervous. “Oh come on,” I said. “You’re not that bad.”

         He had very pale blue eyes, and a snub nose; about my age, maybe a year younger. And I’ve seen and made the best of enough receding hairlines to know that in his case, the tonsure had been no great loss. Yes, of course I judge by appearances, they’re my job. On which basis I made up my mind about him on one second flat, exactly the same way people make their minds up about me.

         “Nice of you to say so,” he said, “though even little white lies are still a sin. But that wasn’t what I meant.”

         “Perhaps you’d better leave.”

         “Perhaps.” He nodded. “I’m small and weedy and I don’t know the first thing about fighting or anything like that, and we’re underground, so nobody’s likely to see or hear anything. And you’re right, who would miss me? I didn’t tell anybody where I was going.”

         Mind-reading is of course impossible, even for a fully trained adept of the Studium, or at least that’s what they tell us. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

         He didn’t react to that at all. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

         “Yes.”

         “Fair enough. You painted all of these?”

         “Yes.”

         He nodded. “In case you were wondering,” he said, “I can’t prove a damn thing. Certainly not enough to make charges stick in a court of law. Actually,” he added with a grin, “I don’t think there is a law that covers what you do, and nobody’s going to be passing one in a hurry, everybody would think he was mad. I mean, it’s not murder, or grievous bodily harm, or administering a noxious substance with intent. I’ve got to hand it to you, you’re clean as a whistle.”

         “Who are you?”

         He smiled awkwardly. “Eustatius,” he said. “At least, that’s my name in religion. I’m from Scheria originally, so you probably couldn’t pronounce what my mother used to call me. I’m a junior deacon of the Studium, currently assigned to field duty.”

         “Good for you,” I said. “And what exactly am I supposed to have done?”

         He sighed. “Oh, don’t make me say it,” he said, “it sounds so silly. And, like I just said, I can’t prove it. Sure, I can point out that in the last year, forty-six people, rich and famous and influential people, who’ve had their portraits painted by you have suffered catastrophic strokes, leaving them paralysed and catatonic. But you would then point out, equally truthfully, that sixty-seven equally rich, famous and influential people have also been painted by you and are as fit as fiddles. And then you’d challenge me to tell the jury exactly how you’re supposed to have done these dreadful things, and I’d just shrug and admit I don’t have a clue, beyond basic philosophical and theological theory.”

         He was looking past me, at the bookshelf; Pacatian, and Saloninus’s Existence and Reality. I winced. A bit like hanging the murder weapon on your wall, mounted on a little plaque.

         “In case you’re wondering,” he went on—he seemed to like that phrase—”I’m a duly ordained priest.”

         “Good for you. So what?”

         “Duly authorised,” he said, “to hear confessions, and bound not to repeat them. Not even if ordered to do so by a court. Not even if they torture me. And if I did, it wouldn’t be admissible in evidence.”

         I looked him straight in the eye. Long practice. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not religious.”

         “Me neither. I’m a scientist. And I’m curious. And I can’t prove anything, but sometimes there are circumstances where my order feels obliged to take action that isn’t strictly in accordance with due process, and to be brutally frank, you don’t have any relatives or friends who could make trouble for us if we did. And as the field officer assigned to your case—” He gave me a sort of dying-lamb look. “Tell me how you do it, that’s all I want to know. And then I’ll go back to my superiors and tell them the whole thing’s just a string of coincidences and you’re just a harmless working girl. Please?”

* * *

         There was one small problem; namely, in order to gouge unlimited wealth out of Mondelice, we needed a little bit of working capital—a few measly thousands, fleabites, the sort of sum we could make in a couple of hours once we were up and running and in full production. Or, if you cared to look at it from a slightly different perspective, a vast fortune; roughly the same as it would cost to buy a cattle ranch, or build and equip three warships, or a small aqueduct.

         At this point, opinions started to differ, like a beam of wood splintering. Mother said, let’s just sell it for what we can get, now that we can prove it’s worth something. Bohemund said, don’t be stupid, we still owe God knows how much, they only leave us alone because they know we’re broke; if anybody thought we had anything worth having, all he’d have to do would be buy up our debts for a trachy on the gulden and then he could take it from us for practically nothing. Juifrez said, fine, in that case, we’ll borrow the money. Using what as security, said Bohemund; you can’t have been listening, because the moment we tell anyone we’ve got something, they’ll be on us like wolves.

         “Fine,” I said. “We’ll just have to raise it some other way. Work for it, something like that.”

         They all looked at me. “Sweetheart,” my mother said, “if we could earn that sort of money, we wouldn’t need Mondelice. We wouldn’t need anything. But we can’t.” She turned back to Juifrez. “Surely we can find someone who’ll give us something for it. Just enough to clear the mortgages off the vineyard, and then we could sell this house and move to the country.”

         “I know a way to make money,” I said.

         “Will somebody put a cloth over her or something?” Amalric said. “She’s starting to get on my nerves.”

* * *

         So I moved out. Nobody was happy about this, me included. My mother pointed out that a young single girl living on her own was either a whore or begging to be treated like one, and quite apart from anything else, the shame and dishonour I would bring on my family— We haven’t spoken since.

         I found out what to do from my father’s research notes. He had a whole shelf of notebooks, tastefully bound in mellow brown calf, which nobody had ever read. I missed him so much. His handwriting was very distinctive—at first sight it looked classically neat and elegant, but when you tried to read it, you could barely make it out—and even if I couldn’t understand what it was about, at least it was a little part of him, my father still present in the world in some form. Like a portrait, I guess, which is why people want the damn things; you can still see his face, even though he’s dead.

         Dad always had to know best, and he loved picking fights with dead scholars. In the seventh volume of his collected notes and observations, he really tore into Modestus of Apamene (who lived six hundred years ago) because Modestus believed that it might be possible—purely theoretically—to reduce a man’s soul into material form, on the same principle as the dual procession of the Divine Aura as outlined in Pacatian and developed by Saloninus in the third book of the Republic. Dad wasn’t impressed by any of that. It can’t be done, he reckoned; and to prove it, he scrawled page after page after page of complex mathematical calculations (so that’s what he used to get up to, locked away in his study, with my brothers and me forbidden to make the slightest sound, on pain of death) leading to the triumphant conclusion that Modestus was a fool and a rogue. What Dad proposed doing about that, he didn’t say, but digging up his bones and flinging them into the sea would probably have been a good starting-off point.

         Except that Dad got his sums wrong. It was only a tiny little slip, and if I wasn’t unnaturally good at figures (a secret I’ve kept to myself all my life, since nobody likes a smartass, particularly if she’s a girl) I’d never have picked up on it. But there it was, a very small difference between what he thought was true and the truth.

         So I did the sums again, having made the very slight adjustment, and you know what?

* * *

         I have this wonderful memory for faces. If I meet someone just once, I can close my eyes and there’s the face, just so.

         “That’s blackmail,” I said.

         He shrugged. “It’s scholarship,” he said. “A man’s all-consuming need to know the truth, to add to the sum of human knowledge. Of course, the idea is, once you’ve learned something, you’re supposed to share it with other people, like they said I had to share my toys with my sisters when I was a kid. But I never liked doing that. I just want to know, for myself.”

         “My father was like that,” I said.

         “Well, there you go. You can understand. And I promise, I won’t tell anyone, ever. Or,” he added, turning his face to stone, “I can have you burned as a witch. Your choice.”

         So I told him.

         He didn’t believe me, of course. So I pulled out my notebooks and showed him the pages and pages and pages of scrawled mathematical calculations, which he obviously didn’t understand. But he had faith. “All right,” he said. “How do you actually do it?”

         So I told him. After a bit he asked for a pen and some paper. No, I said, no notes. You never know whose hands notes might fall into. He sighed, but he’d come so close, so very close, within a quarter-inch of getting what he wanted, and having me killed wouldn’t make up for that, not one bit. He gave in. I like it when people are reasonable.

         When he’d gone, I made a few sketches, while the memory was fresh in my mind.

* * *

         My brothers decided they’d do it all themselves.

         Nothing to it, really. Just hack galleries into the side of the mountain, drag out the ore, crush it, smelt it, stack the ingots, carry them down the mountain, load them on a cart, job done. They were strong as bears and proud as lions. They could do anything.

         Actually, they really were as strong as bears, and utterly determined, and my God, they stuck at it. They had pickaxes and rakes and big wicker baskets; they’d traded their fine Permian horses for a dozen good oxen, guaranteed salted, which promptly caught the fever and died, so everything that went up or down the mountain went on their backs. The people who told me about it later said the locals thought they were mad. For one thing there was no water, apart from the red, poisonous stuff. As you know, a gallon of water weighs ten pounds. The nearest clean spring was a mile and a half away. But they’d made their minds up; wealth beyond their wildest dreams was there for the taking, and all that separated them from it was a little hard work and a little inconvenience. A matter of perspective, you see; compared to the rewards, the expenditure of effort was trivial. So they stuck at it, for three months, until a gallery caved in and broke Amalric’s back.

* * *

         That week, I got three new commissions; also my first ever cancellation.

         “Why’s he changed his mind?” I asked the clerk. His Grace had decided that it would be inappropriate. I asked what that meant, exactly, and got no answer.

         Well; you can get so far and no further. I sat down and did some figuring. The cost of setting up a viable iron ore mine on Mondelice, doing everything properly, which is the only way—I’d found out all about it; read Auxellus on mining operations, talked to surveyors, contractors, gangmasters, hauliers, commodities merchants, compared prices on everything from shovel handles to flat-bottomed barges—was nine thousand, eight hundred gulden. So far, forgetting about the three new commissions, I’d earned nine thousand, four hundred. Almost there; so very, very close.

         I sat and looked at the figures. Four hundred gulden. A trivial sum, or just slightly more than a stonemason in the slate quarries would be likely to earn in his lifetime. So I went back through my costings, to see if I could shave a little off here and there, like the industrious gentlemen who make their living clipping tiny little bits of silver off the edges of coins. But I’d done too good a job. Everything was pared right down to the bone.

         Well, I thought. It’s begun. First the intellectually curious monk from the Studium, who by some weird coincidence had a massive stroke forty-eight hours after he visited me. Nothing could be proved, of course, but as he’d pointed out, the fine and upstanding scholars of the Studium don’t need evidence. And if I had an unfortunate accident (these old houses are firetraps, everyone knows that) who would miss me? But a Brother of the greatest house of learning in the world is a different matter entirely; if he’s not in his stall in Chapter, questions are asked.

         My first cancellation; word starting to spread, you don’t want anything to do with her, bad things happen to her customers. Presumably the fine and upstanding scholars had been keeping a lid on the rumour while they conducted their scientifically organised investigations, waiting for enough instances, a sufficient ratio, to satisfy their particular version of the burden of proof. Quite possibly they’d sent poor Brother Eustatius along to see what would happen to him, like a canary in a coal mine. All in all, this would be a good time to run; don’t stop to gather your five most treasured possessions, or even put on your hat. Just go.

         Four hundred gulden short. I thought of Amalric, my brother—apparently he still knew what was going on and could understand what was said to him, but the only part of him that moved was his eyes; his eyes could still follow you round the room, like a tricksy portrait. The nine thousand four hundred was safely invested with the Knights, along with my will; if anything happens to me, anything at all... Four hundred stupid gulden. That’s two more portraits and two more sales to my unpleasant friend, and was it really likely that I’d be around that long? To do one more, quite possibly. Two, though; no. The Studium is many things, but nobody can accuse them of inefficiency.

         I consulted my diary. An appointment early in the morning, to paint a portrait of Her Grace the Countess—a fascinating woman, by all accounts; born in an obscure little village in the mountains, joined the Opera at age fifteen, married to the Count at eighteen, widowed at twenty-three; mistress of kings, prelates, and philosophers, the most celebrated and notorious patron of the arts in the Empire, officially still the fourth loveliest woman in the City; and it was a rush job, she needed the portrait as a birthday present for some hapless satellite or other, and she’d promised cash on delivery, and her word was as good as money in the bank. Seventy gulden from her, a hundred and thirty from my friend, who’d rather have all his teeth pulled with rusty pliers than miss out on a collector’s piece like that. Still two hundred short. So close, but not enough.

         A family of five could live quite happily—luxuriously—on capital of nine thousand six hundred gulden. And, if Mondelice hadn’t turned out to be one huge iron nugget, we’d have been perfectly content to do just that (only, if there had been no Mondelice, I would never have gone into business or earned so much as a bent trachy). But if I simply went home and handed them a draft on the Knights, I knew perfectly well what they’d do. They’d charge ahead, spend the lot, cut just one or two little corners that couldn’t possibly matter; they’d be bankrupt within the year, or crushed to death under a collapsed roof, and this time everything would be gone. So close you could practically touch it, but not close enough.

* * *

         I painted the Countess, and she took away the finished result while the paint was still wet. She paid cash, and a thirty gulden tip—ridiculously generous, but she could afford it and she was overjoyed with my work, proving that she was a woman of taste, because it was the best, second best, painting I’ve ever done. That’s me exactly, she said, several times; it’s like you’ve opened up my heart and looked inside. And thanks to you, I’ll be me for ever and ever, long after this flesh is dead and gone. I could see what she was getting at; a year or so later, and she wouldn’t be her any more. There would be slight changes, little differences, and she’d go from being the fourth loveliest woman in the City (with certificates to prove it) to a sad, hideous monster, a hermit crab in a brilliant pearl shell, a peasant family squatting in a ruined palace. You caught me just in time, she told me. Well.

         Thirty gulden. Thirty gulden is a hell of a lot of money, but not enough, so she might as well not have bothered. And if she’d had thirty gulden when she was fifteen, she’d never have left the mountain village. She’d have stayed there, and married a carter or a farrier, and lived happily ever after. Or at any rate a damn sight longer.

         I went to see my friend. I had a proposition for him.

* * *

         “You’ve never told me,” I said. “What do you do with them all?”

         He gave me a horrified look. “You don’t need to know that.”

         “Actually,” I said.

         “You don’t need to know.”

         I opened my portfolio and showed him a charcoal sketch of the Countess. He went white as a sheet. “Yes,” I said.

         “Her—”

         “Yes.”

         Actually, the way he managed to pull himself together was quite admirable. “We were lovers once,” he said. “Did you know that?”

         “No. I need two hundred for her.”

         “I haven’t got two hundred.” He wailed it at me, as if I’d got him stretched on a rack. I believed him.

         “How much have you got?”

         “A hundred and five. That’s all. That’s me wiped out.”

         Yes, but I had the extra thirty, so that was all right. But no, it wasn’t. I needed more. “When you say wiped out—”

         He was breathing fast and shallow. “There’s a few things I can sell,” he said. “A farm in the Mesoge, a half-share in a ship, some family silver.”

         “Good,” I said, “because you’ll need the money. But first, you’ve got to tell me. What do you do with them?”

         He explained. I’d broken him, I think, because it all came out in a rush. My guess is, he was relieved to be able to tell someone. He was, he told me, an alchemist. Like his father before him, he’d devoted his entire life to the search for immortality. Quite early on, he’d proved, mathematically, that eternal preservation of the physical is impossible, can’t be done (pages and pages and pages of calculations, no doubt); so he’d concentrated his researches on the doctrine of the dual procession of the Holy Aura—

         “Oh,” I said. “That.”

         Yes, that; and he was convinced that it was possible to reduce the very essence of a man’s intellect, character and memories into substantial form, something tangible, something—

         “Something you can keep in a bottle.”

         He gave me a look of pure loathing. “Yes,” he said. “Something you can keep in a bottle, for ever. True immortality. I know it can be done, and I’m so very close—”

         I looked at him. “Sure it can be done,” I said. “Tell you what. Give me four hundred gulden and I’ll tell you how. It’s not that difficult. If a woman can do it, it can’t be.”

         He shook his head, like a bull bothered by flies. “I don’t need to know that,” he said. “And I couldn’t do it, not to a living person, it’d be worse than murder.”

         “So you pay me to—”

         “Yes.” Hard to tell who he hated most, me or himself. “Because, you see, they don’t keep.” He stopped. I thought he was going to be sick. “Like apples, you know. If you don’t store them right, they go bad. But it’s not difficult, storing apples, so long as you know how. And I will,” he added savagely. “It’s just a matter of practice and experiment. I’m nearly there. It can only be something very slight.”

         “Thank you,” I said. And then I told him my proposition.

         I thought he was going to faint.

         He accepted.

* * *

         Ask any artist and they’ll tell you. The biggest test, the greatest achievement, is the successful self-portrait. I set up my easel (for the last time) and looked for the light. I paint by the inner light, but the other stuff helps too.

         When he told me about the storage problems, the going bad, he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. And money is useful—it’s everything—but I didn’t get started in this business just for money.

         And I’m an artist, and I’m good at it. I set up my mirror; back to the window, mirror towards it, so that the light was reflected onto my face. I laid out the basic lines in ochre, then built up in colour, shadows first, then the light. It’s a cliché, isn’t it, about not being able to look at yourself in the mirror when you’re ashamed of something. Now I’m more ashamed of what I’ve done than anyone else alive, but for me, looking in the mirror was the only way out, the only way I could put it right. Actually, that’s garbage. Skewed perspective. Hardly surprising. Live with someone like me for twenty-six years, of course you’ll end up seeing all twisted.

         There’s a moment when it stops being just lines and shapes and it becomes a face; like a house when people move in. I took a step back and looked at her, me, on the canvas. Hello, I said.

         The reason I started in the business was I missed my father, so very, very much. I would close my eyes and see his face, exactly, fresh, perfect in every detail. So I painted him; over and over and over again, that’s why I learned, that’s how I learned, and each painting was better than the last until finally I got it just right, the best, really the best work I’ve ever done. My father in his habit as he lived; that’s a quotation, isn’t it? Anyhow, it was him, looking back at me. And I remembered Modestus of Apamene, the fool and rogue who’d been right all along; and I thought, I can do it. I can bring him back.

         And I did. I painted him, and I did the sums, and I reduced him, his intellect, character and memories, his very essence, and I put him in a bottle, for ever and ever. But my friend is right. Unless you store them right, they don’t keep. They go bad. And I really don’t want to talk about that.

         My friend will pay four hundred gulden into my account with the Knights, and in exchange I’ll give him this self-portrait, of the most remarkable mind and soul he’ll ever encounter, he agrees with me on that, together with the formula, the pages and pages and pages of maths. He’s agreed to give me time to write this, which I’ve now done. He thinks he’s figured out what he was doing wrong with the storage; it was just a little thing, he says, a tiny adjustment.

         I hope he’s right.

Copyright © 2019 K.J. Parker.

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

K.J. Parker is the author of the best-selling ‘Engineer’ trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous ‘Fencer’ (The Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and ‘Scavenger’ (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies, and has twice won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. “Portrait Of The Artist” is a sequel of sorts to “The Thought That Counts” in BCS #250. K.J. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

SANKALPA

by Marie Brennan

3. Samsara

         When I was four years old, I killed myself.

         I was the daughter of the king of Shurparaka. Though my father was a kshatriya, neither he nor his men had the hearts of that warrior caste. They spoke fearfully of the power of the House of Kuru and the invincible might of the great Bhishma who watched over the Kuru king. They would never have risked war against Hastinapura. And I knew, by instinct deeper than bone, that I could not accept such cowardice.

         I took my sari, filled it with stones, and tied it around my little body. Then I jumped into the river and knew no more.

* * *

         In my next lifetime I was born in the land of Kalinga, where warriors had courage and honor—but no strength. Our kingdom was dwindling, a shadow of what it had once been. I was three when the armies of Hastinapura overran us, burning as they went.

         My mother escaped the palace with me in her arms. I did not know what fate awaited us in the hands of our conquerors, but I had no wish to find out. I squirmed free of her grasp and ran back into the flames.

* * *

         My father in one life had made a sacred vow to Ganga, swearing he would not take up arms against the House of Kuru and the man who was the holy river’s son. Another celebrated my birth, because now he had a daughter he might wed to one of the hundred Kuru princes and thereby gain an alliance. A third lived too far away: his people, the Tusharas, had heard only distant tales of Hastinapura and had no contact with it in those days.

         Again and again I died. Better to cut my thread short and start again than waste lifetimes on a path that would not lead me to my goal.

         In those days men lived for centuries, if they were not killed. I could die as many times as necessary. However long it took, Bhishma would still be there.

2. Tapasya

         My soul was no stranger to hardship and suffering.

         For twelve years I practiced austerities in the woods, astonishing even the sages and ascetics. I abandoned the luxuries I had known as a princess and allowed my hair to grow into matted locks. I let dirt and ash cover my skin, where once I had worn nothing harsher than silk.

         One year spent standing in the waters of the Yamuna, whose goddess is the sister of death, but I did not die. One year spent standing on the tips of my toes, my balance never wavering, held aloft by my unflinching will. Advised by my grandfather Hotravahana, I learned to live without food, to survive for months on the nourishment of a single leaf or the vitality of the air itself.

         I traveled to Prayaga and made sacrifices there; I studied at the ashrams of Narada, and Chyavana, and Vishvamitra, and many more. I bathed in the waters of Ganga, and she, knowing my purpose, cursed me: to be reborn as a river, bearing water only four months of the year, difficult to approach, haunted by crocodiles. But such was the power of my austerities that only half my soul fell to this curse; the other half continued onward, burning the heavens themselves with the heat of my determination.

         Until Lord Shiva himself appeared before me and granted my wish, the vengeance that had driven me to such extremes.

         Then I built a pyre on the banks of the Yamuna and gave my body to the flames.

5. Prati-Prasav

         No one dared to touch the garland of lotuses that hung from a pillar outside the palace of the Panchala king Drupada. For long years they hung there, but their petals never withered; they remained fresh and soft, awaiting the hand of a courageous warrior. Lord Karttikeya, son of Shiva, had declared that whoever took up the garland would destroy Bhishma, the holy river’s son.

         No such warrior lived in Panchala, nor in any of the kingdoms of Bharatavarsha. The garland’s maker had carried it from one end of the land to the other without finding anyone willing to bear its burden. Even Drupada, that mighty king, refused to take it up.

         By the time I was born to Drupada, all his court were accustomed to its presence. And young as I was, small as I was, no one thought I would reach up to touch the ever-fresh lotuses.

         My father shouted in fear, but it was too late. The garland slipped from the pillar into my hand, and I placed it around my neck.

         And I remembered.

         Remembered flinging the garland onto that stone in fury and contempt. Remembered the countless refusals of kings and princes, all of them too frightened to face Bhishma, even with the blessing of great Lord Karttikeya. Remembered returning to the forest and my austerities and my pyre.

         Remembered why I had begun.

1. Svayamvara

         A grand gathering of kings and princes, noble warriors all. My father was the king of Kashi, and he made a promise to myself and my two sisters: that we would choose our own husbands. And so all the men came, resplendent in their silks and their armor, bearing weapons and gifts, hoping to win our favor.

         My sisters giggled and whispered in the nights preceding the ceremony, speculating as to who might come, whom they might choose. I listened and smiled, but I did not join in, because I already knew my answer.

         On the day of the choosing, I stood with a garland of roses in my hands, their petals growing damp against my palms. Waiting for the moment of my choice.

         But then came a clamor at the door. A late arrival, riding in a splendid chariot decked not for display but for war. In a voice that rang throughout the hall, he declared that he had come to claim brides for his brother, and he invited the men in that place to oppose him if they could.

         He did not invite us. For him, that ceremony of our choosing was a thing of no consequence.

         With one strong arm he swept all three of us into his chariot. Paralyzed with shock, my voice frozen in fear, I could make no sound, but the roses crumpled in my hands. The kings and princes gave chase, but he defeated them all. Even Shalva, mighty Shalva, Shalva for whom I waited with my garland, fell to that invader’s hand. And when he did, the roses slipped from my fingers to the ground.

         Even then, I thought all was not lost. Shalva was not dead, and when I was brought to Hastinapura with my sisters, I asserted my choice. My sisters might be just as pleased to wed the Kuru king as any other, but I had chosen Shalva. And Bhishma, who had torn us all from that hall, gave me his blessing to go.

         But no one would take me in.

         Not Shalva, shamed by his defeat at Bhishma’s hands. He would take no woman who had been stolen by another—no woman whose virtue was tarnished by the touch of another man. Not my father, the king of Kashi, who thought I should be pleased to join my sisters in Hastinapura.

         And not Bhishma. He who had stolen my happiness for the sake of his brother’s now turned me away. Even when his own guru took pity on me and ordered him to marry me, even when they battled to the brink of death itself, Bhishma refused. For he had sworn a vow of celibacy, and his dharma was too precious to him to sacrifice that vow.

         It mattered nothing to him what my own dharma might be. That by his theft, he had robbed me of my love and my future. Great-hearted Bhishma, father to all the kingdom of the Kurus, would have been more kind had he killed me.

         So I vowed to give him that kindness in return.

4. Janma

         Even in this life, I was not what I should have been.

         Drupada of Panchala had his own bitterness, his own wish for revenge, and prayed to Lord Shiva for a son. The Mahadeva answered his prayer—but in sideways fashion: that Drupada should have both a daughter and a son; a daughter who would become a son; a daughter who would be a son.

         When his queen conceived, Drupada gave thanks. When she gave birth, he wondered if he was cursed.

         For indeed, she had given birth to a daughter. A baby girl—and how could such ever be the instrument of his vengeance? While Drupada’s wife had faith, he doubted.

         Together they found an answer of sorts. They resolved in all ways to raise me as a boy: to conduct the ceremonies for the birth of a son, to give me the education in scriptures and war that would befit a prince.

         So well did they hide this from all the world that no one ever suspected. So well did they hide it that I myself never understood—never saw the proofs that would have made me realize I was not in all ways a man of the Panchalas.

         For only a man of the Panchalas could do as Drupada wished. And only a man of the Panchalas could do what Lord Shiva had promised me, before I burned.

7. Kshatriya

         When the great Kurukshetra War began, I was there.

         Together with the rest of the Panchalas, with my father and my brothers and my sister Draupadi, I arrayed myself for battle, with my shining mail and my keen-edged weapons and my chariot drawn by horses the color of unbaked clay. I was not the greatest warrior on our side; that honor belonged to the five Pandava brothers, Draupadi’s husbands, and to holy Krishna, and to Krishna’s brother Balarama, and others besides. My own brother Drishtadyumna was greater than I, and our brothers Yudhamanyu and Uttamaujas rode in honor alongside the chariot of Arjuna: the great archer, mightiest of the Pandavas, gifted with holy power by the gods themselves.

         But Arjuna rode alongside my chariot, with his brother on the other side. Because I had sworn to kill Bhishma.

         On those broad fields the warriors died in their thousands, in their tens and hundreds of thousands. It was the end of an age: the death of the Dvapara Yuga, when dharma wavered on only two pillars, and the beginning of the Kali Yuga, the fallen age where mankind clings to only a single remaining pillar and righteousness is all but lost. We watered the field of Kurukshetra with blood, built mountains of bones and shattered steel.

         I loosed more arrows than I could count and counted every one that struck my flesh. Time and again my bowstring was cut, my bow itself shattered by someone else’s shot; I fell from my chariot and found another and fought with every weapon that came to hand. I strove to avoid Drona, my former teacher, my father’s hated enemy, because it was not my destiny but my brother Drishtadyumna’s to kill him, and my fight lay elsewhere. But I fought Drona’s son Ashvatthama, again and again, flinging the broken remnants of my sword at him and escaping to re-arm myself and return to the fray.

         Sunrise to sunset, day after day. Strive how I might, I could not draw near Bhishma. Our Kuru enemies knew of my vow, and knew in turn that Bhishma had sworn he would not fight me.

         Not out of guilt for what he had done. Because he refused to fight one who had formerly been a woman.

6. Yaksha

         In the regions outside my father Drupada’s capital was a forest considered to be haunted by spirits and strange creatures. In that forest I found a high-walled mansion, fragrant with smoke but seemingly uninhabited.

         In that mansion I sat down and prepared to starve to death.

         My secret was a secret no more. My father and mother, clinging to their faith in Lord Shiva, had wed me to a princess of the Dasarnas. And I, all unwitting, had gone to her bed.

         Even now the armies of the Dasarnas mustered outside my father’s walls, their king Hiranyavarman swearing to kill Drupada for the insult to his line, that the Panchalas had sent a woman to be a husband to their princess. I had taken up the garland of lotuses, vowed to be the instrument of my own revenge against Bhishma... but I loved and honored my family in this life, and I could not put my desires above their well-being. Instead I would die, and seek another life in which Lord Shiva might grant my prayer.

         Starvation felt familiar. In my past life I had known how to endure it, how to live for months without the taste of food. I would not call on that knowledge now. My fixed intention was to die.

         Until a voice spoke from the air. It misunderstood the purpose of my fast, thinking I sought through austerity to accomplish some other end. It offered to grant my desire.

         Again and again I refused, saying that what I wished could not be done. But the voice revealed itself as Sthunakarna, a chief of the yakshas, the spirits of nature that serve the god Kubera. Finally, despairing, I told him of all that had befallen me.

         Laughing, the yaksha materialized before me, leaf-green and wild. For one such as he, my problem was easily solved.

         The yaksha’s favor was meant to be temporary. I promised to return as soon as the armies of the Dasarnas had left, as soon as I had carried out my duty to my wife.

         I kept my word. But in my absence, Lord Kubera discovered what Sthunakarna had done. That mighty god cursed the yaksha for his presumption—cursed the yakshini for her folly. I would remain a man until I died, and she would not regain the masculinity she had lent me until I was gone.

         For Sthunakarna, perhaps Lord Kubera’s decision was a curse.

         For me, it was a gift.

9. Karma

         Lying in my tent on the final night, I heard my brother Drishtadyumna’s screams, and I did not move.

         The war was over. Only a handful survived on the Kuru side; on ours, only a few handfuls more, of the millions who had taken the field in the great battle at the end of the age. One after the other, the commanders of the Kuru army had been slain; the Pandava brothers had vanquished their evil cousin, the whip and goad to all this strife. But in the eighteen days of fighting, the rules of honorable combat had been broken again and again. Arjuna had shot Bhishma while the latter faced me. His brother had struck below the waist in a duel with maces. Drishtadyumna had slain Drona, his own guru.

         Such things do not pass without cost.

         When Drona’s son Ashvatthama stalked through our nighttime camp, cutting down our few remaining warriors as they lurched out of sleep, I knew from the blood on his hands and his feet that he had not given my brother a warrior’s honorable death. And I knew from the light within him that he was filled with divine power, for Ashvatthama was the avatar of a Rudra, a servant of Lord Shiva, and had fully awakened to his nature.

         The gods grant their blessings and their curses where they choose—even on both sides of a war. Mahadeva might have granted my prayer, and that of my father, but he granted Ashvatthama’s prayers as well. And I was not the only one who had begged Lord Shiva for vengeance.

8. Darshana

         Days of slaughter. All on our side knew the truth: that so long as Bhishma commanded the Kuru armies, we could not prevail.

         Again and again he fled from me. Because I had once been a woman: the princess Amba, stolen from her svayamvara and abandoned by everyone; the princess Shikhandini, raised as the man Shikhandi. That I was now a man in body as well as spirit meant nothing to him.

         I had never meant anything to him.

         Inexorable forces, driving against one another without yielding. Lord Shiva had promised me, his son Lord Karttikeya had promised me, that I would kill Bhishma in revenge for what he had done. But Bhishma’s father had granted him a boon as well: because he yielded the throne to his younger brother, because he vowed never to take a wife whose children might threaten to divide the kingdom, Bhishma would never die until he chose to.

         Now the Kuru kingdom was torn in two by his brother’s grandsons instead, and the Dvapara Yuga was dying—but Bhishma yet lived.

         Through the screams and the mounting piles of dead I chased his battle-standard, a golden palm surmounted by five stars. Every time I glimpsed his white awning, his white horses, I bent my bow. I was not the greatest warrior on the field, but I was a fine archer; arrow after arrow found a home in his flesh. None of us were easily killed, though, and him least of all.

         An eddy in the flow of battle. A sudden swirl of forces, the formations breaking apart, and there before me was the white chariot.

         And Bhishma, for the first time since Amba left for the forest, met my gaze.

         Afterward, as he lay on his bed of arrows, he asserted again and again that it was Arjuna’s bow that brought him down, Arjuna’s shafts that caused him pain, Arjuna’s hand that killed him. Not mine.

         But Bhishma chose his death when he met my eyes. That great man, that revered guru, praised by his allies and his enemies alike, mourned by the very man who slew him, had been caught in a trap of dharma for too long. Forced by one principle to violate another; forced by honor to commit acts of dishonor. He fought against the worthy on behalf of an unworthy king. Though he strove to live righteously, he could not escape his failures.

         In the end, he could not escape me.

         One glance. In it, I saw regret. Apology. And acceptance.

         Then, at last, Bhishma fell.

0. Rakshasa

         Humans are not the only ones capable of comprehending dharma. Though many of the rakshasa race fall to evil, they can also rise to great good. And some, like humans, remain somewhere in the middle for lifetimes on end.

         My soul is that of a rakshasa. For my enemies, this is cause enough to condemn me: only a rakshasa would pray so fervently for vengeance, or cast aside her femininity for a masculine form and masculine deeds. To them, I am inhuman. Unnatural.

         When Arjuna undertook austerities to gain the power to defeat his enemies, he was praised. When the gods transcend the illusory division of male and female, they are worshipped.

         I have the soul of a rakshasa. I have been a woman and a man. I have been a princess and an outcast, an ascetic and a warrior. I have done both good and evil.

         I fear the judgment of neither man nor god.

10. Moksha

         He lay dying on the bed of arrows for days, long after the end of the war. Imparting his wisdom to the righteous king who would rule over the final fading of the Dvapara Yuga. Waiting for the heavens to reach an auspicious alignment for his passing.

         By then I was dead, cut in half by Ashvatthama in his rage. Ashvatthama in turn was cursed, condemned by Lord Krishna to roam the earth for three thousand years, bleeding and unable to speak. For souls as stained as ours, salvation does not come easily.

         But for Bhishma, the time had come. On the first day of Uttarayana, he breathed out for the final time and passed into the heavens.

         And I too had my release. Not from the wheel of rebirth, but from the chains that had bound me since the moment Bhishma swept me into his chariot. Whatever would come next—whether I rejoined the rest of my soul as a cursed and inhospitable river, was reborn as a rakshasa, or did penance as an animal for lifetimes to come—I was, at last, at peace.

Copyright © 2019 Marie Brennan

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Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to Turning Darkness Into Light, a sequel to the Hugo Award-nominated Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent. She is the author of the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, the urban fantasies Lies and Prophecy and Chains and Memory, the Onyx Court historical fantasy series, the Varekai novellas, and nearly sixty short stories, including ten in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as well as the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides. For more information, visit www.swantower.com, @swan_tower on Twitter, or at www.patreon.com/swan_tower.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ONE FOUND IN A WORLD OF THE LOST

by Shweta Adhyam

         The sun hung in the blue sky, the river roared, a breeze rustled through the forest, all unconcerned that a funeral pyre had exhausted itself on the bank. Some distance away, a sacred fire crackled in a quickly built fire-altar. Before it sat Pavitra’s father, as stunned as she herself was. Pavitra, thirteen years old, sat behind him, fiddling with the pebbles underfoot. Little one-armed Mohita sat beside her, aghast at the loss of his hero, Gayatri. Tamarasa, the pack’s story-singer and priest, fed the sacred fire ghee and puffed grains and dried grass, chanting shlokas in praise of Yama, that he might take good care of Gayatri’s departed soul.

         The story sang of Yama asking his son Yudhishthira to name the greatest wonder. Answered Yudhishthira, “Day after day, countless people die, yet the living wish to live forever.”

         Once upon a time, Pavitra knew, people lived to be old. They lay for months on their sick-beds, their families fighting to keep death away. And still death surprised them, cutting short what they had expected to be one more day of medicine and ministration. Now, of course, with Bhoomi, the very ground they lived upon, having turned hostile, they died as Gayatri had: quickly, violently, unexpectedly.

         Bhoomi these days let no one grow old; she did not even let them settle. Once, she had been forbearance itself, letting them tread upon her, rake her for crops, dig into her for dwellings. But, said the songs, she had grown tired of the constant fighting over who owned her. Now she quaked angrily whenever the people’s numbers grew, breaking open and swallowing one, or ten. If they so much as planted a seed or trod a path, her plants turned vicious, with snaking vines and falling branches crushing roofs and carts and shovels. Their food had as much a chance of killing them as they of killing it.

         Despite it all, underneath it all, they still expected to live forever.

         Certainly Pavitra had not thought—no one had thought—that Gayatri, her identical twin, would be next. Gayatri, who was unafraid of the hard life they led, who was decisive in hard situations, who inspired confidence in everyone around. Who more and more was accepted as leader of the pack, no matter that there were people older.

         That Gayatri.

         Gone.

         To a heaven? Reborn? Or—dreaded thought—a hell? Yama only knew.

         They had been tracking a boar, Gayatri and Pavitra, creeping forward quietly through the foliage towards its soft grunts. Then the grunts went silent and they were walking blind. Awfully dangerous, but it was so close and they were all so hungry always. Gayatri had trudged on and Pavitra, as usual, had followed. Apparently they hadn’t been as quiet as they thought, for in a half-breath, the bushes parted and it stood directly in their path, head lowered, pawing the ground, half-again the size of a typical boar. By the time Pavitra could raise her bow and nock an arrow, Gayatri had hefted her axe and taken off at a run towards it.

         Gayatri mistimed her blow, and the boar sank its tusks deep into her gut. Pavitra stood, stricken, not seeing the smallest opening until after the boar had flung Gayatri to the forest floor. Then a volley of her arrows had found their target. Then. Far too late.

         A sob escaped her into the chant-filled air around the sacred fire. Her father half-turned, his face sadder than Pavitra had thought possible, and took her hand. “What’s the matter, my love?”

         “Why am I such a useless hunter, Father? Why couldn’t I have stopped it, saved her?”

         Father faced her and placed a hand on her cheek. His eyes were serious as he looked into hers.

         “Pavitra, do you know how I know, with perfect certainty, that there wasn’t the smallest possibility of landing an arrow?”

         Pavitra shook her head.

         “Because Gayatri is not here.”

         Pavitra nodded, and her father gave her one last look, meant to be fortifying, before he turned back to the fire. He would say that, of course. He would not see, would not admit, that she was terrible at the one thing that kept them all fed.

         It had always been so. When she and Gayatri were six, they’d been taught to wring the necks of rabbits caught in the pack’s traps. It took them both many tries... but Gayatri had never hesitated. Not even once. Whereas Pavitra only had the courage to try because Gayatri went first. Pavitra’s weapon was the coward’s: bow and arrows, used at a safe distance. Gayatri used the axe. Gayatri could not wait until she was old enough to hunt, whereas it had taken Pavitra a very long time, to understand her responsibilities, to tear herself from Tamarasa’s side and remove her head from the whirlpool of story-songs it was forever in, to learn to shoot arrows. Even after all these years, she only hunted alongside Gayatri and still shed a tear or two for each kill.

         If Bhoomi was planning to doom their pack, she could not have done much better than have Yama take Gayatri and leave Pavitra behind.

* * *

         “I’ve nothing more to say to you all!” exclaimed the girl, Gayatri, in frustration and rage. Her father and Tamarasa, they at least ought to have known better, but they were being the worst of all. She picked up her axe. “I’m off to hunt. Perhaps you’ll all have come to your senses when I return.”

         She stalked off into the forest, reeling. In her mind was a terrifyingly real image of being gored to death by a wild boar; she had no idea where the image came from, and no one wanted to listen to her. So clear was the image, it was as if she had witnessed her own death from but a few paces away. Fear coursed through her veins; she fought it for control over herself. A good thing this situation had a ready remedy: find prey, meet it with her thick blade, return triumphant.

         She stopped. Soft hoof-beats sounded on the forest floor. She stepped quietly towards the sounds and saw a grey deer in a small clearing.

         She remembered herself saying, on many occasions, how hunting was like a meditation; how all the world fell away save the connection between hunter and prey, how the danger hummed under her skin like life itself. She remembered the words, but all she felt now was a wrongness. Her legs were like lead, the axe was unwieldy in her hands, and inside her skin she only felt terribly, terribly alone.

         She shook off her malaise. It was understandable—an image of her own death had occurred to her—but this was not time nor place for it. She forced herself to consider her prey.

         The deer, for some reason separated from its herd, nosed the lower branches of a tamarind tree, nudging off ripe fruit. It cracked the thin shell with its hooves and licked at the tangy flesh within.

         The girl chased away her morose thoughts—it wasn’t like her to have them. Deer were notoriously skittish; her usual method of rushing it was unlikely to work. Her hands itched for a bow and arrows, but the axe was her weapon; it was all she had. So she lifted it and—feeling an errant, quickly suppressed pang of sorrow for the beast—hurled it through the air at the deer’s head. A breathless moment later, it met its target with a thunk, lodging itself in the deer’s skull. The deer slumped down in the small clearing.

         But—what was this?—no, it hadn’t. Not all the way. It only sank to its knees. Then, as if it had turned into deer-coloured smoke, it roiled and dispersed and rose, filling out a new form.

         To the girl’s great astonishment, where the deer had knelt there was now a strange being with the body of a woman and the head of a deer. The axe had dissolved in the transformation, as if it were no more than a clod of mud tossed into a river. The girl forgot her discomfort and confusion... and gaped. Did such things happen outside of the story-songs? What next, was the creature to offer her a boon?

         The creature turned slowly around, peering at the trees. “Who was it that bested me?” it asked. “You have just saved me from a curse. Emerge, that I might reward you!”

         Surely this was a trick. Everything sensible in the girl screamed to run away, but she was rooted to the spot by wonder... and by another old memory, resurfacing, of herself saying that no one ever gained anything by risking nothing. And that memory did not let her be cowardly.

         “I see you,” said the creature, walking directly to where the girl was concealed behind bushes. “My saviour.”

         The girl forced herself to leave cover—cowardice did not become her—and stand face to face with the creature. Its eyes danced in mad delight; its mouth quavered in laughter so subtle the girl might have been imagining it.

         “What is your name?” asked the creature.

         “I am... Gayatri,” said the girl, and it felt wrong. As if she were lying. No, worse. As if she were stealing. “Who are you?”

         The creature sighed. “I have been under a curse so long I have forgotten my name. But I am a yakshini, and I remember the way back to my home. Will you accept a reward for having saved me?”

         The girl bit down the ready refusal on her tongue and said, “What kind of reward?”

         “What would you like? Safety and stability, escape from Bhoomi’s wrath? Beauty? Immortality? Simply name it.”

         Desire exploded in the girl’s heart at the mention of safety and stability, rest... She quashed it. What would she do in such a world? She was a hunter. But she’d been right, these were gifts that would benefit her pack, gifts worth taking risks for. Even if they came with a large sense of foreboding.

         “Can you make me invulnerable?” she said, giving in to the image of her death, the boar’s tusks sinking into her and what it would mean for them all if she did indeed die.

         The yakshini’s deer-face grinned; she nodded eagerly. She plucked a handful of leaves from a nearby bush and murmured some words over them. As her shloka reached its crescendo, she crushed the leaves and drew a shimmering circle, vertical in the air, with the juice they left on her fingers. The shimmer covered the circle for a moment, then retreated to its edges. Through it, the girl looked into a whole other world, one that was as hard and dry and scrubby as her own was green and wet and mossy, with stone pillars taking the place of trees as far as her eye could see.

* * *

         The story-songs said that when Yudhishthira answered that question of Yama’s, and numerous others besides, Yama was pleased enough to bring Yudhishthira’s brothers back to life.

         Pavitra would have no such luck.

         Tamarasa came up to her as she sat cradling Gayatri’s axe, trying to feel her lost sister through it. Mohita, who had followed Gayatri around everywhere, had now attached himself to Pavitra. She had patted him to sleep beside her.

         The ceremonies were complete, everyone had had their midday meal, and all were lounging about in various states of rest, just as they did every day. Soon Tamarasa would sing, lulling them to sleep. Usually, this afternoon rest was Pavitra’s favourite time of day. She especially loved it when the ballad of Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, rang out in Tamarasa’s warm, clear voice, the almost-presence of the goddess binding everyone together in love and understanding. Often, Pavitra would sing along.

         “What would you have me sing, Pavitra?” asked Tamarasa.

         “Why do you ask me?” Pavitra was still thinking of how she could have prevented Gayatri’s death. She had no time to choose songs.

         “There is no one to whom Gayatri was more important.”

         Pavitra looked pointedly in the direction of her father, who sat, morose, some distance away.

         “He has you,” said Tamarasa.

         “Me?! How could you compare me to Gayatri?”

         Tamarasa placed a hand on her head. “In the olden times, dear Pavitra, you would be a child upon the brink of adolescence. You would have just begun to take interest in your family’s trade, or quite another one, perhaps. Your father—or perhaps both your parents, for your mother might have still been alive—would have indulged whatever you wanted to learn, found you an apprenticeship. You would not have had to hunt for—”

         Pavitra pushed her hand away. “Why are you telling me all this, Tamarasa? Do you think I ought to grieve more?”

         “No, my dear, I merely wanted to caution you against mistaking the loss of Gayatri for some imagined inadequacy of your own.”

         “It’s not imagined,” muttered Pavitra. “She’s the daring one. She could jump into a fray with her axe and hack an animal to pieces. She was not—” Pavitra gulped, laid a hand on sleeping Mohita’s head. “She was not useless at... at the important things.”

         Tamarasa went quiet. There was no doubt which incident Pavitra was referring to.

         Some months ago, the pack had crossed the river on whose banks they now sat. They had lashed branches into rafts and poled their way across. Mohita, in the same raft as Pavitra and Gayatri, had stuck his hand in the rippling, gurgling water, laughingly splashing everyone on board as they indulgently let him. Until he screamed, and they saw that a gharial had his arm in its flat jaws, its scaly nostrils flaring in triumph. The gharial and Mohita thrashed against the raft, those on board holding on to Mohita, the gharial whipping its spiked tail, pulling him to itself, threatening to upturn the raft in the process and make meals for its circling fellows. Pavitra was one of those clinging to Mohita, determined that if he were to go, she would too. Her bow and arrows were useless against the armoured hides of the gharials.

         It was Gayatri who ended the impasse. She raised her axe... and hacked off Mohita’s arm.

         It still made Pavitra sick to think of the blood, and Mohita’s screams, and the horrified faces of her people. She never could have done it, but it had been the right thing to do. Mohita survived, and so did everyone else on the raft that day.

         “So don’t try to console me,” continued Pavitra to Tamarasa. “The whole pack has sustained a great loss today.”

         “No doubt. But we do still have you, and your bow. Your heart may not be in hunting, but you are still strong, and valorous, and your aim is impeccable.”

         “What makes you the authority on where my heart lies?”

         A grim smile played upon Tamarasa’s lips. “Because I have heard you sing.”

         The words fell like arrows upon Pavitra’s heart. It was true, for in the moments she was singing, she could forget what a burden it was to be alive. If only singing brought them food, too. “I cannot waste my time on music.”

         “I know,” Tamarasa said, sadly. “But for now, you can let us take comfort in your existence, and tell me what to sing.”

         Pavitra’s heart immediately and selfishly called out for the songs of Saraswati, but she knew she did not deserve happiness and comfort, not now. “Isn’t it obvious? Sing of the warrior goddesses whom Gayatri took so much joy in. What else?”

         “That’s what will make you happy?”

         Pavitra, unwilling to discuss it further, looked straight at Tamarasa. “Yes.”

         Tamarasa gave her a strange look but complied. She started with a ballad about the demon Mahishasura and the bloody end he met at the hands of Chamundi. She sang of Sumbha and Nisumbha, demon brothers destroyed by Kalika and Ambika, the dark and light aspects of the Supreme Goddess, the Devi. She told of Durga, and Kali, and innumerable others, reaching a crescendo with the death of Raktabija, the demon whose drops of blood, when spilt, sprang to life as his exact replicas.

         Each note, each word, landed upon Pavitra’s ears as a lamentation that she was alive while Gayatri was not. And she gripped Gayatri’s axe, letting the regrets beat her heart, willing her sister alive, in vain.

         And then Tamarasa changed register.

         She sang the songs of Saraswati. The soft notes carried images of beauty, of gentleness, of learning. Pavitra tried to push them away, but the music cradled her heart, holding it, letting it rest. She wanted to tell Tamarasa to stop, to return to singing about the warrior-goddesses... but instead found herself picking up the notes, singing, full-throated, full-hearted, until Tamarasa’s voice faded away and Pavitra’s carried the song alone. She poured in all she had until she had sung every single song of Saraswati’s.

         Then, even as she breathed deeply to regain her breath, her eyes drooped, her head sank to the pebbled bank, and she slept.

* * *

         When the girl, Gayatri, stepped through the yakshini’s shimmering circle in the air, she found herself in a clearing bathed in soft-crimson twilight, amidst scrubby bushes, stunted trees, and stone pillars that stretched as far as she could see. There was also a permanent brick fire-altar painted in red and white stripes, with small metal pots by its side. The place looked like the temple ruins her pack sometimes came across, except roofless, in vastly better repair, and infinitely multiplied. She felt a pang—of what, she didn’t know; just that she wasn’t supposed to feel it.

         “Where is this?” she asked.

         “My humble abode,” said the yakshini, her deer-face crinkling into a smile.

         The girl’s skin prickled, but she ignored it. She’d known that coming here was a risk; she had to arm herself now and be ready.

         “Now,” said the yakshini, completely at ease in this world she claimed to have been away from so long, “I must go gather some herbs for the ritual, and some firewood, and perhaps some dried grass. Make yourself at home.” She let out a sharp whistle. “My friend here will see that you don’t get lost.”

         Dried leaves rustled, and the girl froze as an immense king cobra sidled into the clearing.

         “Aheendra,” said the yakshini, and the girl realised with a shudder that she was talking to the snake, “we have a guest. Guide her back if she wanders too far, will you?”

         To the girl’s great incredulity, Aheendra nodded. Whoever heard of snakes obeying commands?

         The yakshini traipsed off, leaving the girl with the king cobra and the pillars.

         Aheendra drew itself up further, flared its hood, and fixed its black, beady eyes on the girl. She froze, sure she was to die in an instant. But it must only have been a warning, for then Aheendra subsided, coiling itself up in a pile of leaves, its slick, mottled scales rustling through the brittle brown, and promptly went to sleep.

         There were only two things to do with snakes: kill them, or step quietly away. The girl did not have any weapons, of course, but as she stepped away from it and it didn’t move, she let out a breath of relief.

         It seemed there was nothing to do but wait.

         She knew she had to find herself a weapon, but she couldn’t stop herself from wandering up to one of the pillars: eight-sided, carved every inch. She ran her hands over the nearest one, feeling the vines and chariots and animals of stone. Interspersed with the pictures were twig-like symbols the girl knew to be the lost art of writing. Even the metal pots near the fire-altar, they were intricately carved. Mining metal was lost knowledge for the people on Bhoomi, so any scraps they found were immediately smelted into weaponry. These lovely, fragile things could not have survived long with her pack, or any other.

         But why, for the love of everything good, was she thinking of loveliness and fragility? She was Gayatri, she needed a weapon.

         Nothing around was promising: there were no fallen branches—indeed, the yakshini herself had gone elsewhere in search of firewood—no big rocks or even sharp, flinty ones. No vines.

         The girl was stumped. She turned around in place, slowly, hoping something would occur to her. Nothing did, and the pillars drew her in once more. She looked wistfully at the symbols, wishing she could read what they said.

         Almost of their own accord, her hand reached toward one, brushed it...

         ...and a voice sounded within her head.

         “I am Suneeti,” it said. “Born one thousand, four hundred and forty-five years ago. Forgot myself as a child, and have been here ever since.”

         The girl snatched her hand away and leapt back in alarm.

         Had the pillar just spoken to her?

         And what if it had? She was Gayatri, not known for shying away from anything, and this was only a talking pillar, after all the wonders she had just witnessed.

         Cautiously, she stepped forward and placed her hand on the stone once again.

         “Greetings,” she said, feeling stupid. Surely pillars didn’t talk.

         “Greetings,” said the voice.

         The girl stayed with her hand on the pillar, but it took effort. She kept wanting to flee in panic.

         “I’m... Gayatri,” she said, the name once again strange on her tongue.

         “Is that what the yakshini told you?”

         “No,” said the girl, puzzled, “that’s my name.”

         “That’s strange. Nobody here knows their names.”

         “Nobody? Who else is here?”

         “Here,” said the pillar, “let me show you.”

         Images flowed into the girl’s mind.

         A little girl sat by a road, petting a friendly grey dog. Her head smarted, she could feel a large bump where it hurt, and she had just been scolded by a woman for “being silly, no one forgets themselves because they bumped their heads.” Everything was bewildering, and she didn’t know what to do.

         The dog licked the little girl’s hands, nuzzled against her legs.

         “Come with me,” it said, “I’ll take you to your home.”

         The girl nodded; the dog dipped its paw into a nearby puddle and, muttering under its breath, drew a circle on the dusty ground. It shimmered and shone, and the little girl and the dog stepped into it.

         And they were in the yakshini’s world, only there weren’t quite as many pillars then. There were a lot more trees, more green plants, not just scrub.

         The dog turned into the yakshini: a dog’s face now, and a woman’s body. She quickly gathered up some herbs and dead branches from the ground and settled down by the fire-altar, seating the little girl on its opposite side. She chanted shlokas, fed the fire; then, as she reached her crescendo, blew into the fire. The flames bent towards the little girl, enveloped her, and carried her some distance away, to where the pillar Suneeti stood now. The flames were not hot, they were cold. So cold. They seeped into her body, into her bones, freezing them, freezing her flesh—

         Into a carved stone pillar.

         And there she stood, year after year: not dead and not alive; unmoving, unchanging.

         And then Suneeti told the girl the others’ stories. Child after child, brought there, confused and disoriented, to be turned into pillars just as she was, until—

         “Stop!” cried the girl. “No more!”

         She sank against the pillar, trying to understand. Each one was a prison, then; a life lost but not completed. She thought to afternoons with her pack, sharing food and laughter and care; she thought of how even the dead had a chance to be reborn... and the monstrosity of the pillars curled around her gut like foul smoke. Bile rose, threatening to spew.

         “And soon, you’ll join us,” said Suneeti.

         “What?”

         “In all these years, no one has come here and not been turned into a pillar.”

         “But all those stories you showed me—those children had all forgotten themselves!”

         “In all these years, no one has come here who has not forgotten their own self.”

         “But I have not!” Even as she said it, however, she thought of all the times that day that her hands, her tongue, her skin had spoken differently... No, wait. She could not doubt herself. She was Gayatri; that was all.

         And yet, perhaps that might not save her.

         She was not a pillar yet; she might escape. Her heart gave a twinge at leaving the others behind, but what was it that she said often? Those who cannot, must sacrifice for those who can. She hated having said it, hated being bound by it, but knew she’d meant it, and that it was important to remain faithful to it. Her people needed her to be herself, to be Gayatri.

         “I must return to my people, Suneeti,” she said, her heart heavy. “Tell me how.”

         “No one’s ever managed it. If you ask me, the only way out is to summon Yama. Because she’s stealing souls, you see. Keeping them from living out their lives, keeping them from Yama at the end. She gets drunk every so often and rails against him. More, he’s a god. If he comes here and sees all this, he’s sure to destroy such an evil creature.”

         “Yama? But that means someone has to die.”

         “Yes, what about that nasty snake? It’s terrified so many of us.”

         “I’m weaponless! It will kill me before I can even scratch it.”

         “Ah well. Yama will come, nevertheless. Just think, we will all be free.”

         For one moment, the girl considered this. After all, despite the tendril of fear creeping up her stomach, she was Gayatri. If anyone had the courage to summon Yama, it was her. Only, invoking him meant she would die, leaving her pack significantly weakened.

         “I cannot die,” she said firmly.

         “That’s why no one has ever escaped. No one willingly courts death.”

         The girl looked around frantically for means of escape. The shimmering circle she had come through was gone now, closed by a snap of the yakshini’s fingers. But perhaps she could open it again? She needed water. And the shloka.

         “Do you know—” she began.

         “No,” said the pillar, evidently able to read her thoughts. “I don’t. But if you can find water in the pots by the fire-altar, it’s just magical enough to open—”

         The girl dashed off to the fire-altar, not waiting to hear the rest of Suneeti’s sentence. There was, indeed, one pot that was half-full of water. Hands shaking, the girl carried it back to the pillar.

         “All right,” she said. “Wish me luck.”

         “Luck won’t help. This hasn’t worked for anyone but the yakshini.”

         The girl snatched her hand away from the pillar once more. She couldn’t afford this not working. She dipped her finger in the water and drew a circle in the air. Sure enough, a shimmer trailed her finger, and when she closed the circle, the whole of it sparkled; when it cleared, the girl could see Father and Tamarasa speaking by the river-side, Mohita clinging to Father’s arm.

         Gladness filled the girl’s heart at the sight of them. As she raised a foot to step through the window, she felt a pang of regret that the trapped souls couldn’t escape too. But the pack came foremost. She shoved her foot forward... and hit the circle: it was solid. There was a barrier where earlier there had been a window. Transparent, but a barrier nevertheless. Frantically, she ran her hands over its entire span, but that was no use. Not a single spot gave. She couldn’t pass through.

         “Father!” she screamed, “Tamarasa, look at me! Mohita!”

         But they were deep in conversation, and the girl noticed something else. A large crack in the ground ran down the river bank. Bhoomi was getting restless.

         Desperate, she threw the rest of the water at the circle, but it simply splashed against it and trickled down.

         “I know it doesn’t feel right to leave without her,” Tamarasa was saying, “but Pavitra is brave and resourceful. She will find us.”

         The girl shivered at the mention of that name: Pavitra. As if that were someone she should know.

         “She’s my daughter, Tamarasa!”

         “And she’s, what, nothing to me? Gayatri was exceptional, but Pavitra is no mean hunter. And—” Tamarasa’s voice choked with angry tears, “what of the story-songs? We already accord them so little importance, but without her to carry them on, we will forget them, and ourselves, and our humanity.”

         Why were they so worried about this Pavitra? And not at all about her, Gayatri? Again, the flutter of fear went through her. Who was this Pavitra, more important than even her, Gayatri?

         Father looked stricken. “But how can I go on without either of my daughters? Oh Yama, will you not return my Gayatri? Oh Bhoomi, guide my Pavitra back to us!”

         Yama? But she, Gayatri, was here, alive!

         “I’m not dead!” she yelled at them, remembering why she had run away to hunt this afternoon: they’d kept saying she, Gayatri, was dead.

         “Pavitra will find us,” said Tamarasa. “I am certain.”

         Slowly, the rest of the pack were gathering on the river bank, knowing what the crack in the ground and the rumble that created it meant. Once Tamarasa said a prayer, they would all set off, in search of another spot they could camp in for a few days.

         Father’s shoulders crumpled. He pressed his palms into his eyes. He spoke without looking up, his voice resigned. “Begin the benediction, Tamarasa. Let’s move on.”

         And Tamarasa began to sing the ballad of Saraswati.

* * *

         On the river bank, Pavitra slept and dreamt. She was Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, sitting on a large white lotus in the middle of a lake, playing on the veena she cradled. She’d hoped to have one since the moment Tamarasa had sketched it on wet river sand, and here it was. Gayatri was Durga, sitting upon a tiger on the lake-shore, each of her eight hands holding a weapon: trident, mace, discus, sword, spear, club, and the foremost two hands holding her axe.

         Gayatri cried out and Pavitra looked up from her music to see an enormous beast emerge from the lake.

         Boar, gharial, deer: it was all of these and none of them. Its skin shimmered one moment soft and shiny as a deer’s, the next hard and scaly like a gharial’s. It had tusks flanking an elongated snout, which it opened to reveal row upon row of sharp teeth. The tail it thrashed the water with had the girth of a gharial’s, the speed of a deer’s.

         It would feed them all for days.

         “Get it, Pavitra,” yelled Gayatri. “I am too far away!”

         “But I only have a veena.”

         “That has strings, doesn’t it? Use it to loose arrows!”

         Pavitra looked forlorn at the veena, knowing that the arrows would scratch it. Such a beautiful one, too, heavy dark wood inlaid with ivory; where had she gotten it?

         “Hurry, Pavitra, don’t let it escape!”

         And, out of nowhere, Pavitra remembered that Gayatri was supposed to be dead. She had seen her gored, cremated, mourned. How could she be so alive and vivid, yelling out to her?

         Unless... unless the images of her death were false. Illusions. Hallucinations. An errant nightmare, even.

         Relief coursed through Pavitra as she arrived at this explanation. She shot arrows from her veena, but they all missed the beast, and Gayatri grew annoyed with her. “You’re not even trying,” she said.

         Then a soothing hand rested upon Pavitra’s head and a voice said, “Sleep well, gentle Pavitra.”

         Her eyes flew open, to find Tamarasa beside her. And Mohita, and the river bank.

         And she knew what was dream and what was real.

         Splinters of pain shot into her every nerve. White sorrow blanketed her, covering, smothering. She closed her eyes tight, curled into an embryo, let it wash over her, through her, across her.

         This was impossible. Gayatri could not be dead. The universe could not allow it; Pavitra could not have been betrayed by her own dream. No, there had to be an explanation. She just had to find it.

         And then it came to her, simple and true.

         She was Gayatri.

         The roar of pain died in her ears, dulling, contracting, removing itself.

         She woke, sighed in relief, and rolled upright. A void yawned within her, but before her was a world she no longer had to shy away from. What she wanted was the same as what her people needed of her: to hunt, to prevail, to provide. No longer did she have to feel ineffectual; she could impose her will on the world, and the world would comply.

         The girl sat upright on the river bank and smiled at Tamarasa, who was nearby.

         “Go back to sleep, Pavitra,” said Tamarasa. “It is high afternoon yet and the beasts are not about.”

         “Why do you call me that, Tamarasa?” said the girl. “Can you not see? I am Gayatri.”

         Not even Bhoomi’s quaking could have matched the alarm those words caused. Every member of the pack, from her father to Mohita, was upon her, asking if she was all right, telling her to sleep some more, checking her forehead for a fever, offering her herbs and soup and water.

         She leapt to her feet, shook them all off.

         “I’ve nothing more to say to you!” she exclaimed in frustration and rage. Her father and Tamarasa at least ought to have known better, but they were being the worst of all. She picked up her axe. “I’m off to hunt. Perhaps you’ll all have come to your senses when I return.”

         She stalked off into the forest, reeling. In her mind was a terrifyingly real image of being gored to death by a wild boar; she had no idea where it came from, and no one wanted to listen to her. So clear was the image, it was as if she had witnessed her own death standing but a few paces away. Fear coursed through her veins; she fought it for control over herself. A good thing this situation had a ready remedy: find prey, meet it with her thick blade, return triumphant.

* * *

         On the other side of the window, Tamarasa began to sing the ballad of Saraswati.

         The girl knew this song, knew its lilts and rhythms the way a leaf knows the quirks of the current that carries it.

         It spoke to her of rest, of kinship, of love. Of Tamarasa lulling her pack to sleep after a hard morning or day. Of the notes binding their souls together against Bhoomi’s wrath.

         Unbidden, the same notes rose from within the girl. They rang in her throat, escaped into the air around her. The already-quiet clearing seemed to still. Suneeti went quiet.

         The girl poured all her strength, her spirit, everything she had, into the song of Saraswati.

         When Tamarasa finished, so did the girl. Her throat was raw; she was slumped against the pillar, exhausted. For one moment, she allowed herself to be light, free, grateful to be alive.

         Then the realisation came crashing down on her.

         Why it had all felt wrong.

         Why the name Gayatri felt stolen.

         Why she had wanted to set the pillars free.

         Why the memories of Gayatri’s thoughts had not had the weight of conviction.

         She was Pavitra, not Gayatri.

         The horror.

         The injustice.

         ...the traitorous relief.

         She fell to the ground, hugging herself, tears coursing down her face.

         She was Pavitra.

         The yakshini stepped into the clearing. She took in the scene and smirked. With a snap of her fingers, she closed the circle.

* * *

         The yakshini had been at her ritual for a good amount of time now.

         Pavitra sat curled up against Suneeti, still trying to understand it all.

         Gayatri was really, truly dead.

         And Pavitra had wanted to be her, to step into her skin, her life, her person, because she had thought that Gayatri imposed her will on the world in such a way that the world complied.

         But that hadn’t been what happened. Being Gayatri had put her in awful danger, and therefore her pack in danger as well. And if Tamarasa’s words were anything to go by, the pack truly did need her. For the first time, it occurred to Pavitra that Father’s and Tamarasa’s words of encouragement might not have been empty of meaning.

         And, if that were the case, perhaps the story-songs were important too, like Tamarasa said. Perhaps Pavitra was doing something of significance by learning them.

         The yakshini continued adding herbs to her fire, chanting. It wouldn’t be long now before the freezing flames took Pavitra. There was no way out, it appeared, except through summoning Yama. Only, not being Gayatri, she didn’t have the courage to summon him.

         But then—and the realisation twisted deep into her heart—Gayatri’s being an eager and excellent hunter hadn’t stopped her from being killed. And Pavitra’s being slow to learn hunting hadn’t stopped her from eventually doing it well enough.

         So, when it would help thousands upon thousands of souls and not hurt anyone besides herself, why should not having courage stop Pavitra now?

         She stood.

         “Goodbye, Suneeti,” she said, caressing the pillar.

         “Good luck, Pavitra. Thank you.”

         She fixed her mind on Yama and ran at Aheendra. Her feet thudded against the ground; her eyes focused on the dancing orange flames reflecting off Aheendra’s scales. She jumped.

         A heavy rope landed on her, coiled about her, took her down.

         It wasn’t a rope, it was Aheendra.

         “No biting, no choking, Aheendra, remember,” said the yakshini, not missing a word of the shlokas.

         Pavitra cried out in frustration and strained against Aheendra’s coils. No use; they were too strong for her. Tears welled up and poured out.

         The yakshini’s chanting picked up, gained more purpose. She would finish soon, and not only would Pavitra be a pillar for all eternity, but every other pillar would lose their one chance of escape.

         Aheendra hissed, its eyes glistening. Its tongue flickered out of its mouth. It opened its terrifying jaws wide and shut them again.

         There was only one way out. Pavitra chased away all thought, scrunched up her eyes, bent forward—and bit. She reeled with shock at the touch of the scaly skin against her teeth and lips. Dark fury flashed in Aheendra’s eyes; a shiver ran through its long body; its jaws opened wide, showing a glimpse of pink mouth and black tongue as it sank its fangs into her shoulder.

         Pavitra cried out, and Aheendra slithered off her, as if realising what it had done. It just hovered there, its head raised, and watched.

         The yakshini’s chants quickened, getting panicky, reaching a crescendo. She hit a gong, its deep notes vibrating through the ground.

         A dark mist crept in at the edges of Pavitra’s vision. It brought sleep with it. She let go.

* * *

         He was dark-skinned, sitting atop his water-buffalo, one hand holding a mace flung over a shoulder, wearing a white silk dhoti and a thunderous frown, just like all the story-songs described him.

         Yama.

         “What is happening?” he bellowed. “What is this place?”

         Pavitra pointed across the clearing at the yakshini. “That wicked one—”

         The yakshini turned to run away, but Yama raised a hand and she stopped.

         Yama’s eyes widened as he took in the field of souls before him. “Who are you?” he asked the yakshini. “Why have you done this?”

         “You took my sister,” she spat at him. “Far, far too early.”

         “My duty is not personal,” he said, raising his hand further. A flash of light burst forth, bleaching everything Pavitra could see. When it cleared, the pillars and the yakshini had vanished from this scrubby world.

         Yama turned to Pavitra. “I am indebted to you, child. That was a courageous thing you did, summoning me. Your time is not yet up, so I will return you to your people. And you may ask for a boon.”

         “Please, worshipful Yama, bring my sister Gayatri back to life,” said Pavitra, not hesitating.

         “Alas, her body is now ashes, or I could have done so. Perhaps instead of returning you, I could have you both be reborn together elsewhere?”

         Pavitra’s heart leapt at this. To be with Gayatri, to never need fear again, to never hunt alone again!

         But then, she would have to start over. Be a child once again, learn to wring a rabbit’s neck, to pierce an arrow through a deer’s soft skin. To give up her story-songs; to accept killing unsuspecting animals; to make, for the excruciating first time, the decision to give up her well-being for that of the pack. Once again, she would have to find herself. And her pack, they wouldn’t survive without her.

         Heavily, she shook her head. “No sir, as you said, my life is not yet complete.”

         Yama smiled. “Then, my child, if I reincarnate Gayatri close to you, if I promise that your pack will survive until she grows up, will you watch over her? Will you bring her up to be the protector your pack needs?”

         For perhaps the first time, Pavitra looked into the future and saw purpose beyond survival. Barely able to speak, she said, “I will know no greater honour or happiness, my lord Yama.”

         “So be it.”

         He raised his hand once more, and all went white.

Copyright © 2019 Shweta Adhyam

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Shweta Adhyam is an Indian-American writer of speculative fiction. In her professional past, she has been an astronomer, actuary, and data analyst. Her personal present is populated by her spouse, child, and ADHD. She spent a childhood immersed in Hindu/Indian-subcontinent mythology and deals with adulting by writing in it. Shweta was part of Clarion West’s class of 2017 and can be found on the web at www.shweta-adhyam.com and on Twitter as @shweta_adhyam.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE WITCH OF THE WILL

by Aaron Perry

         When the Hedgewitch of Feckless Lovers’ Lane turned one hundred and five, she decided she did not fancy brewing potions for the rest of her life. As her grandmother had told her, there was not much fame in potions—people would do whatever foolish, brave, or malicious thing they had intended, with or without the brew. So the witch packed up her laboratory and set her sights on a grander legacy: she stole the free will of the king.

         The witch had seen the king’s father’s and grandfather’s rule, had watched the generational corruption of good intentions, and she had grown tired of divine mandate, so she took it away. She wrote out every significant deed the king would do until the day of his death, on a sheet of parchment as long as she was tall, in writing cramped as a column of marching ants. On a bleak winter’s day she folded it, sealed it, and nailed it to the front doors of the mortuary. There it would remain, not to be read until the king’s death—a reminder to all who entered those doors that kings, too, went to their graves.

         When asked why none may read it, she replied, “I know everything the king will do in reaction to everything in his life—the exception being that piece of parchment. If he knew what was written, his will would be his to command once more, and then it wouldn’t be much of a foretelling now would it?”

         For this she was widely declared a fraud, but some believed, and there grew up a secret society called the King’s Chroniclers. They recorded everything the king did, from insignificant events such as executing his half-brother to momentous occasions such as scratching himself in public. No one knew what sort of details the witch had written down, and if she was to be vindicated, it would be best to record everything for posterity.

         The king inevitably got wind of this. He tried to make the witch recant what she had done, but when he sent his soldiers to take her, the witch was perpetually out. When he later thought to burn her house down, his soldiers spent the afternoon wandering up and down Feckless Lovers’ Lane like goldfish in a bowl, unable to remember what exactly they had come for. When he sought a wizard to outfox her, he discovered the wizards of the realm were all her nephews and quite fond of their aunt.

         At last, the king tried to have the parchment pried off the mortuary doors, but it would not budge. Taking a chisel to it—or even an axe—merely resulted in shattered iron. Eventually he resorted to burning the mortuary to the ground, but when the smoke and cinders cleared, the parchment alone survived. It hung in the air at the exact height it had been nailed to the doors, immutable as lead. Finally, the king went back to what was most familiar to him: he pretended the parchment did not exist. He went so far as to build a monument around it, encasing it in the marble base of a statue of himself.

         But this did not erase the parchment from the minds of the people. On the day of the king’s death, nearly ten years later, the streets were empty of mourners. Everyone, even the doubters, had gathered to tear down the statue and finally read what the witch had written.

         The mood was tense, and tenser still when a carriage arrived in the Square of the King’s Will and the queen herself stepped out. She stood in silent appraisal, dressed head to toe in mourner’s black, stonier than the edifice of her deceased husband. Her veiled gaze swept slowly across the crowd until finally it came to rest on the witch, who bowed ever so slightly. The queen reached into the carriage and withdrew a sheaf of notes thicker than scripture and went to join the ranks of the King’s Chroniclers. They no longer committed themselves to secrecy.

         After the clamor had died down, the workmen glanced at the witch, who stood with her arms crossed in the shadow of the king’s memorial. She nodded, and they took up their hammers to dismantle their liege. The parchment emerged by painstaking degrees. When the statue was but dust and rubble, the witch strode across the stony ground and plucked the parchment from the air. She breathed on the seal, whereupon it cracked open with a faint pop.

         She scanned its contents briefly, smiling to herself as though she had forgotten how wonderful her work had been. She handed it to the queen.

         “If you will, Your Highness.” She leaned a little closer. “It cannot mention you by name, for it was his and his alone, but you may want to censor some of the bawdy bits.”

         The queen took the parchment, which trembled like an autumn leaf in her hand. “I will not omit so much as a pen stroke from this.”

         She checked it against her notes, her expression tightening into a mask of painful, cold fury. Hours later, she relinquished the parchment and handed it to the next member of the King’s Chroniclers. One by one they checked the document. The afternoon wore on, the sun slipped below the horizon, and night fell. Still they worked by lamplight. At the witching hour, the final chronicler raised her head—she had been the king’s taster—and they had their awful, wondrous answer.

         The king’s will had not been his own.

         Every deed of significance had been foreseen and recorded on that parchment, and that night the Hedgewitch of Feckless Lovers’ Lane became the Witch of the Will. She rose meteorically in fame that night, ascendant in name and power. The queen appointed the witch to the newly created position of High Court Magus and Alchemist. No one impugned her craft any longer, neither to her face nor behind her back. People feared her—nearly as much as they respected her. She constantly had appointments, and not always with the nobility.

         One afternoon nearly a year after the death of the king, she found one of the kitchen knaves in her chambers. He looked perhaps fourteen and stood gazing at the living portrait of her grandmother.

         “You know,” she said, “I have a waiting room for a reason.”

         He whirled about. He was at the awkward stage between boy and man—tall for his age, strong from tearing apart deer and pig carcasses for the king’s table, but such timidity lurked behind those grey eyes. Even though he towered over her, he would not meet her gaze.

         “I’m sorry.” He gestured to the portrait. “I heard her talking to herself, and I thought it was you.”

         “Truly?” The witch raised an eyebrow. “Most people can’t hear her. What’s your name?”

         “Canute.” He looked back at the portrait again. “Is she really alive?”

         “Are you? Am I?” The witch cocked her head as if to say the matter was debatable. She drew up alongside him to look at the portrait of the old woman. “My Gran is alive in a sense.”

         “It doesn’t seem like a nice way to live.”

         “It’s better than nothingness. At least, until she’s ready to accept the prospect.”

         Canute’s brow creased. “Nothingness?”

         The witch watched him with cautious curiosity. Most people wanted to take what she offered without letting her rub off on them. A discussion such as this would have certainly been unwelcome with nobles or even most of the commoners who came to her.

         “I’m sure you know that witches, along with all practitioners of magic, can’t go to paradise once they die?”

         Canute nodded.

         “Well, that’s only half true. We can’t go to paradise, but neither can we go to damnation. We go nowhere; our essence becomes nothing. Magic touches the soul in a way that unknits it from within, makes us incompatible with nature. That includes what naturally comes after this life. We are, in the end, the stewards of our own souls.”

         “Doesn’t that make you uncomfortable?”

         “More uncomfortable than the idea of damnation? No. And I cannot help what I am.”

         He hesitated before saying, “I see.”

         The witch smiled. “My Gran didn’t like it, either, which is why I painted her into that portrait. Now she has time to come to grips with the concept. That’s probably what you heard her muttering about.”

         They stood side by side for a time in quiet contemplation before the witch asked, “Now why did you come up here? Certainly not to discuss philosophy.”

         Canute stiffened. “I was hoping you would do something for me. I heard you helped the scullery maid so I thought, maybe...”

         “Yes?”

         Now he met her eyes. “Would you do for me what you did for the king?”

         Canute looked at her with such hope that it took a moment to realize what he meant.

         “You mean the old king?” she asked.

         “Yes. I’m sorry. I—I imagine it’s a lot of work.”

         It was a lot of work, but that wasn’t what astonished the witch and made her skin crawl with unease.

         “I didn’t do that for him, Canute. I did that to him. Do you understand what it means to take a person’s free will? I made him meaningless as a cog in a mechanism. If anyone had taken and read that parchment, they would have seen the whole of his life etched in ink and would have held his fate in their hands. They would have owned him. Devoured him. He may have feigned apathy, but it plunged him into existential despair during his final years. He nearly killed himself several times. The only thing that stayed his hand was the thought that it didn’t matter; that whatever he did, he would not be the agent of his own actions.”

         “I don’t care. I want it.”

         “Why?”

         “It’s simpler. It seems better...”

         He trailed off, and only then did the witch truly see the boy. Not all his burns were from pans, not all his scars were from the slip of a blood-slick knife, and the way he cradled his left arm was not merely shyness.

         “Oh, child.” She drew near, and he flinched as she laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll learn nothing if I inscribe your will only to give it back to you. It’s impossible to know what your own future holds, for if you did, your actions would inevitably change it. It would no longer be your future. Unknown sorrows await us all, and knowing what might once have been will make no difference in facing what will be.”

         “I think it will,” he said. “You would take my will from me, and then I would take it from myself.”

         The witch lapsed into silence, for she could see the boy would not be swayed. Like most people, he did not understand that knowing his future would return his will to him. Every time a besotted youth sat down with a diviner, it was not their future being revealed but their future being returned to the ether of mere possibility now that they were aware of it. Knowledge did not like to be known before its time.

         But she also saw that in this moment she could give him a measure of happiness, however fleeting. She placed a finger beneath his chin, forcing him to again look her in the eye.

         “Tell me your wish once more.”

         “I wish for you to take my will. As you did for the old king.”

         “Very well. Come back in a week, and it will be finished.”

         The relief on his face sickened her, but she kept her word. As she had done over a decade ago, she took a sheet of parchment as long as her outstretched arms and covered it in writing as dense as swarming locusts. What she discovered in the boy’s life surprised her, and for the first time she doubted her own skill. She did not see how a broken boy such as Canute could become the fated man of his written will.

         When Canute returned the following week, he thanked her and tucked the sealed parchment into his filthy tunic. Never did his hand stray toward opening it. His eye did not so much as glance at it. This surprised the witch.

         She watched him carefully in the coming months and kept an ear to castle gossip which she normally disdained. She could not remember all of Canute’s will, but certain events remained lodged in her brain like arrowheads. Four months later, the first of them occurred—Canute killed one of the kitchen cooks with a fire-iron. When the witch heard of it, a line of her own stark writing hovered in her mind’s eye: And he will slay his tormentors with a fire-iron named Providence.

         Immediately she went to the dungeons, where Canute was being kept. In the dead of night, with the guards drawn down into an unnatural slumber, she stood outside his cell. He sat in the far corner, half-hidden in shadow. He did not seem the least bit disturbed.

         She knew he could not discern her face beneath the shade of her hood, yet he smiled at her. “Thank you.”

         “Canute,” she said, “I did not give you your will so you could follow it to the letter and somehow assume that absolves you of guilt. In reading it, you’ve regained your free will. Your decisions are entirely your own.”

         “I never read it. I burned it.”

         Too late did the witch understand what sort of comfort the boy had sought in having his free will removed. He had not wished to know his future but to become bound to it inexorably. In this way, he felt himself absolved. He stood helpless before the sorrow given to him and blameless in the wake of the sorrow he gave to others. Neither guilt nor grief had any power over him now. It left her speechless, and she departed the dungeons without another word.

         In her chamber she sat staring at her desk as the clock ticked through the early morning hours. A cloying unease had begun to molder in her belly—a feeling that she had unleashed something foul into the world. Unlike the old king, Canute had the opportunity to read his will and do with it what he would, but he had not. Revoking the king’s will had been a show of power but also a punishment. Canute’s was neither; it had been intended as a gesture of comfort for a boy drowning in a world implacable as the sea. She had not expected him to take refuge in his drowning. He had surprised her, and with a sinking certainty that she had never felt regarding the king, she knew Canute was now her responsibility.

         The following night she returned to the dungeons. Canute lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling with an expression of wide-eyed madness. He remained motionless, arms and legs splayed like a vivisected frog. She recognized this existential paralysis. The old king had often lain in bed, unable to move under the weight of his thoughts, contemplating one action after another, discarding each as a fate he did not want.

         “Canute.” He did not stir. “By refusing to read and reclaim your will, you have handed it over to me. I would reveal it to you if I thought it would make a difference, which I don’t, but I will tell you this: if you continue as you are, there will come a day when I feel obligated to kill you.”

         His whisper echoed in his cell. “That is fine. I trust you more than chance, or providence, or fate.”

         The witch left him then. She had not come to convince him, only to confirm her own suspicions.

         In the royal alchemy hall she brewed a pot of tea, then sat lost in thought as it grew cold. Had she possessed the stunted empathy that too frequently accompanied great sorcerers, she might have been able to kill Canute now or ignore him entirely, but this miserable child and the winding path of his fate lay upon her conscience like a cairn. Unable to take final action or sink into apathy, she embraced the one option left to her: not breaking the fate of another but bending it. She would have to use her knowledge as a lens, to focus his fate on her. As the writer of his will, not an actor within, it would be difficult to predict what her meddling might do. Almost impossible.

         And yet she would try.

* * *

         The next week she relinquished her position and arranged for her nephew to take over as High Court Magus and Alchemist. When the queen asked where she was going, the witch did not answer for a time, thinking of the many nebulous lines that comprised Canute’s will.

         At last she said, “To the village where a boy will fall in love, the snowfields where a man will meet a god, and to a place by the sea, where a monster will fear death for the first time.”

         The queen was used to cryptic responses from her, so this came as only a mild surprise. On a chill morning beneath budding cherry trees, the queen wished her farewell, and the witch bit back the urge to warn her away from the boy in the dungeons. She had taken the will of another twice now, and the more she learned about the old king or the boy, the more she realized how little she knew about anything else. Who could say how Canute would be freed from the dungeons, whether it be escape or pardon or coup? Best to let the knucklebones of chance lie where they may and pray that fortune smiled on the queen.

         She traveled far to the north, where the air was too cold for thunder, the ground too hard for burial. At the very edge of the kingdom she found the village of Ichor, a place where auroras danced through the skies and the people spoke the queen’s name as that of a mythical beast. When the witch arrived she set aside her great power, becoming a hedgewitch once more, content to watch and wait for a time. She was only one hundred and sixteen years old.

         The villagers regarded her with suspicion and curiosity at first, but a slow trust began to grow as she proved herself to be a rather boring witch. She brewed potions and tinctures, cured coughs and joint pain, and safely delivered children from womb to world—many, many children.

         One afternoon as she returned along the forest road from a morning’s foraging, she found the village carpenter standing outside his workshop. He stood with his back to the open door, tears streaming down his ruddy cheeks and into his beard.

         “What’s wrong?” she asked.

         The carpenter shook his head. “A silly thing to cry about. Truly.”

         She went to the door and peered inside. On his workbench lay a coffin-boat, coated with pine resin and ready to burn as it floated onto the misty lake.

         “Who?” she asked.

         “No one. Perhaps it’s morose, but I build them ahead of time, when I can still hope I’ll never have to use them. This morning I realized I—I have not built one for a child since my grandson died. Not since you came.”

         He smiled through his tears, and that’s when the witch knew she had the villagers’ love, for they trusted her with their children. She opened a school, teaching them about stars and herb lore, arithmetic and logic. The children grew thoughtful under her tutelage, if perhaps a bit too silver-tongued, and when they came of marrying age, many of them wished for nothing more than to travel to the capital and have nothing to do with weddings. When they expressed such desires, the witch merely smiled and told them they had time to do all that they wished.

         And then one day Canute arrived. He wore a short sword at his hip and bore the compass of the royal cartographers on his lapel; a boy no longer, but it was him. He came to find the borders between kingdoms, something so neat on a map and so nebulous in the real world—or so he told the villagers. The witch saw through him. He was a spy for the crown, sent over the top of the world to a place where borders were enforced by mountains rather than armies.

         She retreated to her forest cottage, watching Canute as he performed his cartography, a second shadow unseen at his side as he traveled through forest and field and mountain surveying which paths might best accommodate a trade route. For the better part of a year he stayed, growing friendly with all the village folk—and a young woman named Vera in particular. On the last day of summer, Canute proposed, vowed to take her back to the citadel with him to a wedding of the sort she could not imagine.

         To the witch’s delight, Vera demurred.

         That evening, the witch went to her. “Will you marry him?” she asked, knowing full well the conflict in her heart.

         “I do not know. He is kind, and so sure of himself, but marriage...” She trailed off.

         “Marriage will mean children, and you have a great interest in many other things,” the witch finished.

         Vera looked troubled. “But do I have what is required? Can I sit the academy exam, with what I have learned here? Sometimes it feels like we knew nothing before you came. How much more is there yet to learn? I... I cannot imagine.”

         The witch withdrew a letter from her pocket, the latest in a long exchange with her nephew asking after her and wondering when she would return. Most importantly, it was sealed with the signet of the High Court Magus and Alchemist.

         “I was not always a hedgewitch,” she said. “Once I had the ear of the queen. I might still, if I chose. Become apprentice to the current court alchemist, and you will not need the academy’s permission to pursue knowledge.”

         Vera’s eyes were wide, alight with inquisitive delight and perhaps something less innocent. Curiosity rarely survived into adulthood untarnished by vain ambition, and the witch knew exactly what she was leveraging. Vera took the letter, running her finger over the seal in reverence.

         The next morning she rejected Canute, and that evening a knock came at the witch’s cottage door. When she opened it, Canute looked down at her, mouth open to speak but silent.

         “Hello, Canute. Have you come to see who stole your love away?”

         His whisper carried a shade of heartache. “You?”

         They watched one another from opposite sides of the threshold. “Do you still trust me? Trust me more than chance, or providence, or fate? If you wish, I can return your will to you now.”

         His eyes grew hard, and he turned away without a word. The witch watched him leave, her heart leaping with alarm that he would harm his would-be love, yet her mind at peace with the knowledge that he would not, for he was not a monster. Not yet.

         The next day he was gone before sunrise.

* * *

         The witch wrote a letter to her nephew, which she sent along with Vera and a gaggle of other village youths who had decided it was time to see the world. After they had disappeared into the horizon down the southbound road, she packed up her cottage and left, leaving only a note behind which read: It has been a joy, but I must go now, to a foreign land where gods still roam. Blessings upon you.

         Traveling by ancient forest roads and through secret mountain passes that Canute himself had discovered, the witch made her way through snow-capped heights and down into foreign lands. Old religions were practiced there, worshipping the sun and sea and stars: things that could be touched and seen and feared.

         In Ichor she had watched loss harden Canute and shear away what remained of his childish heart. Here he would lose something else and cross the gap between man and monster. When the time came, the witch would place herself at the center of that rage.

         But first she needed a guide.

         The witch spent her days close to the earth, covered in mud and bramble, stalking through grasslands and aspen groves. She followed the stag-elk herds taller than any man and preternaturally sensitive to the scent of magic. She learned to be silent, the voice of the wind more familiar than her own; to move quietly in step with the ponderous turning of the world itself. A part of her began to fade—not lost but locked away bit by bit, buried in quiet bends of her mind.

         On the morning of her one hundred and twenty-first year, a doe elk gave birth to a birch-coat fawn. Its fur shone purest white, speckled with black, like flakes of windborne ash across the face of the moon. The witch drew near, her scent of nothing but sky and earth; her steps slow and careful.

         While the fawn found its feet, she slew the mother with a knife of bone. She rode it to the ground where it kicked fiercely before growing still. The fawn looked at her in bewilderment, and she reached out to lay a hand along its muzzle. Its eyes grew wide, and it snorted in alarm as she drew the fawn down into sleep, its blood slow as ice floes in its veins, and with tears in her eyes she brought the knife to bear on it as well. She cut through delicate bone and tender sinew, until its lower jaw came away in her hand. She stared at it for a moment before whispering an apology and casting it aside.

         The fawn healed by turns of magic and time, and the witch was no longer alone. She raised it on goat’s milk and mashed fern leaves, bringing it into an unnatural dependence on her. She had raised familiars before but never in such a manner as this. When its speckling faded and it shone like a ghost in the moonlight, she took to riding. By instinct it brought her to austral valleys and lonely peaks, holy places that no human eye had seen in generations.

         Among the people of those wind-scoured hinterlands she became a specter of fearful mystery—a woman astride a jawless white hart, its tongue lolling in grotesque abandon. She carried with her the remnants of elder things: tusks slung over her shoulder, desiccated faerie wings strung along a cord about her neck, the shimmering skin of abyssal leviathans fanned across her thighs. The people knew marks of power when presented to them, and whether such a person called themselves witch or shaman or magus mattered little. They sought her out, following at respectful distances until she had their attention wherever her hart appeared.

         And then, like a specter himself, Canute appeared as well. He was older, his features hidden by a beard, his skin wind-burned and creased with the passage of time, but there he was all the same. He came from the mountains he had mapped years ago, bearing gifts wrought with alchemy that carried the scent of magic unknown to the witch. It smelled faintly of her nephew: coriander, cut with winter sunshine, yet touched with something else. Vanity.

         Canute entranced the people of the moors, wooed them not with promises of power but of love and peace. The queen wished to arrange a marriage, to unite their two great civilizations in harmony. She wished, the witch suspected, for gold and spices from the southern archipelagos, carried like sleight of hand over the top of the world.

         The people ultimately knew they must consult the gods, and they set off in seeking, following roads and crossing lakes out of their season, Canute in their company. If they noticed that the witch followed astride her maimed hart, they did not tell him. She was of them, of this land, and things of the hinterlands did not concern the foreign queen’s messenger. Not yet.

         They struck into northern climes as winter fell, trudging through cold that shattered bone and against wind that cut like a wet knife. They crept through caves that ran along the roots of the mountains like a tracery of cobwebs, past unspeakable slumbering things. Always in their party was one more shadow, one more sighing breath, the weight of one more gaze that Canute might have noticed had he been looking for it, but after the sorrow of times gone by, he had begun to forget the witch once more.

         At the crown of the world, deep beneath the earth in fungal caves where mushrooms grew like trees and faeries pinwheeled within phosphorescent auras, they came at last to the labyrinth of the Aged Dreamer—a craggy willow that required neither sun nor riverbank. It slept in the center of a wending maze, where its eternal night visions caught the essence of the world like light within a crystal, bending it into the spectrum of all that was.

         Here the people barred Canute’s way, forbidding him entrance into the final labyrinth, but to the witch they paid no mind, and before she disappeared into the twisting pitch-black depths she sent them to Canute with a question.

         The eldest member of the hinterland peoples approached Canute and asked, with unhidden curiosity in his voice, “The avatar of the maimed hart asks if you trust her—more than chance, more than providence, more than fate?”

         Canute screamed in horrified rage. He surged past them, shattering all ambassadorial goodwill as he set foot into the labyrinth. At the heart of the mountain he found the Aged Dreamer ablaze, the witch standing in its light. He choked on his fury, unable to speak as the chosen walkers of the labyrinth appeared behind him and wept at the sight of the burning Dreamer, its boughs dripping cinder and ash.

         “Rage, Canute. You will not complete your task for the queen.” The witch picked up a smoldering chunk of the Aged Dreamer and crushed it in her hand, a tongue of smoke trailing up from her fist. “I will crush you again, and again, and again.”

         Righteous anger overcame the elders’ sorrow and strangled their fear, intent on justice no matter the signs of power she wore. They bound her hands with braided birch bark and painted her tongue with ashes of the Dreamer, and as they led her away she met Canute’s eye.

         “And you will help me do it, Canute.”

         He watched as she allowed herself to be led away, bound in body and spirit, her strength dampened by the rituals of epochs past, from times when humankind had the barest understanding of the powers that surrounded them, when cause and effect were like the mist of a dream.

         Canute was still free, and even without the Aged Dreamer’s omens perhaps he could sway the people of the hinterlands into an alliance, but not if he wanted to preserve his will, etched upon the mind of the witch.

         That night the witch was stripped naked and bound from head to toe in chains of bronze. She was flame-strider and wind-talker, with eyes of ice and hands that knew the earth as a friend, but the sea knew no master, and in the morning they would feed her to the salty depths. There she would either perish or remain until the passing of all ages.

         From where she lay in the cold center of the camp she could see Canute’s tent, sense the conflict from within. With his paper will burned and the witch dead, his will would rebound to him, his once more. At Ichor, the witch had shown him a love he might have had; what he had lost to maintain his fettered will. Now she was showing him what he might still have; what he had not yet lost, if only he could let her go to the grave.

         At midnight he doused his lantern, his silhouette eaten by the darkness. As silence fell over them, with only the witch and her guards awake in the night, Canute left his tent and struck the sentries dead. Wielding a sword forged from a fire iron called Providence, he hacked through the witch’s bronze shackles. She whistled, fluting tones high and clear in the frozen air, and her maimed hart bounded through the encampment. They fled amidst the chaos, allies by circumstance alone—but all the people saw was the witch and the ambassador leaving together, the Aged Dreamer nothing but piles of ash. Canute howled as they leapt along moonlit snowfields, his cry like a banshee’s in the still night.

         His voice hissed, his breath hot in the witch’s ear. “What do you want?”

         “I want you to take back your will and become a man, not a cog for which I am responsible. I offered you a choice today, a new choice, one outside your will, and I will offer it again. There is no escape from this fork in the road.”

         Canute struck her savagely and leapt from the back of the stag, disappearing into the night. She cast a glance over her shoulder, and she knew it would not be long before Canute found her again. He had suffered too greatly to allow her to roam free as keeper of his will, and he would not take it back as his own. He needed a middle road.

         Thankfully she had left him one.

* * *

         The witch could have spent her days fleeing from Canute’s wrath, dancing around him, forever teasing him out until the thread of his life snapped. But she did not wish for such a long and dreary existence, so she left the hinterlands and returned to the lands she had called home as a child. It was a place by the sea, where salt drifted through the air and across the tongue; where mangroves with gnarled roots clotted the still, marshy waters and birds flocked in every season.

         Her maimed hart died young, a price she had always known it must pay for the trauma of its birth. She laid it to rest alongside the familiars of her childhood, when such things had fascinated her. She stood over their graves in the shade of a mangrove tree, long-buried memories resurfacing, recalling foolish decisions of her youth and pain inflicted on undeserving creatures. How much she had changed since then, and how little.

         For a season she came to its grave every day in remembrance, and then every week, and then every month. As one year turned over into the next, she laid a wreath of citrus leaves on its cairn, and something within her broke. Flames of anguish licked at her soul, and she fell to her knees amidst bitter sobs. She clenched sandy soil in her fists, watching the grains slip from between her fingers, and her grandmother’s words came back to her:

         There will be no ultimate price to pay for whatever you do in life, child. No justice. You are the steward of your own soul.

         Those words had come from a grandmother who was still wise, still a master of her own mortality, and it was no coincidence that the witch recalled them now. There might be no final reckoning for her, but this life held enough agony of its own. The longer she lived and the more she learned, the more she realized how little she knew.

         For the first time since accepting the burden of responsibility for Canute, she felt fear. She could be sure of nothing, not even a man whom she had weighed and measured and put to a sheet of parchment so long ago. There was no telling how she played into his fate, for she was an outside observer; a meddler. She had the power of a god and the failings of a human, with the experience to know how dangerous that could be. If she was going to truly bend his fate to her will, balance the scale she had tipped, there could be no half-measures.

         She stood and cast her gaze out across the estuary, where flocks of cranes stood like sentinels in white. This place had been her beginning, in a time beyond memory. It would not make such a bad end, either.

* * *

         Canute appeared one morning with a litany on his lips. His voice preceded him, sending egrets and clouds of swallows into the air.

         “I name you Marisol,” he called, “born here, born on a summer solstice, born alone bearing a caul meant for two.”

         Marisol smiled and did not move from where she sat, staring out across the estuary as a fragment of herself came back to her. That had been her name, and that had been her birth—the necessary fate of all practitioners of magic. To feel the touch of magic was to be intertwined with the soul of another, the first step in losing one’s personhood and becoming simply another part of the world; a conduit for the cosmos. Now Canute would return that individuality to her; ground her so solidly in herself that she could not reach out to become anything else. He was fettering Marisol in her own essence.

         “Did you end her?” she asked. There was only one person he could have learned this from.

         Silence returned to her, and then he said, “I burned her portrait. She is no more.”

         Marisol closed her eyes, and another line of Canute’s will came back to her:

         And he will seek power from one whose fear of death outweighs love of life.

         “And now you have come to do what I did to her,” she said. “To keep me from my death, to make me the lockbox of your soul.”

         Canute emerged from the brush wearing a mask blank as slate. He held Providence in one hand and a mirrored shield in the other, reflecting Marisol’s tired eyes back at her.

         “Name me,” she said, and stood to face him. “Define my origins and my borders. Take my magic from me. Do you think then it will be easy? Do you think we who are touched by magic don’t all fear this day, like an eagle fears losing the skies? I am your god, Canute. If you’ve come this far, it’s only because I let you.”

         The threads of her identity wrapped around her, binding her magic tightly, but her limbs thrummed with memories—the experiences of more than two lifetimes, the movements of fear and anger and survival.

         She hurled a fistful of sand against his mask and lunged, her fingers seeking the hollow of his sternum. He balked, shield raised, then swept low, striking at her ankles. With disdainful fury she stomped on his blade, pinning it beneath her foot, and drove rigid fingers toward his throat.

         He dipped, and his mask cracked beneath her strike, the porcelain around his right eye falling away to reveal one wild, grey eye. With a snarl he threw his sword and shield away and wrapped his arms around her. She went for his neck, her teeth snapping shut on his collar bone, and he roared as he lifted her high then drove his knee into her back. She bit down on her scream and shunted the pain into a strike to the jaw, which he shook off with bearish resilience.

         They rolled away from one another, coated in sweat and blood and sand.

         He spread his arms wide, overshadowing her, drawing her attention in with slow, decisive movements. In a flash a crossbow quarrel flew from the trees and buried itself in her thigh. She cried out and pitched forward onto the sand, her leg rigid with pain.

         From the undergrowth stepped the woman from the village of Ichor—a woman whose name Marisol was curiously unable to remember. She wore her own signs of power, yet she had crouched in the humid shadows with an iron bolt and fear in her eyes. Marisol laughed through her pain, for even gods can be fools. She had robbed Canute of his love, but she had not robbed him of an ally, and there were more people than just her grandmother who feared death.

         Canute flipped her onto her stomach, face pressed to the sand. Boots appeared in the edge of her vision, and then the woman was squatting in the sand, staring at her like a specimen in a jar.

         “You, too, child?” Marisol asked. “Did I not give you enough the first time?”

         The woman reached out and with a savage tug removed a hank of hair by the roots. She coiled it into a glass vial, then stepped on Marisol’s wrist. Marisol knew what was coming, and she closed her eyes to it, but still the image of the woman burned bright in her mind’s eye. A woman she had cared for as a girl, raised into a woman, sponsored into a witch.

         Marisol opened her eyes. A silver chain around the woman’s neck disappeared into her collar, and Marisol knew what lay there against her breast—a diamond of exquisite perfection, yet harboring the tiniest inclusion, a necessary flaw. The tool of a witch too young to be forgotten by the world.

         “Child, have you been walking the halls of my mind without my knowledge? Have you stolen your name from my memory?”

         The woman wedged a sliver of wood beneath Marisol’s thumb nail and removed a mallet from her belt, but Marisol held her gaze.

         “Is that a memory lattice around your neck?”

         Mallet hit wood and wood parted flesh, and a strangled groan escaped Marisol’s clenched teeth. The woman tore the thumbnail from its bed and dropped it into another glass vial. Marisol’s feet drummed against the sand, her blood drooling out onto the beach, bright in the sunshine, and she choked on her cries.

         “You have what you need?” Canute asked.

         “For now,” the woman said.

         As she walked away, Canute bent to whisper in Marisol’s ear. “You may have taken her love from me, but you didn’t take her. You are a weak god.”

         Marisol closed her eyes, felt the sun on her cheek, the sand growing wet beneath her fingers. The flow of fate could never be controlled, merely nudged here and there, to waver briefly before settling back into its path. She had been a fool to try, and yet she did not regret it.

* * *

         Marisol awoke at twilight, tied to a chair in her empty bedroom. Remnants of daylight illuminated the woman from Ichor. She sat at an easel.

         Her brush traced unseen arcs across the canvas, careful dabs and negative space. After a moment she looked up and met Marisol’s eyes. She set her brush aside and walked over to Marisol, holding her gaze.

         “The eyes were what I noticed,” she said, “about your grandmother’s portrait. The detail that had been put into every facet—pale blue, just like yours.”

         “They’re called witch eyes for a reason, child. When was the last time you looked in a mirror?”

         The woman blinked.

         “You wear your power too openly. The eyes, almost no one notices; the scent, almost no one understands; but that lattice around your neck, filled with stolen recollections? People feel too many gaps in their memories—especially if they all center on you. I hope you haven’t been lying to him. This could all get quite nasty.”

         The woman took a step back, studying Marisol a moment longer before returning to her easel. She mixed her paints, cut with blood and hair and fingernail, and continued her work. At some point Canute walked by the open doorway, but he glanced in without a word. Marisol was a mere thing to him now—perhaps she had always been.

         She sat in that bare room for days, allowed water and nothing else as the woman continued her work. Marisol’s stomach became an echoing hollow inside her, a place she retreated to touch the walls of pain that throbbed there, serving as a shield rather than a prison. On the fourth day, she awoke from the restless half-sleep that sometimes came over her and found Canute and the woman examining the painting in the late afternoon light.

         Canute’s eyes flicked from the painting to Marisol to the woman, who nodded. “This will do.”

         Canute untied her and dragged her out to the cemetery of familiars. He looked at the cairns, each marked with a placard in a language he couldn’t read, and said, as though it were a measure of good faith, “I will lay your body to rest with your ancestors.”

         Marisol laughed. “You’re no less ignorant now than when I first met you.”

         He threw a rope over a bough of the ancient mangrove that grew close to the house, far from the waterline. “Do witches not bury their dead? Do you wish to be immolated?”

         He fastened a noose around her ankles and hauled her up, so the world spun madly as the blood rushed to her head. The woman placed the painting flat on a stool beneath her.

         “Not doing this elegantly,” Marisol gasped.

         The woman glanced up at her. “Yes, well, your nephew said you never instructed him in the artful dark. Which bead of blood will be the fatal drop to seal your fate? I don’t know how to sift through such paradoxes. Clumsy divination cannot say—I do not know how you painted your grandmother so elegantly. Would you like to tell me? It will make this easier.”

         “I think not.”

         The woman went back to securing the painting, so it would not tumble to the earth beneath the deluge of Marisol’s blood as they waited for the drop that carried her soul. It was the first time Marisol had seen the painting, and as she spun in lazy circles it stared up at her like a sorrowful mirror. A bitter smile turned up the corner of the mouth, a smile she wore even now.

         Canute stood by, his stony gaze wavering neither left nor right. “You could have avoided this, had you just let me be.”

         “A stone in a river or a rising tide are things we let be. You wanted to pretend you, too, were a force of nature, but you only become that by handing your agency to someone else. If a thunderhead gave me its volition, I would not let it scour the earth, either.”

         Canute drew his belt knife, folded steel glinting ember-like in the setting sun. “When a squall gathers on the horizon, you run, Marisol. You do not fight.”

         He laid the knife edge against her neck and pulled. Blood drizzled like tree sap from her neck—slowly, so slowly—and Canute frowned. He glanced at the woman from Ichor, who shook her head, studying Marisol like a locked puzzle box. Canute laid the knife against the other side of her neck and pulled again, and again a lazy drizzle of blood stretched out to the painting in drips and drops.

         Marisol shrieked, half-mad with panic that her body still felt, regardless of what she knew in her mind. “Cut again, Canute. Give me gills, turn me into a mermaid. You will not catch my soul with that blood sieve, no matter how well she painted it.”

         Canute’s fingers wrapped around her jaw, digging into her cheeks as he turned her to face him. “What did you do?”

         “Only what every witch does,” she replied, “and what I promised myself I never would.”

         The woman stood, understanding leaping into her eyes. She crossed the distance between them and tore open the collar of Marisol’s shirt, revealing a livid scar down the length of her sternum. She pressed two fingers against Marisol’s neck, her eyes growing wide as the sensation that rebounded to her was nothing, nothing, nothing.

         “She has cut out her heart and enspelled it with a synecdoche. She’s a blood-shade.”

         Canute turned away, the pent fury in his voice flaring even as his tone dropped. “What does that mean? She doesn’t look like a shade.”

         “She cannot be bled to death. Her heart is...” The woman looked around, at the house, the mangroves, the estuary. “Somewhere else. We cannot complete the painting without it.”

         “Can you find it?”

         The woman fell into a conflicted silence. “No. Not unless she has hidden it someplace very stupid.”

         “Or I tell you.”

         They both turned to Marisol, who continued to spin slowly by her ankles.

         “What is a musician who does not fear his critics? A sailor who does not fear the storm?” She looked out across the still, sunset waters. “A witch who does not fear death... yet allows herself with wither into a shade anyway.”

         From behind her came the woman’s answer, small and filled with dreadful anticipation. “Free.”

         “Free to do anything. I did not hide my heart away in a vault of stone, or sink it to the bottom of the sea. I fed it to a crane, and when the bird dies, so will I.”

         The wind gusted, and Marisol swung around to face them. Canute was staring out across the waters, as though he could wade into that multitude of birds and kill them one by one. The woman, too, stared, with the face of one defeated. “We will never find it.”

         Marisol tilted her head, the gashes on her neck tugging strangely. “I am neither a wind-shade nor a time-shade. I can still be strangled, still be burned.”

         The woman’s expression tightened, and she shook her head before Canute could ask the question. “No,” she said to him. “She—she’s taunting me. I learned the making of a blood sieve from her grandmother. I could not guess how her soul might ride the last breath from her lungs or which flake of ash might carry her to the sky. Such sieves are beyond me.”

         “Can you experiment?” Canute glanced at Marisol, panic rising behind the anger. “Can you learn?”

         The woman recoiled at his pleading touch. “Only on people.”

         “And?”

         A fragile stillness came over them, on the precipice of desperation. Slowly she said, “And I would never do that.”

         “Why not?” Canute loomed over her.

         The woman met Marisol’s gaze. Marisol smiled.

         “Canute,” the woman said. “We don’t need to do this now; we have time, have her bloody name. Can’t you see what she’s doing?”

         “She? The crone I’ve stripped of all power and hung from a tree branch? Yes, I can see what she’s doing. What I can’t see is what you’re doing. I did not bring you here to fail at the final hour.”

         He turned on the spot, his feet kicking up sand as he looked about with an animal panic. “Maybe we’ll even find the one she—”

         “Canute. No. She’s beaten us.”

         The wind sighed. The noose around Marisol’s ankles creaked. The crack of Canute’s fist across the woman’s nose was like the snap of falling timber. She gasped and reeled but did not lose her feet.

         Her expression darkened. “I see.”

         With a snarl she spoke a word of power and ensnared him. She crooked a finger, and through the cloth of her shirt the memory lattice flared like starlight—but she had only a novice’s training, only a novice’s focus. Marisol watched as the woman stared into Canute’s furious eyes, remembered he knew who she was, and the cosmos faded from her grasp.

         Canute drew his sword. “I’ll cut you down to a bloody stump, nothing but a head to speak sorceries as I need them. You don’t think I know your name still? You don’t think I took precautions against forgetting? I will twine you around my fingers, break you down like I’ve broken—like I’ve broken...”

         He twitched, his blink erratic and forced. He looked to Marisol, and she snorted. “Forgotten my name, Canute? Maybe she has it.”

         Canute rounded on the woman, and terror filled her eyes, surging up from the depths of her soul. She brought a hand to her temple, eyes squeezed shut, arcane words at her lips. The memory lattice shone once more, and then she fell to the sand, convulsing like a patient in a stroke. Canute hesitated, watching as the woman grew still. Her breath sent grains of sand skittering across the beach, but her eyes were empty.

         “First she took my name from you,” Marisol said, and closed her eyes. “Then she took from herself—removed it from her own mind. But ensorcelling one’s own memory, taking what one knows and casting it aside—that requires a defter hand than hers.” The witch opened her eyes. “A hand such as mine.”

         Canute had barely turned before the rope untied itself from the witch’s ankles and the winds howled, carrying her emaciated body to the ground gentle as any autumn leaf, and then they did not touch her at all. She was stillness in the eye of a storm—her lank hair, her filthy shirt, her exhausted body untouched by the winds.

         Canute dropped to his knees, sword anchored in the sand, head bowed against the gale. When it softened to a breeze, he looked up, and the witch stood over him, hands clasped behind her back. She spoke to him in a language he did not understand yet felt familiar to his soul, like the voice of a mother to a babe in the womb.

         The witch reached down and took the sword from his grip, once a fire iron called Providence, and the final line of Canute’s will came to her lips, bittersweet as a balm, but she did not speak it aloud. Instead she placed the blade against his neck and said, “I told you there would come a day I felt I must kill you.”

         With his final breath he looked into her eyes and said, “I’m sorry.”

         “I know.”

         The witch struck his head from his shoulders, and then for a time she did nothing. She looked down at Canute’s still form, made small in death. Now, at the end of the decision she made long ago to step into his life and drink that bitter brew of responsibility for another’s sins, she could not say she had done right, could not know. She could only hope and fear in equal measure.

         The woman from Ichor lay beside him, her expression a blank mask. The witch reached down and let her hand cover those staring eyes.

         “Canute was so sure of himself.” She did not know if the woman heard, or if the words were even meant for her. “A curse I gave him, which he would not allow me to lift. I suppose that surety was appealing to you, even after you’d found something greater to chase, and I wish I had foreseen that. I’m sorry.”

         The witch wiped a trickle of blood from her collar and flicked it to the wind, then took the necklace from the woman and crushed the diamond between her fingers. “But your choices were your own, Vera. Farewell.”

         The Witch of the Will disappeared thereafter. None could say for certain where she went, but it was rumored she returned to an old forgotten house on an old forgotten lane, and that a person who has the right motivations might stumble upon her brewing potions, waiting for a crane to die.

Copyright © 2019 Aaron Perry

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Aaron Perry is a full-time writer, part-time sake brewer currently living in Japan. His work has been published in Deep Magic, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Kzine. He occasionally tweets from @KnownSequitur.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Athlerrod,” by Ferdinand Dumago Ladera

Ferdinand Dumago Ladera is an acclaimed artist born in Iligan, the city of waterfalls, situated in the southeastern part of the Philippines. He was trained and received a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at FEATI University in Manila, Philippines. He has a diverse background as a fine artist, graphic designer, and photographer. He specializes in fantasy and science-fiction illustration. View more of his work at his website, ferdinandladera.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2019 Firkin Press

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