Issue #300 • Mar. 26, 2020

Special Double-Issue

“The Hummingbird Temple,” by C.C. Finlay

“Uzumaki of the Lake,” by Richard Parks

“Bound by Sorrow,” by Maurice Broaddus

“To Balance the Weight of Khalem,” by R.B. Lemberg

“Never a Butterfly, Nor a Moth With Moon-Painted Wings,” by Aimee Ogden

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

THE HUMMINGBIRD TEMPLE

by C.C. Finlay

         The royal family had gathered for dinner in their private hall at the Spring Palace, a rare event that included all the children and the full contingent of royal spouses, but Lin had no interest in the dinner or the formalities. After the last bite of dessert, she excused herself with a quiet, unenthusiastic bow to her father, the Dynast—who dismissed her from the far end of the room with a bored, dyspeptic frown—and hurried toward her private suite located at the top of Crippled Heron Tower.

         Her maid made a perfunctory attempt to follow, but, as she was certainly a spy for some other member of the royal family, Lin dismissed her with a frown much like her father’s. When the maid again attempted to accompany her, Lin spun and snapped: “I have work to do!” It was sufficient to drive her away.

         The summer was growing late, and the sun set earlier each day. As Lin pressed through the maze of ever-more-empty corridors and climbed the tedious flights of stairs to the tower’s highest level, she reminded herself that she had chosen these remote rooms for reasons.

         If they had nothing else to recommend them, her quarters were situated as far as possible from the Dynast’s wing, which meant that they were also far from the eight other heirs and all their mothers. As the ninth heir in the current order of succession, and the only one lacking a mother at court, she had no realistic hope of ever sitting on the throne, and being physically removed from those who possessed such hopes allowed her to ignore, mostly, their petty political intrigues while she pursued her own long-term projects.

         She reached the top of the stairs without breaking a sweat. Guardsman Ochs, her usual evening sentry, stood at attention outside her door—for her own safety, of course, since it was dangerous to be the Dynast’s heir—and opened it wordlessly as she approached. He was very large and imposing, and she supposed that gave an impression of safety, but he was not very bright, and if she were choosing her own guards—which she was not currently permitted to do—she would select them for intelligence instead.

         He bowed stiffly and closed the door behind her.

         She slid the iron bolt into place, and her shoulders unknotted, just a little, for the first time since she’d left these rooms in the morning. Her pet monkey spider, Snub, rattled his cage in greeting, but she was too lost in thought to attend to him immediately.

         Servants had entered while she was gone, to bring fresh water and linens and to bank a fire in the hearth. The extra warmth was needed in all seasons. The walls at the top of Crippled Heron Tower were a filigree of stonework, and the breeze was constant. The heavy curtains were already pulled aside for her. At this height, the evening sun was unobstructed by any other rooflines or treetops, and she loved the way radiance poured through the windows.

         The sun hasn’t set yet. I still have time.

         Couches and cushions for guests, which she seldom entertained, were shoved to the walls, creating space in the middle for the massive sandalwood table—which still had a smooth, creamy fragrance after all these years—where she worked. She circled the table slowly, like a hawk spiraling in the sky, and studied the model temple complex that she was building out of bleached white hummingbird bones.

         The temple covered the table, which had been acquired from an executed general. Lin pretended it was a gift from her father—both the table and the execution (the general was a gross provincial man who, in addition to peculation and a host of other crimes, had wanted to marry her to cement his place at court)—even though the Dynast scarcely acknowledged her existence in public. In truth, she had been forced to spend a significant part of her comparatively stingy yearly allowance to bribe palace guards to acquire and bring her the table. She assumed they had asked her father for permission first. Either way, she had learned that sometimes, through will and determination, you could take one truth and turn it into another.

         Muffled voices came through the door. Someone was speaking urgently with Guardsman Ochs, which was conspicuously uncommon. Lin refused to be distracted.

         The model buildings spread before her were an architecture of her own design, based on the mythical Temple of the Dyness of the Golden Lake, informed by the treatises of the Three Wise Builders, and constructed with advice from senior members of the Royal Council of Engineers and the Court Geomancer. Her explanation—that she was considering retirement to a convent, if the Dynast could be persuaded, and that she wished to study the construction of temples in order to pursue that work there—reassured everyone and made them more willing to assist her. An heir without ambitions at court was less likely to be dangerous, intentionally or accidentally.

         She paused opposite the western window, while the light spread like diaphanous lace across the table, and searched her model for flaws.

         On a jade hill above the water, rendered in swirling blue glass, a pagoda made of bones rose in nine meticulous tiers, the lines of each ascending rooftop more opulent than the last. The pagoda was surrounded by eight pavilions, which represented the cultures and architectural traditions of the eight regions of her father’s vast empire. Extensive gardens and orchards, filled with tiny plants shaped from bone, twisted throughout the structures. On a cramped, heart-shaped island, opposite the pagoda, was a small open-sided tea pavilion; the ninth, representing the throne. Lin had paid the royal jeweler to carve a miniature pot and cups from hummingbird bones. With a magnifying glass, custom made by the royal astronomer’s own lensmaker, she could even see the royal crest carved on each piece.

         Alas, her domain had no subjects. She did not know yet if that would change, but she did not think it likely.

         Her building materials were sorted by type into black jade bowls that lined the edge of the table. Tiny white ribs, smaller than the curve of her littlest finger, filled one bowl; they were perfect for building the arched gates in the orchard walls. Delicate bone-rings plucked from eye sockets rested in another; those she used like hooks for stringing curtains made of iridescent feathers. Hollow, straw-like wing and arm bones provided wallposts and screens. A bowl of larger, flat keelbones were used for tiling the roofs. A variety of skulls spilled over the tops of several bowls—the short spike of the wasp hummingbird, the graceful arc of the ruby, the hammer-like knob of the woodpecker hummingbird. Not as many uses for those, although they served well as a tumble of boulders in the meditation garden at the center of the temple complex.

         When she first began this project, she had employed hunters to capture hundreds of breeding pairs of hummingbirds from every corner of the realm and send them back to the capital. Workmen had constructed a huge aviary complex adjacent to the summer garden, so the birds could multiply and provide enough bones to meet her need. Now a small palace of cages sprawled across many acres, filled with countless flowers and thousands of darting gem-like birds. It had become one of the royal attractions, frequently visited by nobles and foreign dignitaries, who marveled at their variety and beauty.

         Lin loved the bones more than the living creatures. Hummingbird wings connected to their sternums in a ball-and-socket joint that was nearly unique among birds. She used the joints as hinges for the swinging shutters of her temple windows. No one—no one—had ever done anything like that before. The royal architects assured her.

         A commotion rose to her window from the courtyard below.

         She ignored it.

         This project was so near its end. To lengthen her pleasure over the past few months, Lin had permitted herself to add just one new detail to the model each evening. Finding no flaws in her work, she circled the table again, searching for today’s essential addition.

         She paused before a bowl overflowing with bones so small and thin they looked like pale white hairs. Like most birds, hummingbirds possessed tongue bones, forked at the end like divining rods. They were small and hollow, and could bend in any direction; perhaps the most flexible bones that had ever existed in any creature. She had been saving these throughout her project, waiting for the perfect moment to use them.

         Tonight was the night, she decided.

         But how?

         Snub shook his wooden cage with eight hairy legs, demanding attention. Far off in the palace, a bell rang. The rattle of spears mixed with angry shouts echoed off the walls of nearby towers. Soldiers... doing something, she guessed.

         She didn’t have time to think about it.

         It was nearing the moment of sunset. She used tweezers to sort and then select the smallest, most delicate tongue bone from the bowl.

         The sun touched the sharp edge of the distant snow-capped mountains and cracked like an egg, spilling the day’s last light over the pan of the sky. It flowed through the open window and flooded Lin’s temple, turning it into pale, translucent gold. With her free hand, she pressed a needle into the wood to create a hole just outside the main gate to the temple. She pushed so hard that the round end punctured her thumb. A single drop of blood bloomed on her pale skin. She rubbed it absent-mindedly against her lips to stanch the flow and lowered the tongue-bone into the needle-hole.

         A bone-white lily blossom.

         Perfect.

         The light changed from gold to crimson while she sucked the blood on her thumb. Her temple was complete. She knew it would never be more perfect than it was at this moment, no matter what she added.

         Snub shook his cage again. In the wild, monkey spiders were carrion eaters. Against all advice from the royal zookeepers, concerned because of the creature’s poisonous spit, Lin had originally acquired Snub to clean her hummingbird carcasses. He had done wonderfully when he was newly born and barely big enough to fill the palm of her hand. But he grew quickly, until he was the size of an infant, and he soon proved useless to the task, devouring the birds, bones and all. She kept him anyway and hand-fed him other things until he became accustomed to her, even affectionate.

         Snub spurted a blob of web through the bars.

         Monkey spiders could smell blood in the air from great distances, though Lin doubted the one drop on her thumb could excite him this much. She had opened her mouth to sing one of the lullabies that usually soothed him when frantic knocking sounded at her door—the pounding of a small fist, not the heavy knuckles of Ochs.

         She stood. Despite the unexpected sound at an unexpected hour, she found herself serene and tranquil. She paused long enough to don her informal robes, tying the silk belt as she walked to the door. The bolt screeched as she unlocked it.

         Hanah, one of the serving girls from the kitchen and Lin’s personal spy, stood there in her apron, wringing her hands and glancing over her shoulder. There was no sign of Ochs or any other guard. Lin had never seen her door unguarded before.

         “What is it?” she asked.

         Hanah stared at the floor. She took a calming breath, but she couldn’t stop wringing her hands. “Your Highness, I’m very sorry to report...” Her voice trailed off.

         “Out with it.”

         “The Dynast, your father, he’s dead.”

* * *

         Kuikin’s life had culminated in this one perfect moment, and he was not about to let anything spoil it.

         He was seated by a small table in a large pit full of silk cushions at The Magpie on the Plum Branch, one of the capital’s most exclusive wine rooms, an establishment elevated so far above his birth or purse that he had never aspired to walk through its doors. Yet here he was. A beautiful young hostess who called herself Jasmine—most likely because she had bathed in the fragrance—sat beside him and smiled, making him feel attractive, which, considering his pox-scarred face, was almost an act of high mancy all its own. Even if she thought, erroneously, that he was a visiting dignitary from some foreign power.

         His colleague Vertir, seated beside another hostess, was relating a highly exaggerated account of his escape from the Brotherhood of Catfish Herders during the Sump River Rebellion, one that emphasized its most ridiculous aspects while downplaying the life-threatening perils and eliding the political elements entirely. Vertir had been a soldier in his previous profession, back while Kuikin was still trying unsuccessfully to be a scholar, and he had a much richer and more entertaining repertoire of stories. Kuikin had heard this particular tale before, but by the time Vertir described the fight in the scum pond, where he had tried to use fish as cudgels while the agitated creatures panicked and attacked everyone, tears were streaming down Kuikin’s face. Jasmine pressed pleasantly against him and also laughed.

         And he was being paid to do all of this!

         He quickly dried his eyes on his sleeve, so he could keep his attention focused on the real reason they were here. Master Hang, the elderly Notary for Buildings, one of the highest positions in the royal bureaucracy, was seated across the room in a similar silk-cushioned pit, where he was surrounded by half a dozen of his own men and twice as many hostesses. They had been there for hours, getting progressively drunker as they celebrated the commencement of a major housing project in the Frog Hill District.

         A new project meant many official fees and unofficial bribes, the latter no doubt the source of funds for this evening’s celebration. Kuikin and Vertir’s boss, the Notary General, was also Hang’s boss.

         “I have enough to hang Hang, if that’s all I wanted to do,” the Notary General had told them a fortnight ago in another wine room on the outskirts of the capital, a place far dingier and much less fragrant than this one, where the only hostess was an ancient crone renowned for her discretion. “He should be collecting huge bribes, but he tells me he isn’t. Builders insist they’re paying huge bribes, but none of their money reaches me. So one of them is lying. I believe the problem is in Hang’s office, among his men. What I need is an outside assessment. If they’re not collecting enough money, that’s simple—I can eliminate all of them and—” he paused to raise his eyebrows “—rebuild the office from the foundation up.”

         Kuikin chortled at that, because he could tell the Notary General intended a pun. Rebuild the Building office. A weak effort, but Kuikin was not above appealing to his master’s vanity. That required a light touch and the right sense of balance. A subdued chortle acknowledged the effort when laughter would have seemed sycophantic.

         “However, if one of Hang’s subordinates is skimming money, I can’t figure out which one it is,” the Notary General said. “He may be so good that even Hang doesn’t know. This strikes me as the most likely possibility. I need you to find out who he is and tell me everything you can learn about him.”

         “And then what?” asked Vertir.

         Most of Kuikin and Vertir’s work for the Notary General concluded with someone’s unfortunate, usually “accidental” death. But the two of them seldom operated in the capital, and this mission might require more circumspection.

         “If one of his subordinates is skimming money, then I will either make him an example or promote him to replace old Hang,” the Notary General said. “Find him. Evaluate him. Make a recommendation.”

         So that’s what they were doing, posing as two foreigners who had come to the capital to make a huge investment in building projects. They’d been investigating Hang’s staff and developing their false story for two weeks while slowly circling upward through the bureaucracy. Tonight’s venture gave them a chance to observe Hang’s inner circle and perhaps make informal contact.

         Jasmine whispered in Kuikin’s ear, asking him to buy another bottle of wine. He sent her for it even though he had stopped drinking for the evening. Vertir never drank alcohol at all, or touched any other intoxicating, mind-altering substance, and with a partial bottle still on the table, they scarcely needed more. But frequent purchases were the rent they paid for occupying seats, and it added convincing detail to have bottles lined up on the table.

         Vertir said something to his own hostess, River, and she followed Jasmine away. Then he slid close enough to Kuikin to speak without being overheard. He glanced over at Hang’s group. One of the assistant notaries was standing on the table, singing a popular bawdy song about a woman beekeeper and all the times she got stung. Perhaps a bit inelegant for this venue, but the other patrons watched and laughed. Some sang along. “So what do you think?” Vertir asked.

         Kuikin sighed. “That we should drag out this investigation and enjoy it as long as possible.”

         “He is no man to play the fool with,” Vertir said. A frown shadowed his face. No need to ever say who “he” was. The Notary General was only he in their life who mattered.

         “Not to play the fool,” Kuikin replied. “To make ourselves more valuable.” He leaned forward. “Think about it. We’ve proved our worth time and again, in every remote shithole of the empire, risking our necks, and for what? The land is at peace, thanks in part to all our work. We deserve a chance to live it up in the capital.”

         “I hate the capital.” Vertir’s head turned toward the doors as he spoke, as if he were half expecting a sudden attack; he was always like that, but cities made it worse.

         Vertir’s displeasure worried Kuikin more than the Notary General’s—he had never had a better or more trustworthy partner, nor one who had saved his life even once, much less several times—and he had no desire at all to make him unhappy. He was about to open his mouth to explain that Hang’s son-in-law was definitely skimming the bribes and should probably be promoted, when the door slammed opened.

         Kuikin jumped in his seat, but Vertir registered no reaction at all beyond a sort of lazy awareness. Several fully armored guards entered the room—the Notary General’s men, grim and anxious. They looked past Kuikin and Vertir, not recognizing them—nor should they have—to find Hang and his associates. The lead guardsman, a severe man with a beard so pointed it might well have been a weapon, marched over to the pit, where the assistant notary was still singing. When he saw the guard, he fell over backward, caught by friends and hostesses. Everyone laughed uproariously, except the guard, who was still trying to get Hang’s attention.

         “Be right back,” said Vertir, and he slipped out of their pit to eavesdrop on the conversation.

         Kuikin saw Jasmine and waved her to his side. “Find out why those men are here and I’ll double what I’ve paid so far tonight.”

         She nodded and slipped away.

         The guard whispered frantically to old Hang. His assistants leaned in to listen. Vertir had an arm around one man’s shoulders, nodding attentively, as if he were part of the group. He always seemed to get away with those kinds of bold ploys, but Kuikin preferred his own methods of gathering information. As Jasmine spoke to the guards at the door, offering them his fresh bottle of wine, he peered into the one still at his table. Was it half full or half empty?

         Hang and his men followed the guards out the door while Vertir slid back into the pillows. “I told them I was an assistant Notary for Produce.”

         “You don’t look like a notary.”

         “No one was looking at me.”

         “You’ve ruined our patiently crafted identity as foreign investors.”

         “I’ll tell them I was a foreign investor who lied about being an assistant Notary for Produce because I was looking for inside information.”

         “Hmm.” Kuikin conceded the plausibility of that. “What did you find out?”

         “Not much. Only that they are to report to the Notary General’s palace immediately. When I said I was an assistant notary, the captain said that I should fetch my boss and bring him and all our staff along to the palace too.”

         “My happiness is over.” Kuikin lifted the remaining bottle of wine and emptied it in one long gulping swallow. When he was done, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “There are no notary emergencies for buildings after dark.”

         “And fewer still for produce,” Vertir said. “So there must be some kind of political crisis.” He paused thoughtfully. “What’s the worst thing it could be?”

         Kuikin’s mind whirled. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Part of their job was to figure out the worst possible situation, and then, if necessary, take steps to prevent it.

         Jasmine returned, her face pale and absent any hint of the pleasant gaiety she demonstrated just moments before. “This one is very sorry to report that she was able to discover only the most ridiculous of rumors from that group of uncouth men who disturbed our humble establishment.”

         Kuikin looked at Vertir, but Vertir shrugged. No one told any rumors to Hang.

         Kuikin took gentle hold of Jasmine’s wrist and pulled her into the seat beside him. “What did they tell you?”

         “They told me to go home to my family and hide.”

         “No, the rumors,” he said, so forcefully that she flinched. “What were the rumors?”

         She lowered her gaze. “His Imperial Majesty, the Dynast, is dead.”

         Kuikin glanced at Vertir. The Dynast dying was pretty much the definition of the worst thing it could be.

* * *

         Lin stood in her doorway, facing the kitchen girl. She went very still for a moment as the news soaked in.

         My father is dead.

         She had always known this day would come, but this was not how she had expected it to arrive. It was a very bad augur for her survivability that a lowly servant girl from the kitchens had been the one to come inform her of her father’s death. A servant girl that she paid to spy for her at that, and one whose services Lin could acquire only because the girl was so far down the ranks of importance no one else would waste coin on her services. No wonder she was wringing her hands—she had probably never been this far outside the kitchens without an escort.

         “Come in,” she said. As soon as Hanah stepped inside, she bolted the door. “Are you certain?”

         Hanah nodded. “I saw it happen. After dinner, he was eating ginger ice. And then he just...” Her voice shook.

         “I see.”

         Ginger ice. Servants carried ice down from the mountains, packed in insulated barrels, for him. The ginger was grown in the royal gardens, carefully bred to his own demanding tastes. It was her father’s favorite treat, saved exclusively for him. She remembered sitting on his lap once when she was about four years old, while he fed a bowl to her spoon by spoon, laughing the whole time. One of her earliest memories. Ten years later, at another meal, she was seated at the far end of the room from her father, beside the general with the sandalwood map table, to—as her maid had patiently explained to her—dangle the possibility of an arranged marriage; the Dynast had stopped by to speak with them, and when he saw all the uneaten food on her plate he told her that ginger ice always aided his digestion.

         Those were the two most personal interactions she’d ever had with her father.

         He had been neither that old nor terribly infirm. It didn’t seem possible that he could be dead. But the absence of Ochs was all the proof she needed. No doubt he had run off to help one of her sisters, probably the infant Jun, leaving Lin completely unprotected.

         I will have to protect myself.

         Lin went to her desk and retrieved a heavy coin purse. She removed a golden dragon and handed it to Hanah. “For your loyalty in coming to me.”

         Hanah stared at the coin in wonder for a moment, then slipped it into a pocket in her sleeve. A single dragon was probably worth all her family’s property. It might even buy back her indenture. “Thank you, Your Highness.”

         Lin jingled the heavy bag. “You brought me news at great risk. You have no further obligation. But I would like you to stay with me and carry this for me. Will you do that?” She offered her the purse full of gold.

         The girl took it in trembling hands and stuffed into her apron pocket, covering it with a dirty rag. She swallowed hard and continued to stare at the floor. “How may I serve?”

         “How long do you think it will be until they come for me?”

         “Perhaps not until the middle of the night,” the girl said.

         “That long?”

         “Half the staff is trying to hide the fact that the Dynast is dead by telling everyone he’s sick. I think they’re afraid we’ll be blamed, because he died just after eating dinner. But the Mistress of Spoons spies for the Notary General, and she ran off to tell him immediately. As soon as she was gone, others rushed to tell their own spymasters. Fighting broke out in the Dragon Pavilion. That’s when I was able to slip away in the confusion.”

         “You did well.” Lin paced around her room, taking stock of her resources.

         “Do you want to go see him?” Hanah asked.

         “What?”

         “Your father. To pay your respects and ask the blessing of his spirit?”

         “No, he’s dead. His spirit can’t help me at the moment. If we’re still alive tomorrow—or whenever the succession crisis is over—we’ll go pay our respects then.”

         Hanah’s mouth fell open in apparent shock. But she was a country girl, and Lin understood that respect for one’s parents was almost the entirety of their religion. Hanah would have gone to her own father’s deathbed no matter the cost or danger, even though he was the one who had sold her indenture.

         “Why will they come for me?” she asked.

         “To bring you official word of the Dynast’s death,” Hanah said.

         “No, they will come to kill me,” she said. Hanah’s lack of reaction indicated she knew as much but was too reluctant to speak of assassination to a member of the royal family. “You must always be honest with me, and I shall always be honest with you. Can you do that?”

         A small nod, eyes still lowered. They were both lying, but it was a start.

         “I am of little use as a hostage, since I have no family in court,” Lin said. “Perhaps, if the succession is finished quick enough, I may be kept alive for a royal marriage, as a means to secure a relationship with an ally. But only a minor ally, one with hope of access to the throne but no chance for ascent. Do you understand?”

         Hanah hesitated. “That makes sense.”

         Good. She wasn’t a total blockhead. She must have had her own worth calculated just as coldly before being sold into servitude. Lin knew, from years of talking to the staff, that while the country-born servants often arrived without much education, they could be deviously clever, which they hid behind a wall of reticence and feigned ignorance. She hoped she had chosen her own spy well.

         Only one way to find out. “Why does it make sense? Speak freely.”

         “Your oldest brother has children of his own and will want to eliminate every other person with a claim to the crown. Your oldest sister is married to the field marshal of the armies. If your brother were dead, then she could rule hand-in-hand with her husband. But they have no children yet, so she will have to kill all the other possible heirs to prevent any challenge to their rule. Both will have reason to want you dead because you have no family, and so there is no one to hold hostage to make you compliant to their wishes. Your other sisters have lesser claims to the throne and fewer resources than those two, so they will need allies. Like you.”

         While Hanah spoke, the sun sank behind the mountains and the room settled into gloomy twilight. Snub grew restless in his cage, swinging it recklessly. Lin reached her fingers through the bars and scratched his chin. Bubbles formed at his mouth. She was careful not to let any drip onto her fingers. It was a powerful acid, and it had been a while since he’d eaten, which tended to concentrate it.

         “So I can expect at least two assassins, and, possibly, if I survive those, one or more emissaries,” she said, lifting Snub’s cage from its hook. “We must retreat to someplace safe while my brother and sisters fight among themselves.”

         “We?” asked the girl.

         “If I am still alive in the morning, I shall have you promoted from the kitchen to be my personal maid.”

         “Thank you, Highness.” Her voice trembled, and her eyes dropped even lower, if that were possible.

         Lin paused one last time to look at her temple. This might be the last time she ever saw it; both its destruction and hers seemed equally probable. At least she had finished it first.

         On the off-chance she might survive the night, she reached into one of the jade bowls and grabbed the elegantly shaped skull of a Royal Purple hummingbird. She slipped it into her pocket as a memento. Almost a decade of her life had been devoted to this project, since she first asked for hummingbirds for her fourteenth birthday, and now this skull was the only thing she had to show for it.

         She grabbed Snub’s cage from its hook, went to the door, and slid back the bolt.

         Ochs stood in the hall, his face red from running, chest heaving from exertion. His heavy knuckles were poised to knock, and he looked startled. Had Jun’s mother sent him back to warn her or kill her? “Your Highness,” he said. “There’s some bad news. I’m here to escort you to a safer location.”

         Hanah stepped into the doorway behind Lin. Ochs’ small, dull eyes narrowed at the presence of an unapproved servant, and his hand went to the hilt of his sword.

         Lin flicked open the latch on Snub’s cage and said, “Bird!”

         The monkey spider launched itself at Ochs, landing on his chestplate and scrambling up to his face. Ochs tried to pull him off, but Snub wrapped his hairy legs around the big soldier’s head and spit acid in his eyes. Ochs screamed and crashed backward into the wall, then the floor, rolling and thrashing, screaming as the skin melted off his skull.

         The poison worked swiftly. Thrashing faded to twitching. One leg kicked weakly, as if he were still trying to run away.

         Within seconds, Snub had eaten his nose and half his cheek down to the bone. But there was no time to let her pet feast.

         “Cage,” Lin said, setting it on the floor.

         Snub had Ochs’ lips in his mouth. He twisted and chewed until he tore them loose, then crawled down the guard’s body, leaving a scarlet trail, and skittered back to his perch. Lin latched the door shut and lifted the cage.

         Ochs’s face was a mix of acid-blackened flesh, white bone, and smears of red blood. As they stepped around his body, Hanah gulped and said, “You think he was sent to kill you?”

         “I don’t know,” Lin admitted.

         Hanah stayed pressed to the wall opposite Snub’s cage as they descended the tower. Clashing swords and frightened shouts echoed up the stairwell from just two floors below, directly in the path Lin had intended to take.

         She thought she had a small chance of surviving if she could escape the palace quickly, but that seemed less likely with each passing moment. “This way,” she said, and ducked onto another floor without waiting to see if Hanah had followed.

* * *

         Kuikin glanced around the wine room to make sure that no one else had overheard Jasmine’s news. River glided in their direction, wearing a big false smile, but Vertir quickly waved her away.

         “Did anyone else besides you hear these ridiculous rumors?” Kuikin asked.

         “No, I was the only one.”

         “Did you share the news with anyone else?”

         “I came directly to you.”

         She kept her eyes lowered the whole time, as one was supposed to do when speaking of the Dynast or the dead. Kuikin reflected that the shared custom existed because both were beyond the reach of ordinary people yet infinitely capable of harming them.

         “You must stay with us a moment, while we talk,” Kuikin told her. “I will pay you as soon as we’re done.”

         “The Dynast dying explains the summons,” Vertir said in a lowered voice. He did not look at the ground, but then he wasn’t superstitious and had faced the dead and even the undead on several occasions and come away unharmed. “We should check in with the Notary General and see what he wants us to do.”

         “We should do something first and then check in with him,” Kuikin said. “This is an opportunity.”

         “How so?”

         “No heir has been named officially, so it’s unlikely to be a peaceful transition.”

         “You think?” Vertir asked. “I mean, there are only armed guards in the streets, gathering all the notaries. How long before there’s open fighting?”

         “If it hasn’t started already.” The government would grind to a stop without the notaries, so their boss was making a play to protect his own power. Kuikin didn’t blame him—the unexpected death of a Dynast often led to the more predictable death of all his ministers. And sometimes their spies. But if he and Vertir acted quickly to secure some other prize for the Notary General, it could assist his situation and improve their own position. “And that’s our opportunity. There are eight possible heirs, one dyn and seven dynesses.”

         “Nine,” corrected Vertir. “The dynast has a new infant daughter.”

         “She must be less than a year old.”

         “A few months old. Rumor has it her mother is ruthless and ambitious. She’s been hiring her own soldiers and would love to be regent.”

         “Nine heirs then. At the top is the Dyn Wang. The dynast’s son by a concubine, but the oldest of his children. And the only male.”

         “Because he saw to it that every other son was murdered,” murmured Vertir.

         “He’s smart, dangerous, and highly motivated. He’s also the Chancellor—already the second most powerful person in the empire. He oversees the imperial bureaucracy and works closely with—” He edited out “our boss” since Jasmine was sitting there. “—the Notary General. That puts him in the strongest position.”

         Vertir shook his head. “Dyn Wang is unpopular and only has the military support of his personal guard.”

         “He’s in charge of the capital police force.”

         “Technically. But the police draw so many recruits and leaders from the army, they might as well be a branch of the army. They’ll support whoever the army supports.”

         Kuikin mulled this.

         “Dyness Fan is the daughter of the Dynast’s first and only official wife,” Vertir said, “and she’s married to Field Marshal Chu. The soldiers are fiercely loyal to Chu ever since he put down the Sorcerer’s Uprising and stopped the border incursions by the Bey of Desmeé. And he is old friends with the Notary General.”

         “So Fan’s a contender,” Kuikin said. Jasmine shifted uncomfortably and glanced exasperatedly at him. “Stay just a moment longer,” he told her. “I want you to leave with something more than rumors.” In truth, he wanted her to leave with the right rumors. He turned back to Vertir. “The Dyness Ying could also make a play for the throne. Her husband is Baron of the Fire Mountain district.”

         Vertir responded with a slight shrug.

         Maybe he was right. The district wasn’t as important as it used to be. “That’s a fair assessment,” Kuikin admitted. “But at least she’s too clever to get caught between her brother and sister.”

         “She may not have a choice; she’s staying in the palace right now.” Vertir narrowed his eyes in disapproval as he registered Kuikin’s surprise. “You really should talk to more soldiers. All nine heirs are here in the city.”

         Kuikin didn’t know that. He’d been too focused on Hang. “I count on you to talk to soldiers for me.” His voice was more petulant than he intended.

         Vertir took no notice. “All of them here at once, and the Dynast dies? It seems like too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.”

         Kuikin agreed. “There will be blood for sure. Wang and Fan can look after themselves, but the other dynesses could be valuable as allies or bargaining chips for our master. We should try to gather up one or more and take them to him.”

         Vertir laughed wryly. “Like tokens at a carnival! Why not collect the whole set?”

         “That’s exactly what we should do,” Kuikin said.

* * *

         Lin, hurrying through the private quarters of the palace with Hanah at her heel, was halfway across the Hall of the Red Moon when the first assassin found them.

         He entered the grand doorway at the opposite end of the hall and slowed when he saw them. Blood dripped from the knife in his hand. He lowered it discreetly to his side.

         Lin glanced at her cage. Snub had finished eating Ochs’s lips and was grooming himself. The sleepy purr in his throat meant that he was useless for a second attack, even if his venom sacs hadn’t been depleted.

         “Dyness?” the assassin said, spoken more like a question than a formal address. He lifted his free hand and beckoned her. His fingertips were red with blood. “Come with me.”

         Lin didn’t recognize him and decided to bet her life that he didn’t recognize her. She pointed toward the stairs she’d just descended. “Her quarters are that way, but she’s not there.”

         The assassin approached them. Lin studied him carefully, wondering who he served. His livery bore the colors of the Field Marshal’s guard, earth brown with aqua blues—”shit and tears” she had heard one of her own guards describe it once—but that could mean anything. Though her oldest sister’s husband was brazen enough to send his own men to do murder, her brother Wang often used deception. And a third party would like nothing better than to see them fighting with each other. The killer could be working for anyone.

         “Where’s the dyness?” he said. The knife was no longer hidden.

         “We were sent to her room to leave this gift,” Lin said, raising Snub’s cage toward the assassin’s face. Her fingers were poised to flick open the latch, but only as a last resort. “However, the guardsmen there said she had already left for Dyness Jun’s quarters. They wouldn’t let us inside. Now we’re off to get further instructions.”

         Worry flashed across the man’s face, and, without a word of thank you, he sprinted for the stairwell.

         Lin continued across the Hall, with its elaborately patterned maroon and white marble floor. Hanah hurried to catch up with her.

         “He thought you were a royal servant,” she whispered.

         “There are advantages to being the daughter no one knows,” Lin said. “Now, hurry. We must knock on two doors before we leave.”

         The first was a thick door in the Tower of the Phoenix.

         Lin tapped lightly and the peephole slid open to reveal a pair of pale eyes.

         “Dyness,” said the voice on the other side. The Apprentice Master of Ritual. “I can’t let you in.” He sounded genuinely regretful. The peephole slid shut again.

         Lin tapped a second time. “I don’t want in,” she said, loud enough that she hoped he heard through the barrier. “Tell your master that when the sun rises he can find me where the Spring Dyn sought shelter from the Lords of Wind.”

         The peephole opened and the eyes returned. “I am listening.”

         “Do you have an old robe or coat?”

         There was a pause. “Yes.”

         “I need it.”

         The face disappeared and a moment later, a wad of fabric was shoved through the hole, which she pulled free.

         “Is there anything else?” the apprentice asked.

         “Just tell him the message,” Lin replied.

         The peephole slammed shut. Lin shucked off her own silk robe, which was too fine to hide her identity from anyone smarter than the first assassin, and slipped into the apprentice’s ragged coat, transferring the hummingbird skull from one set of pockets to the other. Then she knelt and wrapped Snub’s cage in the better fabric, tying it off like a hastily prepared bag of valued possessions, which, in a way, she supposed it was.

         “Listen closely,” Lin said to Hanah. “I can’t have you trailing ten feet behind me and avoiding this cage. Snub will do you no harm. With his cage wrapped, he may even fall asleep.”

         Hanah stared at the floor and nodded.

         “We must walk close together, with you in front of me. In the dark, anyone who sees us will mistake us for panicked servants.”

         Hanah nodded again. She was terrified enough for both of them but holding together despite that. Lin approved. She picked up the bundled cage, hoisting it like a bag of laundry.

         “Lead us through the Courtyards of the Three Sisters to the Sun Gate.”

         “Yes, Highness.”

         Lin grabbed her by the collar. “If you call me ‘Highness’ again, you’ll get us both killed. I’d rather kill you first. Do you understand?”

         “Yes, h... yes.”

         They had just descended the steps into the first courtyard, near the fountains, when pounding footsteps made Hanah freeze. A group of soldiers appeared as shadows from the middle courtyard, running toward them.

         Hanah dodged out of their path. Lin cowered behind her.

         “Go to your quarters, stay in your quarters,” the captain shouted. Lin recognized him, and he would surely recognize her if he looked closely. The soldiers ran past, into the palace, all but the captain, who paused before them.

         “Servants must go to their quarters,” he repeated. He glanced once at Hanah but was busy scanning the palace walls for archers. “I won’t be responsible for your safety if you’re not in your quarters.”

         “We’re on our way there now,” Hanah said.

         “Well, you can’t go that way. It’s—” Words failed him. He grabbed Hanah by the arm and spun her around. “You need to go around through the West Tower.”

         Lin was ready to argue, but Hanah grabbed her hand. “We can take the servant passages. Thank you, captain.”

         “That’s a long way back,” he said as he ran to catch up to his men. “Be careful!”

         Lin was grateful; the tattered coat had rendered her almost invisible.

         With Hanah leading the way, they ran up the stairs and retraced their original route. Shouting and crashing chased their heels. Hanah ran until they reached the Hall of the Red Moon, where she paused, gasping.

         The half-moon had risen and light came through the tall windows, casting a cool glow across the sandstone floors. The body of the assassin they’d encountered moments ago was sprawled in the middle of the floor, his blood ruining the exquisite maroon pattern.

         “Keep moving!” Lin whispered to Hanah, and gave her a shove. Slash marks covered the assassin’s arms and shoulder. A broken spear was thrust through his ribs. His head rested cantways to his body—it had been nearly chopped off.

         Lin gazed into his dead, accusing eyes as she stepped around him but found no answers, either to who had sent him or who had killed him. The soles of her slippers were sticky and she glanced down belatedly to avoid tracking through more blood.

         That was what saved her from the second assassination attempt.

         Small round crimson prints, in groups of six, like domino dots, emerged from the spreading pool beneath the killer and marked a clear path toward her room.

         “Blood ants!”

         “What?” Hanah asked, her voice rising sharply.

         “Some fucking vivimancer sent blood ants after me.”

* * *

         Kuikin paused for a moment to think. Even though he and Vertir had decided to rescue any of the dynesses they could find, they couldn’t go after them all at once.

         “May this one leave now?” Jasmine asked, eyes still lowered.

         “Just a moment longer,” Kuikin said. The wine house had swirled back to life around them, with music, singing, and laughter. No one seemed overly concerned about the sudden departure of Master Hang, but if Jasmine said anything to anyone before he and Vertir got a head start, they could be trampled.

         “So what’s our plan?” Vertir asked.

         “Ying and the next two dynesses, Lei and Tai, have husbands with guards and estates they can retreat to,” Kuikin said, quickly and quietly. “That leaves the two younger ones, Bo and Zheng, still living in the palace with their mothers.”

         “Don’t forget the infant.”

         “So that’s three still at the palace.”

         “Four. The orphan will be there too.”

         “The motherless dyness?” Everything Kuikin knew about the orphan dyness would fill less than a page in an official report. No one knew her mother, but it was clear that she had been neither the wife nor concubine of the Dynast. She had left the baby on the palace doorstep with an intimate token that could only have been a gift from the Dynast, then disappeared. The Dynast had declared the girl one of his heirs, perhaps as a gesture of love for her mother, but in so doing he may have caused her more harm than good. His acknowledgement gave her the weakest claim to the throne. Without support, her life was likely to be short and never wholly her own. And of no advantage to them. “She has no family, no allies.”

         “Sounds like she could use some help,” Vertir said.

         “Sounds like she’s already dead,” Kuikin grumbled. “Do you want to rescue every stray cat in the city while we’re at it?”

         Vertir stared at him quietly, which was damned unnerving.

         Kuikin waved his free hand, like a schoolmaster erasing a chalkboard, trying to take back his last comment. “So if there is fighting in the palace, where will they go?”

         “There will definitely be fighting in the palace,” Vertir said. “The entire family was present for a royal dinner tonight.”

         “Let me guess—soliders told you.”

         “They wanted extra guards in the palace.”

         Kuikin frowned. “You could have started with that information.”

         “I knew you would get there soon enough, and you like our plans better when you’ve talked them through yourself. Either way, the palace is where we should start.”

         That was fair, but it still stung. “I don’t have a better suggestion,” he conceded.

         Vertir nodded. They were in agreement.

         Kuikin pulled out his purse and shook loose a small pile of coins, which he then divided in half. “This is for the wine,” he said, dropping the first pile into Jasmine’s free hand. Then he placed the rest in her other hand. “And this is for you and River. Now go and tell everyone that the Dynast is dead. There’s going to be terrible fighting. They should find someplace safe to hide until the succession is decided. Tell everyone.”

         She jumped out of the pit and ran to River, blurting out everything in a voice so loud that it stopped the nearby revelry. Kuikin and Vertir were already walking out the door.

         “Creating chaos again?” Vertir murmured.

         Kuikin shrugged as they stepped outside into the cool night air. “Chaos is interesting. More chaos means more opportunities.”

         The door burst open behind them. Patrons and staff fled in every direction, shouting the news. Jasmine led the charge, still carrying the coins intended to pay for the wine. Kuikin admired that kind of initiative.

         “Let’s get to the palace ahead of your opportunities,” Vertir said.

* * *

         Lin stared at the tiny trails of crimson prints and tried to figure out how long she had before the blood ants found her.

         As she was searching for some way to disguise her scent, a fist-sized ant struggled out from beneath the assassin’s body. Long angular legs scrambled for purchase while its feelers waved wildly in Lin’s direction. She screamed and stomped its bulging abdomen—thick, yellowish fluid squirted out from under her grinding heel. The mandibles twitched, still trying to bite her even as its life faded.

         “What was that?” Hanah whispered, eyes wide.

         “Blood ant,” Lin said. “It must have just molted—the shell wasn’t very hard.” This reeked of her brother, Dyn Wang—the only one with the necessary resources. Blood ants were incredibly expensive, since they had to be specially bred for each target. “They’ve been scented for me, so they won’t bite you. But the others will follow my trail until they find me. When the trail dead-ends in my room, they’ll back-track and—”

         “More!” Hanah cried.

         Three ants skittered through the doorway toward her, the clicks of their chitinous feet sending tiny echoes across the tile. Each ant carried enough poison to paralyze an adult with a single bite. Two bites would slow the target’s breathing until they slipped into a coma. In the wild, a blood ant would paralyze its prey then fetch the queen to lay her eggs inside the warm and living nest. But those used for assassination had stronger poison and a different master.

         Lin’s skin crawled. Blood ants were usually sent during the night, to catch their prey sleeping. She wasn’t in bed asleep, no one was tonight, so this had an air of desperation, of being rushed. But someone had clearly been planning to murder her for a long time.

         She dropped Snub and jumped onto the assassin’s chest, hoping his odor would disguise her own. She took the broken end of the spear in both hands and yanked it from his ribs. The three monstrous ants circled in her footsteps and crawled over Snub’s rattling cage. He hissed and tried to get out.

         The ants caught her scent and rushed the assassin’s corpse.

         With a quick thrust she slashed open the second ant in a spray of fluids, then whacked the other two aside.

         They rolled back onto their feet and came at her together.

         Hanah shrunk against the wall, eyes wide. “Distract them,” Lin commanded. She knocked them aside again with the spear point, but it gave her only a few seconds reprieve.

         The servant girl acted instantly, dashing over to kick one like a ball. It flew across the room and bounced off a decorative screen.

         Lin jabbed at the last blood ant and missed. It climbed up her robes and skittered toward her face. She flung the spear down and grabbed the ant at the joint between its head and thorax.

         The ant squirmed in her hands, mandibles straining to pinch her. It was the only impulse the creature had, and proximity to her warm skin made it frantic. It twisted and flipped in her grip, scratching at her wrists, seeking any purchase that would give it leverage.

         Her hands were slick with sweat. The ant started to wiggle loose. Tiny drops of venom formed on the tips of its mandibles and dripped onto her forearm, which instantly went numb.

         She wrenched with all her might. The head popped off and rolled across the floor.

         The last ant dragged itself across the floor on two legs, smearing the killer’s blood and its own milky abdominal fluids in its wake. Its mandibles pinched at her desperately. Hanah lifted the broken spear and smashed the shattered butt onto the creature’s head, over and over until it stopped moving. Then she dropped the weapon, letting it clatter to the floor.

         “So...” Hanah said. “What exactly are ‘blood ants’?”

         “A waste of gold and years,” Lin said, stepping down from the assassin’s body and turning to wipe the soles of her slippers on him. She couldn’t begin to calculate the cost of this assassination attempt, nor the length of time it had been planned. To be used this way, blood ants had to be raised from the moment they were hatched and then starved and fed on only the blood of their intended victim. If someone was investing that much time and resources into killing her, and she was the last in line for the throne, then her sisters were in serious trouble. “If we survive the night, remind me to find out who was in charge of my menstrual rags.”

         “Yes, Hi—”

         Lin glared at Hanah, who snapped her mouth shut. She picked up Snub’s cage and ignored his agitated struggling. “Now lead the way back to the kitchens by the Sun Gate.”

         “This way,” Hanah said.

         The servants were all hiding or had fled. Their halls, though narrow, were empty and showed no evidence of bloodshed. It would have been smarter to come this way first, but the thought had never occurred to her. It made her wonder what else she was overlooking. She nearly tripped with the sudden realization: perhaps her model of the temple had not included enough room for the servants. She might need to redesign the whole thing from scratch.

         When they reached the kitchens, Lin passed Hanah and proceeded to the storeroom where the rice-counter girl had her bed.

         The door was cracked. A dirty face peered out from the darkness.

         “Where’s your master?” Lin asked.

         “I don’t know. She told me to wait here.”

         “When your master returns, tell her that the orphan dyness may be found where the Spring Dyn sought shelter from the Lords of Wind. Do you understand?”

         “Yes.”

         “Repeat it for me.”

         “The orphan dies in the spring wind—”

         “No. Listen closely.” She made the rice counter girl repeat the message until she could say it word for stuttering word.

         “If you want to get a message to Mistress Spoon,” Hanah offered, referring to the master of the kitchens, “I could deliver it.”

         “Don’t disappoint me now, you’ve been doing so well,” Lin said, leading her away toward the formal dining rooms. “The rice girl provides rice to Mistress Spoon, but she reports to the Holder of the Keys.” Rice was collected as taxes from the peasants. The Holder of the Keys was the royal treasurer.

         Hanah nodded. She was not someone who would need instruction twice. “Why are you leaving messages?”

         “Will your family be worried about you?”

         “Yes.”

         “Then we must send a message to them as soon as possible. I have a few friends here who will be worried about me too.”

         Hanah stared at her, and Lin felt as if she’d been caught in a lie. She took a deep breath.

         “Tomorrow morning, I’ll need someone with sufficient status to negotiate my surrender to one of the survivors of tonight’s succession struggle. If I tell just one person, they can betray me to whomever they’re allied with. But if I tell two—especially two who oppose each other, like the Master of Ritual and the Holder of Keys—then I’ll have a chance to survive.”

         There. The raw truth.

         Hanah nodded. “So where do we go now?”

         “To the place where the Spring Dyn sought shelter from the Lords of Wind.”

         They entered the Dynast’s breakfast room, where she pushed a pressure plate on the wall and slid back a hidden door. Cool air flowed up the stairs, carrying a rush of smoke.

         “They’ve set fires,” Lin said, drawing cloth across her face. “Probably with fire ants. We’d better hurry.”

* * *

         The sharp fragrance of smoke stung Kuikin’s nose as he followed Vertir toward the palace. The city always smelled like smoke, but it was worse tonight, and voices pierced the air, louder and shriller than usual. Their route corkscrewed through dark, narrow alleys that were deliberately maze-like to slow the progress of any attacking force. Walls closed in around them, and Kuikin paid more attention to dodging the restless cockroaches, some as large as his own shoes, than he did to his partner.

         When he looked up again, the alley opened into a broad avenue and Vertir was gone. Kuikin rushed into the street, slamming into an ostrich that reared back, wings spread, and lunged at his face. Vertir grabbed his sleeve and dragged him out of the way.

         The royal boulevard was filled with ostrich carts and pedestrians—servants’ families fleeing the palace district. Wooden wheels clattered, birds screamed, people shouted. One cart was stacked with a whole household’s goods and two old women on either side to steady the piles. A carpet fell off the back and unrolled to Kuikin’s feet. When the grandmother turned to grab it, a tower of dishes toppled over and shattered on the ground. She hurried back to steady her remaining piles, and the cart continued on, leaving both the rug and broken dishes behind. The next cart carried nothing but frightened children, trailed by anxious parents.

         “You wanted opportunities,” Vertir said. “Here are your opportunities.”

         “Let’s go,” Kuikin growled, pushing on without him, only to become tangled in a mob of people headed the other direction.

         Vertir rescued him and cleared a path through. Close to the palace, the streets grew weirdly quiet and empty. The walled estates on either side of the road were shuttered and dark all the way to the canal. Kuikin started for the bridge, but Vertir grabbed his sleeve again and dragged him into the shadow of an arched doorway.

         A moment later, a group of soldiers appeared around a corner, dozens of them, running from the palace. They wore plain uniforms with no insignia or livery. As soon as they passed, Kuikin leaned out toward the street. Once again, Vertir yanked him back into the shadows. A group of stragglers came, dragging wounded comrades between them. When they had gone, Vertir led the way and Kuikin followed.

         The smoke was eye-wateringly thick beneath the looming shadow of the palace. The Ruby Tower, which housed the concubines and several of the dynesses, was burning out of control. As they watched, the top of Crippled Heron Tower burst into flame, blazing like a candelabra in the night. Halfway down the street, at the main gate, soldiers in at least three different uniforms battled one another. Swords clashed against shields and mixed with angry shouts.

         “That looks like the quickest way inside,” Kuikin said and started toward the fighting.

         “Does it?” asked Vertir, grabbing his sleeve for at least the third time. He pointed to a length of tapestry that dangled over the wall, reaching halfway to the ground.

         Kuikin shuddered at the thought of pulling his own weight upward, hand over hand, like some common laborer, but this did seem more likely to be successful than navigating an armed skirmish. “Give me a boost up?”      

         “Sur—”

         In mid-word, Vertir held up a hand for silence, turned his head, and then dashed down an alley. Kuikin raced after him, shouting in frustration. “We don’t have time for this!”

         Whatever this turned out to be.

         At the end of the alley, a group of three men confronted two young women—servants fleeing the palace, to judge from their clothes. The men were dressed like common thieves, but their neat haircuts and conspicuous size marked them as royal guards. The largest one gripped the woman in the apron by the hair, holding her at arm’s length while she cursed and struggled to break free. Her companion was sprawled on the ground, arms wrapped around a large bundle. The other two guards were drawing their swords.

         Kuikin paused, looked closer.

         Her beautiful companion, in the fine, bloodied slippers. With the bundle wrapped in embroidered silk.

         Something’s not right here.

         Before he could figure it out, Vertir had already dropped the big man. It happened too fast for Kuikin to follow, although he recognized the snap of broken bones and the peculiar sound a skull makes as it’s being concussed. The serving woman staggered free as Vertir faced the other two guards.

         “You could always just walk away,” he suggested, holding up his empty hands.

         “We’re the ones with the swords,” one said.

         Not for long, thought Kuikin.

         The two guards exchanged a nod, then raised their weapons and made to flank Vertir, who stepped inside the reach of one before he could swing his blade. Within the space of a blur the guard was slamming into a wall. The other man rushed to attack, and all Kuikin saw was his head snap back before he fell down lifeless.

         Vertir stood there with a sword in either hand. He jammed the first blade into a crack between two stones and snapped it in half, then did the same with the other and tossed the hilts aside before offering to help the woman in the ragged coat to her feet. The woman in the apron hovered nearby, giving every appearance of being ready to leap to her defense.

         After a moment’s hesitation, the woman on the ground accepted Vertir’s hand and allowed him to pull her upright.

         “I would tell you that it’s not safe out here tonight, but you already know that,” Vertir said. “Do you have somewhere to go?”

         “I am told there is refuge to be found at the Temple of the Broken Swords,” she replied, crisp and precise, looking pointedly at the weapons that Vertir had just tossed aside.

         He raised an eyebrow.

         The hackles rose on Kuikin’s neck. Only former soldiers could claim refuge at the Temple of the Broken Swords. Kuikin didn’t take this woman for a soldier, and neither did Vertir.

         “You do not recommend going there?” she said as she retrieved her bundle and clutched it close to her chest.

         Vertir shook his head. “I make no recommendation. If that’s where you want to go, follow the big street down to the canal and turn west through the district gate. You’ll see it at the end of the vista. Good luck to you.”

         “Good luck to you as well,” the young woman replied.

         Kuikin studied their reactions. The beautiful woman had absolute command of her expressions, and it was impossible to determine if she was relieved or worried or puzzled. Meanwhile, the other woman glanced from Vertir to the fallen guards to her companion, but every time she glanced at her companion, her eyes flashed downward.

         One of the soldiers stirred. Vertir paused just long enough to kick him in the head. “Now we find our way in,” he said, leading the way again. “No more stray cats tonight, I promise.”

         It was Kuikin’s turn to grab Vertir’s sleeve. “Change of plan. I think we should escort this young lady and her companion to the Temple of the Broken Swords.”

* * *

         Lin did not like the ugly pox-scarred man with the intense gaze, but she was glad for the protection of the other one, a former soldier if she was not mistaken, particularly after he easily dissuaded at least two more small groups of roving thieves from attacking them. The thieves weren’t as dangerous as the three palace guards who had been sent to kill her, but no matter who killed her, dead was dead.

         The ugly one introduced himself as Kuikin, carefully omitting his surname, as commoners did when announced to royalty. He introduced the soldier as Vertir. He did not ask their names, and she did not offer. She refused their help with her bundle and hugged it to her chest as they walked. Although she could feel the weight of Snub napping fitfully again inside, she still felt safer with her hand near the cage’s latch.

         “Thank you for helping us,” Lin said to Vertir, but he just shrugged, as if he had as much need of gratitude as he did of weapons.

         “As the ancients remind us,” Kuikin said, “if you want happiness for a moment, pursue your own goals, but if you want happiness for a lifetime, help others.”

         “Are you happy tonight?” she asked him.

         He lowered his gaze. “Truly, no one is happy tonight. All we can do is hope for a better day tomorrow.”

         He spoke like a man who always tried to say the right things, possibly for the wrong reasons. The Court bureaucracy was full of similarly obsequious louts. She detested them as a class, but this one didn’t quite strike her as a typical bureaucrat.

         They crossed a neighborhood of smaller shops and homes, all restricted by law to one story in height so that they could not overtop the walls of the palace, and passed through an arched gateway into an older quarter of more run-down buildings that ricketed their way upward two and three stories. Most of the ground floor windows had been hastily boarded up, but eyes peered out from the recesses of upper levels. These were the homes of people with nowhere else to go and nothing to do but wait. All these buildings should be torn down, Lin thought, and rebuilt with more elegant proportions and better materials.

         The Temple of Broken Swords emerged suddenly from this dark mob of structures. It looked like a half-abandoned fortress, with ancient weatherbeaten walls half a mile long and fifteen feet high, topped by jagged shards of broken glass and glazed pottery that captured and reflected the moonlight. A guard tower at the corner stood twice as high as the wall, but missing stones and cracks indicated its disrepair.

         Not quite what Lin had envisioned or expected.

         Vertir led them to a blocky gatehouse. A pair of life-sized statues carved from red sandstone, their features eroded smooth with time, guarded either side of the entrance. One held a large spear and the other a tipped cornucopia of stone in which someone had left dried flowers.

         Hanah, who had stayed close to Lin’s hip, leaned in to whisper. “Who are they?”

         The one called Kuikin overheard her question and turned to reply before Lin could answer. “The Goddess of War and the God of Medicine,” he said, nodding at the statues. “The temple is a place for retired veterans, especially those who have been injured. They come here to be healed. Some stay as monks or nuns to help others.”

         Hanah wrinkled her brow in a frown. Not the they she had been asking about.

         “Thank you again for bringing us safely here,” Lin said to the two men. “Hanah, can you give each of them a token of our appreciation before they continue their own important journey, which we regret interrupting.”

         Phrased like a question, but spoken like a command. The one named Kuikin definitely noticed the distinction, to judge from his quickly suppressed half-smile.

         Hanah froze, confused, then her hands dived into her apron, and came forth with two gold coins, which she held out in offering to each of the men.

         Vertir raised an eyebrow but made no move to accept. Kuikin stepped forward, not to take the coins but to shield them from the view of anyone in the street. “Thank you, but we cannot accept your gift,” he said, with eyes lowered. “You may yet need it more than we do. Please put it away before it attracts unwanted attention.”

         Hanah looked to Lin, who nodded her assent.

         “It is a dangerous night,” Kuikin said. “Please allow us to see you safely inside these walls.” Vertir moved toward the door, but Kuikin held out a hand to stop him. “Let us wait for permission.”

         Whoever this Kuikin was, he clearly seemed to recognize her, but he was not on her payroll, and in her experience that meant no good. She gave the cage a gentle shake to wake Snub in case she should need him.

         “Hanah,” she said. “We do not wish to trouble these gentlemen any further on our behalf. Please summon the monks so that we may go inside.”

         Hanah pounded on the door and called for it to be opened. A shadow passed across the inside of the door’s eye, but there was no answering voice, no sliding of bolts. After a few moments, she gave up and looked to Lin for instruction.

         “Try again,” she said, and Hanah tried again, but with the same results.

         Kuikin cleared his throat. “It is said that the Spring Dyn sought shelter here from the Lords of Wind when they killed his father and destroyed the palace. But of course he had been a soldier, serving in the southern marshes.”

         Lin gritted her teeth. She did not understand why this ugly man was talking to her, did not comprehend why he thought it was important to tell her this.

         And then she did.

         She was not, and had never been, a soldier. Nor did she have a second plan. It had always been refuge here or nothing. Panic surged through her as she looked around her, expecting to find some alternative at hand.

         “I am confident we can find a solution to this problem,” Kuikin assured her, eyes lowered.

         “Your confidence is appreciated, but your solution would be more welcome.”

         “Vertir?” he said, looking to his companion. “If you please.”

         Vertir’s face registered open doubt, but he shrugged and stepped to the side of the door. The dried flowers were swept from the cornucopia with a single efficient gesture, then he thrust his hand inside, elbow deep.

         On the other side of the wall, a bell rang.

         “This is a temple for warriors,” a voice replied instantly. They had been watching her the whole time and refused to answer the door. If she wasn’t afraid of being left out on the street, she would have been furious. “Only warriors and their guests may enter after dark.”

         “I served in the Barbarian Legion under General Kan,” Vertir called back. “The seventh cohort.”

         A pause. “What is the sigil of the sixth cohort?”

         “Moon over mountain, blue over green.”

         Another pause. “This is a temple of healing.” Apparently Vertir had provided a satisfactory answer; Lin heard a change in the quality of the voice above them—it was less defensive now. “Only those who seek peace may enter, day or night.”

         “May your gardens be a shield, providing peace until the dawn,” Vertir replied.

         It had the cadence of a ritual answer, properly spoken. A heavy bar scraped back and the door creaked open. A monk emerged. His head was shaved, but stubble covered his chin. He wore the knee-length amber robes of his order. Lin had read that the color symbolized how their traditions were preserved unchanged over time, like insects trapped in resin. His right leg had been replaced with a peg made from the horn of a mammoth stag beetle.

         “The seventh cohort protected our right flank against the army of Desmeé at the Battle of the Blue Crows,” the monk said. “Not one man in fifteen was left alive in that cohort.”

         “It was your left flank,” Vertir answered. “That’s why you still have your left leg. And it was not one man in twenty.”

         The monk nodded. “Welcome, friend. Have you brought a gift?”

         Vertir spread his empty hands and looked to Kuikin, whose face registered a sense of alarm that did not comfort Lin in the slightest. “Hanah,” she said.

         As Hanah reached into her apron pocket, Vertir waved her off. “Bringing money to the gate would be an insult to the temple. Flowers, fruit, a small piece of art...”

         Kuikin fidgeted, as though looking up and down the street for a garden to raid. He seemed on the point of gathering up the dried flowers Vertir had just dumped on the ground.

         “I’m sorry,” the monk said. “But if you have not brought a gift, the night gate is barred.”

         “Wait a moment,” Kuikin said, patting his robes as if he expected to discover a rosebush.

         Vertir frowned at him and bowed to the monk. “We understand and honor your—”

         “Perhaps this will serve.” Lin reached into her pocket and produced the hummingbird skull. Her memento.

         The monk held out his hands, right hand cupped formally inside the left.

         It was the only thing she had to remember her hummingbird temple with, and she hesitated a moment before placing it in his palm.

         He examined it closely. “A Royal Purple?”

         “Yes,” she replied, acknowledging his answer with a small dip of her chin. She was impressed.

         “It can be ground into a powder and used in the treatment of seizures. We thank you for your generosity.” He tucked it into his pocket and turned to Vertir. “Your gift is accepted. You and your guests may spend the night here. Names?”

         Lin opened her mouth to provide one, but Vertir looked first to Kuikin, who replied with a small shake of his head.

         “None for now,” Vertir said. “And if anyone asks at the gate later, it is better to say that no one is here.”

         Any lingering amusement faded from the monk’s lips as he waved them inside. “Come inside quickly. It’s a foul night.”

         “But you and I have been through worse,” Vertir replied.

         The monk nodded. Lin wondered again who this Vertir was and how he’d come to find her in the street.

         Kuikin entered the temple first, imitating the manner of the Court bureaucrats, head high, hands folded in his sleeves. She supposed it was as close to royal protocol as could be managed under the circumstances, and if her heart did not warm toward him, her sense of appreciation did. She gestured Hanah ahead and then followed her. Vertir and the monk closed and bolted the gate behind them.

         “Come this way to our guest quarters,” the monk said, gesturing toward the buildings along the wall. “We’ll give you something to drink and a place to rest the night.”

         A glass of wine and a warm bed sounded wonderful to Lin at the moment, but Vertir shook his head.

         “If it is acceptable to you, we’ll stay at the Middle Pavilion until dawn. For the purpose of meditation,” he said.

         “That is acceptable,” the monk said.

         “I would also like to request the lighting of the outer ring.”

         That gave the monk pause, and he tried to study Lin carefully out of the sides of his eyes. This Kuikin fellow had figured out her identity already. Perhaps the monk had too. “I assure you all, you are safe within these walls,” he said.

         Vertir bowed. “Surely a fellow soldier knows that being safe is not the same as feeling safe. You will be doing me a favor tonight by lighting the outer ring.”

         The monk sighed. “As a favor then, for the Battle of the Blue Crows and our fallen comrades.”

         Vertir bowed again. “I will be at peace tonight, trusting my fellow soldiers to guard the wall.”

         “And in the morning?” asked the monk.

         “We will see what the morning brings.”

         The monk withdrew to the gatehouse, and Vertir led their small party over a stone bridge and through a fragrant orchard. They crossed a wide empty field, filled with a carpet of clover and other low-growing wildflowers, to a pavilion set in the exact middle of the temple grounds. Vertir took her free arm without permission, as if she were some aging aunty, and assisted her up the steps. When they reached the center of the large structure, he folded his hands behind his back and withdrew to a respectful distance.

         “Many soldiers find it hard to be at peace after war,” he explained. “Jumping at every sudden movement, lashing out at every shadow. The same thing can happen to anyone after they’ve been attacked. The Middle Pavilion is a place of safety, used for meditation. No one can approach, except by crossing open spaces. The roof is low and broad, and the pavilion is situated so that no arrow can reach beneath its shelter from any wall or hidden vantage. It is a place where wounded spirits may come to feel safe again and heal.”

         “What he means to say,” Kuikin explained, eyes lowered, “is that no assassins can take us by surprise here.”

         “I understood perfectly well what he was saying,” Lin replied. “Do not ever condescend to me again. I will ask if something is unclear.”

         Kuikin winced. “Of course.”

         Vertir laughed, entirely inappropriately, at his companion’s discomfort. She approved. Outside, at the edge of the field, a lantern brightened into being. One by one, they winked on around the perimeter of the temple grounds, creating a ring of light along the edges of the orchards and gardens that surrounded the pavilion. In the shadows beyond, the dim shapes of workshops, barracks, and other buildings huddled against the walls.

         “And the lanterns mean that we’ll be able to see anyone approach, even in the dark, but they won’t be able to see us,” she said.

         Vertir nodded. “That is correct.”

         “Who are you loyal to, Master Vertir?”

         He stared at her directly and paused thoughtfully, but before he could answer, Kuikin replied, eyes lowered. “Our loyalty is to the rule of heaven.”

         She laughed, also inappropriately. Always saying the right thing. But this time she suspected that he meant it. “Are we truly safe here?” she asked, her voice low, sounding more shaken than she intended to reveal.

         “Yes, for tonight,” Kuikin said.

         “No,” Vertir said softly. “No one is truly safe as long as we are breathing.”

         Kuikin opened his mouth, as if to argue... and then simply shrugged.

         “At least we are still breathing,” Lin replied. She looked to Hanah, who swallowed and bowed her head. Then she put down Snub’s cage and shook her hand to force feeling back into her fingers.

         Inside the silk bundle, Snub rattled his cage and hissed. Kuikin leapt back. Vertir narrowed his eyes. “What’s that?”

         “Let me introduce you to Snub,” Lin replied, bending down to untie the cloth cover.

         “Perhaps you could introduce yourself first,” Vertir suggested.

         Lin looked up, but Kuikin was vigorously shaking his head and stepping between them.

         “Let’s leave it until morning,” he said.

         “Are you sure?” Vertir asked. Glancing over his companion’s shoulder at Lin, as if he might see something that he’d previously missed.

         “I’m sure.”

         Vertir seemed to accept this with no further argument. Lin thought that she might trust him. At least she didn’t actively distrust him. And he trusted this Kuikin fellow completely.

         “I suspect many things will be clear in the morning,” she said. Such as, who had survived in the palace, and whether it was one of the siblings who wanted her dead or one who would find her useful alive. “You gentlemen have brought us this far, and we are grateful. If you want to leave now, it might be safer for you. This would be the time, and I will say nothing to stop you, nor tell anyone what you have done.”

         Without looking at each other, they both replied, “We’ll stay.”

* * *

         Kuikin stretched out at one end of the pavilion and stared glumly at the roof. The two women napped fitfully side by side at the very center of the space, next to the cage holding that creepy giant spider that looked big enough to kill a man, while Vertir, who seldom slept, made constant rounds of the garden, even though no one had come to bother them, not even one of the monks.

         An hour or so before dawn, the sky lightened in the east, outlining the temple’s decaying battlements. Birds blossomed into song and flitted restlessly throughout the garden. Kuikin capitulated to insomnia, rose, and went to sit on the wide steps. With any luck, there would be an assassin on the wall to put an arrow through his heart.

         He might be presenting a brave face, but this was, without question, the worst night of his life. He had been in denial about it, had refused to even hear her name spoken, but there was no doubt in his mind: they had rescued the orphan dyness. Nine heirs to the throne, and they had found the only one with no money, no family, and no connections. No way to reward them, and no one to reward them for her. The worthless one. Whoever won the battle of succession at the palace would almost certainly want her dead.

         The Notary General will be disappointed in us.

         He and Vertir had gambled and lost.

         There was a children’s game called Pips, played with nine-sided dice, numbered in ascending order on each face. They were used in various combinations to teach addition and multiplication, and then rolled randomly as a form of testing. Kuikin had never excelled at that game compared to other children in his village, but he got much better when he went to the university and discovered a version played for money on beery tabletops in noisy taverns. There, it was called Luck of the Gods. Nine dice for the nine gods. Competitors rolled all nine dice and the highest total won. If the totals were equal, then whoever had the lowest pip lost. So you never wanted to roll ones. With one exception—theoretically, nine of anything beat a higher number, and if you rolled nine ones it beat everything else.

         He forgot the exact math, but the odds of rolling nine of anything were nearly one in four hundred million. In all of Kuikin’s dicing, the closest he had ever seen was eight fours. He remembered that night well, because four was considered an unlucky number, a symbol of death, but eight was the number associated with prosperity. He and his fellow students had stopped gambling for the night to argue, philosophically, whether the fours or the eight determined the luck of that particular roll. They all passed out drunk before reaching a consensus.

         Tonight he felt like they had rolled the dice and turned up eight fours.

         If only he had admitted it earlier. When they arrived last night, as Vertir led the way to the pavilion, Kuikin had held back and asked the monk to send word to the Notary General that they had a prize for him. Oh, well, it had been the right decision at the time.

         “If you and your friend had not come by, my companion and I would be dead.”

         Kuikin startled at the young woman’s voice—the orphan dyness had risen and stood by him. “A roll of the dice,” he replied, not bothering to hide the exhaustion in his voice.

         “But your choice to accompany us here and your aid in securing our entry were not. Chance played a part, but so did intention.”

         He nodded acquiescence to her point, and she sat down beside him as though they were just two weary refugees from last night’s fighting and not royalty and commoner, a gesture that created an unexpected upwelling of sadness in him.

         Something small and bright buzzed in front of her face then zipped away. “There are so many hummingbirds here,” she said.

         “They escape from the Dyn’s Palace of the Birds,” he explained. “The city is filled with them, but they come here because of the gardens and the quiet. People call this the Hummingbird Temple now.” She seemed thoughtful, almost too quiet, so he added. “People say the Dyn scattered ten thousand jewels across the city and they love him for it. Loved.”

         She laughed heartily, and he had no idea why, nor could he ask. But as she studied the falling towers in the dawn light, the joy trickled out of her face. “This temple is more dilapidated than I expected,” she said.

         “It’s been a long time since it received any royal funds,” Kuikin explained, and she looked so... disappointed that he couldn’t help blurting out, “I know the Notary of Buildings. Well, the future Notary of Buildings.” Probably. If the Notary General accepted his recommendation to promote the son-in-law. “Perhaps he could pay for repairs here as a public service.” At his personal expense, of course, to teach him the error of accepting bribes without sharing the wealth upward. The Notary General would like that suggestion.

         Her lips thinned and her delicate brow furrowed, and he regretted saying anything. Sleeplessness and melancholy were two old friends who always encouraged him to feel awful and make bad choices. Under the circumstances, it was cruel to speak to her of the future. She was probably going to be dead before the end of the day. If anyone turned out to be very displeased that she had survived this long, he and Vertir could end up dead too.

         A single woman crossed the wide field bearing a tray with a steaming teapot and four cups. The senior abbess, to judge from her faded robe and the colors on her belt.

         “Thank all the gods,” the dyness said, spying the teapot.

         “Any news from the palace or the city?” Kuikin asked as the grey-haired veteran bowed and placed the tray on the bottom step.

         When she looked up, the scar across her scalp gleamed pale in the dawn. “The fires are mostly out and the city has grown quiet. Your companion is meeting with a large group of officials at the gate. They are discussing how many of them should be permitted to enter.”

         “Good,” said Kuikin—thinking that a large group was not a good sign at all, because it meant that someone had won last night—at the exact same moment that the dyness also said, “Good.”

         She sounded no more pleased than he did.

         The abbess bowed and withdrew, and the dyness hurried down the steps to pour a cup of tea. Carefully, without trying to offend her, Kuikin placed his hand over the cup.

         “Your Highness,” he said, eyes bent determinedly toward the ground. It was the first time he had used the formal address.

         “Yes?”

         “You do not have a royal taster here. While I do not suspect the monks of any harm, we cannot be too careful until you are returned safely to the palace. I should drink the tea before you.” And if it’s poisoned, that solves all my worries.

         “I shall risk it,” she said. “If I don’t have tea immediately, I might as well be dead.”

         As she raised the cup to her lips, he poured some for himself. The tea had a bright, energizing fragrance with just a hint of citrus. He took a sip. It was very good tea, especially if it was going to be his last. The kitchen girl joined them. Kuikin poured her a cup of tea as well and they all looked silently at the dawn. The air smelled of soot. In the distance, smoke spiraled upward from the ruined peak of Crippled Heron Tower, giving it the appearance of a snuffed candle.

         The dyness sighed. “Hanah?”

         “Yes, h... yes?”

         “You may call me ‘Highness’ again,” she said. “If you wish, you may also take the coins I have given you and withdraw before anyone notices. You should be well established for the rest of your life.”

         So, thought Kuikin, the dyness had no illusions about her fate. It was the same offer to leave that she had given him and Vertir the night before.

         The kitchen girl sniffed disdainfully. “I’ll stay, Your Highness.”

         Vertir crossed the field at a brisk pace, leading two men and a woman in formal court robes. The Notary General, the Master of Ritual, and the Holder of Keys. Three of the Dynast’s Five Fingers. A quorum.

         The dyness returned her cup to the tray and stood, like a prisoner awaiting judgment. Kuikin stood beside her.

         The three paused at the bottom of the steps—just long enough for the Notary General to grace Kuikin with a deep, unhappy frown—then got down on their knees and bowed. Vertir stood at attention like a guard. Kuikin wasn’t sure what to make of that, especially when none of them spoke. He had never been invited to the palace and was unclear on the court protocols.

         “Please tell me which of my brothers and sisters are dead,” the dyness said at last.

         The Notary General replied without looking up. “All of them... your majesty.”

         Kuikin felt as though his own legs had been kicked out from under him. He staggered to the ground and kneeled, touching his head to the clover.

         “We await your instructions,” the Notary General said.

         The Dynast’s hand came to rest on Kuikin’s shoulder, and when she spoke, it was calmly and with authority. “Rise, and summon the Notary of Buildings, “ she said. “I have work to do.”

Copyright © 2020 C.C. Finlay

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C.C. Finlay has published five books and dozens of stories. He’s been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and his work has been translated into sixteen languages. For the past five years, he’s been the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His most recent appearance in Beneath Ceaseless Skies was all the way back in BCS #3 and #4 with a story he co-wrote with his wife, novelist Rae Carson.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

UZUMAKI OF THE LAKE

by Richard Parks

         “I trust you brought your spirit wards?”

         Kenji looked insulted. “Of course, Lord Yamada.”

         We were in Tamba Province at the request of Prince Kanemore, in aid of Lord Taira no Hitoshi. Specifically, to investigate strange sounds, odd lights, and ghostly apparitions at a small lake on the edge of his estates.

         That lake had once been claimed by his neighbor Lord Hondo no Tadayuki, until a festering border dispute had been legally settled in Lord Hitoshi’s favor. Relations between the two daimyo had been strained since, though so far with nothing more serious than a minor skirmish at one of Lord Hitoshi’s border stations. Yet these affairs often went from minor to major very quickly. Part of our mission was to see that this did not happen.

         “I only raise the subject to remind you that ghosts, if that is indeed what we’re dealing with, can be a delicate matter. This one more than most.”

         “I presume you’re referring to Lord Tadayuki’s late wife?” Kenji asked.

         “Of course.”

         Lake Aoi was rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a woman. Since the lake, before its change of ownership, had been a favorite spot of Lord Tadayuki’s late wife, Yumiko, naturally many people assumed the spirit was hers. Aside from that, there were strange sounds and rumblings from near the lake that no one could identify.

         Kenji sighed. “Hitoshi-sama made it very clear the situation is awkward, and I know full well an exorcism might not be diplomatically appropriate. That a priest in Lord Hitoshi’s employ performed an exorcism on Lord Tadayuki’s late wife would likely not sit well with him, even if well-meant. Given that, why am I even here?”

         I smiled. “That’s your own doing. Would you like to leave?”

         I already knew the answer. Kenji, once an itinerant priest, was now the abbot of his own small temple, albeit established on my own estates at Kamakura. Yet it was popular among the farmers, which had led Kenji, like myself, into being responsible for more than we ever imagined... or wanted. We both needed more useful—and interesting—occupation. When my old friend Prince Kanemore’s request had come to me, I was happy to oblige. I would have asked Kenji to come as well but never had the chance—he had already heard and volunteered immediately. We were both here because we wanted to be. One question remained—what had we gotten ourselves into?

         We had taken leave of Lord Hitoshi that afternoon, after a very brief audience regarding the situation involving both Lord Tadayuki and the seemingly haunted lake. Now we headed toward the lake on foot as dusk approached. Ghosts, I knew, were not necessarily the only creatures we might have to contend with, but I had my tachi and Kenji his stout priest’s staff with heavy brass crown and rings. Kenji also had his wards, proof against most yMkai and minor devils.

         “My lady would scold me for being without escort,” I said. “But I think we’re prepared.”

         “Unless the dragon appears,” Kenji said. “I don’t have a ward for that.”

         I frowned. “What about dragons? Is that another rumor?”

         Kenji glanced at me. “You didn’t know? There’s a story that a dragon sleeps in a cavern beneath Lake Aoi, coiled around a throne of gold.”

         “That seems unlikely,” I said.

         He shrugged. “There are those who are convinced the stories are true. It was widely assumed that part of the acrimony between the two lords was the struggle to decide who would possess this treasure. The lake was incidental.”

         “Rubbish. ‘This bit of land’ and ‘that bit of land’ is more than enough excuse. I’ve seen daimyos take up arms over less. Yet I hadn’t heard that particular rumor. How are you so well informed?”

         “Oh, please, Lord Yamada. I’m a priest. We hear things. Almost before anyone else.”

         I had no answer for that. We topped a small rise, and Lake Aoi appeared before us, with the setting sun striking fire across the water. The lake was perhaps two bowshots across and twice that long. Bigger than a pond, certainly, though nothing like Lake Biwa near the Capital, which extended for leagues.

         “It is lovely,” Kenji said. “I can see how Yumiko-sama might have been captivated by this place, but if she’s here, her soul must be persuaded to move on. Attachments to the physical world will hinder her spiritual progress; whether she proceeds to one of the hells or heavens is her karma.”

         I could hear the sincerity and concern in Kenji’s voice, and I knew it was not falsely offered. As we got closer, we saw nothing out of the ordinary, either out on the water or along the shoreline, other than an aosaginohi standing in the shallows. Like all aosaginohi, it glowed in the fading light, appearing as a heron-shaped lantern come to life, but at our approach it made a brief chittering sound and disappeared.

         “Shy creature,” Kenji said.

         “And unlike many of its ilk, completely harmless. May they all be of that sort, especially whatever is responsible for our being here.”

         “There is a first for all things,” Kenji said, but he did not sound optimistic.

         We had stopped earlier that afternoon along our journey at a small farming village on the estate, some of whose residents were not above supplementing their rice with fish from the lake and some who were also in service at Lord Hitoshi’s mansion, but none could be persuaded to accompany us to the lakeshore near sunset. We did manage to elicit a description of the specter, apparently a very regal-looking lady, and where it tended to manifest. However, no one present had ever seen Lady Yumiko more than fleetingly and could not say for certain if this apparition was indeed her spirit. Lord Hitoshi himself could do so, only he was no more enthusiastic about visiting the lake after dark than his villagers.

         “Understandable,” Kenji said. “If inconvenient.”

         “Kenji, did you ever meet Lady Yumiko?”

         “I’m afraid not. Since we have no reliable witnesses, it may make identifying the ghost... problematic.”

         Regardless, I knew from long experience that ykrei could take on shapes not their own in the course of settling unfinished earthly business. Yet what would it mean if the ghost did resemble Lady Yumiko, even—or perhaps especially—if the appearance was meant to deceive? There was simply too much I did not know.

         “Do you see anything?” Kenji asked, as we stood together on the shoreline.

         “Not at the moment. Do you sense anything?”

         Over the years I had become more sensitive to the presence of spirits and yMkai than most, but Kenji was a trained priest, and his perception was keener than mine.

         “Something fairly close by. I don’t know what, but it does not feel dangerous.”

         The sun had set, but the light had not completely failed. The fire on the water had softened to a golden red glow. Under less pressing circumstances I would have taken the time to enjoy it, but we were on a mission. “The villagers all say the spirit is mostly seen near the north shore. Let us go there.”

         We followed the shore from the south to the north, through a small grove of maple trees and along a well-worn path to the other side. From there we could see that the lake was fed by a small waterfall closer to the eastern end. Behind us a long, rectangular shadow rose that stretched for some distance east and west, and I looked closer.

         “It’s a wooden barrier. Is this the border with Lord Tadayuki’s estate?”

         “After the border was moved; that is my understanding,” Kenji said.

         The distance from the barrier to the lake was no more than a bowshot. The barrier itself was made of tall posts with wooden lathes woven between them. It had a single barred gate flanked by archer platforms, though unmanned. “Defensible, at need. I presume this was Lord Hitoshi’s doing?”

         “More than likely, though whether as a practical matter or as a message to Lord Tadayuki, I would not speculate,” Kenji said. He paused and he looked away from the barrier. We both noticed that the area immediately around the lake had fallen silent. There were no crickets, no frog song. “Lord Yamada....”

         “I see it.”

         “It” appeared to be a white mist forming at the base of the waterfall. We were too far away to see it clearly, but the mist obligingly moved in our direction, slowly floating over the water, and as it moved, it coalesced, becoming less mist-like and more like the shape of a human woman. Kenji reached for a ward but simply held it, as one would a weapon at ready. For my part, I simply watched, and as I did, something else caught my attention.

         “Kenji, do you hear that?”

         Kenji took his eyes off the apparition long enough to glance at me, then at the ground.

         “I do... it sounds like something large stirring, deep underground. It’s faint; I presume the normal night sounds masked it before.”

         “Your dragon, perhaps?”

         “I do not know... look, something’s happening!”

         The last bit was uttered in a harsh whisper, and I looked back at the lake. The apparition was now fully formed and no more than about forty paces from us, floating over the water near the north shore. It appeared to be a woman of about thirty, with long black hair tied in a ribbon. She wore court dress, with a delicate brocade kimono and Chinese-style jacket of blue silk embroidered in wave patterns. She was turned sideways to us so her face was difficult to see, but I could tell her eyes were large and dark.

         Too large for a human, but not terribly unusual for a ykrei.

         “I know what we both plainly see, Kenji. What do you sense?”

         “It is a spirit, Lord Yamada... but—” He stopped.

         “But what?”

         “I do not know what sort. A ghost? I am unsure. And what is she doing?”

         I was as puzzled as Kenji. The apparition was kneeling on the water as one would a cushion and appeared to be staring at something on the surface, though in the poor light we could see nothing other than herself on the water. After a few moments she turned and looked directly at the pair of us. One more moment, and she was gone. With her disappearance, the normal sounds of the night returned.

         “Well,” Kenji said finally. “That was odd. What should we do now?”

         “This will likely be awkward, but I strongly suspect we need to go have a talk with Lord Tadayuki.”

* * *

         I wasn’t wrong about the meeting being awkward, but at least Lord Tadayuki agreed to see us the following morning. We were escorted into his hall where he, a thick-bodied man of about fifty, sat on a raised dais, his ornate war sword prominently displayed on a stand beside him.

         “I know you are here on Hitoshi’s behalf,” he said without preamble. “But under Prince Kanemore’s remit. Which is the only reason I’ve agreed to meet you. I do admit, however, to some curiosity as to what you want.”

         I bowed. “I trust you’ve heard of the rumors surrounding that bit of land... once in dispute.”

         He grunted, and a fleeting smile passed his lips. “If you mean the lake, it still is in dispute, in my view, though I admit that so far the law has not been in my favor. What of it?”

         “My lord, I speak of the rumor relating to your late wife’s presence,” Kenji said. “If such does turn out to be true, surely you realize she cannot remain bound to this earth.”

         “To that lake, you mean. Sometimes I think she cared more for it than she ever did for me,” Tadayuki said, sounding wistful. “Regardless, I do not wish her spirit to suffer. I assume you’re diplomatically asking if I would object to her exorcism?”

         “That is certainly part of the reason,” I said.

         “I have no objection, though I doubt this would have happened if the lake hadn’t been removed from my estates in the first place... still, no matter. I would like to know what your other reasons may be.”

         “I assume you’re aware of the legend surrounding Lake Aoi?” I asked.

         Tadayuki’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You mean a dragon and a throne of gold? Total nonsense. Does Lord Hitoshi put any credence in that old fable?”

         “I have no idea,” I said. “Though I admit I was curious about your feelings on the matter.”

         “Then I believe I’ve answered that question,” Lord Tadayuki said as he got to his feet, signaling the end of the audience. “Was there anything else?”

         “No, my lord,” I said. “You have been most helpful.”

         Lord Hitoshi had kindly offered us the use of a pair of horses during our investigation. While I was somewhat more comfortable these days on horseback than once was the case, I still found walking more helpful for thinking, and silence most helpful of all. I was quiet most of the way back to Lord Hitoshi’s estates, and my silences always had a way of getting under Kenji’s skin.

         “What is going on in that mind of yours?” he asked when he could stand it no longer.

         “I think Lord Tadayuki is hiding something.”

         “About his wife? My understanding is she died of a fever. He has yet to remarry.”

         “About something. Whether his wife or her ghost is involved, I do not know... on a related subject, what else do you know about the legends of the dragon under Lake Aoi?”

         He considered. “There are no further details I’m aware of, just that the legend exists. There is precedent, of course. There’s a quite similar story about a dragon sleeping under Sarasawa Pond.”

         “The sacred pond near Kojufuji Temple in Nara?”

         “The same. There was a rumor some years ago that the dragon was about to emerge, and vast crowds turned out to see it.”

         “What happened?”

         Kenji smiled. “Nothing. The dragon hasn’t appeared, to this day.”

         “But the people believed it to be there,” I said.

         Kenji shrugged. “Believed? I think many still do, and why not? You and I have seen things just as strange and unlikely. A dragon sleeping beneath a pond isn’t beyond belief, even granted that we’ve never actually seen one.”

         I stroked my chin. “That is true.”

         Kenji gave me a hard look. “You say that as if it were a point of some importance.”

         “Perhaps it is. I do not know as of yet. Let’s get back to the lake while it is still daylight. There is something I want to see.”

         Kenji was clearly intrigued, but he managed to hold his tongue until we reached the shores of the lake. On the westernmost shore we had previously noted some boats used by the residents of the village we had passed through. We borrowed one of the boats and set out into the lake, though Kenji was a bit apprehensive.

         “Are you planning on meeting the ghost out on the lake itself? Are you planning on getting us drowned?”

         “I’m planning on seeing what she was looking at. It was about here... ah! See it?”

         Kenji did. A small disturbance on the surface of the water, invisible from our previous vantage point on shore. It looked like a small eddy at first, but after a few moments I realized it was, in fact, a stable uzumaki—a small whirlpool no broader than the width of my hand.

         “I thought she was just looking at the water,” Kenji said.

         “Then one must ask why at that particular spot. The water’s surface would look rather much the same anywhere else on the lake, would it not? Why here?”

         “We’re too far from the waterfall for this to be caused by a current,” Kenji said.

         “True,” I said.

         “Do you think... it could be the dragon awakening?

         “I admit that possibility. Yet let us put this boat back to shore and see if there is another possibility we’ve overlooked.”

         After we returned the boat to its proper place, we walked back to the north shore, the one closest to the border barrier, and waited.

         “Lord Yamada—” Kenji began, but I raised a hand for silence. After a moment or two I heard the faint sounds again, coming from the earth beneath us. I recognized it as a sort of chuffing and clicking sound, repeated in rhythmic fashion but not completely in lockstep.

         “Kenji, assuming a dragon was indeed stirring and twitching beneath our feet, what sort of sounds do you think it would make?”

         “I would guess rumbling, and an occasional shudder of the earth.”

         “And are those the kind of sounds we are hearing?”

         He frowned. “No, Lord Yamada, they are not.”

         “Kenji, my friend, I think we had best go see if that gate in the barrier actually works. We need to visit Lord Tadayuki’s estate one more time. There’s something I need to see.”

* * *

         I was the first back to the lake, and now I didn’t need a boat to see that the formerly small whirlpool had grown to the size of a drum and was getting larger moment by moment. Kenji finally returned through the gate, a little out of breath.

         “Is everyone out of the tunnel?” I asked. It was a point of some concern, as Lord Tadayuki’s miners had needed some persuasion to understand their imminent danger. After all, to bore a tunnel from Tadayuki’s estate on the other side of the barrier all the way to the lake was a great deal of work.

         “I-I think so. The miners had seen the water coming in, but it wasn’t very much at that point. Their leader thought it was an underground spring.”

         “I can only hope they believed us, else Lord Tadayuki is about to lose several good men. Did you send my message?” I asked.

         Kenji nodded. “They had a courier. I presume, to bring their master progress updates. Lord Tadayuki should be receiving it shortly. What did you tell him, by the way?”

         “Only that I intend to keep his involvement in this scheme a secret, for the sake of the peace. If Lord Hitoshi ever found out, there would be trouble, and the last thing the Emperor needs is another open war among his vassals. I think Prince Kanemore would agree.”

         “Not to belabor the point, but how did you know about the tunnel?”

         “In the first place, you’re a priest, whatever your failings might be. There was no way you’d be in the presence of a ghost and not know it, so the apparition we saw could not possibly be Lord Tadayuki’s late wife. What then? The obvious answer was a water spirit, likely the kami of this lake herself. As for the dragon, one might expect a disturbance within the earth, as you pointed out and we overheard. One would not, however, expect it to sound more like men digging than a dragon turning in its sleep.”

         Kenji smiled a faint smile. “So Lord Tadayuki truly believed the story of the dragon and the golden throne, despite his protestations?”

         “If he could not have the lake, a throne of gold would make a fine substitute. How he thought he would deal with the dragon, I do not know. Nor does it matter. Whether there is a dragon in a chamber under the lake or not, Tadayuki’s men tunneled too shallow and compromised the lake itself. The uzumaki is growing, and it is about to get a lot bigger.”

         As we watched, the truth of my words became more and more apparent. The whirlpool was growing by the moment, and the spin of the water was getting faster and faster. Now I could hear it, the rushing of water almost as if I stood on the shore of the ocean.

         “So the kami was trying to warn us,” Kenji said.

         “Or warn anyone with sense enough to pay attention.”

         Now the whirlpool was as large as a man was tall, and then as two men, and the roar of rushing water was almost deafening. The apparition appeared again, standing on the water near the edge. She seemed a little sad.

         “We weren’t able to stop the digging in time,” Kenji shouted above the din. “Likely she’s doomed. Once the lake drains completely, she’ll be gone, even if the lake eventually refills.”

         “For her sake and Lord Tadayuki’s, I hope not. Let’s wait, but I suggest we move further up the bank. The lake isn’t the only point of danger.”

         Indeed, there were further rumblings beneath the earth as the maelstrom grew. Already the water level in the lake had dropped by the height of a man. There was one final crash, and the ground itself shook as if the dragon truly was breaking free.

         “Ah. That will be the tunnel collapsing... if we are lucky.”

         So it proved. The uzumaki likewise turned erratic and collapsed in on itself, then disappeared as the outflow from the lake ceased. I addressed the spirit directly.

         “Your waterfall will renew the lake soon enough, now that the drain has been sealed.”

         The apparition placed her hands together and bowed in our direction, a bow which we returned before she disappeared. Soon all was silent again, for a little while, before the chorus of crickets and frogs returned. I started along the shore toward Lord Hitoshi’s mansion, Kenji following closely behind.

         “Lord Yamada, it’s all well and good to keep Lord Tadayuki’s involvement out of this, but what are we going to tell Lord Hitoshi? You think he won’t notice half of Lake Aoi is missing?”

         “No doubt he will, and of course we must tell him something.”

         “Such as?”

         I smiled. “Well, I was rather leaning toward the dragon.”

Copyright © 2020 Richard Parks

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Richard Parks is an ex-pat Southerner now living in central New York state with his wife and a couple of grumpy cats. He is the author of the Yamada Monogatari series, just concluded with Yamada Monogatari: The Emperor in Shadow from Prime Books. In addition to appearances in several Best of the Year anthologies, he has been a finalist for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

BOUND BY SORROW

by Maurice Broaddus

Remembering our past...

         “All journeys are born of death.” The eyes of the Wise One glistened as he spoke. “Let me tell you a story. Each word in its place; none forgotten. The order is sacred, exactly as I once heard it. You would do well to heed its wisdom, young warrior.”

         A great drama played out behind the old man’s eyelids so plainly the warrior could almost behold it. The campfire flickered in his eyes, which no longer focused on the young warrior but were lost recalling the words to the story. The warrior took a stone that fit snugly into his palm and sharpened his blade. When matters of life and duty became too much, threatening to drag him under the sea billows of life, he kept his head down and focused on what he knew he did best.

         “Deep within the jungle,” the Wise One began, “a lion stretched out, ready to die. For this once proud and dangerous beast was now old and useless. Winter had settled into his bones, and now he starved, too weak, for he had forgotten how to hunt. On occasion, the fires of desire rekindled themselves in his raging soul; the memory of who he once was drove him to reclaim his power and lost glory. But those days became fewer and fewer.

         “The lion dreamt, wanting to be feared as an outcast god. To have his name ring out with terror and respect, to be remembered as strong, he planned to threaten a village. Harnessing what strength he had left, he prowled about the village. Feeding on its elderly and infirm, enough of his former glory returned for him to truly terrorize the village. They sought to appease him by providing him tribute. A woman.

         “Her husband had long departed, to parts unknown, presumed never to return, leaving her behind as a widow, along with a whelp. The lion took her as his bride. The laws of nature dictated that the lion kill the whelp, for it was not his own blood. To raise another’s progeny only invited a threat to his own line. However, the lion took pity on the mewling whelp, sparing him since he was no threat.

         “However, the mercy was lost on him, and the whelp grew up nursing only hate. Hate drove him. He hated his true father, cursed every drop within him that belonged to that man. But, with his own father absent, he focused his hate on the lion. Every day he dreamt of being strong enough to slay it. Little did he realize that by dreaming, he was truly fulfilling his purpose, for a dreamer was who he was. For, the way of blood was not his true path. He was born with the sign and raised to fulfill his role as Umlando. His true path was the way, the duty, of stories.

         “Still, hatred still burned within his bosom.

         “The lion stalked his nights and haunted his dreams. The whelp, threatening to become a man, sensed that his time had come. The final trial of the Umlando was to face the enemy within, to slay that which distracted him from the stories of the tribe. The trial began with the ceremony of purification: meditation without food, chewing on the Ibogo root until the visions came. However, he had no need of visions. He knew who he had to slay. He crept into the forest to find his foe. Armed only with a knife, he snuck up on the slumbering lion until he was inches from its mouth. Its foul exhalations warmed his face. He drew his blade and slit its throat.

         “The lion reared up in its death gasp, choking on its blood before it collapsed. Its muscles began to shrivel like spoiled fruit on a rotted vine. It lost its fur and its haunches straightened, becoming arms and legs. The form shrank before him until it was that of his father. At that moment he realized that he was now a man without a tribe.”

         The warrior stabbed his blade into the ground. With a frown he said, “Your tales become heavy-handed, Wise One. Why waste my time with this children’s tale?”

         The campfire danced in the night, casting the Wise One in steep shadows that distorted his face.

         “Because death is your birthright. Death is your gift. Only through the shedding of blood will you find peace.” The old man’s voice crackled, dry as kindling and grave as midnight. He leaned toward the young warrior. “All journeys are born of death.”

         “This sounds like a curse. Am I a poet? Am I king? Am I warrior? A war wages in me between what I wish to be, what I am told to be, and what I am. And all you offer me are empty rituals of stories.” The young warrior retrieved his blade, inspected it, and wiped it clean. He sheathed it within his kaross before the flames drew his attention again. To no one in particular he whispered, “I will seek my own way. If death gets in the way, so be it.”

         “Give me your hand.” The Wise One held out his hands. Wrinkles filigreed his calloused palm.

         The warrior grasped the old man’s hands, his own seeming pale and sickly compared to them—but the Wise One only clasped his left one. He flipped the warrior’s hand to reveal the black mark on his palm.

         “A mark. So?”

         “I have not always walked among your people,” the Wise One said. “I was born in Nok, the land of magicians and artisans. Yet I knew my fate lay in a distant land. This is no mere mark. It is a choice. The mark of an Umlando.”

         “Umlando? Then why have you never told me this until now, Wise One? Always it was a ‘birthmark,’ another sign of my weakness.”

         “The Umlando. Theirs is a sacred duty, but few know this tradition or caste. We have no scrolls, only the power of our minds. You have a good mind, a fine memory, and could be of the holy ones, a keeper of tribal History and Memory. To tell these things to an outsider would be to become a traitor to your people, to fall under a High Curse. Do you understand me? My time is almost done and you wish to go... live your life your way. I have one last story that’s fitting for you to hear.”

* * *

I.

         There is a grief we carry from knowing everything we love we will lose.

         The skies started to churn, and lightning struck a nearby tree, blistering it where it stood. The furious river frothed before Dinga Cisse as he attempted to gather his bearings. He strapped the package to his back. He had come too far only to allow Gerard to drift down the river. His friend’s enemies had left him tied up on the raft, for the river to judge his fate.

         As Dinga waded in, the package on his back shifted, threatening to slip loose in the thrashing current. Caught up in the river’s undertow, Dinga almost lost his burden. Spied through the spray around him, the waterway opened wider, drifting further away from the sight of land. Rain fell, though its fury was lost against the spew of the river.

         A stain marked Dinga’s soul, weighing him down more than the roiling waters. The water couldn’t wash it away. Paddling furiously, he caught up to the raft. The waves tossed his friend Gerard’s bound frame about along the battered wooden deck.

         Stirred from silent vigil, crocodiles slid into the waters.

         Dinga hoisted himself onto the raft, cutting loose Gerard’s bindings. The water darkened with circling shadows.

         An enormous crocodile flung itself onto the end of the raft, nearly capsizing it. Dinga almost stumbled into the crocodile’s gaping mouth. Keeping its snapping maw out of reach, he wedged his legs against its neck, pinning the crocodile to stop its progress. Its massive jaw thrashed about, smashing a section of the raft like so much kindling, sending Gerard splashing into the current. Dinga buried one of his knives into the side of the crocodile and used his last bit of solid footing on the sinking raft to launch himself onto the huge crocodile’s back. The creature widened its mouth in a terrible yawn, writhing to snap its jaws at him. Dinga plunged the other sharp blade into its eye socket.

         He dove from the snarling creature. Bobbing in the water, he struggled to keep the package in place on his back. Waves washed over him. The water stripped the burden from his back like a lithe-fingered pickpocket.

         Dinga cried out, stretching after the barely floating package. He caught sight of the still unconscious Gerard.

         Dinga swam after the pack.

         Like a flung spear, the wounded crocodile darted toward him. Dinga shifted just enough to avoid the initial attack, but the thickly scaled hide of its flank ground against him. The force of the impact rattled Dinga to his core, jostling all the broken pieces that formed him, each loose shard cutting him in a new way.

         “Come on, defective warrior,” he thought, “be of use to someone.”

         Never did he even consider asking his god for aid. He knew his pleas would fall on deaf ears. He dove lower in the water. Securing the straps of his pack in each hand, he drew its cord across the crocodile’s throat and pulled taut. He drove his knee into its back until it slumped, its movements stilled. Unconscious or dead, he didn’t care. His lungs burned, and he released the crocodile’s huge body. He swam toward the surface, each kick weaker than the last. The moonlight silvered the surface of the water above him, a bright light he gave into and drifted toward.

         Entering the light, he broke the water’s surface. Gerard, sputtering for breath with each stroke, was paddling toward the shore. Dinga fastened his pack tighter. Its great weight pressed on his chest, making it hard to breathe. A dense space filled his lungs and clotted his heart—both comfortable and familiar, almost reassuring—which he held onto like he didn’t know what he would do without it. The swirling eddies tried to sweep him down the channel. Mud sucked at his feet. He staggered through the waves and collapsed on the shoreline next to Gerard.

         “Are you ever going to speak of what brings you to stray so far from your people?” Dinga wheezed out as nonchalantly as he could, arms outstretched on the sand.

         “Fortune favors you.” Gerard rolled onto his side, not quite ready to chance drawing up on his knees. The gold hue of the sand only made his ruddy complexion all the more pale. Already his neck and face reddened with impending sunburn. His flat, broad-brimmed petasos hung along his back with the desperation of a sailor clinging to his sinking ship. His purple chlamys, more like a wet black curtain around him. “You head out on a journey and a capable, stout companion stumbles across you. You should be thanking your god—or is it gods, I can never tell with you people—not asking silly questions.”

         “Nyame no more favors me than he does his actual followers. Where we journey in remembrance of Lalyani, gods fear to cast their eyes.” At the thought of his god and his journey, Dinga grew still. He had set out to prove himself once he reached fifteen summers, years of dedicated service, and for what? Suffering and isolating silence. “Besides, your people won’t miss such a stout, capable companion?”

         “The fact that my people have missed me so far is entirely the point,” Gerard said in a hollow, almost defeated, voice. He wrung out his chlamys. “Thus I accompany you on your errand. Will there will still be great peril?”

         “Yes.”

         “And your enemies expect your demise?”

         “Yes.” Dinga turned away from him.

         “Good. I need the relaxation.” Gerard grinned, craning about waiting for his friend to join his merriment, but his self-amusement proved far from contagious. “Why press the matter of my motivations? Surely two are better than one, no matter the journey.”

         At the thought of how much of the journey lay ahead of them, the pack seemed too much to bear. But the weight reassured him. He’d forgotten what that, what anything, felt like.

* * *

         The meat roasted on a makeshift spit above the flames, away from Gerard’s chlamys drying near the fire. The smell of it caused Dinga’s stomach to grumble. Tired and stiff-necked, worn down by unattended sorrows and the rage that came with it, a deep ache filled his sinews. The heat of the campfire failed to thaw the chill in his bones. He didn’t realize how cold he was until the flame’s warmth settled around him.

         Hypervigilant, Dinga returned his gaze to the perimeter of shadows, his warrior’s senses slowly attuning themselves to the unfamiliar country. The thorn bushes and nettles had little consequence except to slow the approach of intruders. The golden grasslands stretched out before them like another world entirely. Dinga was too used to the dense groves of tree cover and thick foliage he had called home for so long. Their new path, to the place he knew they must find, veered upward along a craggy hillside and the waning copses of trees that oversaw the valley, toward the mountain. At least that was what his heart told him, if Lalyani’s stories were to be believed; though he didn’t know how much to trust it. All he had to go on was faith.

         “We’re lost.” Gerard must have tired of the long silence which settled between them.

         “We’re not.”

         “Just admit that we’re lost.”

         “We’re not.” Dinga jammed a stick into the flames to stir them. “We are where we are supposed to be.”

         “Now you sound like the philosophers littering my home.”

         “That’s how Lalyani described the Path to me.”

         “Is ‘the Path’ the route or the destination? You sound confused on the matter.”

         “All I understand is that she wanted me to make this journey. Needed me to make it. In service to her... gods.”

         “What of your own god? Won’t he be jealous?” Gerard spat before returning his attentions to the cooking meat. “It is a ‘he’, right? I’m never certain of gender assignments of deities.”

         “I... want to believe.” Dinga grew quiet while he considered the accidental truth of what he said. His whole life, he considered himself little more than a leaf on the current of the Niger River, tossed and carried by forces more powerful than him, clinging to the certainty that he was destined for something. His voice, little more than a whisper lost in the crackle of the flames. “I seek the face of my Father. I no longer know who I am.”

         Gerard gazed at the flames, allowing Dinga a measure of privacy. “I could carry the pack for a while.”

         “No. I have to carry it alone.”

         “No, you don’t.” The steel of urgency stopped short of pleading. “We can share its burden.”

         “Then I don’t know how.”

         “Tell me the story of the pack.”

         “Some stories are too hard to tell.”

         Exhausted, Gerard settled into his bedding. “Then tell me a story of your village.”

         Dinga fit a sharpening stone into the palm of his hand and began to whet the blade of his panga. The words came to him like a recalled memory.

         “Just outside the kraals stood great earthen mounds. No one knows who built them; only that they were considered sacred. Some claimed they were the burial plots of fallen orisha. As such, the villagers attended them with great reverence, guarding them the villagers’ duty. Every evening at sunset, the villagers left the mounds as they went about the business of dinner preparation. A young boy always found his way to the foot of the furthest mound, sheltered by forest overgrowth in his private alcove where he could play uninterrupted.

         “One day a young girl approached him. Her sun-touched hair, a frizzled mess. Dirt smudged her face. Her feet tougher than leather, she wore no shoes. Stopping short as if not wanting to interrupt, she waited off to the side. The boy froze his play, like a zebra aware of being under the scrutiny of a lion. When the boy glanced up, he recognized something achingly familiar in her face that he could not place.

         “‘Hello,’ she said.

         “‘Hello.’ His hands furrowed the mud.

         “‘Do you know who I am?’

         “‘Don’t you know?’ He angled his head sideways, confused by her.

         “‘Boy!’ From a clearing, his father watched them. His face blanched as if in fear, anger morphing his expression darkening like an approaching storm cloud.

         “At the sound of his voice, the girl scrambled into the foliage, no longer lion but rabbit.

         “The boy sat there, mud up to his elbows, still confused.

         “His father searched the trees like a hunter and approached slowly. ‘You are to never see or speak to that girl again.’

         “‘Did I do something wrong?’

         “‘Did you hear me?’ His father’s voice, a terrible thunder.

         “‘Yes, father.’ The boy lowered his gaze, thoroughly scolded.

         “‘Good, then the matter is settled.’ For his father was also the mansa of the village, his word respected as law.

         “Ever since the first appearance of the girl, things changed within the boy’s house. His mother withdrew; became more distant, like a ghost wandering the village. Barely eating or speaking. Having heard the griot’s stories of the ogbanje, the boy knew it had to be the girl’s fault. The elders often spoke of ogbanje—”children who come and go”—evil spirits that would haunt a family, bringing misfortune. Some said the ogbanje would deliberately die and come back again, simply to cause a family more grief. Concerned, the boy screwed up the courage to approach his father.

         “‘Father.’ He knelt before him. ‘Forgive me for disturbing you.’

         “‘What troubles you?’

         “‘The girl. I believe her to be ogbanje. I know the tales but not what I should do, and I did not know who else to tell.’

         “‘You were wise to bring your concern to me.’ His father patted the seat next to him for the boy to join him. ‘I have dealt with the... ogbanje. Banished it to another village. In time, its curse shall be lifted. One day you will be a mansa of your people. You must be an example to them. Let nothing or no one tarnish your reputation, for your honor is all you have.’”

         Dinga’s words faded into darkness, which suffused the camp. Gerard had fallen asleep. Dinga kept watch, comforted by his friend’s gentle snores. A discomfiting emptiness gnawed at him, one he’d arranged his entire life to avoid. Running from the hollowness of guilt, avoidance had become a way of life. He needed to reconnect with his forgotten lineage.

         And keep a promise.

* * *

II.

         There is a grief we carry from losing someone (or something) we love.

         Gerard’s distant voice below warned that these cliffs were too sheer to be climbed, but Dinga continued his ascent. The bundle shifted on his back as he drew himself up, its uneven weight nearly dislodging his precarious grip. Each hand grappled for purchase. Each foothold insecure, and he pressed himself to find another before it gave way. Exhaustion took its toll on them, but a sense of mission fueled them. His muscles burned but if he kept moving, if he kept busy, he wouldn’t have to deal with the pain.

         When he reached an upper ridge, he stopped to rest. A few minutes later, Gerard’s pale forearm slapped onto the ledge. Dinga hoisted his friend the rest of the way up. Slipping the pack from his shoulder, Dinga allowed his muscles the freedom to unclench, conserving their strength for the final climb of the cliff face. Though he didn’t know what he would find, he knew their journey was nearing its end. One way or another. The pair huffed together in silence.

         Dinga chanced a peek over the edge. Wisps of clouds lolled over the tree tops below them. It was as if they had left the world behind them, separated from all that was familiar. Gerard passed him a waterskin, and he drank sparingly before returning it. Fumbling through his own pack, Gerard’s eyes filled with the frustration a traveler belatedly remembering all the things he forgot to bring. The silence thickened between them, intruding on them, whispering in the language of sorrow. Gerard could not take its trespass for long.

         “This journey is madness.”

         “And yet, here you are.” Dinga’s head rested on his arms, propped up by his raised knees.

         “By your side.” Gerard fished about in his pack. “And I bet you don’t even appreciate it.”

         “This madness might have many symptoms. Maybe lack of giving thanks is one.”

         “I’m serious.” A now unfamiliar note filled Gerard’s voice signaling his solemnity. “This is a quest for death. You have already stopped living, and it’s like you won’t be satisfied until your body follows your spirit.”

         “I made a promise to deliver this. So I will go there, no matter the price, because I need a place to take my...” Dinga didn’t know what word he reached for to describe what he felt. Like trying to push through a wall of stone, refusing to be moved, unable to touch it. Afraid that were he fully immersed in it, he would never return. Yet if he didn’t go to where he needed, he also might never return.

         “You can’t convince me she would have wanted this. Your loss is real, I understand that. But you have built a shelter in your grief. I’m sorry. I’m probably the only person left who might have the right to say that to you.” Gerard took another swig from the waterskin before burying it back in his pack. He no longer met Dinga’s eyes. “I loved her, too.”

         Without another word, Dinga reached for a solid crag overhead and lifted himself up. From his vantage point, the summit of the cliff remained hidden. He concentrated only on the climb, ignoring its strange disorientation. A terrible inversion of the heart, a steep descent into dark places. A sheer drop into his own emptiness. His muscles ached to the point of numbness. Unable to feel, floating in a well without words, all he knew was that he had to stay present in his pain. Exposed on the mountain face, unable to hide. Not giving into the panic, feeling overwhelmed, helpless, alone, the jumble of emotions churning within him as he climbed. Left with nothing but the spirits of his ancestors and the ghosts of his memories, he had to keep moving...

         ...as he wandered the Land of Tribes. Ever since he had made up his mind to prove himself to his Father Nyame, his journeys had brought him to the north in search of a legend only whispered about. The lost city of Wagadu. Someone dogged his trail, that much he knew. Though they maintained their distance, his well-honed hunter’s instinct alerted him that someone was following him.

         The city of Utica was a port along the north coast. When he reached it, he wandered the streets, confused for a beggar. He made friends quickly: of the men who attempted to rob him, two remained on their feet; one might regain the sight of their left eye given time; and the last told him of the place where scoundrels met. Dinga knew that was where he would find the information he needed.

         Dinga slipped into the tavern the robber had told him of, the Empty Kraal, retreating to a seat toward the rear where he could both observe all exits and the patrons. Weak flickering lamplight barely illuminated the room. In the corner, a musician tamped the wooden keys of a balafon, accompanied by a troupe pounding the soft canvas of djembe drums. Dinga ordered a meal and waited.

         Within the hour, Gerard stumbled in. Dinga had run across Gerard on several occasions. Gerard always seemed to cross his path whenever a bounty marked his head back in his homeland. Few of Gerard’s nation ventured deep into the Land of Tribes. But he visited often of late, lingering, Dinga knew, until he believed his kinsmen had forgotten about his latest transgressions. The trail he followed usually led to the intersection of reward and opportunity and to unscrupulous dealings.

         Even with the simple drape of his chiton cloaked by his thick woolen chlamys, Gerard’s peculiar gait announced him. His gray-tinged beard framed by a tangled black mane of magnificent hair bards might sing about for generations. His locks fallen across his forehead, he carried himself somewhere between an already-tipsy philosopher lost on his way to the local school and, with mighty limbs forged from a life of hard labor, an ex-soldier ever braced for a fight. He couldn’t have been the one trailing Dinga because he didn’t bother to ferret the tavern’s shadows for him. Instead, he sidled up to the bar and loudly ordered drinks. Before long, he was singing songs and regaling the gathered thieves with tales of a golden city.

         Then she strode in. Lalyani.

         It had been years since Dinga had seen her last, but there she stood there as if only a day had passed. With her gazelle-pelt skirt, cowrie and copper necklaces, iron and ebony bracelets, and thin plaits, she joined Gerard, silencing him. Dinga continued to eat, studying them all the while. Once finished, allowing them time to be lulled into their intense conversation, he approached them.

         “‘Oh wanderer, lost in the Valley of Life, remember that nothing is ever what it seems to be, and seeing is not always believing,’” Gerard recited upon noticing him.

         “Is he with you?” Dinga asked Lalyani.

         “Do I strike you as someone who travels by song?” A mildly annoyed sneer stretched across Lalyani’s face.

         “The road is a long and lonely life. Company is not always a bad thing.” Dinga glared at the nearest patron, who was obviously eavesdropping as much as he could. The man vacated his seat, allowing Dinga to sit.

         “Are you offering?” Lalyani leaned back but didn’t fold her arms in front of her. His presence intrigued her. The moment between them, charged; before settling into something comfortable and familiar, like finding a piece of himself he didn’t realize was missing.

         “Do I strike you as someone who travels with drunken bards?” Dinga jabbed a thumb in Gerard’s direction.

         “As I said, he’s not with me.”

         “I’m sitting right here.” Gerard feigned protest, more as an excuse to gesture for another drink.

         “I’ve heard tell of a mighty warrior in search of a lost city.” Dinga nodded for another drink. The barmaid winked at him and brought him lotus juice in a tall cup. Slipping her a few extra coins for her discretion, he would keep his head clear.

         “What sort of warrior?” Lalyani asked.

         “Mighty. Brash. Feared.”

         “A woman?” she asked.

         “The finer details of the story were lost in the telling.” Dinga smiled, not something he did often, but Lalyani always had a way of drawing that out of him.

         “Look, Din...,” Gerard interjected. “Mind if I call you ‘Din’?”

         “Only if you don’t want me to answer you.” Dinga suspected that Gerard exaggerated much of his ignorance to lull those he encountered into underestimating him

         “Well, we’re in the middle of a business conversation.” Gerard gestured toward Lalyani. “Of the one-to-one, client services variety.”

         “The topic of which may align with my own interests.” Dinga took a long swig of his lotus juice. “If it reassures you, I have no interest in any bounty, only in reaching the city itself.”

         “No interest in any bounty?” Gerard drank before muttering to himself. “No interest in the truth apparently.”

         Ignoring him, Dinga turned to Lalyani. “Tell me more of your city.”

         “There is a city out there, governed by a race of gods.” Lalyani’s eyes grew distant, lost recalling the telling of a dream. “Where the best, brightest, and bravest dwell. A city of wonders. I’ve heard tell of giant towers, contraptions allowing people to fly, weapons undreamt of, and medicine to cure any disease.”

         Dinga considered her story. At first blush it sounded like the fabled city of Nok; the celestial version, not the terrestrial one his people called home. To hear the griots tell the tales, many of the ancient cities were earthbound incarnations of ones named in the heavenly realms. He wanted the city to be Wagadu, the prophecied lost city some whispered he was fated to rule. It was told that Wagadu had disappeared for seven years, then was found again, only to vanish for another seven-hundred forty years.

         “I know what you’re thinking.” Gerard tracked his eyes. “If the great war drum, Tabele, is beaten, it will be found again.”

         Lalyani passed a glance from Dinga to Gerard and back, with the uncertain stare of someone who knew they held only a piece of the story. She continued, her voice tentative. “Devils tied the city fast to the sky.”

         “Gold or no gold,” Gerard said, “it sounds like a fool’s errand.”

         “Then we should take a fool,” Dinga said.

         “I’m still right here.” Gerard raised his mug in a toast toward them. “But this humble fool has a great thirst. Barmaid!”

         “We have many ears surround us.” Dinga leaned in. “Someone has been trailing me all day.”

         Gerard rubbed his chin. “I may have the beginnings of a cunning plan.”

         “That perhaps I should go outside to draw them out to see who is so intent on divining my destination?”

         “That does sound remarkably close to my idea,” Gerard said. “Do you want me to come with you?”

         “No,” Dinga and Lalyani said in unison.

         Dinga snuck out the back entrance, down a dark corridor. With space at a premium, the port city’s buildings pressed close together, barely allowing room for people to pass. Little light fell into the alley. Still, he didn’t have to wait long for a scurry of movement as four men stepped out of the shadows, looking to surround him. Each clutched what Dinga took as a pehla stick: long, wildebeest-tail switches. However, the reedy sticks began to glow, their dull green charge throwing a stolid gleam onto the men’s faces. Their armor was equally strange, with vests of gold scales and a fringed collar mimicking the hide of a lion.

         The first man punched Dinga in the belly, robbing the wind from him and sending him sprawling back into the dust. The beaming pehla sticks whistled like frayed bamboo rods, the sting sending lightning flashes of pain along Dinga’s backside as if directly stabbing his brain. He opened his mouth to cry out, only for a guard’s hands to grapple him as they wrestled along the ground.

         “That didn’t take long.” Lalyani stepped into the alleyway.

         “Dinga has a way of causing things to escalate.” Gerard drew a short sword from within the folds of his chlamys. He glanced back at Lalyani. “Aren’t you joining in?”

         “By the code of where I come from, fighting should only be done among equals. With spear or sword. If someone from an upper caste has to fight someone from lower caste, it shows contempt for them.”

         “Yes,” Gerard waded toward the men, “I’m going to need you to show some contempt.”

         “Be aware,” Lalyani brought her spear to bear with a smile, “When elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled.”

         She dove into the men with the lithe grace of a dancer.

         Renewed at the sight of his comrades, Dinga threw the warrior astride him off, and the men’s next attacks struck only the air. The pehla sticks sang, their reedy call filling Dinga’s ears like a swarm of bees. He could no longer distinguish between the pounded rhythms of the drums inside and his own pulse slamming at his temples.

         Ducking, he avoided the blows. Gerard swept the legs of the one behind him, only to be grabbed by the neck and slammed into the wall by another. His sword clattered to the ground. He sprang back up, his hands stiffened like pangas of flesh, and chopped the first man in the sides of his neck, sending him sprawling. Lalyani kicked one in the chest, the force of the blow leaving him doubled over. She whirred her staff, catching one in the jaw so hard several of his teeth rattled to the ground like dice. Still conscious, his body opted to collapse anyway.

         Dinga side-stepped the punch he knew was coming and grasped the last man’s wrist to flip him over his shoulder. He leapt toward the man, cuffing him with his panga hilt. The blow staggered the man back into the arms of his companions. Re-thinking their strategy, they retreated down the length of the alley and around the corner. Though only a heartbeat behind them, by the time Dinga, Lalyani, and Gerard rounded the corner, the men had disappeared.

         So, their first quest together had begun...

         ...though the sun slipped behind the mountain, leaving only a cold wind scoring his and Gerard’s backs. The air grew thin. There was no room to take in its beauty nor the vista below them. Dinga fixed his attention on his next handhold, concentrating on the long slope running along the crestline. His fingers inched along the ledge above him, for any sturdy projection. Though still lean, he missed the youth he had once been. Or at least the lesser weight he had once carried.

         Not for the first time, Dinga began to doubt his quest.

         The night stretched into an aching territory of shadows. The silence and solitude, away from the noise of the demands of his village, away from the noise of the press for time, allowed him a moment. Being alone, the sense of loss overwhelmed him, beginning to undo him as if the jutting crags beneath his feet had been uprooted. Sculpted by the silence, he became more completely who he was. Grief seeped under his skin like rainfall on arid soil.

         Dinga crawled over the summit. His arms hung numb at each side, his legs unsteady with each step, uncertain that he even was walking. The weight on his back pressed him. Tentatively, he moved across the plateau. The night sky hid the starlights, as if veiled behind a great curtain. The singular darkness swathed him, cold and unforgiving. He strained his eyes for any break in the seamless night. The world all shadows and whispers, lost in the gravid darkness, he was barely able to see where he was. He knew to trust the darkness to take him where he needed to go. His legs buckled and he collapsed. He reached out for something solid but only found the ground. A grim silhouette staggered toward him, and Gerard crumpled exhausted next to him. Too tired to do much more than lie there, Gerard turned to him.

         “Tell me a story of your village,” Gerard squeezed out between gulps of air.

         “Your tricks to get me talking won’t help you.”

         “You love the sound of your own voice. Besides, you can’t help yourself—you can’t resist the pull of stories. It’s in your blood. Your very nature. So, again, I ask you to continue the story of your village.”

         Dinga took a slow breath, his mind drifting to a faraway corner of his heart until he found the loose strand to further spin his tale.

         One day the boy, now a young man, settled into his camp for the night. He had just set off from his village. His father, the mansa, was dying. He knew one day he would be a mansa, but not today and not soon. For it was said ‘Four times Wagadu stood there in all her splendor. Four times she turned her face. Four times Wagadu changed her name. Four times she disappeared and was lost.’ He had much to learn and more to prove until then.

         Thinly muscled, burned dark by the sun, the left half of his body was a maze of tattoos, lines broken by dots. A small nose ring matched his brass armlet. The handle of a panga blade jutted from his belted loincloth. Knowing that he was no longer alone, he reached for his spear.

         A young woman emerged from the surrounding shadows. His wide eyes took in her beauty. Slender bodied, long-limbed, tall and proud, her head held high. A spear slung through her kaross, she raised her arms to signal that she was no threat. A broad girdle of bronze beads could not hide that she was heavy with child. There was something hauntingly familiar about her face.

         “Do you remember me?” Slow and deliberate, she entered the light of the campfire and sat down across from him.

         “I could not forget.” Unable to bear her face, the young man’s focus drifted back to the flames. “I once believed you to be ogbanje.”

         “Ogbanje?” She threw her head back in laughter. A wild, inviting thing. “My mother was never named. My people are the Mo-Ito now.”

         “I know of them.” For the Mo-Ito were a mixed-race people who accepted any who wandered into their community as long as they followed the Path. “You speak Mande well.”

         “I speak many languages. Where do you travel to?”

         “In search of Jenne-jeno. Perhaps. I have not made up my mind.”

         “The fabled jeweled city?”

         “So men claim.” The young man stirred the kindling in the flames. “If you are no ogbanje, then who are you? Why does my family suffer as if a plague has struck whenever you are around?”

         “For that you would have to ask your father. Our father.”

         She let the words hang in the air between them and sink in. The young man studied her face. As if knowing his intent, she leaned into the light of the campfire. The amber light of the flames lit her face, distorting it with eerie shadows. Slowly he began to see it. Despite her near-sable complexion compared to his more russet one, the ghosts of his ancestors played along her face. The arch of her eyebrows. The familiar flare of her nostrils. The strangely angular shape of her jaw. And she had her father’s—their father’s—eyes.

         “Did he... make you leave?” The words caught in his throat. He recalled his father’s words: “I have dealt with the... ogbanje.”

         “Once I was old enough to ask questions. I spent a lot of time around my elders in their weaving circles. Elder women love their gossip, especially when they think no one else of consequence is around. And children are rarely considered of consequence, though they have great consequence.” She shifted about her weight.

         “And you sought me out. Why?” A deep pang radiated in his heart, paining him. The young man no longer knew what to do with his hands.

         “We were meant to be free. Free of our pasts. Free to live. I wanted you to know the man your father is. And perhaps... me.”

         “Are you with child?”

         “That’s never a polite thing to ask a woman.” She smiled, but it was cold and, despite the lightness of her tone, without humor. “I repeat my mother’s transgressions. I fell in love with someone I could not have. Whose first love was to duty and tribe.”

         “And their wife?” The young man regretted the directness, the perceived harshness, of his words as they stumbled out of his mouth. He had no intent to shame, though his words had the impact of hurled stones.

         She lowered her head, choosing to fix her eyes to the flames.

         The boy, learning to be a man, walked over to her. He sat down next to her and set his hands on hers. “We are more than the transgressions of our parents. You should not travel alone. If you would have my company, I would like to see Mo-Ito before I head to the jeweled city.”

         “I... would like the company.” She smiled, her slow grin filled with inviting humor.

         Exhausted, Dinga rolled onto his back. He swore he spied a shift among the shadows in the night sky. It bobbed along like a black ball in a sea of ink. The moon slid out from behind the cover of clouds, its light catching the occasional glint as it slowly came into view. Through the brooding silhouette of crags, a domed cityscape drifted through the sky into view.

         They’d found it.

* * *

III.

         There is a grief we carry from betraying creation, the very world around us.

         Dinga visored his hand above his eyes as if that might help him discern the shadows better. The city within the globe bobbed above them, shifting in and out of view as if not quite in focus, lost in the swirl of night stuff. A shimmer haloed it like a heat mirage about its edges, as if other planes intersected along any particular line of sight.

         “How does it stay up there?” Gerard froze in study of it, his voice stopping short of awe.

         “There must be a support of some kind. Something connecting it to or suspending it above these crags that we can’t see.”

         Gerard arched his head toward him. “You know, it’s all right to say you don’t know.”

         Hitching his pack higher on his back, Dinga headed toward the exposed rock formation. “Come on. We have to get closer.”

         “Can you see a way in?” Gerard called after him, already speeding up to a near trot to keep up.

         Dinga pointed to a cleft along the wall of rock. “There. A doorway.”

         “That’s barely a hole,” Gerard said. “And I don’t see a set of stairs leading up there.”

         “It’s our way in.” Dinga couldn’t explain the tug in his bones, the way his spirit drew him along with a deep confidence that his steps were true. As he climbed through the aperture, the darkness welled about like a living thing. He forced himself forward, each step an act of faith that his feet would find ground when they landed. The floor gave with each step, as if he walked along a sprawling bog. His mind filled with the image of treading along an intestine. They descended down the dark tunnel. Dinga ran his hand along the wall to steady himself only to be met by a strange, fetid mildew slicking the sides of the cavern, accompanied by a cloying stench that ached his belly with queasiness. Their footfalls broke the sacred silence, each step sending them further and further from the world they knew.

         Dinga tried not to think of where he came from. Abandoning his family, his kraal, everything that rooted him in the world, to carve his own way. No matter what the Wise One prophecied, he would find his own destiny on his terms. Alone. That was what it meant to be a man, his father had taught him. To seize the world by the throat and force your will upon it. That was what made true leaders, and Dinga was born to lead.

         Yet he had never felt so lost.

         Lost in the dark, his body moved as if on strings, imitating the motions of walking. With no point fixed in the distance, movement became illusion. Time and space meant nothing; simply a new ether to pass through.

         A plop echoed in the distance. Dinga hesitated, listening for further sounds. The tunnel grew warm; a stream of liquid splattered their faces from some unseen pool.

         “You bring me to the most excellent of places.” Gerard spat to clear his mouth. The cavern magnified his voice, his words echoing into the darkness.

         “I only promised you a memorable experience,” Dinga said. “Full of peril.”

         “I won’t soon be forgetting this. Especially the smell.” Gerard’s hand snapped forward to grab Dinga’s arm to halt him. He sniffed with intent, the way he did whenever someone presented a new wineskin. “Dinga, this place has an awful familiarity about it.”

         “I have seen nothing like it before.”

         “Because you restrict your travels to the Land of Tribes. But I have seen something akin to this before.”

         Dinga rotated in place, noting the detailed architecture of the system. An intelligence was present in its design. “It is like we’re in an undercity of mazes.”

         “Because we are. Like aqueducts, though I haven’t seen its like so advanced.”

         “What are you saying?”

         “We are surrounded by the shit of the gods,” Gerard said.

         Ignoring him, Dinga squinted at a pinprick of light down the corridor. “What’s that up ahead?”

         “Perhaps it signals the end of our quest.”

         Dinga shifted the weight he carried. They had traveled for so long in the senseless dark, he’d almost forgotten it was there. He nudged it again to make sure it was real. And still present. He scrambled toward the light. A window of clear material, sturdy and hard, sealed an observation portal. They pressed themselves to it to get a better view.

         From their vantage point, they floated above the great city, overlooking an elaborate array of towers of burnished glass and white marble. Tile roofs bathed in the sun’s light, its rays washed along the building tops, illuminating the tiles such that they sparkled like diamonds scattered across the sky. He wondered how human hands could have constructed it, save by sorcery. When he scanned the edges of the sphere, a massive forest spread out, an expanse of undulating green. A thin veiling mist lowered over the tree tops. The mighty river. The canyon of crags, which, from their positioning, he guessed hid armaments of some sort. He felt as if he stood on the edge of the world. Somehow the cares of the world far below them became... less.

         “How do we get... down? Up?” Gerard asked. “Truly, this place makes no sense.”

         “I need a moment to think.” Dinga rubbed his temple to ward off the threatening headache.

         “I may have the beginnings of a cunning plan,” Gerard said.

         Those words never failed to send a chill down to Dinga’s nether regions. “Dare I ask?”

         “The easiest way in is to let them bring us in...”

         “No.” Dinga already regretted opening the door to his lunacy.

         “...as prisoners,” Gerard finished.

         “No part of that half-thought even qualifies as a sound idea, much less a plan.”

         “But it’s the best we can muster.” Gerard shrugged.

         “No, I agree with your friend,” a female voice chimed in. “As stratagems go, that option seems more a consequence than an actual intention.”

         The men whirled around. A statuesque woman blocked their lone exit. Dinga hadn’t heard her approach, and even now, it was as if his keen senses couldn’t quite settle onto her. He reached for the hilt of his panga, but something in her eye gave him pause.

         A wan light glowed about her, though Dinga could not divine its source. Her maroon and black vestments, a series of small plates woven like a scaled kaftan, reminded him of the uniforms of the assailants who had ambushed them years ago in Utica. Along the bronze complexion of her left arm wound a tattoo of a scaled serpent. Her long black hair, drawn back in gold plaits.

         “Who are you?” Dinga asked.

         “With you being the strangers to our land, I would think that proper manners would dictate that you introduce yourselves and your intent first.” The woman retained a practiced nonchalance, but her relaxed bearing belied a battle-ready stance.

         “I am Gerard, scion of Sparta,” he announced as he stepped forward. Dinga recognized his positioning. Gerard moved to flank her, splitting her awareness between the two of them.

         “And you?” Unfazed, her attentions not the least bit divided, her eyes shifted to Dinga, as though still assessing their level of potential threats.

         “Dinga. Of the clan Cisse.” His fingertips itched, regretting that the only weapon he brought with him was his panga. Though his instinct didn’t sense her radiating a death spirit. And the way she carried herself, with her defiant tone and stance, reminded his heart of Lalyani.

         “I am Luci’Kobe.” She bowed slightly, her appraising gaze never leaving them.

         “You’re beautiful.” Incorrigible, Gerard sweetened the tenor of his voice to something approaching charming. “You, my dear, could be a princess.”

         “Why would I aim my dreams so low?” Luci’Kobe demurred, her tone playing to his poor flirtation but never taking her eyes from Dinga. “Why does your gaze linger so?”

         “You remind me of someone.” Dinga returned his attentions to the window. “I can’t believe we’re at the Dreaming City.”

         “You have no idea where you are. Dreams are about truth, sometimes deeper truths unknown to us.” Approaching slowly yet intently, she took his chin and turned his face side to side, inspecting him. “You have a fascinating mind. Dark and beautiful, like a many-roomed house with most of the doors locked. What business brings you skulking about the bowels of our city?”

         “What strange anatomy you must have for your bowels to hover above the rest of the body,” Gerard said.

         “A promise.” Lingering at her comforting touch, Dinga hesitated before he drew away.

         “A vague answer,” she said.

         “Trust me, the specifics wouldn’t make the explanation any easier,” Gerard huffed.

         “You love the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” Luci’Kobe cut her eyes toward him.

         “I do. I really do.” Gerard bowed slightly. The flourish of his hand appeared to reflexively signal for a drink.

         “My sister wished me to travel here...” Dinga’s words trailed off. He searched for something true to offer. “In hopes that I might find peace enough for both of us.”

         “All who find us were meant to make the journey.” Withdrawing a few steps, she paused and gestured for them. “Come along. Let’s see how well your plan works.”

         “Plan?” Dinga asked.

         “The one involving you being my prisoners.”

         “No offense.” Gerard planted his hands to his sides, refusing to move. Within the folds of his chlamys, he reached for his short sword. “But you’re alone and expect us to just dance into your prison cells on your word.”

         “Oh.” Her lips upturned, cold and mischievous. “Our kind is never alone.”

         Dinga held his hand up to halt Gerard. The shadows about them shifted. Much like when he had first spied the suspended city, when he fixed his gaze on the darkness directly, the shadows shifted. A spiraling curtain of night slithered with purpose, like a living weapon. Luci’Kobe flicked her wrist in their direction. Two globules of the shadow stuff flew out, lashing itself about each of their wrists. The remaining shadow glided across the surface of the ground before forming as a cloak about her.

         “This way, gentlemen.” She curled her finger towards her.

         Luci’Kobe escorted them to a strange conveyance, much like a hovering cart. She closed her eyes as if in concentration, and the vehicle seemed to respond to her thoughts and veered toward the heart of the Dreaming City.

         The jutting towers of the city were a magnificent vision. Dinga had seen nothing of its like in all of his travels. Around the outer edges of the city, the high-walled channels of the undercity girdled it. Domed roofs and fretted archways embossed each building. Heavy gold-laced gates guarded the narrow streets paved with marble, which funneled into slimmer alleys, like the veins on the hands of an old woman. They passed an open-air marketplace. Colorful floating disks rotated above each stall, like fans circulating the air doubling as umbrellas for canopies. The morning sun sent a cascade of colors along the array of spires. The shape of two birds, like sentient air, circled overhead.

         Noting Dinga’s interest, Luci’Kobe said, “Part of our surveillance and security system.”

         “What strange science is this?” Gerard asked.

         “Science is a diluted form of magic,” she said. “To your kind, sorcery is something to be learned. Mastered. Written down in scrolls and passed down, each iteration weaker than the last until one day they are just fanciful scribblings. For us, sorcery is something to intuit. To feel, like the blood pulsing through your veins.”

         “It’s beautiful,” Dinga struggled to voice.

         Gerard leaned over. “I have a new cunning plan: we steal the birds.”

         “Is theft your true mission?” Luci’Kobi asked.

         “No,” Dinga wanted to shove him out of the speeding vehicle’s window. “I spoke true. My friend simply believes he has jokes.”

         “Mine is a singular humor. An acquired taste, not always for the faint of heart,” Gerard concurred.

         “Much like many diseases.” Luci’Kobe’s words snapped but without bite. “Do not worry: we’ve dealt with the occasional court fool before.”

         “What is this place?” Dinga pressed his face closer to the vehicle’s window.

         “This is Wagadu.”

         “Wagadu?” The words trailed from his lips. He recalled the words of the Wise One of his kraal. “Four times Wagadu stood there in all her splendor. Four times she turned her face.” But this bauble gleamed, so unlike the...

         ...ruins the trio encountered at the end of their journey. Dinga squatted over a pile of crumbling stones. Weeds grew between the shattered cobbles. Toppled columns laid across what had once been grand plazas and spacious streets. The picturesque ruins, now the ghost of a city.

         “Wagadu was the last city ruled by the gods,” Lalyani said.

         “The gods have let things go to seed.” Gerard kicked over the remains of a collapsed wall, perhaps hoping to reveal a hidden room full of treasure.

         “What do you think it means?” Dinga asked.

         “That once there was a city,” Lalyani said. “Perhaps this was just a small place where chiefs gathered to discuss the business of the tribes. And one day the city fell, and in so doing, became a legend spread by the whispers of greedy drunkards in the back of taverns.”

         “Hey!” Gerard said.

         “Do you really believe that?” Dinga recalled the men who attacked them, with their strange weapons and attire.

         “Not really. It would be easier to believe that Wagadu never existed. I know in my bones the true city, the Dreaming City, exists somewhere. And I will find it. My bones will reside there and my spirit will know peace.” Lalyani knelt to sift through the dirt. “Do you not burn to learn more of our ancestors?”

         “Should I?” Dinga asked. “They have done little but disappoint me so far.”

         “To learn more of your past, where you came from, is to know yourself better.” Standing up, Lalyani took his hand. “Remember what you once told me. ‘We are more than the transgressions of our parents.’ Look around and see the dream of what could be. We will one day rebuild this.”

         “We?” Dinga said.

         “I carry Wagadu in my heart. Promise me that one day I will rest there. Some believe that other than Olodumare, the orishas were actually rulers of ancient city-kingdoms. Or great heroes who were deified after their deaths. One, even one such as yourself, can become one of the orishas.”

         “There is a process?” Dinga asked.

         “Known to a few.”

         Dinga shook his head as if to clear it of foolish notions. “We are too young to plan for our deaths.” He had long reconciled that his was the path of blood and violence, a story which could only end one way. However, the thought of such a fate for his sister unsettled the core of his spirit.

         Interrupting his course of thoughts, Lalyani took his chin and turned his face to hers. “A warrior has to accept the beauty and terror of life. Death always stalks us, and we never elude it for long. When death finds you, make sure it finds you alive.”

         Then Lalyani propped her hand on her hip in that defiant way of hers, as if saying...

         “...you will wait here for Orunmila to summon you.”

         Luci’Kobe stepped out of the vehicle. Before them was a building whose structure was reminiscent of a tree. Constructed of triangle-shaped sections, the curving facets of the wall gave the building the illusion of movement. With a shimmer and a sigh, the wall’s essence shifted, its very components blinking out until an opening formed. When they stepped through the door, the latticed canopy shaded a courtyard. Hanging gardens lined the interior, and pipes for an internal irrigation system served as interior walls. At the center of the courtyard, a structure sifted water, creating a waterfall.

         “Orunmila?” Dinga held up his bound wrists.

         Lalyani waved in their direction, and the black bands shifted, became globules, and rejoined the material forming her cape.

         “Orunmila, one of the primordial irunmole, an orisha who had a hand in creation. He is the orisha of wisdom, knowledge, and divination.” Luci’Kobe opened the door with her approach, as if she were the key to an unseen lock.

         “I haven’t come to see any orisha,” Dinga said. “Only perform my task and lay down my burden.”

         “Whether you realize it or not, it is he you have come to see.”

         “She did say wisdom, knowledge, and divination,” Gerard said. “He probably knew you were coming.”

         “Ours is a living culture,” she continued. “Stories and traditions and rituals, sacred instruction of what it means to be human. We are a net of connections and come together to tend to our sorrows. You live in the shadow, denying who you are, what you feel. Do you not think we share your pain? Your anguish cries out to us. Once a strand has been ripped from us, we have to adjust to become whole again. We have no choice but to respond.”

         Dinga sucked his teeth. “Nyame, the Father I have known and followed all my life, has abandoned me and turned silent. Yet your solution is to offer me more gods?”

         “Nyame? That one is lost to us. That name is not spoken here.”

         “Tell me then, to whom should I pray?”

         “You’ve lost your ability to wonder and be awed. Learn how to ask a god for rain, and you will always have influence,” Luci’Kobe said. “We need others in times of need and loss and suffering. Only an idiot does it alone. You believe the lie of individuality.”

         “Don’t blame me,” Gerard said. “I’m Greek. It’s what we do.”

         “Though I am agoze, an initiate of Oya, I was born a diviner,” Luci’Kobe said. “My mother was a Great Mother. What some among your people might call an aje. A witch. When I was five, she was killed by a member of the Tigari, a witch hunter cult.” Luci’Kobe closed her eyes and laid her palm over Dinga’s heart. “You endure life, an endless existence of routine. You feed your shadow self, giving it life until it rattles through every part of who you are. An accumulation of wounds and sorrows, trapped in a ritual of grief, unable to move, much less move on. You limp through life believing that you’ve dealt with your pain. Instead, you are walking with death.”

         “So, I shall never be king?” Dinga sneered. So-called Wise Ones, or even Wise Ones-in-training, exhausted him with the need to prophesy who he should or would be.

         “Grief breaks us and can take us from the path we were called to. But we can also be remade in times of sorrow. All we have to do is the work to become whole again.” She opened her eyes. “Your path remains yours. You choose how to move forward.”

         “Me next, do me next.” Gerard raised his arms about. “I want to know my fortune.”

         Luci’Kobe stared him up and down as if he were small. “Your plan is a rousing success.”

         She strode through an exit. The door closed behind her, leaving a wall without any trace of a seam.

         “You introduce me to the most interesting people.” Gerard slid down against the back wall.

         With a mix of longing and regret, Dinga stared at the door. He stretched out along the floor, the gentle susurrus of the waterfall behind him calming him.

         “What is it, my friend?” Settling into his corner, Gerard crossed his legs.

         “Today would have been the anniversary of my sister’s birth. I can’t help but feel... incomplete. A missing puzzle piece. I daydream about what the young woman Lalyani would have been.”

         “Tell me this is all worth it.” Met with silence, Gerard sighed. “Tell me another? story of your village.”

         Dinga closed his eyes to stem his welling tears. He continued his story.

         The young man and the woman who was his sister each went their own way, for each had a respective destiny they were meant to follow. But on occasion, their paths crossed and they shared an adventure together. In time, their father learned that they knew one another. Whatever his thoughts, he took them to his grave, for he never spoke to the boy within the young man again.

         Then one day sickness came to the young woman. The Wasting. A series of bulging masses within her that seemed to eat away at her from the inside. Though they traveled to all the known healers, the Wasting proved resistant to all of their therapies, medicines, and sorceries. The young man tended to her, remaining by her side when physicians attempted to remove the unnatural growths through excision and cauterization. He recalled how he had once been captured by his enemies and tortured for information; their treatment was less cruel than the ministrations of the physicians.

         The young woman, exhausted and not wishing to live out her days in a vain search for a cure, asked him that they should retire to a small kraal. Bargaining with her body, though resting in bed, everything became a blur of horrible pain. Stripped of her dignity, constantly shifting her position in vain attempts to get comfortable, she found only postures of lesser anguish. He propped her up at meal times and fed her soup broth. Bathing her, dressing her lesions as best he could, spreading a poultice upon them to numb the pain, the boy within the man tended to her. By evening, he told her tales from his youth, of his adventures, and of his dreams.

         The boy within the man hid his anger. He silently raged at the Wasting, how it reduced her; lamented the time lost between them. He quietly cursed his father for separating them for so long, and the time they would never have together.

         The day came when she knew she neared drawing her last breath. The vital, strong woman was a faded dream. Left behind was only a withered crone, gaunt to the bone, whose every breath was a rasping wheeze. A combination of her pain, or the healing potions brewed for her once the Wasting took root in her. Screaming about the old withered woman visible in her cup, she stopped recognizing her own reflection. Often, she’d fling the cup across the room, and the young man left her side to pick up the pieces. When he returned to her bedside, he crawled into bed alongside her and wrapped his arms around her.

         “‘I will keep you safe from her,’ he whispered in a reassuring tone, stroking her thinning hair. The conversation pained him. He was in a habit of rushing to end their conversations when they turned to her death. Or to not have to hear the quaver in her voice. The confusion. The fear. This stranger before him. But she turned to him. Lucidity filled her eyes again. Her hand struggled to reach his face and stroke his beard, since he had not shaved since they had entered the village.

         “Promise me.” She ran her fingers through his premature gray strands, her recurring silent lament that she’d never have gray of her own.

         “Anything,” he said.

         “Take me to the home of my gods.”

         “The orisha?” he asked.

         “Yes. Find the Dreaming City, that they would welcome me home. And promise me you won’t go alone. That’s the only way I might truly find rest.”

         Dinga rolled over and allowed his soft sobs carry him off to slumber.

* * *

IV.

         There is a grief we carry from the things we didn’t even realize we’d lost.

         Dinga sprawled out on the marble floor, unable to get comfortable, unable to rest, yet not wanting to move. His was the view of the enslaved: from the dirt floor of the waiting pen. Part of him angry at the inhabitants of the Dreaming City. From all of the magic he had seen them demonstrate, at any point they could have come down from their precious mountaintop and saved Lalyani. They chose to keep their medicine to themselves, locked away in their lofty sky bauble.

         Sweat trickled down his back, and he trembled like an infant beset by fever. He feared attempting to stand, knowing his legs would threaten to buckle beneath him. Lalyani’s face tormented him. He longed to feel the ghost of her touch, running her fingers across his thinly haired scalp to tease him. Rolling over, he was unwilling to find Gerard in the dark. Rather, he was content to spend his nights on the floor, staring at the distant wall, replaying his failures from the past. Every injustice on an endless loop of trauma, while he lay impotent to do anything about them.

         “What are we going to do?” Gerard’s footfalls echoed back and forth behind him. “We can’t stay here forever.”

         “Why not?”

         “You may be comfortable in prisons, no matter how gilded the cage, but I am not.”

         We were meant to be free. Dinga knew she would not want him to remain in this place. Willing strength to his heavy limbs, he began to stir. “What can we do against their magic?”

         “I may have the beginnings of a cunning plan. Their magic may be powerful, but...” Examining the strange patterns along the wall, searching for any opening, Gerard fished within the folds of his chlamys to reveal the hilt of his short sword. “They are human enough. They may bleed easily enough.”

         “No,” Dinga said.

         “No what?” Gerard stopped moving.

         “No. We will not harm her.”

         “Look, Din, I don’t know—I won’t pretend to know—what you’re feeling. But she is not Lalyani.”

         “Her spirit is true. She won’t allow anything to harm us. She will see us through on our journey.”

         “How do you know?”

         “I don’t. I just do.”

         Heavy clomps along the marble floor slowly drew their attention. Not knowing where in the wall the door might appear, Gerard backed to the center of the room. Behind them, the opposite wall dissolved into an entrance. Luci’Kobe’s black cape undulated in an unfelt breeze, like a living thing stretching after having woken from a nap.

         With a military formality to her carriage, she walked with a stiffness she wore uncomfortably. Behind her marched three uniformed guards with gold mail vests and fur-lined collars. Their charged pehla sticks were drawn but remained at their sides. Behind them strode a man with the slow, determined stride of an elephant. His arms thicker than a grown python and legs like tree trunks; his sable skin nearly as black as a shadow in the wan light. A wispy white beard dangled from his chin, reminiscent of a boy’s first attempt to grow out whiskers. Black silk robes swathed him, and red pants that stopped just below his knees flashed out with each step. A necklace, the beads of which also alternated between red and black, dangled from his neck, and a maroon kerchief wrapped his head. He chomped on a large, though unlit, cigar. His left hand twirled three silver coins.

         “My lord Eshu, these are the spies we captured.” Luci’Kobe stepped away from the prisoners, not meeting their eyes.

         “Spies? Who dares infiltrate the Dreaming City?” Eshu flicked the coins between his meaty fingers. His heavy-lidded gaze landed on Gerard.

         “Oh. I thought your question rhetorical,” the Greek said. “You know, since we aren’t spies. You can’t spy on something you never realized was there.”

         “And who might you be, slick-tongued one?”

         “I am Gerard, scion of Sparta.” He bowed with a flourish, his hands reaching into the folds of his chlamys. His eyes locked onto Dinga’s, awaiting his nod. At least Dinga hoped that he was waiting. His friend was impetuous under his best temperament. Desperate and trapped, Gerard might be prone to lash out at the slightest provocation or perceived opening.

         “And you?” Eshu focused his studious gaze on Dinga.

         “Dinga. Of the clan Cisse.” His eyes flitted from Gerard—who lowered his stance, ready to charge—to Luci’Kobe—who angled away from him, her cape trailing along the ground—to Eshu, whose gaze remained steady and unhurried.

         “Cisse, eh? We’ll see about that.” Eshu swished his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “You and your compatriot now have a choice to make. Do so.”

         With the barest movement, Dinga patted the air. Gerard made the face of a child dissatisfied with his gift but stood up in a relaxed posture. Dinga stepped toward Eshu. “I don’t know where I am. Or where I’m supposed to go. I only know that I am to be here.”

         Eshu smiled, almost satisfied. “Take them to the temple. Let us introduce him to his history.”

         With that, Eshu turned on his heel, trailed by the three guards. As soon as the wall reformed behind him, all the tension left Luci’Kobe’s body.

         “Spies?” With mild amusement, Dinga side-eyed her.

         “You prefer ‘exiles lost on their pilgrimage to a dream’?” she asked.

         “Exiles is a bit harsh,” Gerard said.

         “‘Outcasts’ any better?” She stepped toward the wall.

         “Who was he?” Dinga hesitated at the area where the exit had appeared.

         “Eshu is a powerful orisha. He is the keeper of ashe and the messenger with the power to make things happen. He opens the way to the path. You have to be careful though, because he’s also a trickster. It’s how he helps people see the fault in making the wrong choices.” Her gaze lingered on Gerard. “Your friend could have ended your journey here.”

         “How do you mean ‘end’?” Gerard glanced at Dinga, who held a knowing silence.

         “The way all stories ultimately end.”

* * *

         The Dreaming City reminded Dinga of his home kraal, with the homes larger and nearly stacked upon one another. Elders and young alike occupied each structure. From what he could see, upwards of ten city residents lived in each residence. Each groupings of homes circled a courtyard. Tables lined the outer edges of it as people came together to share a meal. In a pantomime familiar to him, an elder told stories while children played.

         The floating cart stopped before a structure which looked like a bauble set in a cup, the way an expertly cut jewel fit into a ring. Spires radiated out from it, recalling the image of a rising sun. Dinga had no way to measure its size. One moment it had seemed to gleam in the distance, they next they were upon it. It resembled hand tools, tapered and pointed, rising from the earth.

         The three of them exited the cart. Golden steps led up to an archway. The air around the courtyard grew heavy, too thick to breath comfortably. The weight like gravity itself tugged at him. A pressure built deep within his lungs, a near burning as if he were running out of breath. The moment had an intensity. A solemn thrum, an invisible energy filled him with a surge of power.

         “What is this place?” Dinga asked.

         “The temple of Orunmila,” Luci’Kobe said. “It straddles the threshold between this world and the next. A living shrine, a dwelling place of the sacred.”

         “Like an unanswered prayer, like so much of the response from the gods to the strife in life.” The pack weighed against Dinga with a renewed pressure, as if needing to remind him of its presence.

         “Have you ever asked yourself who you are without your pain?” Luci’Kobe slowed as she neared the courtyard. “Once you’ve finished your errand, what will you do next?”

         “I don’t know if I’m ready.” Dinga shifted the pack, unsure if he was even willing to let it go. “How do we know we are at the right place?”

         “The heart will know.” Luci’Kobe closed her eyes, a reverential pause. “It is here that you will fulfill your promise.”

         A moment settled between them, respecting her silence for a few heartbeats.

         “You said you were an agoze, to be an initiate of Oya?” Dinga’s voice raised as if he were asking a question.

         “I am a child of Oya’s, orisha of storms, life, death, and rebirth.” Luci’Kobe opened her eyes. “The orisha may have one name in one place and another elsewhere. They rule the sky city but have allowed others to live here. Those they’ve found worthy. They can be proud, insouciant, and cruel.”

         “Like every god I’ve ever known.”

         “Like the essence of humanity when you get down to it.” Her words were thick with an air of defensiveness. “The... lesser orisha have more limited, specialized gifts. Health, fertility, good crops, protection from enemies. Down to being barely distinguishable from humans. In fact, some were humans, warriors and kings who distinguished themselves in life and have found power among the ancestral dead.”

         “I have no use for gods I have never heard of.”

         “That does not mean that they have no use for you. Just because they are a story you have not heard before does not mean they are not real to many. Three orisha form the Primodial Irunmole. They were present before time began, when there was nothing except the vast region of outer space and the earth was shapeless beneath the sky, an endless stretch of water. The domains of the orishas were then carved out. The supreme orisha, Olodumare—also called Olorun—ruled the sky. Orunmila—also called Ifa—was given the power to bend time to his will and read the future. His was the gift of deep understanding, of plumbing the secrets of existence since he was the only orisha present at the moment of creation other than Olodumare. There was the mysterious orisha, Obatala—King of the White Cloth—spirit of ethics, morality, purity, humility, and peace and shaper of human bodies. Considered the father of all orisha, it is they whom Olodumare trusted as if they were his own.”

         “You can say many things about the Greek pantheon,” Gerard said, as if needing to remind them of his presence, “but at least they understood that there was more than one letter in the alphabet to name their gods after.”

         “You know little of the magic to manipulate the elements and even less about the orisha to know to show the proper respect,” Luci’Kobe said. “There are four-hundred plus one orisha.”

         “Where does Eshu fit into things?” Dinga asked.

         “He is one of the powerful orisha, bound by nothing. He represents uncertainty, randomness, or chaos. Neither good, nor evil, he was born of chaos and chance and accident. His very nature and portent is that of unpredictability. Language is his gift, for he is Olodumare’s linguist. Whenever Eshu appears, there is a flaw in the sequence of events, a disruption of divine intention. With his presence, things become unclear.” Luci’Kobe touched her forehead as if struck by a headache at the very thought of him.

         “All stories pass through him,” Dinga mused to himself.

         “Yes. The second-oldest story begins with she who ruled down below.” Luci’Kobe inhaled slowly, almost as if preparing to unload a painful memory. Or a secret not hers to share.

         “Olokun ruled over the deepest of waters and the expanse called the wild marshes, a grey area, where no life dwelt. Not animal, not plant. This was the balance of creation: Olodumare ruled the sky above, Olokun the waters below. Anything that fell to the bottom of the waters remained intact, never to be seen again except by her, and she became the mother of secrets. Other than her, the orishas lived in the sky, acknowledging Olodumare as the owner of everything, the highest authority in all matters.

         One day, Obalata pondered Olokun’s domain and lamented that it was bereft of life. That, in their judgment, her kingdom was one of grey monotony; a melancholy bleakness. So, they went to Olodumare and petitioned that there should be solid land so that fields could grow and hills and valleys give shape to it, and that orishas and other living things could live there. Olodumare agreed but knew such creation to be an ambitious enterprise, and he asked who would do such a thing. Obalata volunteered.

         Obalata went to the house of Orunmila, since he understood the secret ways of existence. Obalata laid out their dilemma, not knowing how to begin the work. So Orunmila brought out his divining tray. He cast sixteen palm nuts and, from the way they fell, read their meaning. He cast and re-cast until he was sure of what existence spoke to him. Orunmila told them to take sacred symbols: a snail shell full of sand, a white hen, a black cat, and a palm nut. But they were to descend to the watery wastes to conduct their ceremony.

         “‘But how will I get there?’ Obalata asked.

         “‘You are to descend the golden chord.’

         “When the preparations had been made, Obalata lowered the chain they had forged and began their descent. They passed from the realm of light through the region of greyness, with only the whooshing like waves to mark his passage. And after a time, they reached their destination. They poured out their sand and dropped the hen upon it. The hen scattered the sand in all directions, where it dried and became land that extended in all directions. The place where Obalata first set foot, they called Ife.”

         “That story means nothing to me. I feel... empty.” Dinga could not explain the strange gnawing in his soul, like a gaping hunger. As if even the space once occupied by Nyame now stood vacant.

         “Your heart knows.” She clicked her teeth with frustrated impatience. “Or it could, if it wasn’t so blocked.”

         “The physicians and phylacteries of my homeland are some of the finest in the lands.” Gerard shifted as if the comment had been aimed at him. “If Dinga had heeded my counsel, we’d each be in a maiden’s lap finding solace right now.”

         “That is what I meant. You rush to numb your pain. You embrace your capacity for distraction, as both amnesia and anesthetic, hoping to forget rather than plunge headlong into your pain in order to get through to the other side. We can be shaped by life.”

         “Can life shape us with the challenge of wealth?” Gerard protested. “The gods seem to overly delight in our trials of hardship.”

         “Orphan—” Luci’Kobi’s shoulders straightened in resolve as she turned to him—”you are a little snail seeking refuge behind the fronds of the banana tree.”

         “I get the feeling that I am not welcome.”

         “The sacred rituals of sorrow are not for you. Your kind plunder and keep for themselves.”

         “Rude.” Gerard hesitated, before taking a step backward. His hands withdrew into his chlamys. “Is this... where my story ends?”

         “That depends. All of your cunning plans seem to fall back to one base course of action.” Luci’Kobe lips curled upward. “Can you be trusted in the market to find yourself a meal?”

         First glancing at Dinga, Gerard shrugged. “I mean, I’m sad too, but I could eat.”

         While Gerard wandered toward the floating saucers marking the marketplace, Luci’Kobe and Dinga crossed the court. He had the distinct impression that ghosts danced with a delicate grace throughout the yard. He and Luci’Kobe climbed up the flight of steep steps until they stood before an ornate arch. A red shaft of light shot out. Dinga jumped back, but Luci’Kobe stood her ground. The beam ran down and then up her before turning to Dinga. It ran along his flesh without so much as the faintest tickle. An entrance appeared for them.

         “What if it had not found us worthy?” Dinga asked.

         “Then your quest would have ended.” Her voice turned dark and serious, her visage stoic. Unable to hold the sternness for long, her face collapsed into a smile. “And we’d have joined your friend for lunch.”

         Golden censers floated along the corridor, producing perfumed clouds. Mosaics of ruby, emerald, and onyx inlaid with gold leaf lined the many-hued walls. Dinga knew it was for the best that Gerard had not accompanied them. His avaricious instincts would not have resisted the casks of gems, golden coins, and silver ingots scattered in the rooms, and he’d have attempted to wander from them with pockets so full, his waddle alone would have given him away.

         A winding stairwell led to a long cold, narrow corridor, steeped in shadows like a tunnel to nowhere. The air, thick with the smell of bayberry and myrrh. Panels lit up alongside them as they passed, heatless torchlights illuminating their path. Neither said a word. The silence took on a meditative quality, holy, brooding, and deepening, alive with intelligence as if its spirit had just snapped awake. They traveled deep within the structure, further inward than the layout from the outside had suggested was possible. The city’s magic built structures that bent space to their will, Dinga surmised.

         Eventually the hallway opened up into a cavernous room; passed between two floating bowls at the entrance filled with water. Luci’Kobe dipped her fingers into the water and marked her forehead. Dinga mirrored her actions before he entered the room.

         About the room were ten statues, three of which were off to themselves, not quite set apart but closer together. Before them was a dais. One of the three statues shimmered, as if blinking in and out of existence, and then a young man stood in place of that statues. About him a gold light shimmered. He walked toward the center dais, stopping short of it. Swathes of cloth, the green silk interwoven with the strips of yellow cotton, wrapped about him. An elekes of alternating green and yellow beads, around his neck. His gold bracelet matched the headdress suspended above him. The crowning mask had ornate images of animals, crescent moons, and a sun carved into it. His eyes brimmed with wildness. Dinga had seen those eyes many times. The distant stare of someone lost in the throes of bloodlust.

         Moving to an unseen drummer, the young man danced. A gentle chant, somehow harmonizing with himself. He stared off with a sway to the rhythms, like a reed caught in a breeze. Finding his freedom, he began to step, a half-march, his stomps coinciding with heavy palms banging against canvas. He bowed and straightened, bowed and straightened to the music until his feet found themselves. Twirling, he spun, circling the dais until suddenly the music stopped. He stretched out his arms, his fingers grasping at the sky. As if his entire body attempted to open itself up.

         “Through this, the deep magic of myal, he can speak to Orunmila face-to-face and through him, Orunmila may speak,” Luci’Kobe answered Dinga’s unasked question.

         “Possession?” He had heard of the gods and some spirits taking over a person’s body.

         “Nothing so crude. Orunmila does not come down, so we have to go up. It’s about being in relationship. To connect with him on another plane of existence. We pray for him to reveal himself to us. That the encounter changes us and orients us to who he is.”

         “I don’t understand. Are they you?” Dinga asked. “Are they with you?”

         “They are with me. I have to let them in. An aspect of them, because how could a mortal hope to contain the immortal. That is where I end, and we begin. All are we. As our consciousness expands, so will our understanding of them.”

         “The gods have a strange way of talking.” Dinga kept his eyes on the still-swaying young man.

         The mask lowered into place, covering the young man’s features from his forehead to his nose. “Orunmila” withdrew a carved horn. Carrying the horn to the dais, he set it down between two halves of guiro. His heavy lips parted. The words uttered did not match their movement though Dinga understood them all the same.

         “Step forward. We know who you are, Dinga of the clan Cisse,” Orunmila said.

         “Then you know why I’m here.”

         “We do, but do you?”

         Dinga paused, sensing a trap in the words. “I only come to fulfill a promise.”

         “You travel all this way, risking life and limb, not to mention the fate of your friend simply to... run an errand?” Orunmila strode across the elevated stage the dais sat upon. With a grand flaunt, his cloth wraps draping behind him, he descended down the steps.

         Dinga flushed hot, like a child caught in a lie. “I... am on a journey.”

         “Good. An admission, that’s a start. What do you hope to find on your journey?”

         “Answers.”

         “Answers won’t bring you what you want,” Orunmila said.

         “I should be the judge of that.”

         Another statue flickered in the dim light of its recess. In its place, Eshu stepped forward. Orunmila glanced at Eshu. The pair conversed without words, the way only siblings could. Eshu nodded. With that he withdrew into the shadow of his alcove until the statue reappeared.

         “You have reached a crossroads in your journey,” Orunmila continued. “We share a similar pain, you and I. My brother informs me that you have come here because of a story. Thus, I am moved to speak with you.”

         With a gesture, a sphere, like a ball of water, formed above the dais.

         “Look where your sorrow has taken you. Your grief moves you through the underworld. It is your duty to mourn, to live in the ashes of their loss. The soul fragments, its bits stolen, broken, or fled from.”

         His eyes filled with an emotion Dinga couldn’t quite read. A dulled pain, perhaps. Orunmila’s face tightened, a hint of anger rose in his voice. The sphere rose and split, becoming four smaller balls.

         “Our rituals create a vessel for our grief, join the hearts of the suffering, for suffering is what unites us in life. Here, we belong. Here we find wholeness.” Orunmila clasped his hands together and the globes melded back into one complete sphere. “We have much to teach here, but few have the ears to learn.”

         “I can learn. I can understand.” Dinga hated the odd note of desperation in his tone.

         “Indeed? Let us see what you have learned.”

         Orunmila outstretched his arms. The room darkened. Light leapt from the dais, forming images flaring to life all around him. Most of the scenes were memories, though some of the depicted quests were unfamiliar to him. So much violence in his stories. The jeweled-city of Jenne-Jeno. The evil wizard Naiteru-kop. The black-hooded raiders of Sjilmasa. The otherworldly bats with star-shaped heads. So much betrayal. Ifriquia. His father. Anasa the Wise One. So much shame. The last image lingered—him in his childhood alcove. With Lalyani.

         “Indeed, you have learned,” Orunmila kept his voice low, tinged with compassion. “How to fight. How to kill. How to temper a blade.”

         “It is easy for you to judge from your heavenly realm, from this Dreaming City. What do you know of the hardships of life? Of death? You are so far removed from your people, I am surprised you can even hear their pleas.”

         Luci’Kobe gasped. Lowering her head, she retreated to the nearby shadows as if unable, or unwilling, to witness any more.

         “Who are you to question the orisha or our ways?” Orunmila rose, his feet no longer touching the ground. He floated toward Dinga with unwavering intent. “You have no knowledge of who we are. Or what we experience.”

         “You tell me then.” Dinga refused to back down. “I wish to know you.”

         Orunmila hovered before him, eyes narrowed to grim slits.

         The silence burgeoned between them, a gulf neither knew how to navigate.

         “You asked me what I have learned,” Dinga began. “I have learned that sometimes it is easier to tell a story about ourselves in order to voice our pain into the world. You talk to me of your precious ways and rituals. That we have a story in common. Tell me a story of your city.”

         The orisha cocked his head in consideration. Several long heartbeats passed in silence. With the boom of a distant thunderstorm, Orunmila’s voice emanated from all around the room at once.

         There once was a boy who only sought to please his father. His father was an important man. He was a Creator, a builder of dreams and ideas and people. So numerous and fabulous were his creations that his name passed the lips of all the people in the world as the Father of All.

         But to the boy, he was simply his father.

         One day the boy crafted a bowl. The boy labored hard, fashioning it with his bare hands. He thought about the ornate designs he would etch into it. All of the things which pleased his father. A single bracelet. A horsetail switch. A cane. A bell. He labored for many days until the bowl was exactly as he imagined. For the truest mark of an artist was to bring into being what they had imagined.

         That evening the boy knelt at his father’s feet and presented him with the bowl. “Father, I follow in your footsteps, born with your spirit to create.”

         His father inspected the boy’s handiwork. “Its color does not please me.”

         With that, he set the bowl aside.

         Ashamed, the boy fled his father’s presence. A rift occurred between them, like a piece of fabric worn bare. The boy wandered about the land studying his father’s handiwork. An hour passed. A day. A week. Yet no one came looking for him. He made his way throughout all which had been created, learning all of its secrets. Still, no one came for him. With each month, each year, that passed, the rift only grew larger, a seam splitting at its threads. Consumed by the memory of presenting his father the bowl, playing the moment over and over in his mind, he finally realized that it was not his shame to bear but his father’s, alone.

         So, the son returned. When the father spied him, he nodded as if only a moment had elapsed. His father never realized a gulf now separated them, much less how to breach it. And the son never mentioned his absence, his travels, or the lessons he learned. All the secrets and mysteries of existence would be his to keep.

         Orunmila opened his eyes. The room brightened. “You came here to receive answers? Come, follow me and see if you are ready for them.”

* * *

V.

         There is grief we carry from the sorrow experienced by our ancestors.

         The décor of the pavilion was a lush mixture of color and textures. Divans scattered throughout the chamber, jumped upon by children in gilt-braided skirts. Other children poured libations into chalices carved from a single emerald. A golden-silled window opened onto a balcony overlooking the Dreaming City. Orunmila led them to the rear of a second pavilion. He paused, steeling himself with a breath before the wall dissolved before them.

         A bed chamber, white walls surrounded a bed covered in white linens. They framed a figure near-buried within them, his dark skin ashy with a terrible pallor. Their slender frame sat up as best they could, drawing tight their silken jupons.

         Obatala, the Sky Father. Father of all the orisha.

         Dinga blinked hard. Obatala looked exactly like his father from his youth, with echoes of his grandfather. The room filled with the smell of Obatala’s thick musk. Their large, expressionless countenance still had an aristocratic air about it. His Father’s face.

         No one resented the arrogance that swaddled Obatala. That was the expected manner and bearing of the orisha. Every calculated posture, even a casual finger waggle, had the deliberate of a dramatic embellishment.

         “Do not be disconcerted,” Luci’Kobe said. “Each person sees them different.”

         Their hands, oddly small, reached for the chalice beside them.

         Orunmila walked towards them.

         Obatala’s attendants, a pair of children who fanned them, challenged him as if he had demonstrated some violation of protocol. The tone of Orunmila’s voice, the brazenness of his manner, perhaps the way he clenched his hands, caused them to reconsider. He dismissed the duo with a glance.

         The white sheets rose and fell. Rose and fell. Rose and fell.

         “I am one for tradition.” Orunmila bowed low and long, an exaggerated gesture, which had the subtle whiff of insult to it.

         Luci’Kobe stood behind Dinga, both nervous and tense.

         “Better than one who forgets. Especially his place.” Obatala’s eyes widened, registering a feigned shock and no light of recognition. “There’s a fine line between forgetfulness and contempt.”

         The courtly life was not for Dinga. He found the sheer gamesmanship of it all, their inane trivialities, wearisome and irritating, like a film of sand caught in his loincloth. Gerard took to it like flies to a corpse.

         “Illness strips so much,” Luci’Kobe whispered. “Who Obatala was. Their friends. Their family. The steady toll of loss. Illness is a winnowing of who we are. Until we arrive at the core within the husk, knowing the fragility of flesh. When Orunmila learned of his father’s impending death, something shifted within him and softened between them. Despite his brazenness, he now attends to his father with the care of a doting nurse.”

         “He’s dying?” Dinga leaned closer to her as Orunmila approached his father, like a planet entering the orbit of the sun, not wanting to get too close. “He’s an orisha. Eternal.”

         “How can the eternal, the infinite, manifest on the physical plane?” Orunmila said without turning to them. “There are mysteries and profundities known only to Olodumare. Even from me.”

         The white sheets rose and fell. Rose and fell. Rose and fell.

         “My father, the father I knew, had a way of putting others around them at ease. Sometimes with inappropriate humor. Sometimes with a wistful smile. Or playful flirtation. When they were about their work, however, they were a serious person. They fought for life, their children. For them, every day of life was a victory.” Orunmila’s hand circled a spot near his father’s bedside. A chair rose from the ground like so much sand assembling a seat. “They were a tough person. A hard person. In constant pain without telling anyone. Another secret hidden from me. Yet all things come to an end. Sometimes the fight itself takes too much out of you. Their herbs and medicines sustain him, but that is not enough to call it life. Not worth the extra weeks or months. Can you understand that?”

         Dinga nodded in respectful silence.

         “Baba Arugbo.” Orunmila leaned low and whispered into his father’s ear.

         “I’m here,” Obatala said. “Who are you?”

         “Sometimes he recognizes me, sometimes he doesn’t. He lived his life until he couldn’t remember how to live anymore.” Orunmila raised his father’s hand to his face. “I am your son.”

         “Yes,” Obatala’s eyes cleared and focused with the dim light of recognition. “I know you.”

         “His dying is telling you something,” Luci’Kobe pled. “You have to be willing to listen.”

         Dinga was no longer sure if she was speaking to him or to Orunmila. Or, rather, if she spoke the things to him she dare not say to her orisha.

         Dinga spoke anyway. “It tells me that life is meant to be incomplete. There is much unfinished between my father and I, that we waited too long to attend to. Now it... never shall be.”

         “Nothing makes sense any longer, losing the pillar around which your world was built,” Orunmila said. “When Olurun created the Universe, I bore witness. It is my burden to know the destiny of everything that exists. It is I whom people call on for healing. So where do I turn when I am in need? Feeding and bathing the dying, yet we do so every day without hesitation; since from the time you are infants, every minute lived is a step closer to death. Life can be cruel. A life of suffering is no life, and death often a relief. That’s why we say only the sky knows who will be saved.”

         The white sheets rose and fell. Rose and fell. Rose and fell.

         Desiring a better vantage point, Dinga risked a step forward. He interpreted the delicate play of words as similar to combat, with their subtle feints and thrusts. Now the conversation intrigued him and he stood in silent witness. Orunmila asked the questions of fathers and sons. If they had any regrets about how he lived. If they had any doubts about who he became. If they were proud of him. If he was loved. And Obatala, being present for the moment, told of their love for their son, and bandaged the old wounds of the heart because it was always up to the parent to restore the bridge to the child.

         “What madness is this?” Dinga asked. His constant, incandescent rage an inchoate thing, without a specific target to focus it on. He welcomed it, as it was better than the overwhelming silence that ruled his mind. Like his entire journey had led to this moment. Somehow all of this felt orchestrated, all staged for his benefit.

         “Madness? Orishas stand beyond what you count as rational or irrational.” Luci’Kobe took his hand, her touch cool, calming him like a cool breeze along a desert plain. “You have a very human lens. The world is not an object to be controlled, manipulated, or consumed. The orisha move through it as you should, appreciating its array of beauty. And pain. All of us are open vessels, free and vulnerable to experience all the joys and sorrows of life to their fullest. Craft sorrow into something that will grow the community.”

         Dinga was where he was supposed to be. Not an imposter. Blaming himself for Lalyani, from the Wasting to their lost time together, carrying the guilt with absolute conviction. Exposed, his damage revealed. He hated the little boy inside him, for not being man enough to stand up to his father. All of his fears, insecurities, and hurts buried within him. Not wanting to be vulnerable or appear weak. Life was a choice. He didn’t have to stay where he was. He no longer wanted to hide. Lalyani knew him and had loved him. What happened with her was not his shame to carry but his father’s alone. His father’s dishonor.

         Orunmila held his father’s hand until Obatala fell back asleep.

         “It’s almost time,” Dinga said to no one in particular.

         “How do you know?” Luci’Kobe asked.

         Dinga peered deep into her eyes, without words, his pain mirroring Orunmila’s terrible knowing. Weeks of sifting Lalyani’s facial expressions to monitor her pain when she wouldn’t hint at complaint.

         The white sheets rose and fell. Rose and fell. Rose and fell.

         Obatala grew quieter and quieter. Softer and softer. Their breathing became more shallow, a hard, jagged thing. Though their lips moved, they no longer formed words. Limp, no longer responding to anything he did. A strangled rattle clotted the back of their throat.

         “Go in peace,” Orunmila whispered.

         The white sheets fell.

         Orunmila closed his eyes. A solitary tear trailed down his face. He opened his mouth as if to say something profound in his father’s last moments, but no words escaped. A sound rumbled from deep within him. His body spasmed once, gripped by a deep pain, and a distant cry began. A haunting keening came from beyond Orunmila as much as within him. A death wail, all of his grief shuddering out of him in one paralyzing instant. He collapsed to his knees, the wail having exhausted him. His hands searched for purchase along the bed frame, enough to draw himself up. He crawled into the bed alongside his father and wrapped a lifeless arm around himself. No one dared approach.

         Something had set fire to Dinga’s soul, a call he responded to. Something raw and ancient and untamed. He wept for the family who had lost their parent, their sibling, and their friend. For Orunmila who was there when they passed, the son who loved them and share his life with them. For the loss he knew all too well.

         A firm hand landed on Dinga’s shoulder, ushering him to the side.

         Eshu stepped between them and stationed himself at the bed’s side to whisper to his brother. “Come. You cannot stay in this place. The mystery soon comes.”

         Eshu held his hand out. Unsteadily, Orunmila took it and rose from the bed. They stepped backward.

         A glow haloed his father’s form. Obatala’s body slowly collapsed, folding in on itself. Much like the Dreaming City itself, different planes intersected it, no dimensions of their form making any sense in the space. The body dematerialized much like the city’s walls when creating a door, opening a portal for itself. Whatever formed the physicality of the space the orisha once inhabited collapsed into a sphere the size of a small ball. Then a marble. Then the head of a needle. Eshu produced a small jeweled container, enclosing the area the glowing dot once occupied.

         “The golden chord?” Orunmila asked, unable to raise his head.

         “We all have our duties.” Eshu placed a meaty hand on his brother’s shoulder before departing in silence.

         And Dinga shared their sorrow, from a place that didn’t have words.

* * *

         When the emptiness swept across the Dreaming City, the community gathered around Orunmila’s temple. The spirits of the unmourned ancestors surrounded it. A hush fell over the streets, with the portent of an impending storm. Luci’Kobe and other attendants congregated at dusk, to witness and provide support. To hold space for their work, as facing emptiness was the key to moving.

         Careening around people, Gerard wandered through the crowd like a lost tourist. Dinga strode to intercept him. “You’re drunk,” Dinga said.

         “I am.” Gerard’s words slurred.

         “On what?”

         “On beer.” Gerard held up a near-empty mug.

         “Where did you get beer?”

         “The gods provide. I let them.” Gerard studied the massing crowd. “What’s this about?”

         “A ritual of remembrance.”

         “Who died?” Gerard chewed his lip, regretting his brashness. Before he met Dinga’s eyes again, he emptied his mug.

         “Obatala. Their orisha.”

         “But gods...”

         “It happens.”

         “Go on ahead. I don’t do funerals,” Gerard said.

         “Yet you have walked beside me this entire time. Lalyani’s journey nears its end. Will you abandon me now?”

         Gerard slowly swigged his beer in silence.

         The mourners began to set up three shrines and then gathered around them. The handclaps started sporadically before finding their united rhythm. A few women began to sing.

         Near the water shrine, Luci’Kobe stepped forward. She brought her arms together, her palms outstretched, and twirled her hands as if grappling with the air. Some of her motions reminded Dinga of the martial practice known as the Forms. He’d never seen them performed as dance. The myal energy built, passing through the dancers like lightning through to the village. The dancers shook, near convulsion; some collapsed. Others knelt, their shoulders heaving as they wept.

         Around the fire shrine, some in the city shouted their anger and pain. The passion of their vented energy igniting the flames. Some simply fell prostrate, unable to hold themselves up. The postures of heartache, broken open by grief, to be witnessed and shared as the story of community.

         Only then did the orisha appear.

         The nine members of their brethren. Silent, unmoving. Reminiscent of the statues in the temple, though not exactly like them, as if each person had caught an aspect of their chosen orisha. Eshu stood behind Orunmila in a protective stance. Luci’Kobe stepped forward.

         “We’ve gathered to honor our ancestors. To offer gratitude for the gift of life, appreciation through drums and dance. We leave food out for them. Your pain is not a private thing. It is not yours to bear alone. It belongs to your community. To have the story, the pain, held by many.” Luci’Kobe handed Dinga a bowl. “For you to join in with their grief.”

         “But I didn’t know them.”

         “You wept for Obatala. And you know grief. You carry a spiritual debt which you cannot repay.”

         Dinga reached into the sacred bowl, finding only roots. Luci’Kobe nodded, and he slipped some into his mouth and began to chew. Their bitter flavor stung his tongue. A sudden lightheadedness caught him off guard. The rush swept through his secret places that had never known love. Places without kindness, where he hid his shame. A kaleidoscopic glow illuminating the parts of himself he was convinced no one would love. The places Lalyani knew. She had touched those places too.

         “It’s time.” Luci’Kobe took his hand. “Follow me.”

         They approached the final shrine, a large bowl surrounded by stones. After her whispered invocation, she picked up a stone and handed it to him. He glared at her quizzically.

         “I know it is not your way. You are much more comfortable with a weapon in hand, ready to slash your way through your problems. But sometimes there is no enemy to vent your anger on. Only the pain and grief to deal with. Grief nourishes life. This will connect you to your community, to help call you back to life. Mourn that which has been lost.”

         She held the stone out again. When he took it, she gestured toward the scattered rocks.

         “Name your sorrow. Keep taking stones until each sorrow is named. When you are done, we will take the stones to the ocean to be scoured clean.”

         Dinga lifted the first stone, its heft comfortable in his palm. He named his denial of Lalyani, labeling her ogbanje. With another he named their complicated relationship. With the last, he named their short time together. Wriggling within the pack straps, Dinga glanced toward Gerard. His friend approached to help free him of the pack. Dinga placed his burden at the foot of the shrine and began to unpack it. Within the bag was a thick, sealed clay container. Fishing around inside, he also withdrew a necklace. Gently as he could, Dinga cracked the jar open. Within it were ashes. He scooped out a spoonful and tamped some into the hollow of his necklace and sealed it with wax. A reliquary to carry with him.

         “Only a broken heart can know true love.” Luci’Kobe placed her hand on his shoulder. “Grief never ends. It may soften, but it is the reminder of the love you had for her. It keeps her in this world. Don’t forget what must be remembered. You are a living memorial to her, but to do that, you have to live.”

* * *

         At the edge of the Dreaming City was a grassy field that overlooked the forest below. It reminded Dinga of the alcove from his childhood. He raised his arms, joining his hands together, his palms curved as if cupping a great bowl. Holding up future generations or taking in the world, the moon, all the stars. A figure approached him, her gait hauntingly familiar until her image crystalized into that of Luci’Kobe.

         “Your friend, Gerard, awaits you.”

         “He can’t wait to depart for home. He hopes for an easier way down than the sheer cliffside.”

         “There are ways known to us to make the way less... perilous.”

         “I suppose he’s had enough peril for one journey. Time enough has passed that even those he probably angered in his homeland have, if not forgotten, given up on pursuing him.”

         “I have something for you.” Luci’Kobe reached behind her and drew a sword. “It is the symbol of Ogun, orisha of war. Also, the patron of hunters and warriors.”

         “But I do not serve Ogun. These days I do well to claim Nyame. Or even be claimed by him.”

         “All who do Ogun’s work serve him. Gods don’t need your faith to carry out their will.” Laying the sword before him, Luci’Kobe joined him in the grass.

         “I wish I shared your faith.”

         “The gods are coming back one day.”

         “The gods keep a fickle schedule. Do they give any hints as to when that might be?”

         “A day. A year. A hundred or a thousand. It’s all but moments to them.” Luci’Kobe stood, reaching her hand down to drag him to his feet. When he rose, she clasped his face between her hands. “You are no longer who you were. It’s alright to shed that outworn skin.”

         Dinga embraced her. “Tell Gerard that I will be with him in a bit.”

         “Do not tarry too long. I do not know how long our beer stores can withstand his one-man siege.” Luci’Kobe smiled, and it drew one out of him.

         When she left, though he stood, Dinga’s feet bothered him. It was his sandals. Lalyani could never abide shoes on her feet, which was why her soles were tougher than leather. He took them off and began to run. He came into the world free, and he would know what it meant to run free, to live in that space, and carry her story within him.

* * *

...to protect our future

         “All journeys are born of death.” The eyes of Selamault sparkled as she spoke, delighting in the intonation of the ancient words. “Maya, bring down the lighting fifteen percent.”

         <Augmented reality sub-routine interface lighting adjusted> said Maya, the AI running all Muungano systems.

         The holographic flames dimmed. The young bard picked his chakram and tested the sharpness of its edges.

         “You love to tell the ancient stories.” Wachiru bridged his fingers over the heatless flames of the artificial campfire.

         “We’ve been telling the stories for hundreds of years. Every word in its place, none forgotten. The order is sacred, exactly as I once heard it. The story telling is the discipline. But when you perform the duty, uphold the sacred trust you were born to, you can’t help but love it.”

         “Or be crushed by its weight,” Wachiru said.

         “Did you not hear the story?”

         “I heard a tale of death and sorrow. I’m not about a grief performance.”

         “True, grief was part of it. But it was the lesson of figuring out your path. On your terms. Held safe by community. We have never been called to a safe path. With life, we’re promised a hard one, sometimes filled with adventure and uncertainty. Sometimes its only the path itself that can fill the longings of your heart.”

         “I don’t know.”

         “Have you become domesticated? Do passions cease to burn within you? Do you want to be safe? Then stay here.” Holding her hands out toward him, the Wise One stood up. “Or get off your ass and come with me. Your people need you to be a leader. Find those of us too savage for delicate sensibilities and refined ways. We are at a crossroads as a people. There is a kingdom of darkness, the old ways we strive against. We are a land torn by fear and in danger of falling back into the darkness that once held us.”

         “Becoming the darkness to fight the darkness,” Wachiru said, his voice low and thick with regret. “So many believe we should project only strength, eschewing weakness, perceived or otherwise. From within or without.”

         “We want to be subject to the scared whims of a manic leader, especially when by moonlight his inner demons get the better of him. The nature of true power can tolerate, even abide, dissent. Because with true power comes security. The secure are unbothered, even by the fever of ambition. Only the weak hate weakness. And his is the language of thrones and kingdoms. Barons of oppression. We chart a different course. That was the dream.”

         “We’re a long way from the idea of Wagadu.”

         “But Muungano is the city dreamt.”

         The young poet grasped the old woman’s hand. She returned his clasp but overturned his hand to point out the black mark on his palm.

         “The mark of Umlando?” he asked, his voice thick with skepticism.

         “Or simply a birthmark. You’ve been raised with duty to family and community. A sacred duty. And a burden. But in the end, it is your choice what path to follow.”

Copyright © 2020 Maurice Broaddus

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A community organizer and teacher, Maurice Broaddus’s work has appeared in magazines like Uncanny, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Asimov’s, and Cemetery Dance, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. He wrote the urban fantasy trilogy The Knights of Breton Court, the steampunk books Buffalo Soldier and Pimp My Airship, and the middle grade detective novel The Usual Suspects. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Dark Faith: Invocations, Streets of Shadows, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror, Fireside Magazine, and Apex Magazine. Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

TO BALANCE THE WEIGHT OF KHALEM

by R.B. Lemberg

The Market of Khalem

         While a student refugee in Khalem, I discover the market by chance. It is the heart of the city—not the palace, not the high-end shopping streets, not the historical museum—the market is the heart of Khalem’s people and their food. Thick lentil soups cook in old brass vats under perpetually dirty awnings; flatbreads glide through the air as they bake upon overhead oven belts. There’s yelling and bargaining and stories and arguments; I thought I was fluent in the language of Khalem, but it turns out I’m only fluent in the smooth, dry speech of the university. The voice of the market fills me up like warm bread dipped in oil.

         The honey seller lets me sample spoonfuls of honey: buckwheat, dark and viscous; the golden quince blossom; pear. Have you gone to the sidewise market yet? he says. My brother has a stall there.

         Where?

         Sideways, sidewise—I am not sure I understand the word. He gestures over his back. Right there. I cannot see anything. Just a wall.

* * *

The Sidewise Market

         I do not have money to come back in daylight. At dusk, a copper coin buys me a grab bag of slightly overheated vegetables the merchants do not want to lug home. I come after closing hours.

         When they start bombing the market, I stop going. But I need to eat, and I need to breathe the air of the sweet decay of the night, the winding stone streets squeezing in the stalls; the star-full sky veiled by the city’s breath.

         I return again and again. In the newspapers: the familiar stalls of dry beans and fruit in their burlap sacks are gone; the honey seller’s face, stilled forever. I am hungry, increasingly hungry; the dormitory rent is raised because of the war. My stipend remains the same. Then it is reduced.

         In despair, I apply to study abroad in Islingar. They will not want me, but I have to do something. The application fees to two universities eat up my stipend; I cannot apply to more.

         One evening, I fall into the sidewise market by accident. Too hungry to think much or notice where I’m going, I take a wrong turn; pass under a stone arch I have not noticed before. The other side is not much different, except it is quieter, as if the night itself holds its breath. In the velvet folds of darkness, I smell vegetables ripe with the day’s heat, almost falling into decay; slops and garbage and urine; above, the old fabrics of the tents rustle softly, their dirt swallowed by the night. A lone lantern sways above the only open stall. It is a simple, rickety construction, a tray of worn wood under the awning whose histories had been smoothed and devoured. On the tray are onions, each globe perfect and golden, shining with some inner light.

         I sway on my feet; I have not eaten since the morning’s single egg; in my hand, the crinkly bag of bargain vegetables makes a desperate noise. The owner of the onion stall has not moved all this time. He is a person behind the light. I am afraid of large men. But he smiles. There is nothing predatory in it. He is not after my vulnerability, my aloneness; he is not after anything. He is the jeweler of the market of shadows, when all the sirens are resting and all the people have left. He is the inheritor of crevasses into which gold has spilled and stilled, the magic of the fissures of the world. So am I, I think, and wonder if it’s true.

         I shuffle on my feet, and slops and refuse squelch under the only shoes I own. He says something. Perhaps something as simple as, would you like to buy some onions? Perhaps he says something else. I am a golden king of loss, and leaving me you will forever hunger for my jewelmaking craft, visible only in the warmest hour of darkness.

         Where are you from? he says. I understand this much.

         Raiga, I whisper. I do not much remember it. Cold, and big men threatening my father. Later, people standing in a long line, three streets long. A serpent of people dressed all in gray, their heads bowed under the stone heaviness of the air. We are trying to leave Raiga. My father holding my hand. We must obtain documents. But I can’t, we can’t. Islingar is not receiving; you are out of quota. I remember people slipping money to Islingar’s representatives. My father’s twitching hand. He does not have enough to give, to be counted in the quota of refugees allowed to flee Raiga’s wars on a ship to Islingar. My father’s face is ashen with defeat, like a curtain falling. He does not speak when the two of us walk back home. There isn’t much home left. Three more months, and then gone.

         Raiga, the onion jeweler says, and his smile brings me back to the sheltering darkness of the sidewise market. Did you want to come to Khalem?

         I shake my head. No, Islingar. But they did not want us.

         He does not say, I’m sorry about the war. How can we be sorry about a war that is not of our making? I’m sorry you had to come from one war to another, from your war to ours, but he does not say it; perhaps he does not even think it. I am not afraid. I should be, I think, but he does not mean me harm.

         Do they have onions there? he asks.

         In Raiga? Yes, they do... I’ve eaten onions since I was little. Onions split in half and roasted in a cast iron skillet. Onions cut into rings and battered in millet flour. Onions diced and browned to sweetness, then mixed into buckwheat kasha. I have not eaten since the morning’s single egg. I do not eat much, now. I have no money; only the market and its darkness feed me, when I can come here at all; when the trolleys are running, when the sirens are silent. A bag of leftover vegetables for one copper coin—vegetables teetering on the tender, sweet edge of rot.

         Do they have onions like these in Raiga? he says. The warmth of his voice neither pulls me closer nor pushes me away.

         No, not like these.

         Never like these, he echoes. I make them out of this city. Like that piece of jewelry described in ancient books: Khalem of Gold. Nobody knows what it looked like, not even people who work at the historical museum—but I will tell you this: Khalem of Gold is an onion; each onion contains the city, and is reflected in it. They glow and are shaped by my carving hand, and so that the city can never be destroyed or forgotten.

         His fingers wrap around an onion. He lifts it to the lantern’s lone light, and in the onion, I suddenly see: the goldwork towers and walls of the Old City; the broken bridge, jagged after a recent bombing yet still shining; rows of humble houses etched in ebullient metal; the curve and sway of the historical museum.

         Would you like an onion?

         I shuffle from foot to foot. I do not know how to tell him I spent all my money so I could eat something, and I will have to walk forty minutes to my dormitory.

         Free, he says. I’m sorry about the war.

         I reach out my hand, and he drops the city into it. It feels warm in my palm. I lose sight of the jeweled detail; my eyes see nothing but onion skin, layers and layers of it, brownish-orange and curling up, and underneath it, golden.

         I do not remember how I make it back to the dormitory. I walk, the onion in my right hand, the bag of vegetables in the other. It is a long walk in darkness, but I am safe in the glow, or I simply do not remember.

         My good knife was stolen a week ago. In the communal kitchen, I cut the vegetables into jagged pieces with a blunt table knife. I am so hungry that my hands are shaking; a stray motion of the knife grazes my finger. I cut—more tear apart—the bell peppers, the zucchini, and the eggplants; throw them with some oil into the pot. It is a deep blue pot. My father gave it to me. A good pot for many things, he said; you can make soup or kasha or even braise fish. But what I have are these vegetables, soft and spotted but still releasing an aroma of secrets and warm stone. The clove of garlic from the bargain bag has begun to rot. I scrape the bad bits off.

         It is more than I’ve eaten in days, since I last dared go to the market. I steal a pinch of turmeric and a few peppercorns from the neighbor; it feels only fair after my knife disappeared, and it is night, and nobody will see me. Darkness has been my first line of defense for as long as I can remember.

         The vegetables sizzle and sag, reminding me of another life—a summer in Raiga, when my grandmother made sinenkie i belenkie—each piece of aubergine and summer squash perfectly cut with an unstolen knife. But mine is better. The vegetables smell of gratitude and secrets, of the sidewise market and words spoken in the dark.

         I have not cut the magic onion from the stall. I look at it while the vegetables cook. Khalem of Gold. The onion does not come with chains, but I think about them now, chains glimpsed only from afar, from a ship, that one time before we landed—the chains of Khalem, upon which the city is balanced. This city, unlike any other, uncomfortable with its own weight and with the war; a city that must always and forever be balanced.

         I spoon warm vegetables into my mouth straight out of the pot, swaying in the bare dormitory kitchen with its grayish floor tiles and a single forlorn ceiling light. We have almost been discarded, these vegetables and I, blemished and sagging and rich with the promise of rot.

         I stand over the pot and eat. There is no point in leaving anything; it will be stolen. I eat until my stomach hurts. I eat until I’ve scraped every last bit from the pot, eaten everything except the onion.

         I take the onion with me to my room, curl around it in bed. I do not know when I will eat again.

* * *

Leaving Khalem

         On board the departing ship, I see the whole of Khalem clearly the first time. It is a carven globe of gold floating in the sky, tethered to the ground with ancient linked chains. The city shines in the evening’s gloom—the humble houses and the arc of the museum’s roof, and the palace, and the cratered bridge, the black pockmarks of recent bombings stark upon gold. One of the chains has been recently severed and repaired in modern fashion, clumsily, quickly, piling rough metal over the ruin of gold.

         It begins to rain. The sheen of water softens the dark evening sky to a deep layered blue. The sea is shivering; wave after wave rocks the ship, but I am allowed to stay on the deck, grasping the railing with hands gone numb in the cold.

         Ten years ago, when my family fled Raiga to Khalem on a similar ship, we were herded into a single windowless room belowdecks. We were not prisoners, but neither were we free to leave—a mercy of Khalem, who took us in when Islingar refused us. We found out later that people had died in Khalem, and the government needed more people to balance the weight of the city on its chains. It wasn’t about offering us refuge, not directly. They had a need—the city needed to be balanced with our bodies.

         But now, leaving Khalem and its glow, seeing it clearly for the first time, I grieve—for all I have seen and have not, for all the doors in the market that I could not open, doors that led to tiny eateries serving dumplings in fragrant green sauce and fried chicken hearts; and how I would smell them and look at the people—older, dressed simply, their faces wrinkled from work—dreaming that one day I would be like them, I would open a door and walk in, coins in my pocket, and order a millet flatbread with tart yoghurt sauce and a tiny glass of tea, and be full.

         In my bag, the onion rests, safely wrapped in tissue-thin paper, together with my acceptance letter from one of Islingar’s top universities. Impressed by your record—but I have excelled out of desperation to get the merit stipend and eat. The student papers to Islingar, too, are conditional. Conditional on my continuing unwavering excellence, my perfection, which will be judged and tested every year. The new university paid for my ticket, too: room and board in third class, with a possibility of a discounted upgrade, but I could not afford that.

         I become at once queasy and elated from the motions of the ship, the salt spray in my face like a lattice of diamonds; all the stars of the night. The carved globe of Khalem recedes into the rain.

* * *

I had a choice

         Belowdecks in third class, I see the same windowless room and wonder if I am on the same ship that brought me from Raiga to Khalem a decade ago. I do not remember much. The smell of despair. Somebody’s grandmother sitting very still on a cot. She was translucent, taking as little space as possible; her eyes glazed with memories of two wars. Children crying. Somewhere, in the distance, a light.

         I shake the memory away. On this ship, people are pressed together, but it does not feel as desperate. Children are crying here too, but grandmothers do not; I see an old woman stirring a soup in a pot. She looks so ordinary, her back stooped, her hair gathered and bound in a garish flowering kerchief, that I almost call out to her in the language of Raiga. She turns, and the greeting is swallowed on my mouth. She looks from under a forest of brows. Her eyes are sunken and dark. She is not translucent—rooted into the planks of the ship like a stubborn ancient tree. Her lips leaf through daughter, son, and settle on child.

         Child, she says in the language of Khalem. Child, what about the onion?

         I am clutching it, always clutching it in my pocket. The streets and gates and towers. Khalem of gold. She looks at it through the fabric. Looks at me, and suddenly I am afraid, and fear snakes like a wet wind around my torso.

         I don’t know what you mean, I lie.

         Oh you know, child. There is a magic onion stall in the sidewise market of Khalem, where every globe is burnished and mellow like the city that was taken away from me, for even though I weigh more than you do, they cast my people out and let your people in to balance the chains of Khalem.

         She stirs the soup in its pot: it is verdant and vivid, herbs and secrets ground first between her palms until their scent opens, then lowered gently into the simmering water. She has shaped millet-flour dumplings and set them adrift in the broth. The ladle with which she stirs is carved, and for a moment I wonder if my eyes betray me. Its handle is golden—an open-jawed lion—and the ladle itself is made of old dark wood. She does not cook this soup for the crowd that presses and sighs belowdecks. This is a memory that twists my stomach and makes me sway on my feet.

         A magic onion stall, she says, that once belonged to my family and now belongs to yours, once belonged to my father and now belongs to yours...

         Nothing belongs to my family. My voice is bitter. My father owns nothing. He is very ill. He gave me his pot, but it was stolen in the dormitories before I left. He gave me his knife, but that was stolen even earlier. When my father fell ill, we could not afford to treat him. He told me to leave Khalem while I still could.

         She sways and stirs the green soup with her princely ladle, her wizened hand gripping the lion by the waist. You had a choice. A choice to stay or leave, she says.

         Yes, that is true. I left Raiga with my family, but now I am older and alone. I could have stayed in Khalem, I guess.

         I collect a dry meal from the opposite side of the room. The sea rations taste of nothing and smell like third class, warm and smoky and sad.

* * *

Abovedecks

         The sea is gray and sputtering, and I can no longer see land. Fog has risen over Khalem, and the far-off Raiga can only be imagined, a rough outline of loss.

         I try to remember it. Pine forests, drops of amber sap at my feet. It is always cold. Big men are threatening my father. Standing in line; it is three streets long, made out of people dressed in gray, their heads bowed under the heaviness of the air. My father’s hand is big and reassuring, but I wonder if he is afraid. We must obtain documents. But Islingar isn’t receiving.

         On the ship bound for Islingar now, I check and recheck my documents. These are not refugee invitations. Mine are student documents with not much weight or rights, but my fingers touch my pocket over and over. I’ve wrapped the permission to enter in waxed paper, put it in my right pocket, sewed it shut. My hand keeps touching, tracking the crinkly outline of the packet, caressing it over the fabric. My fingers worry at the seams. Each evening I finger the stitching open and check, then stitch it shut again. My left pocket holds the onion.

* * *

Nayra

         The grandmother is still there, in the third class common room by the stove. It is an electric stove, white and battered, but I do not see it connect to anything. Why is there a stove here, if the food is dry rations? I did not think about it before.

         She stands in the same way, her stooped back to me. The ladle has transformed: its handle is a silvery seahorse with enameled eyes and the wood is mahogany. She is cooking a thick lentil stew in the manner of the markets of Khalem, spiced with turmeric and cardamom and leaves of amber. I am not hungry, for a change; my stomach is full of dry pieces of bread from the rations; but the smell of the lentil soup stirs me. I’d eat it forever. I’d ladle it with the ladle with the silver seahorse and the lion of gold. I’d scoop it with my bare hands and be burned.

         I am Nayra, she says without turning.

         I take too long to respond. I have had many names, but none of them fit.

         She gives up. Give me the onion, and I’ll feed you.

         I can’t.

         Nayra stirs and stirs her pot, on the hot stove that does not connect to anything.

         She says, Twenty years ago the streets of Khalem were crowded with stalls. Every rounded fruit and root and vegetable had a carver, adorning the produce that grows on the slopes of Khalem. They were jewelers of everyday, for all they often argued. What did not sell was diced and stirred in burnished bronze pots, and then cooked low and slow while the cooler air spread its blessed breath over the tired city, the sellers swapping tales and ladling soup under the bejeweled net of the stars.

         And the onion stall belonged to your family? I ask.

         Nayra turns to me, and her eyes are golden like story, like childhood. One of the onion jewelers was my father, she says. There were many more. I no longer remember.

         I, too, don’t remember much—not of Raiga, not even of Khalem. There is the ship, the semi-dark glowing closeness of it, and abovedecks, the fog and he wind.

         Give the onion to me, Nayra says. You don’t need it. But I do.

* * *

Abovedecks at night

         I find a spot on the open deck from which to watch the sea. Nobody bothers me here. Not much can be seen in the darkness, but I listen to the incessant language of the waves. Above me, the stars dive in and out of clouds. In the depths of the sea I imagine its life—giant fish, red and gold and almost as round as an onion.

         I take my onion out, cradle it in my hands. It has not begun to soften or rot. It shines like it shone in the dark sideways market. Its jeweled ridges feel soothing under my fingers—the streets and markets and homes of Khalem. My fingers trace the past of Nayra’s story: stalls that line the streets, people selling all manner of things that are round and bejeweled—onions, figs, the purplish globe artichokes; oranges, not needing to be carved or otherwise adorned, for their skin has drunk from the sun.

         My onion is glowing golden between my palms; I am occupied by its secrets. Only later, lying awake on my berth and trying to fall asleep, I wonder if I have heard, from a distance, a sigh coming up from the bottomless sea.

* * *

Night after night

         Night after night I climb up to the deck and let my onion shine. In calmer weather, I hear the sigh from the sea, more pronounced now, and sometimes a shadow, as if of wings, rising and falling like a breath cradled and diffused by the wave. On stormier nights I hear nothing, and the deck hands send me below.

         I have eaten my fill every day. I am not used to this—to eating this much, to eating so much dry bread, to not having anything stolen.

* * *

The shadow ray

         It is raining. The night sky adorns itself in the sideways stitching of rain. The deck hands are sheltering elsewhere. I take out my onion—a familiar gesture by now—and raise it to my chest. My palms cradle the houses and streets of Khalem as its light ventures forth, golden and warm like a beacon.

         Out of the sea, triangular wings rise, darker than the onion-gilt wave. Flitting between the ship and the water. It is a sea animal, a ray. It traverses the boundary space between the ship and the sea, the boundary space which is softened by spray and the sideways stitching of rain. Our eyes meet; it is human; human like me and like Nayra, and I do not know why I think this.

         What is your name? I shout to the shadow in the sea. It sprays me with water, or maybe it is the ship’s sudden movement, lurching away, and then it is gone.

* * *

The Maid of Murur

         Later that night, lying on my berth, I count breath after breath to a hundred, but sleep does not come. I count the number of berths in this corner of third class, I count the people fast asleep, the wooden beams above my head. I count the knots on the beams and their patterns, I count the wet sound of steps coming closer and closer.

         I stop counting and turn to see a pale-blue hand draw back the curtain. There are three more people asleep nearby, but the stranger is quiet; only the water trickling down their breast and hip makes a sound, like a sigh.

         I am called the Maid of Murur. Her naked skin is pale blue, like the wave. She holds her ray skin neatly folded across the elbow. And you?

         I am.... I am.... I turn my eyes away. I can tell you what I am called in my documents?

         What would you like to be called? Her voice shivers. I sit on my berth and pat the place next to me, push the blanket towards her.

         My mouth opens. Belezal. I have not expected this, never imagined that name could be mine. It is a Khalem name, the name of the great mythic artisan who fashioned the first bejeweled globe of Khalem out of gold; before everyone took up this form, before onions and figs and artichokes were carved to resemble his craft. It is said that his golden coffin hangs from the central chain of Khalem and balances it with its weight.

         Are you a man?

         I shake my head. Neither this or that, you know. I heard I can be whatever I want in Islingar.

         My father wouldn’t understand. The thought pains me, that I kept it a secret from him for so long, that he’d think I was hurt in the war, that he failed to protect me. But I lost his knife and his pot, and that pains me much more than losing the name he had given me.

         I stare at the small puddles on the floor, uncertain when the ray-person slipped away.

* * *

Hunger of a different kind

         In the third-class commons, the rations-people mock me when I ask for more. The words are almost soft at first, but after a few days it intensifies; they call me a growing boy and a vulture of dry bread and they laugh with their I’ve-always-eaten-my-fill mouths. Nayra nods at me from the other side of the room. Her tireless arm stirs the pot.

         You’re hungry again, she says when I make it over. She is cooking onions today—onions sliced into thin rings and cooked translucent and golden with turmeric and cardamom. As I stand there transfixed, my mouth watering, she grimaces. It’s not the same. The onions that grow on this ship taste like water. Not like the ocean even, for that is full of salt and life. The water of the ship is sanitary and still, and it bloats these onions, steals any life and taste from within. What you smell is the spice.

         They grow onions here? It is hard for me to imagine, but she nods.

         Even deeper within the bowels of the ship there are gardens tended by those of us who will never land.

         Nayra stirs the pot, a familiar motion by now. Today the handle of her ladle is a bird made of silver, its feet transformed into chains wrapped around the wood of the spoon.

         No matter how much spice I add, it will never taste like Khalem.

         Nayra’s gaze slides over my bulging pocket. I wait for her to ask again, but the only sound she makes is the stirring, stirring, stirring the simple pot on the stove which is not connected to anything.

         You said that you will never land?

         She sighs. Not now. Not ever, perhaps.

         Islingar is not receiving?

         Oh, I have the documents, Nayra says. Documents for Islingar, a land where onions soak up even more water, a land that is tasteless and smells like nothing I know. No, child, I want to go back to Khalem.

         Belowdecks on my berth, I eat everything in the ration packet, but I am not full. I want to eat all the dry bread that scrapes the insides of my mouth and slides down my throat like a gravelly lump. I want to devour Nayra’s onions, their bloated, watery taste softened by spice. I want to taste the ocean, drink the brine and the seaweed until we are safe on dry land. No matter how much I eat there is an emptiness in me, the weight of Khalem that can never be balanced by chains.

* * *

Words of Murur

         I climb abovedecks that night. It is windy, and the ship lurches; but I have become stealthier. I hide from the deck hands, my clothing blown this way and that by the wind. I am huddled in dreary cold wrappings against the gusts of water and wind. When I take out the onion, I doubt anyone will see me. Not the maid of Murur; not the ship hands, not even the stars in the overcast, punishing sky. Not even Nayra. You do not need the onion, she said. My father was among the last onion jewelers of Khalem. Every rounded fruit and vegetable had a carver, adorning the pliant flesh with the slopes and streets of Khalem, adorning the graveyards and markets and chains that hold it aloft. You do not need it, but I do.

         I should have told her, my father, too, used to carve—with his paper-thin knife made from my grandfather’s razor, and with his big carver’s tools. There is no natural magic remaining in Raiga, but the artists make it out of the fallen forests, out of memory. Out of wood they shape birds and streets and houses, carve protections and lions into the corner beams. But he found no wood in Khalem. It is a city of gold and chain, of stone and carved onion. When my father sickened—

         The maid of Murur is here. She sits heavily on the wet wooden boards by my side. Her naked human skin is glowing blue; her slippery ray-skin folded once more over her arm.

         Your onion glows like a beacon.

         I do not need it, I say.

         Not even to call me out of the turbulent sea?

         Maybe. To call you. I smile despite myself. Why are you at sea?

         Because Raiga is at war.

         I know very little about Murur. A small country neighboring Raiga from southeast, for centuries swallowed and spat out by Raiga’s conflicts.

         Murur was pretty once. She shakes her head, and droplets of water fall on my hands from her seaweed-braided dark hair. Pretty before all the wars. Now everything is rigid—the clothes, the words, the people. They do not want someone like me, and I’d rather be in the ocean than anywhere with my family. Her voice goes mocking, shrill with pain. You say you can love a person of any shape—then why can’t you marry a boy?

         The way she says the word ‘boy’ makes me clench inside. She asked if I was a boy, but I am neither this nor that, at least not yet.

         She looks at me, worried. Clasps my hand. I do not mean you. They would not want you, just like they do not want me.

         Her hand on mine is warm and wet, and my feelings churn like the storm. At least she told her family who she was. I did not tell my parents, when I left. I was hungry and alone, and it did not seem possible to have that conversation in Khalem. I just hoped to be free in Islingar.

         I say, You can be whatever you want in Islingar.

         I do not have the documents. I am not even alive anymore, not in a way you are alive, Belezal. I do not even have a human name. I traded all that for the ray-skin. I did all that to be free.

         She no longer has a human name; but my name—my name!—my name on her lips is like gold and salt water. The name Belezal is Khalem’s heavy chain weighted with the shores that I wanted to reach all my life, as warm as a carved golden onion.

         It is cold here, I whisper. Are you not cold?

         A little. She scuttles closer to me, and I put my shaking arm around her shoulders.

         It is cold here, I say again. My lips, too, are like ice. Soon we will wrap a single ray-skin around us and plunge into the sea. But I do not want to go there. I mumble, Would you like to come down—to my berth?

         She does, and we do, and we drape her ray-skin over the berth’s opening so that nobody can look.

* * *

The pot of empty water

         You smell like the sea, Nayra says. Like seaweed. It’s morning, and I’ve wandered over to her stove again after the rations-people refused me any extras. Back in the berth, my lover ate the last of my dried bread—stale and too salty, still better than sea snails and worms. Then she left. I am hungry again, hungry always and as long as I can remember.

         Nayra gives me a knowing look. Ah, youth.

         I look away. She cannot come ashore with me.

         Nayra’s wrinkled hand stirs a pot of empty water. The ladle is plain wood with no adornment, its handle worn thin by decades of work.

         No documents?

         I nod. No documents. Where we come from, they do not want people like us.

         But they wanted you in Khalem. And my father—my father—Nayra’s voice runs thin and bitter. Runs out.

         My father, too, was a carver. I have thought of this moment, practiced the words, but I cannot quite say them now. My father—in Raiga he was a carver of wood; he could have carved ships if he lived closer to the coast. But the ships of Khalem are hammered out of sheet brass; they cannot venture far into the open sea.

         This ship, Nayra says, was made before Raiga and Islingar, made in the great isle of Selei before it sunk underwave, made when Khalem as we know it was only beginning, when Belezal forged the streets and the chains.

         That’s my name. Belezal. A name made real last night on the lips of the shapeshifting ray of Murur.

         A weighty name to carry, Nayra says. A legacy of chains. She is silent for a moment. We were exiled from the city, my father and I, so your people could balance the weight of Khalem.

         She is bitter, but I stay by her side. I want to say, I had nothing to eat there. We barely survived. My father is very ill, and even the knife he gave me was stolen. In Khalem, I could not be who I am.

         I do not say these words. They will not help.

         I love the city, too. I do not say this either. I did not love it when I came and left.

         I say, I do not understand why the city needs to be balanced with our bodies. Our weight.

         Because it hangs in the balance.

         Nayra relents and releases a small pouch that hangs around her neck; warms the spices before crushing them into the boiling water. They float, dissolving in that heat. She stirs the empty soup as I watch, and she ladles it—hot water, just water from the secret bowels of the ship, first sanitary-still and then vibrant, alive with Nayra’s spices.

         I take a sip, and it is the city: its markets and birds and crowded streets— For the briefest moment, I see it as it was in peaceful times. The jewelers of fruit and root and vegetable in their festive embroidered robes under aprons, and my father—my people—carving birds and reindeer into housebeams made of stone and wood; and small-statured people I have never seen carving jewels out of spice berries. All around are shouts and argument and song; good-natured cries and little brass-bells calling the market to dinner. Even the honey-seller is there, with his wax candles carved like the onion, carved like the city. I swallow, and it goes away.

         Who are the jewelers of spice? I ask, and Nayra nods.

         These people are called Khidi. They say they founded Khalem. It was their city before it was hung suspended in the air, before the weight of the world was balanced in it.

         You do not believe it?

         I do not know. She shrugs. The city is always changing.

         I am sorry, I say. I am sorry for everything. My father’s sickness, the war that spat us out of Raiga and into Khalem, the tumult and din of Khalem, the churning of the sea and this ancient ship that traveled it before our countries were real, before Belezal spun the chains of Khalem. I’m sorry we can come together only in memory shared with a spoonful of empty soup. I’m sorry my lover won’t come ashore with me. I’m sorry I took a name too large for me to carry. I’m sorry that I am and am not a boy.

         I tell Nayra, I’m sorry you cannot go home. I cannot, either. I do not know where it is.

* * *

Tide

         The maid of Murur comes back in the night, when I am asleep in my berth. I blurt, you do not need the onion to find me.

         I don’t, she says. But it is good to have the light.

         Her lips latch to mine, and the sea of her swallows me.

* * *

An Offering

         I bring the onion to Nayra the next day, proffer it in both my hands as I would give her the city. The strongest light.

         I do not need it, I say, but you do.

         She turns towards me. Away from the stove. The ladle is poised in her hand. It is ebony, crowned in a golden bulb of an onion. Did she hold it before I spoke? I don’t know.

         What made you change your mind?

         I swallow. I don’t know.

         My lips move, soundless. The onion jeweler gave me a gift; he did not need to give it. I can choose to give, too.

         And, I am no longer sure this is mine.

         And, You have been on this ship for decades. You cannot return to Khalem.

         This is Khalem.

         Aloud I say, I did not know you before.

         The ladle shakes in Nayra’s hand. She kept asking me for the onion, but now I know that she did not think I would give her anything.

         What about your lover?

         I shrug, pretending indifference. She can find her own way to me.

         Are you absolutely sure? But Nayra is already stretching out her hand.

         I let the golden globe go. It is a gift, this Khalem of Gold, a gift I did not have to receive, or to give. But I did, and I am, because each jeweled onion contains the city and is reflected in it, and each carver carves the city and gifts it to those who need to remember it and pass it on for others. We may not understand Khalem and its chains and its weight, but we can remember it, so the city can never be destroyed.

         Nayra lays down her ladle and takes up a paring knife. With slightly shaking hands she peels the city—its golden skin and the streets and its bridges and the curve of the royal palace. Memory sloughs off, revealing the white flesh inside. Her motions are sure now. She carves that up too, the onion beneath the skin, the meat and heart of the city, its hidden mechanical core—now only, and ever, an onion. My eyes blur. The smell in my nostrils is sharp and triumphant for a brief, bright moment.

         I hear the rings fall onto the hot oil of Nayra’s pan. My eyes are closed now, but I hear them. They sizzle at first. Then they hiss. Then they sigh as they sag. They are gentle and soft and translucent, caramelizing to brown.

         Into the softness I think, war has damaged Khalem. It is not the city of your youth. But Nayra’s eyes are closed. She is inhaling: the soft, yielding flesh is releasing the sun.

         She says, Do you have that dry bread? I have eaten it all, but I manage to beg a few more pieces off a new rations-person. Nayra softens the bread with some oil and fries it, then heaps golden onion on top. Cuts it in half. She eats like a bird, in small pecks, her eyes closed and her whole body rigid, attuned to some inner vision. A trickle of tears runs down from the corner of her right eye; her left is dry.

         I watch for a bit, and then I have to look away. There’s the uneaten piece, heaped high with translucent brown onion. No longer my onion, the shining carved Khalem of gold. No, this is disemboweled. Dead.

         As if I never received it as gift from the jeweler at his stall, as if it never gave me the strength to leave, as if I never made of it a beacon for the sea, as if it never held the city and its streets and memories and light.

         Just a cooked vegetable.

         I take a step back. Another.

         Nayra opens an eye. That’s for you, she says. The second half. You should eat it.

         I turn away and run, all the way to my berth and the dark.

* * *

Silence

         At night I am on the deck. The weather is still and pleasant, and hosts of stars litter the sky. I stare out into the sea, but there’s nothing. Not even a shadow of wings.

         The next night I cup my hands like an onion and lift them, empty, to my chest. I have not gone to see Nayra. I have not eaten.

         The sea is still.

* * *

A storm in the smallest space

         The maid of Murur comes to my berth in the dead of the night. The ray-skin in her hand is dripping salt.

         What happened, Belezal? Where is your beacon?

         I shake my head. I gave it away. I shouldn’t have, but—maybe I should have? The moment was clear and translucent like an onion gently softened by heat for a brief moment before wilting.

         You gave it away? The maid of Murur’s voice is thin, sharp.

         I thought—I thought somebody else needed it more. Someone who cannot go home.

         I, too, cannot go home. I thought—I thought you cared? Her lips tremble; her hair is seaweed trembling like a forest in the small space of my berth.

         Nobody cares about me, she says. My family, caring only for the shape they gave me, the order they imposed on me, the people who wanted the body but did not see me—the friends who turned away—the summons of war—the bitter embrace of the sea—

         And all the boys you did not want. I do not know what made me say that, and I do. Because she, too, would not see me unless I made clear that I’m not a boy, or at least neither this nor that.

         She rises, wrapping herself tight in the slithery ray-skin, and I know I will lose her, and I do not want to lose her, and I have to lose her; I do not understand how this happened so fast.

         It’s not about you being a boy, Belezal. You should have asked me first about the onion—you should have asked me first about everything— Her voice is like a storm on the sea, carrying all the weight and anguish of water.

         I want to hug her to me, but I can’t. No, I say. I shouldn’t have asked you about the onion. It does not belong to you, or to me. It belongs to Khalem.

         I listen to the rapid beating of footsteps, then a splash, far away. In my hectic dreams later, an enormous shadow ray encircles the ship, and tightens; then lets go.

* * *

Leavetaking

         A day before landing, I go to speak to Nayra once more.

         I’m sorry about your lover, she says when I tell her.

         I shake my head. She did not want me. Not everything I am.

         Don’t be so sure about that, Nayra says. In her hand, the ladle is all silver vines creeping up to a blossoming rose. Sometimes it takes more time and more words than youth can afford. You have to exchange many words; they will lead you deep into each other’s truths. You are not born with all the perfect words, especially if where you’re born the words were not allowed. You need to make the words. Words and memories and food and touch. You have to be patient.

         I shrug. I cannot be patient now. She is gone. And then, bitter, She just wanted the onion.

         Nayra smiles. I have never seen her smile before: like a tired window cracking open into a seascape of purest azure.

         No, child. It is I who wanted the onion. She only wanted your light.

         The words sink into me, glowing and golden; too painful to hold.

         I change course. You have the documents. Come ashore with me to Islingar.

         I cannot. She shakes her head. Even though I cannot return, I must stay true to Khalem.

         I say, I lived in Khalem for a decade, but I did not truly know it before I met you. Did not love it before we spoke. You’ll carry Khalem with you ashore. Its spices and markets and truths. And its love.

         Nayra shakes her head. Then she pats mine. Not yet.

* * *

Islingar

         In Islingar I settle in the seashore town of Luga, home of the university. Excelling is easier now that they give me a stipend to cover my lodgings and food. I eat the tasteless fruits of Islingar, great slabs of bread cut thin and toasted to dryness.

         I sit with my books by the window overlooking the sea. I nibble on dry bread and daydream of a great ancient ship made of wood and barnacle-covered; made in the isle of Selei before it sunk underwave, made when Belezal forged the streets and the chains of Khalem. In my vision the ship is enormous, larger than water and land. As it grows in my vision I hear, deep within it, the sound of Nayra’s ladle making circles in the pot of soup.

         I buy a blue pot and put empty water to boil on my electric stove. It is plugged in, and the low humming of it comforts me. I buy overpriced sumac and coriander, turmeric and cumin, and I stir the empty soup with a ladle made of wood. The spices here are not as potent as Nayra’s; they hardly taste of anything. I add more and stir, always keeping an eye on the horizon. There is no ship I see, and no gigantic ray.

         I begin to add lentils and vegetables to the pot. The zucchini and onions are waterlogged here, barely tasting of earth, but I can afford them.

         In time, I buy larger clothing and marvel at how easy it is both to find and to buy these sizes. When strangers ask me where I’m from, I say Khalem.

* * *

They were jewelers of everyday

         My father sends me a package over the sea. It is his own carving knife, thin and sharp, made from my grandfather’s shaving razor. My father cannot hold it anymore, much less carve.

         The package tarried for three months before reaching Islingar. There is no letter—confiscated in customs, perhaps. The binding is torn and the back address smudged, but the knife arrives safe in its wrappings, still holding a razor-sharp edge.

         It takes me four days to find a good onion. The store onions of Islingar have no luster, but a middle-aged woman sells me a good one from a communal garden patch. It looks slightly tarnished and does not quite glow, but it smells like the dark and golden streets of Khalem’s sidewise market.

         When I sit by the window to carve the onion, my hands shake. I lost the first knife in the dormitories, but the knife I hold is dearer even. Why did my father send it? Because he thought me his son, even though I said nothing; to inherit his knife and my grandfather’s, or because he thought I should inherit them as a daughter? What was I? Neither this nor that, a person who was brought to Khalem and left it, a person always looking back to the sea? Did it truly matter why my father sent me the knife? It is of Raigan make. I hold it, the handle warm with my touch and older than my life, older than all the wars I have known. It has traveled from Raiga to Khalem and then out of Khalem oversea, like I did.

         I carve—hesitantly at first, then with abandon. I am a carver in the lineage of Khalem but I am also a stranger to it. A stranger everywhere. I carve as my father would carve—birds and reindeer and trees; I carve as Nayra’s father would carve—streets too wide, imprecise, the bulbous roofs of Khalem’s inner quarters, the curve and sweep of the museum. I carve things of my own: a harbor, much like this one in Luga, which cannot be found in Khalem. A ship, which neither of our fathers have seen. And then I am out of onion.

         My creation is dull and clumsy, uneven. The images I saw so vividly in my mind are shapeless gouges and slashes. If the maid of Murur only wanted my light then what I made is crude and feeble; it cannot compare to the great work of the carvers of Khalem or to my father’s craft. It cannot call anyone out of the sea. It cannot do anything.

* * *

A summons and a wave

         When I sense her presence by my side, I think I am dreaming. But the maid of Murur is real, her blue skin glowing with pinpricks of light. Her ray-skin has transformed into a studded leather coat. She wears a white men’s collared shirt beneath it, and a pair of sharply pleated trousers, in the latest fashions of Islingar.

         Did I call you?

         You did. She smiles, and her mouth is lit by a row of small, sharp, white teeth. And I decided to be called.

         I want to reach out to her, touch her tide-starry hand, but I cannot, not yet. The depth of words that Nayra spoke about is missing.

         I tell her, I need to be—I need to be what I am, even if it’s a boy. I am neither—or both—and one day I may be entirely a boy, or not, but I cannot—I cannot have you tell me I’m special and different from other boys, so if you cannot have a boy, it will not work.

         She puts her hand on mine, soft and heavy, breaching the boundary between wakefulness and dream. I’m sorry I said that. Thing is—it’s not about you or any other person, boy or not. It is because—of what they wanted me to be. I’m good with a boy and a girl and a person who is both or neither, a person of any shape, as long as they do not want me to change who I am.

         Why would I want to change you? I blurt. You are perfect.

         Her hair shadows my face, runs down my body in star-drops of water and light. Words, Nayra said, words to get to the deep still core of ourselves; but we touch and words scamper while our waves crush relentlessly, gently ashore.

* * *

A chain of words and soft onion

         We talk in the night. How she came to the ship after I disembarked, her ray-skin draped over her arm and dripping tears in the third-class commons; how Nayra gave her my half of the old piece of bread and leftover onion. How she ate it, the ancient city and all its heart and its wars, its kindness and cruelty and its sacrifices.

         A piece of Khalem is in her now as it is in me, a memory golden and sharp like a chain that balances both of us.

         It is easier to find the right words now that I’ve lived for a while in Islingar, my lover says. I have even picked up my name again. Gabi. She waves her fist fiercely towards the sea and beyond it, Murur. They do not get to take it away from me, not anymore.

         But I am here only provisionally. Even if I’m excellent in my studies, I cannot stay here forever.

         I do not ask Gabi how she got her documents.

* * *

A morning in Luga

         In the morning, she is still here, sprawled asleep in my bed. The onion I carved flickers on the kitchen table, barely there, but she found me. All what is needed is my light.

         I slice up my clumsily carved onion into a pan with some oil and soften it gently with sumac and cumin. The jewelers of everyday in Khalem carved their unsold produce each night and cooked it for a big communal meal; tomorrow I will find another onion and practice until I am truly a carver.

         Nobody’s watching, but I look around anyway, before unplugging my stove from the electrical outlet in the wall.

         There is no change. The stove hums gently, the warmth of the heating element cooks the onion base. I add lentils and rice and water and set it all to a gentle simmer. My ladle is wood, but as I look, it sprouts a handle of silver. It is a chain. A chain of Khalem holding tight to a ship that forever travels between all the shores, a ship more ancient than wars, a ship that saves us and drowns us, a ship that traversed the waves a thousand times for those of us that do not have a place to go, so we must always be going places.

         I know that one day we will see it again, my lover and I; see the ancient barnacled ship fill our vision and expand. We will run down to the harbor, Gabi in her jacket of ray skin and I in my big Islingar clothes. We will hold hands and run breathless beyond the customs tower, race barefoot to the pier. The air will be too bright and too green, full of smells of dry seaweed and wind.

         We will climb the rusted, ancient chains of the ship, go down to third-class where the stove hums as softly as mine and an old woman of Khalem stands motionless by a big pot of water. We will ask our elder to come ashore with us, or maybe we’ll tell her we are ready to come on the ship once more. We might never be allowed to enter Khalem again, might never find home, but we’ll balance the weight of each other.

         I will not stop carving until it is so.

Copyright © 2020 R.B. Lemberg

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R.B. Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Ukraine, Russia, and Israel to the US. Their stories and poems have appeared in Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, and more. R.B.’s work has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Crawford, and other awards. Many of R.B.’s stories and poems are set in Birdverse, an LGBTQIA+-focused secondary world. Their Birdverse novella The Four Profound Weaves is forthcoming from Tachyon Press in 2020. You can find R.B. on Twitter at @rb_lemberg and at rblemberg.net.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

NEVER A BUTTERFLY, NOR A MOTH WITH MOON-PAINTED WINGS

by Aimee Ogden

         To spend a season in a place is not enough to turn it into a home. Some seasons last longer than others, but do not be deceived. Remember that, daughter-mine, when you level the lintels of whatever house you build someday, when you set a boat with sails or lay soft furs in the bottom of a deep dugout.

         You were still a secret moon riding high in my belly when we came to Ksmal. The People of the Butterfly had lived in the valleygreen a hundred years before the war drove us out and into Ksmala arms, but a hundred years was not enough to make that place ours. Before that, our greatmothers and greatfathers sailed the broad seas for many years, when the land they once loved sank beneath the waves. Ksmal is not my home either, and it is not yours.

         I had lost weight on the long, long walk up out of Tir Ardol, so much that my clothes hung loose, and that is why the? Ksmala did not send me into quarantine with the other pregnant women. To separate women from their mothers and sisters in their time of need—this is only one of their ways that I do not understand. So I let my baggy shirt hide my stomach and I clung to my mother’s hand.

         But their mountains, oh, I remember how the Ksmala mountains soared green and lovelydark like forgotten dreams. I suppose they are still as green now, but my eyes have faded. The city mothers spoke to us that night through a translator, an older Butterfly woman dressed in Ksmala gray. She warned us not to stray close to the slopes, lest the things that haunt the mountain forest find us. “The beasts of the wilds will welcome you into their bellies,” she said. “Stay here, where we only wish to welcome you into our hearts.”

         I did not know it then, but the Ksmala sought to devour us just as much as any beast of the forest. A heartwelcome sounds better than a belly, but it is dark and cramped and it squeezes like a fist.

         The city mothers assigned us each a barracks-row where we could shelter. There were no walls between our family’s space and the next; only a point beyond which the bunks stacked against the wall were theirs and not ours. The walls smelled of fresh-cut lumber, for the Ksmala had built these barracks against our arrival, and it reminded me of the lee where your father gave you to me. I wonder still if he made it to another of the Ksmala cities, or if he is buried under soft leaves and shadow not far from the valley where we touched so briefly. The armies of both the Tirish and the Sdureck often came farther south than that, and each side claimed that we aided the other.

         But then again, perhaps he made it all the way across Ksmal, over the beast-haunted mountains and into whatever lies beyond. Into something like safety. Not a home, no. Don’t forget, daughter-mine. We are the People of the Butterfly, after all, and we have only ever drifted between places, from one to the next. I write these words in silk and canvas so that you will remember.

         So few things had stayed with me on that long terrible walk. Two blue tunics, turned ghostgray by weather and wear. One pair of trousers. No shoes anymore, for they had long since worn to string and rags. Besides my clothes, I had only one tattered song-poem, inscribed in precious ink by your father on the soft face inside a dry piece of bark, and the clay idol of the Changing God I had made when I came of age. “You must hand over your books and letters and writings,” the translator told us, that first night. Her face was so still, like a stone polished smooth with use. There were two guards at the door, splendid in scarlet gambesons, waiting with open-mouthed sacks in their hands. “The city mothers must examine these things. To determine if there is useful intelligence about the war in the valley.”

         I handed them your father’s poem without a thought. I am sorry. My sister—your aunt Elthau—handed over the two books of hymns that she had carried inside her vest across the past year, across the countryside. My mother had a few poems of her own, their ink faded by time and my relentless, curious fingers. My father had not been a poet, but Elthau’s father had been. We fed them all the words we had brought with us, yet these weren’t enough. The guards checked our clothing, felt along hems and down the length of seams; they rifled through our bedding and checked under the corn-tick mattresses. After inspecting it for inscriptions, they left me my clay god-shape to clutch.

         The half-full sacks were closed and carried away, and then there was food for us to share, sticky rice-balls topped with slices of beetroot that bled sunrise-pink. I filled my belly, and when one of the city mothers passed close, I seized her hem and said that Ksmala food was not so different from our own. That it was good to be here. That this waystation between one place and the next was far better than any cave or wind-lashed crooked tree. Better even, perhaps, than a soft green valley where two warm bodies laying close together have left dark imprints in the moss, for it is hard to say what sorrows that dawn will bring to such a place such as that.

         The elder Butterflies of my clan looked at my mother’s face and not at mine when I said these things. Half-full with child though I was, there was an adult cadence to those glances that I had not yet learned.

         The translator rattled off a string of flat Ksmala syllables, but the city mother shook her head, silencing her. “What is this one’s name? Shemi? Shemi.” The city mother’s words in my language were clear, though bluntly accented, as if someone had pounded their sharp fine edges with a hammer. “We will be lenient in your efforts to learn to speak Ksmala. But for a time only. The gods’ mercies are only bestowed on those who reach for them.” She smiled, not unkindly. “You are not prisoners here. You are Ksmala too, or you will be.”

         I did not know it then, but those two things could not both be so. This place is the Ksmala’s home, and it is their cage too.

         That night, I woke, coughing, in smoke-scoured darkness. Inside me, you thrashed and fought. You had already recognized the bitter breath of burnt ink. When you were born, I called you Oya because it means bitten by flame.

         Don’t forget, daughter-mine. Embroider these things on your heart as well.

* * *

         In your second summer, you were too big to carry in your sling anymore and too small to toddle along beside me in the fields in the hot sun. Too big was a fact and a force of nature; I could not bend to mind the plants with you on my back; too small, though, was only a burr on the back of reality. You were too small and you did it anyway, your fingers dirt-blackened from digging up the tiny shoots of weeds that I missed. If you complained, you did it in Ksmala, the first language to shape your tongue and your thoughts. But you did not complain often.

         I had spent my childhood summers tagging along in my brother’s boat when he fished the river, lying in the bottom singing songs while the dripping net rainbowed cool water over me. I picked the scarletsweet berries that hid in the rocks up at the top of our valley, and sometimes I got picked by the cruel thorns that guarded those treasures. I sat at my mother’s feet while she sewed or cooked or wove, and I picked up the songs that were forever falling from her mouth to put them away in my heart. You, my too-big too-small daughter, did not sing. Even if you’d had something to sing about, I did not dare sing you Butterfly songs in the fields. When we came home at night, there was the communal cooking to do, and after that the washing-up, and then if I had an hour of daylight or candle-flame to spare, most of us spent it bent over our sewing. The people of Ksmala often said there was no one with a defter touch at embroidery than a Butterfly, and we were always glad of the extra coin so that we could sew our own clothes, and put aside scarves and eating-blankets and skirts for our children’s need-baskets.

         After days like that, I did not have the strength even to whisper my mother’s songs when you and I curled together in the bunk at night after curfew check. The field work was hard, is hard. To the Ksmala, hard work is a way to wipe one’s slate clean. We had many marks on our slates, the Ksmala said. The way we love our men is impure, they say—but what is more perfect than a butterfly lighting once upon a soft blossom, drinking its fill, and leaving the flower to share its beauty with another? I have seen these Ksmala youths going down to the river for their marriage-blessings, their faces like raw chicken-flesh after the ritual scrubbing. I do not want this purity of theirs. I do not want it for you either.

         But here is what I do so dearly wish: for the tapestry of your life to be soft unbroken cloth, not rags and tatters stitched together with forest-vine. Not a thread torn short by a Tirish spear.

* * *

         A week after your second birthday, my mother died quietly in her bed at night. We found her before the morning checks and I wept trying to wake her, but you did not. I was still weeping, my sister Elthau too, when the city mothers arrived. “Now, Shemi,” they asked first, “had she been sick at all?” No, I told them, I did not think so, but they took the body away anyway, and as they had done two years before with our words, so too they did with my precious mother, instead of giving her back to the earth that had given her in turn to us.

         When your grandmother was burned, still you did not cry, so I cried for us both, wailed and wept and screamed. The other Butterfly women held me back to keep me from trying to pull the shrouded body off its pyre, to tear the veils away and kiss my mother’s face. To let her sleep in the ground’s soft womb and not be plucked at by the cruel sharp fingers of flame. They held me back but when I screamed, I screamed in the language of my youth, and so the next morning the city mothers came to take me to be cleansed. It was only when they took me away that you cried. Oh, how you cried.

         As for what passed in the cold dark halls beneath the City’s Hand—I cannot linger there. The city mothers brought me back to you after, and though I had been scrubbed till I bled, my sister called to our neighbors for warm water. You lay in my lap while my sister washed away the crimsonsting beads of blood that wicked up through my skin. All the thoughts I’d stoppered up until then—my songless daughter, your old-woman childhood, the empty basket of your wants and needs—poured out of me, rinsed away with the lukewarm bathwater.

         My sister dried my back and kissed my cheek and said into the secret shell of my ear, “Shemi, my heart, after the cocoon, the butterfly can never be the same. There is no unspinning the silk.”

         “And the world is our cocoon,” I whispered, in the old tongue, but she laid a finger on my lips until silence led me down into sleep. I dreamed of butterfly wings whose scales fell away in the storm. When I woke, I could not remember what shape lay beneath the scales. But with your head pillowed on my arm, I whisper-sang, without staccato consonants to wake you, in my mother’s silksoft voice.

         I will give you the words of the songs, too, another time, when I have more room to write and the thread is cheap again.

* * *

         You turned five, and the city mothers took you to their school for four hours each work-day morning. You swam the seas of the Ksmala tongue fish-fast and nimble; in later years Ksmala parents would come to slip you coins and sun-cakes and little trinkets in exchange for tutoring their children in mathematics and natural philosophy and even in their precious hymn-work. But when you joined the parade of Butterfly-daughters trickling up into the city from the barracks, it was not your agility in the Ksmala tongue I thought about.

         Each morning when I watched you go, I would sketch the Changing God’s chrysalis against the palm of one hand. Let her skim lightly over the day’s breezes. Let her be warmed by the sun, not battered by the rain. Let her drink deeply of what is sweet and good and be spared bitterness.

         You do not pray, daughter-mine, but these are good things to meditate upon.

         I remember one day when your aunt and I went out to the fields together, as we often did. It was harvest season for the cabbage-turnips, and we crawled between the rows with our sharp knives to part the firm round stems from their roots. The morning was almost pleasant, while the shadows of the mountains sheltered us still from the heat.

         The week before, a mountainbeast had come down off the slopes to pick off Ksmala cattle. The guards had slain the creature and dragged it through the city streets trailing copperstain blood. It was a terrible thing, a heavy jaw full of needleteeth and half a dozen bottomless black eyes. But it was a thing that could be slain. In my most foolish fancies, I imagined the far side of the mountains dotted with colorful awnings and rough-hewn cabins, a new homeland for our lost Butterflies. My other sisters, my cousins and nieces and nephews, even your father, safe and happy somewhere on the mountain’s sturdy shoulders, though their spears were sometimes blackened by beastblood.

         Too fanciful, even for me, to imagine that my kin might fly back over those snowy peaks looking for those they’d left behind. But Elthau caught me looking, sometimes, and when my careless gaze cost me a bloodied fingertip, she reached out to still my knife-hand. “Her future is here,” she said to me. A funny word to me, future. The future is a vast house with many doors. In the wild forest of the language I walked as a girl, there are many strange and lovely things, but there are few tools for building such a castle of air. Fewer still uses for one, once it exists. “There is nothing on the other side of the mountains but icewater and bones.”

         “Perhaps they built boats, then.” My knife flashed free of her grip, and another stem leapt free from the soil and into my basket. “Perhaps they sailed the wide sea, back the way our great-great-great-grandmothers came into this world.”

         She scoffed and seized my bleeding hand to bind it with a strip torn from her apron’s hem. “Then they are sailing it still, in search of land that fell below the waves. Or they have learned to be not Butterflies but fishes, to live in a country where air is water and forests are kelp.”

         “There may be other lands, far out past the horizons the Ksmala understand.” Or perhaps our kin could make their own country, an island forged from overturned wooden hulls and lashed together with knotted canvas rope. I could picture them, then. I see them still when I close my eyes and beg for sleep to come on its shy little hooves. “We are not the last Butterflies.”

         “Look around you, Shemi.” My sister stood and shook out her soiled skirt. Around us, other women were bent, brown braids dim with sweat or covered by straw Ksmala bonnets. Dressed in dovedrab browns and grays, not the gay raiment of a flowered hill. “There are no more Butterflies.”

         She moved off then, to work a different row. By the next year’s harvest, she had married your uncle Ksit Malon Marro. His aunt was one of the city mothers then, I don’t know that I have ever told you that. Do you remember when your aunt would come back to visit us on sevenday afternoons, while we still lived in the barracks? I was always grateful for that, though I am not sure she knew it. She is the only one besides me who still remembers our mother’s songs, after all, even if she does not sing them.

         You joined us for the noonday ration that day, and if you noticed the set of your aunt’s jaw or mine, you said nothing. After we ate, you bent your back beside mine in the rows of cabbage-turnips. You hummed to yourself, the notes to the harmony of a Ksmala hymn that you’d been neglecting your sewing-work to scribble upon in the halflight evening hours. This is not to nag you so long after the fact, daughter-mine, only to set the day in your memory properly. When we were dismissed and paid out the day’s wages, you walked home beside me, chattering in Ksmala, and you did not stop at our barracks doors, as I did, to kiss the poor ragged homeblessing that hung from the lintel.

         I went to the table and joined you, as you took out your sewing-bag and upended it. The Ksmala suffer us our idols and our needlework and the bright bits of cloth we hang in open doors and windows; they do not deny us our butterflies. To them the brightscale wings are those of a celestial messenger, not the God and mystic that we see. But they did not often buy our embroidery in its customary patterns unless we muted our butterfly rainbows into moth-shadows. Because the Ksmala praised the virtue of industriousness, we had begun to sew black ants and golden-brown bees in neat soldier-rows at the edges of tablecloths and the corners of napkins.

         Your project was to add a cluster of ladybeetles to a burghess’s lacy handkerchief; the apple-red shells of the insects flashy but not so much so that they would pain a Ksmala’s pigeondrab eyes. Me, I had started a new design for a Ksmala wall-hanging commissioned by a city mother, on the occasion of her son’s first hymn being sung in the Hand. I had chosen spiders for the pattern, cribbing from our neighbor Chayen, with whom I had shared a bed from time to time once you were grown enough not to report your mother for aftercurfew departures. Do you remember our dear Chayen? Do you remember her spiders, how they danced across her designs with delicate grace? Mine have always come out stretched too thin across the fabric, poor things, as if they could not decide where to be, or what.

         No one wanted my spiders ... but perhaps something adjacent. With a fragment of charcoal I began to sketch out a new pattern, an asymmetrical spiderweb for each corner of my belabored tablecloth. There is a level of abstraction to a silkspun web that a busylegged insect’s form lacks; and though a dewglitter morning web is beautiful for its own sake, it is also a thing of work and purpose. I marked out with pale pink chalk where an imagined beam of sunlight might highlight the strands of silk, and when I marked those sharp hard angles, I thought to myself how much they reminded me of the letters I had grown up reading, the lines I had scratched in the dirt to leave messages for my younger siblings.

         I looked up at you, daughter-mine, waiting with your needle and looking back at me. And that was when I knew I could give it to you, this one bright brief glimmer of the sunny life you should have known.

* * *

         By the time you saw your first decade through, you hadn’t outgrown your childish habit of thrusting your tongue between your teeth as you sewed. A charming look of concentration, in my eyes. But your schoolmothers, when they called me in, did not ask me what I thought; they told me what to think. During my evening hours, of course, so as not to deprive the fieldmaster of my time.

         They sat me down upon the benches where the children your age sat with their slates propped upon their knees and told me that a proper young lady must soon leave such childishness behind. Not a word about your accomplishments in voice and word and wit. No, only the innocent light that burned in you, whose soft glow they recoiled from. How, they lamented, would you ever come by a fine Ksmala husband if you kept at such loutish behavior—even with a good trade to your name?

         They clucked, too, over how close your heart had entwined with Enet’s; it was not proper, they insisted, for two souls to close themselves off from the love and goodness of the rest of their peers, their community. My fingers, too, had tied many a worry-knot about you and Enet and your tight-twisted hearts, though the ply of my yarn ran opposite theirs. I smiled and thanked them for their thoughts—do not be wounded, please, daughter-mine, that I did not rise to defend you, for my soul was weary and small then. And do not begrudge me my fears, then, about dear Enet. It is not too late for a woman grown to feel the breeze from the Changing God’s wings.

         When I stepped outside, I let the sun burn their peevishness away from me. I hoped that you would never have a Ksmala husband. Nor a Butterfly one either. As if that is all a person could amount to, to be anchored one to the next.

         I walked home to the apartment we had rented by then, over a glass-blower from whose rooms the hot acrid air floated up to us. It was cheap, though, and we did not suffer so badly from the cold winters in the shadows of Ulgon Lis as did our Butterfly friends and cousins who had otherwise fared better finding housing in the city. A few Butterflies, especially the eldest, still lived in the barracks. I missed them sometimes, missed the easy warmth of Chayen or Kitu as I had for years now missed the bodies of the men whose barracks lay on the far side of the city from ours. There was no creeping between houses after curfew as there had been between beds. But it was good to have our own space. To be away from the noise and the forever-smells of other women’s feet and other children’s sick.

         You had already set the pot to boil with the potatoes for our dinner. Strong enough to carry the water up the stairs and tall enough to work the stove without the little wooden stool; I knew you would soon be taller than me. Your father was tall, or at least the shadow he casts in my heart is a long one. Beside the stove you sat, tongue between teeth as you bent over your work. Already we were well-known for our spiderweb patterns, so delicate and intricate. Other Butterflies had long since begun to make their own, but they let us be the only family to sell them to the Ksmala. A way of thanks; a gift given in return for our own. So clever, how you captured it, silk for silk, the Ksmala would say, and we would smile and take their coin and let them think we were clever, in their elder-sister head-patting way. We were cleverer by far than they ever allowed for in their rules and rows.

         We had halfway finished our supper when a client came to our door, ducking her head around the houseblessing in order to knock. Another foreigner to this city, a Tirish jeweler, though never as foreign as we; not so long as Tir Ardol follows the same gods of order and rule as the Ksmala. Surely you remember this woman, who had ordered an altar cloth, made to order for her daughter’s wedding feast, with our cityfamous spiderweb patterns. She scarcely haggled when you brought out your work—only praised your steady eye and confident hand.

         You smiled the easy happycat smile you had already learned to turn on Ksmala in their kindest moods. In the web’s silver highlights you had picked out a rude shorthand missive in your bloodborn language, jagged angles spiraling outward from the center in a list of the customer’s shortcomings and two paired couplets comparing the bride to a buffalo. I had already long cautioned you against what might happen if, one day, the Ksmala realized our game. But I think you would rather play it than live without it. Risky enough without sewing daggers into every pattern, but you might have lost interest had it not been for the dangerdance you could work into it.

         Maybe I worry for nothing. They have never yet figured it out; perhaps they never will. Our writing is so different from the Ksmala script, the hardfast lines instead of soft easy curves, the spiral outward instead of back and forth oxplowing. The Ksmala look into the world as if it is their mirror, and they only smile when they recognize themselves in the reflection.

         The woman gave you her coin, which helped us make rent, may tomorrow’s wings blow kindly on me for how much I leaned on you in those days. And before she left, she made charmed murmurs over the work laid out and the finished fineries on display. “This is your best yet,” she said, lingering over the great tablecloth that you had folded over, unfinished. “The complexity of the pattern reflects the divine plan. Is it already spoken for?”

         “It isn’t for sale.” You smiled again, as bland as ever. You put a Butterfly flutter into your accent, though I know you wield Ksmala like a handborn blade. “It is for my someday-chest.”

         The woman clucked her disappointment. “So much time spent on something that will only sit idle for so many years!”

         “My future household will be worth the wait.” You bowed a student’s proper bow. “And it is said that busy hands do the gods’ work.”

         “It’s true, it’s true.” The client winked at me on her way past. “Such a virtuous daughter you’ve raised!” Her gaze rolled over me and my home: the faded-dye green of my jacket, the scarlet flowers growing out of a broken teapot on the sill. The idol on its own high shelf. “And at such a disadvantage,” she said, with knifetongue kindness, and slipped out.

         You watched her go. A familiar disdain curdled your face when her shadow faded from our doorstep. Supper had gone cold, but I made you sit back down, finish eating; no day will come where I will let food go to waste. You dragged the potato through the redspice sauce and gulped it down in huge angry bites. That way, I think, you could pretend it was the redspice sauce dragging the tears from your eyes.

         I volunteered to mind the dishes after, and you silently went back to your sewing-work. The bubble-burp of the soapy water; the slip-slip-hiss of the thread. We both worked separate and in silence, and it was only to my back that you said, between the kiss of needle to fabric, “I don’t want to be Ksmala.”

         Oh, my heart. “It is not safe to be a Butterfly,” I told you, “in a place like this. A moth, perhaps, with moon-faded wings. But still a thing of beauty, something gentle and precious.”

         I did not look at you, so that I would not shatter this moment and send the broken pieces of you skitter-scatter across our home. After a moment, your fabric rustled again, and I went back to my dishes.

         That night after we had gone to bed, I opened my eyes on the darkness to see a shadowghost shape slide over the floor to the shelf where the idol slept. Your lips did not brush it in reverence, but you did whisper to it, and what things you said I do not know, will never know, will never ask you. The way you never ask what it is I bend my neck to, every night, the manytreasured embroiderings that never see their day in the marketplace. It had been years, many years, since I’d seen you let the Changing God carry your worries away. That night I cried myself to sleep with silent tears.

         I should have asked you then whether a Butterfly was even what you wanted to be, but I didn’t think of that until it was already too late. Daughter-mine, I am sorry.

* * *

         My daughter, a woman all but grown, you have hands as strong as steel from long hours of sewing. At night, when I come back from the fields, you still have the strength to massage my aching shoulders and back. Are you not exhausted from the long days you spend as midwife-assistant in the Halls of Confinement? Would your hand not be rather be occupied with Enet’s? While you work my knots, I try to count up all the hours of needlework you’ve put in; to convert them to weeks, months. Years? How much of you has been tied up in spools of silversilk thread?

         I dream of the day when I can give you these silken letters, so that you can understand some fraction of the whys I never gave you. But I dream in shame, for understanding me should not be your duty. Your mother is a selfish woman.

* * *

         My other letters are yours, now. This one is for me, to remember, to pretend that you will press it, too, between your palms someday. There are some paths a mother cannot follow except in the dark secret hallways of her heart.

         Let me set you down in silk this way: sitting on the floor of our little apartment with your head in Enet’s lap. Enet, braiding your hair with strands of gaily-colored thread, hiding rainbows in between the thick dark curls. Enet has been your companion through such a long string of years now—a strange thing, in my eyes, to spend so much time bound to one heart. But you love her, and Enet loves you. It is not good to eat from only one tree, I would have scolded once, for what will you do then if the fruit sours? But you, daughter-mine, are not a Butterfly like me, nor Ksmala either; something in between and far away. I tried never to nag you for what you are, for what your life and I have made you. But I weep sometimes for the bright colors you might have unfurled to a different world, a different time. Then I dry my tears, and I count the ways that I am learning to love this strange enduring union too.

         You were humming softly to yourself. You used no words, but I recognized the shape of the sounds you made: the song-poem your father wrote for me nearly twenty years ago. You wore the same oversized blouse every day now, and your fingers were laced over the generous folds of fabric. Together you and Enet had both lain with a Ksmala man, though only your belly grew hard and moon-round. How my daughter eats, I joked with the Ksmala matrons, the city mothers, our clients. Like a horse! I am going to have to marry her off before she eats me out of house and home. And then we would all laugh together, but I did not mean it and neither did they. Behind those kindly smiling faces they were always sniffing for deception and sin. And ready to sew some from whole cloth where none could be found.

         Your eyes were closed, but as if you felt my worrywatch gaze, you turned your face toward me. “Don’t worry about me, mama,” you said. Your eyes opened, two golden suns to warm my face. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

         A backward thing, for a daughter to bear up under concern for the mother that bore her. But our whole world is upside down, ground flipped with sky, and what was strange has become what is ordinary.

         I shook my head. “I’m too old.” True, though not to the heart of the thing. Someone had to be here to flutter her wings, to churn up the winds of distraction and deceit. “I’ll be fine,” I promised you, and that was true and it was not, which is a thing that can be so in such a wrong-side-up world. I have your aunt still, ghost of my sister-gone that she is, and my mother’s songs are sewn too deep into my heart for any scourging stone to reach. That is more than many are granted, in this sorrowstrange world.

         “Almost curfew,” said Enet, her voice apology soft.

         You stood, your hair all bound up. That outsized shirt of yours fell past your hips, so that your father’s loving words could be seen spiderwebbed all about the hem. I wonder if Enet ever wrote a poem for you, to be shared with your child. But that is none of my concern.

         Enet put on her warmest cloak, the one you had sewn with rosethorn endearments on the inner lining. She reached for the packs without embracing me, as was ever her way, and I could see my best kitchen knife where it winked inside the cloak’s folds.

         You folded me up in your arms so tightly I could feel the child leap and twist within you. I held my granddaughter too, then, in the only way I ever will. “Stay here,” you said, daughter-mine, against my ear. “If you’re seen with us tonight, they might—”

         “No,” I said, gentlehard, and your shoulders shook against me. Even in an upside-down world, a mother’s word is final. You will understand this, soon enough.

         The last time I saw you, daughter-mine, it was as a darkcloak shape sliding into the shadows of the mountain pass. Your outline and Enet’s crossed one over the other up the switchback path, so that I could no longer tell you one from the other. Up you went until you disappeared, swallowed up by the forest where the evergreens grow stout and close together like fat wise old women, where the beasts which the Ksmala do not dare to name roam. The forest is full of shatterdream darkness, but the forest is not forever, and you have the strength of doublelife to carry you over to what world waits beyond.

         I stayed until I lost sight of you and after, until sun had rolled nearly out of the sky, and then I went home hurryhard before curfew. Your bed was heaped up with blankets in a woman’s sturdy shape, and I made excuses for your exhaustion to the under-mother who came to our door. An extra night, for you to hurry away into the forest. To slip further out of reach.

         I lay down on my bed with the Changing God idol against my cheek—you refused to deprive me of it when you left, though in leaving it you deprived me of something much greater. I will never begrudge you that. And it was some comfort yet to have my idol with me, when I had little else. I didn’t have the breath to whisper my worries, so I wept instead, and the old clay drank away my tears until at last I slept. There would be punishment, on the morrow, but I will not bind it into my memory with silk. Our choices bear their consequences, and so must we. I would not change mine.

         Because I dreamed then as I still do: of my daughter welcomed with open arms into a rainbow-clad Butterfly village on the far side of your mountains, with your father there to welcome you; of you and Enet all alone, building a cabin and holding off the forest with song and blade; of a world of strangers who share with you no common tongue but who make room for you in a cozy corner of their homes, their cities, their stories. I dream that you and Enet steal aboard a boat and put to sea and cross the globe searching for an island that drowned long before you were born.

         I dream of you, my spider-daughter, who, unlike a butterfly buffeted by trouble and change, will creep into what crevices you may, who will make a home wherever one can be found.

         You, my spider-daughter, will spin yourself a new world out of silken steel, and into that world will your own child be born. Another spider-daughter, perhaps. Or maybe something just as new and strange and wonderful.

Copyright © 2020 Aimee Ogden

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Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes about sad astronauts, angry princesses, and dead gods. Her work has also appeared in Analog, Shimmer, Fireside, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. With fellow BCS author Bennett North, she co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, which features fun and optimistic speculative fiction. Her novella Sun-daughters, Sea-daughters is forthcoming from Tor.com.

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COVER ART

“Arvandil,” by Flavio Bolla

Flavio Bolla has been drawing since he was three years old. He first came in contact with the world of concept art in 2006. Since then, he has worked hard on the fundamentals to improve his design skills and to be able to create fascinating worlds. His work has been featured on various internet-platforms, magazines, and book covers. View more of his work online at www.flaviobolla.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2020 Firkin Press

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