Issue #239 • Nov. 23, 2017

“The Mouth of the Oyster,” by Adam-Troy Castro & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

“Woe and Other Remedies,” by Michael Anthony Ashley

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

THE MOUTH OF THE OYSTER

by Adam-Troy Castro & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

         The plague that ravaged our fair land and led to my own meeting with the maker of eyes was eventually traced to a gnat infestation in a single barrel of common spices, in the hold of one unremarkable ship, which happened to dock at Shien-La on one otherwise typical day.

         Three out of four who showed the first symptoms died within hours, but the disease saved its worst torments for those who fought their way back from the brink of death. Strong men were reduced to emaciated invalids and beautiful women became scarred and pitted hags; all were aged decades by the blistering of their cheeks and the loss of their teeth. Bright and inquisitive children became puzzled imbeciles, unable to understand even the simplest words spoken to them. A second plague took its shape in the suicides of those who could not endure whatever little the scourge had left them.

         As for me, I writhed for a day and a night and a day and a night, screeching in agony as my eyes shriveled like plums abandoned in the broiling afternoon sun. I begged for death, but my lovely young bride Li-Fan whispered sweet assurances in my ears, telling me that the divine who rule all things would not shatter our life together before we had the chance to live it. I cursed her and lashed out at her in the manner of all driven mad by suffering. But even as she felt the first itch of the fever herself, she caressed me and kissed me and changed my soiled linens and dabbed my burning forehead with soft compresses, determined to defy the conflagration with no power but her love.

         Bless the divine, we were more fortunate than most. We lived. We held on to our home and our fortune. I resolved to be thankful for my new life as a healthy blind man. Li-Fan, who had once possessed a dancer’s grace, survived with some weakening on her right side and a gait slower than any she had known. We accommodated her infirmity and my darkness. I learned to read and write the alphabet of those whose vision has failed. She learned the patience of one who now took twice as long to cross a room. The cold fact of the matter was that in some ways the catastrophe rebounded to our personal gain. Most of my competitors in trade had died. Entire communities found themselves in need that my family enterprises could fulfill. Our holdings grew. The petitioners at our gates began to include the princes and princesses of the realm. Because we both believed that too much profit in the face of our nation’s suffering would be not only unseemly but shameful, we donated fortunes to the rebuilding of the nation, and we came to be revered as incarnations of the divine light.

         Li-Fan and I often asked each other how we could regard any of the improvements in our circumstances as blessings when so many not as favored by random chance still cried out in misery; surely, profiting too much, too soon, meant inviting curses yet to come. And yet, almost without our willing it, the arc of our good fortunes continued to curve upward.

         This was true even of our marital bed. Ours had been an arranged union, as per the tradition of our people; our honeymoon as terrified strangers mollifying each other with cautious smiles had been a fleeting one, but it was soon replaced by joy as we realized that the sometimes-disastrous lottery of random-boy matched to random-girl had in this case surpassed any union we might have arranged by ourselves. The plague came before that routine could have degenerated into rote boredom, and we soon discovered that its ravages had only made a great thing better. Now I was blind and a creature who explored his world by touch, by scent, by smell, and taste; a creature who had no trouble making his lover his entire universe, because so much of what he sensed during the act was encompassed only by his own reach. She was weakened, subject to fluctuating limitations of response and movement and thus more given to wonder, every time, at the pleasures she could still give and receive; in a way, she now experienced her body’s capabilities each time as if for the first.

         We became a world of two.

         Then one day Li-Fan returned from the local market with the maker of eyes.

* * *

         I found Jin-Kwon’s speech polite but calculating, in the manner of a man who knew how words could be used to inspire trust but had found the skill only after painstaking practice. His overly formal accent testified that he had mastered the language of the Imperium late in life, learning to speak with great precision but missing the vernacular. From the gravel coarsening those tones I detected a lifetime of moderate drink and arduous travel in cold places.

         He knew enough to obey the established custom of our land, which dictates a decent interval engaged in respectful conversation before the introduction of base concerns. So the three of us knelt at the same low table sipping warm blossom tea as he complimented our home and blessed our hospitality and expressed the great honor we had bestowed upon him by welcoming his visit. As I responded with all appropriate humility and grace, inquiring after the sights he had encountered on his journey, I had ample time to ponder just why my beloved wife had brought him to me. Despite the physical distance between us, I could sense the anticipation that fluttered in her breast. As Jin turned from polite conversation toward the autobiographical, explaining at length how as a youth he had lived on the border between our country and the golden lands and traveled back and forth at will, my wife’s excitement grew. He went on to relate that he had apprenticed at two trades, the mundane glass-blowing artistry of his ancestors—and the elementary sorcery he had picked up from a tribe a few leagues to the west.

         He finally concluded, “I make eyes.”

         “Ah,” I said.

         “You are not surprised?”

         “Most visitors who come to this office are polite about the way I look, and Li-Fan has assured me that my altered appearance is of no consequence to her, but I remain aware that these sunken hollows must be unpleasant. If she has seen your work, then I trust her judgment, and what remains is a mere matter of—”

         “Please forgive my failure of clarity, good sir. Your wife has indeed seen my work. But I do not make inanimate glass prostheses. I make eyes that see.”

         The room became silent, his words reverberating in the air.

         “That is not possible,” I whispered.

         “And yet,” Jin-Kwon said, “are there not men in this land who stand on legs made of wood, or chew with teeth constructed of ivory, or adorn themselves with hair spun from silk?”

         I said, “Do not treat me like a fool. A wooden leg is not a leg.”

         “True. By all standards that define life, a wooden leg is inanimate. But it can still support a man’s weight and, with his remaining leg, transport him where he needs to walk. Similarly, the eyes I propose to fashion for you will never be perfect replacements for those you have lost. You will never again see in the precise fashion you remember, never again behold life in all its myriad aspects. But my limited gifts are capable of creating orbs sensitive to one of life’s facets, orbs that will bless you with perfect sight as long as that facet is present for you to see.”

         I heard him place a heavy object on the table before us, and I perceived from the creak of a hinge that it was a chest, opened now to display whatever he had carried within it.

         “Your honored wife can confirm that what I show you now is a selection of glass eyes, hand-colored to reflect the most common and a few highly uncommon shades of iris. She will confirm that as artifacts alone, they have been constructed with the greatest beauty. None of these shall be yours, because any I produce for you will of course need to be custom-fitted.”

         “They are beautiful,” Li-Fan reported for my benefit. “There are many that would be pleasing, on your face.”

         “And you claim that they see?”

         “What I provide now is not the vision I promise, just the proof that I can deliver what I say. May I approach?”

         “With the understanding that when this proves to be a fraud I shall have the servants eject you by force.”

         I heard him stand, sensed in the air a motion in my direction and felt his breath inches away, followed by the pressure of cold glass against one of the sunken pits that had once been my windows to the world.

         And I saw.

         Granted, it was just the stained-glass image of a butterfly with wings of purest green and gold, illuminated from behind by sunlight, but how rich the image, how gorgeous the stippling between segments of color! How immediate the sense of dust floating in the air between that painted masterpiece and myself! I had in my eagerness to recover from my great loss repressed how satisfying even the most mundane sight could be. I had willed myself to forget. But this sight, that I might have passed over when my life offered a parade of other sights like it, robbed the strength from my limbs.

         Then the darkness returned, and I was blind again.

         I heard Li at my side then, kissing my forehead and whispering that it was a blessing that my sight could be restored.

         A thousand leagues away, Jin-Kwon said, “That is just one image. It is a heartbeat out of time. I can give you more than an image: I can give you one entire facet of this jewel we know as life. You need only choose the facet.”

         “Such as?”

         “Any you can name, good sir. In the golden lands, where this technique was perfected, tradesmen used to willingly carve out one of their own eyes, to replace it with one that could better serve their respective professions. Healers implanted eyes that could diagnose illness. Portrait painters implanted eyes with flawless understanding of shading and pigment. Investors implanted eyes that could spot opportunities for profit. Soldiers implanted eyes that could discern the weakest points of their enemy. Courtesans implanted eyes that could spot the hidden desires of the men who sought their company. Mothers implanted eyes that could never overlook the needs of their children. The options are limited only to the imagination of the buyer. You name the facet, and I shall provide you with an eye capable of seeing it. It would be my honor, good sir.”

         My re-acquaintance with darkness made the light Ji-Kwon offered seem beyond price. I knew that I would not be able to maintain my composure for long, and so I took advantage of the impassiveness that can be an eyeless man’s greatest compensation and said nothing, aware that my wife could see through me and that it was likely the maker of eyes could, too.

         “I will need time to reflect.”

* * *

         Choosing a facet for myself was not something I could accomplish in a single languid afternoon. I invited the maker of eyes to enjoy our hospitality as we considered the matter. Two of our house servants moved his meager belongings into the guest cottage down by our lake, while Li-Fan and I went on with our evening, talking about anything but the controversy at hand.

         That night, we made love with an urgency that we had not known since before the scourge. I grasped Li with the desperation of a drowning man seeking solid purchase in storm-tossed seas; she clutched me with the hunger of a starving woman permitted to join a traveling feast. There was a sense that we had wandered into a strange country marked by pitfalls capable of destroying us.

         Afterwards, she rested the side of her face against my breast, stroked my chest with her finger, and said, “Do you forgive me?”

         “For what?”

         “Bringing this man to you.”

         “You imagine it requires forgiveness?”

         “I almost resisted. I feared what he promised. But then I saw what he did in the marketplace, for another man blinded by the scourge. That man wanted only to carve wood again and in a minute he was back to his own trade, chortling in delight at the return of the gifts the scourge had taken from him. I could not deny you such a blessing. But...”

         “Say it.”

         “Since the plague, you have never seen yourself as less than whole. You have never bemoaned the dying of your light. You have never been less than a man as complete as other men. All I have done is poison your contentment by introducing you to this stranger who says you should want more.”

         I said, “Come here.”

         She shifted her weight to face me; I could not see her beautiful eyes, but I could feel her soft breath and from that was able to reconstruct a full portrait of her on my mind’s canvas. The painting even included the way the light of the bedside candles shimmered on her sleek black hair. There was no way any eyes, capable of seeing either a single facet or the entire jewel, could have improved on it.

         I told her, “If I were to remember no moment but this one, and I knew that the next heartbeat would be my last, then I would cross the final veil content that my life on Earth has provided me with more than any man could ask.”

         “You flatter me.”

         “Not at all. But tell me what is really bothering you.”

         “You said that you would consider his offer overnight, but I know you and I suspect that you would elect to see Beauty.”

         “And this bothers you?”

         “I am no crone, my love. But since the scourge touched us I am less than what I once was. I am drawn, pale; almost withered, frailer in aspect than you likely remember me. I know that time is a second scourge and that it will inevitably take what I have left, day by day, and though I would never ask you to give up Beauty, I fear becoming more and more invisible to your new sight.”

         I felt tears on her cheek and understood how heavily this had been weighing on her. I ached to assure her that whatever vision I had would always deem her the most beautiful woman I had ever known; but I also remembered my uncle, a philandering man who had fallen out of love with my aunt almost as soon as the first bloom of youth vanished from her cheeks. She had become in effect, if not in name, a household servant, cleaning his clothes and warming his bed while he chased the harlots at the House of the Scarlet Moon. She had become invisible to him. My father had been a more faithful man than his brother, but it was also impossible to observe the way he looked at my mother and not know that whatever passionate fires had once driven him had cooled to spent coals.

         That night I contemplated the purchase of eyes capable of perceiving Beauty. I yearned for the reflection of the sky on a crystal-clear mountain lake. I ached for the plumage of the peacock, the rich green of the forests of my youth, the glow of dear Li-Fan’s eyes as we gazed upon one another in the manner only known to lovers. I could not believe that any eye set in my skull would ever be able to behold her and not see beauty. But perhaps she was correct. Perhaps Jin-Kwon’s miraculous eye would dispel illusions I needed.

         And with that I gave up so many things, so many golden sunrises and so many lingering sunsets. I kissed my wife and said, “Do not fear. I already see Beauty.”

         That left me with my second choice.

* * *

         In the morning I rose early and made my way down past the garden to the pond I had once treasured for the placidity of its waters, which daily reflected the snow-capped peaks on the horizon. The sight had long struck me as a blessing that doubled the joys of the day, and in memory it still provided me that, along with pleasures that my blindness now brought out in sharp relief, like the tang of the moss that hugged the rocks on the far shore and the velvet cool of the waters caressing my skin as I waded to shoulder-depth.

         As the ripples smoothed I heard motion in the water and stirred with the fear known to any man who finds himself trapped and without defense, in absolute darkness. “Hello! Who’s there? Identify yourself!”

         Jin answered from the water, so close that I jumped at the sound. “Forgive me, good sir. I did not intend to startle you. I was just paddling over to wish you the blessings of the day.”

         I relaxed, though I retained enough of my prior fear to fuel annoyance. “Did you not see me coming? Did you not consider that a blind man might appreciate warning that he does not enter his bath alone?”

         “Again, good sir, forgive me. I did see you making your way down the path. But I also observed that you wore a broad smile. I foolishly concluded that you had detected my presence here and were demonstrating good fellowship toward your humble guest. I similarly approached now with the same assumption in mind, intending only a friendly good morning. If the happy countenance I detected only reflected a soul at peace, I express regret at any damage I may have done to it.”

         Sometimes we treated our anger as a polished jewel, too precious to be set aside. I retained mine for many long seconds before seeing it as a burden and letting it slip, unmourned, into the peace of the fine day. The last of it expressed itself with a grumpy, “For a man who makes eyes, you certainly have much to learn about the blind.”

         “Forgive me. I have not often dealt with those fully blind. Almost all of my commissions in the golden country came from the sighted, who wished only to replace one eye with enhanced replacements of my manufacture.”

         “Very well. Forgive me as well. These days I startle from the slightest rustle.”

         “I can imagine,” he said, the water lapping about his chest as he made some kind of gesture in emphasis.

         “Indeed, that is why I am now happy that I have encountered you. There are many dangers to fear in a place as peaceful as this one. The scourge was such a danger: unsuspected, unseen, merciless in the destruction it wrought, devastating in the suffering it caused. I do not suppose you can create an eye capable of seeing such a horror before it arrives.”

         He chuckled. “Alas, sir, I cannot. If I could create an eye that could predict the whims of fate, I would place it in my own head, become a trader like yourself, and in months become the wealthiest man in all the kingdoms. But the caprices of the divine wind, whether good or ill, will always be beyond us. The facets captured by my manufactured eyes must exist, and the future is forever unborn.”

         “A shame,” I said.

         But he was not done: “The only horrors an eye of my manufacture could see are those that originate with Man.”

         So my second choice was not to be either, but even as it was taken away another presented itself.

         Somewhere nearby, water splashed as one of the small creatures who shared this blessed place dove in in search of its first morning meal. A firebird chirped the song its kind uses to greet the mid-morning sun. One of the servants stepped on gravel. The wind rustled and brought with it the not-unpleasant tang of the stables and their magnificent horses. Jin told a tale of his youth in the golden country, but my mind wandered elsewhere, to the tragedy of Hsan, a neighbor long dead.

         Hsan had not been a wealthy man, but he had been a kindly one, by his very constitution more concerned with the well-being of others than with his own. Many a time he came upon someone destitute or starving and parted with his own meager savings or his last bowl of rice. He was considered by some to be a fool, but such a holy fool, in his way, that his neighbors saw to it that his coffers were replenished, his larder full. And yet Hsan had been taken advantage of often, robbed almost as much, and finally, one day, slain, his clothes stripped from his back, his coins stolen from his purse, his flesh rent with knife wounds.

         Many were the other stories I knew of the trusting betrayed by the vile. I had always prided myself in my own ability to weigh the intentions of others, but I had become more vulnerable since the curtain of darkness had descended on me, and I knew I myself wasn’t immune to malice.

         I must have remained silent long enough for the subject of my contemplation to grow obvious, because Jin coughed. “Good sir?”

         I said, “Make me an eye capable of discerning the presence of evil.”

* * *

         That night Li-Fan and I dined alone, once again leaving the maker of eyes to his own counsel; and following that we linked arms and strolled through the garden. Across the path we met two of our oldest servants, now off-duty and enjoying their own peaceful night under the stars. When they greeted us as their masters Li-Fan tittered and told them that as their work was done for the day, there was no need for such obsequiousness. She wished them a fine evening and they wished us the same. I said nothing.

         We descended the dozen steps to a sunken grove that I had always regarded as a haven and there we sat, holding hands and enjoying the sound of mountain water as a pipe laid in our estate walls channeled onto a sculpture of polished stones.

         After some time Li-Fan rested her head on my shoulder. “Something bothers you, my husband. It has been bothering you since we passed our retainers.”

         I hated how petulant my next words sounded. “That... informality you showed with them. I am not certain it’s a wise idea.”

         “They are not just servants to me, husband. They are friends. I do not possess the heart to speak to them any other way.”

         I grumbled. “You are a kind-hearted woman.”

         “I live in the way that gives me the most peace. If I lived as a suspicious, jealous witch, I would be wrapping myself in a cloak of unhappiness, and all the blessings of this life would be lost on me.”

         “Perhaps.”

         But she was still disturbed. “Have they done anything to displease you?”

         “No. This is just a blind man’s sullenness.”

         But inwardly I was even more certain that I had given Jin the wisest possible instruction. It was wonderful to be married to such a trusting soul, so filled with kindness that she could not imagine any corruption existing in the hearts of others, but it was not hard to envision a moment when that quality would lead her to open our doors to thieves or murderers. Jin’s eye would make us safer.

         Then she said, “Husband?”

         “Yes?”

         She drew closer, and for one intense moment I could feel a tremble overtake her, communicated through her delicate hands to my bare skin.

         “You would not have expressed such doubts of those honorable people before the arrival of the maker of eyes. I fear that you have decided to have yourself fitted with an eye that will eliminate uncertainty from matters of trust.”

         I sighed. “I asked for one that could detect evil.”

         It was a long time before she spoke again. “Would you then gaze upon me with that eye?”

         Though I had not admitted it to myself, this shameful fantasy had been growing in me since first I learned that such an eye could be made.

         She went on: “I know that you sometimes treat me like a paragon of virtue, less a real woman than your ideal image of one. But I am a creature of flesh of blood, as prone to weakness and corruption as any other. There were times during your fever when you were so hateful to me that I almost struck you down, to put us both out of your misery... And there are times when even my great love for you cannot dispel the anger I feel because of some trespass you commit without thinking. I have considered betraying you, in ways small and large, any number of times, and I have always decided that giving in to that impulse is not even close to being worth what I would have to lose. Would it make you any happier, to see that moment of passing weakness in the hearts of those who have then renewed their vows of loyalty to you? Would it make you feel any safer?”

         I was forced to say, “No.”

         “You are a kind and blessed man, and so I cannot blame you for not seeing the terrible danger in such a choice. But evil is around us at all times. It is in us at all times. Think of the worst impulses you have, all those momentary temptations toward callousness and cruelty that you entertain for a heartbeat before you banish them from your mind. They all come from inside you. Would you want me to be able to see them? Would you want to see them in me?”

         Had I still been capable of tears, I might have wept. Instead I lowered my head and trembled, while she embraced me and wept in my stead, the two of us a closed room with an occupancy of one.

         She whispered: “Will you tell him not to finish the eye?”

         I shook my head. “No. There is another facet I would like to see.”

* * *

         The morning was a time for going through my family’s accounts and balancing profits against losses. It was tedious and exacting work that a lesser man might have delegated to others, but a businessman who bleeds from a thousand tiny cuts will in time lose all treasuries. I had perceived a few places where our more distant enterprises might have been subject to embezzlement and a number where our charitable gifts threatened to become hemorrhages, when one of the servants entered to announce that Jin was at the door of the main house, requesting an audience.

         I consented and the maker of eyes entered, cloth rustling softly as he crossed the room.

         A blind man can tell much about the feelings of another even when that other lingers in wordless silence. Presently I sensed in Jin honorable respect for me, a commendable pride in his work, and the glow of recent accomplishment. He was not, I judged, a bad man. I could tell that with or without his eye.

         At length I finished scratching in my ledger and addressed him: “You have completed your work?”

         “Yes, good sir.”

         “And you are prepared to set it in place?”

         “Yes, good sir.”

         “One question. What if I do not like it?”

         “Then it may be removed, like any other prosthetic.”

         “In that case, I very much look forward to gazing through it, if only for a few instants. But if you do not mind, I would prefer not to test it in this room. Will you accompany me to the tailor’s quarters?”

         He gave his assent, and so we made our way to one of the estate’s smaller chambers, where in the days before the plague I had housed an artisan tasked with maintaining our formal wardrobe. His fitting room bore the estate’s only full-length mirror.

         Realizing what I was up to, Jin positioned me at the correct angle before producing the orb I had commissioned. It fit into the abandoned socket with little ceremony, and when he stepped back I spent ten seconds gazing upon my own reflection.

         I said, “Please remove it.”

         “Is it not comfortable?”

         My voice had acquired a strangled quality. “It is very painful. Remove it, now.”

         He obliged, and blindness returned as a blessing.

         On our way back to my chambers I moved like a man who had been punched in the stomach. Once we arrived, I drank half a bottle of rice wine before saying, “You do excellent work, my friend. When we are done here I shall see to it that you receive payment in full. You may dispose of the eye. I never wish to use it again.”

         He said, “Was it faulty?”

         “Not at all. In truth, I fear that I will not be able to shake the memory of what I saw for as long as I live.”

         Jin said, “I have never experienced a dissatisfied customer before. Would you like me to produce another eye for you?”

         “I considered that, my friend. But Li-Fan inspires trust and encourages wisdom, revealing the best heart of things. She is the only eye I need; a better eye, it turns out, than that which I deserve.”

         Jin said, “Then perhaps another aspect?”

         I leaned back. “I considered asking you to craft me an eye capable of seeing when I have acted like a fool, but again my wife sees this more clearly than any orb you could fashion.

         “I also thought of asking you to craft an eye that could discern which of the things I want are things I should not have; but as it turns out, I can also rely on my wife for that perspective.

         “Finally, I was tempted to ask you for eyes capable of seeing sunrises and sunsets, but I have already been blessed to see my share of those; and they, like most other things I would ever want to see, I can recall in all their infinite beauty from the days when I had sight.”

         Jin’s voice became disbelieving. “Aren’t you even interested in painted prosthetics, for cosmetic purposes?”

         “My dear Jin: to belabor the obvious, I am a man without eyes. Painted prosthetics would deny the truth of my condition and fool no one. I have no need for your wares. I can only express my sincere thanks to you for making the honorable attempt, and wish you the best of health and prosperity in your journey.”

         Jin was silent for so long that I found myself wondering whether he had departed without my detecting it, but then the cloth of his garment rustled and I knew that he was still in the room with me, his kit still at his side, his miraculous craft unequal to the task of bridging the distance between us.

         After that, all that remained was the settling of accounts.

         Jin left our home twenty minutes later, and in all the years since, I have not heard any news of his further travels.

* * *

         It has been two decades since the maker of eyes came to us, and life has proceeded with the calm of a boat idling on a tame river. Word reaches us of another outbreak of the scourge, perhaps the last embers of the old one, ravaging one of the empire’s most distant outposts to the north. We have sent generous alms to the region, to aid as best as we can. In the meantime our own enterprises continue to prosper, so much that the Emperor has bestowed upon us courtly titles.

         I direct our accounts and accept our visitors and am generous to our servants and drift from our beautiful home to our well-tended garden and back, living a blessed life, wrapped in the happiness that makes small inconveniences of my wife’s fragility and my own darkness.

         From time to time she still asks me what I saw when I used Jin’s eye to peer at myself in the mirror. I tell her I saw the small flickering flame of my soul, being simultaneously fanned by a smiling benevolent god and choked by a noxious baneful demon. I tell her I had asked to perceive the alchemical nature of reality, and that the vision of these two forces competing for my soul overwhelmed me. Knowing that if I peered at their swirling ghostly figures for even one more instant I’d become a lifelong slave to elixirs and talismans and magic herbs, a man obsessed with obeisance and invocations, I removed the eye at once, and now tell myself it was but a dream.

         This is a lie.

         What I had asked to see was the interconnectedness of all life. And the paradox of appreciating my insignificance in the cosmic scheme while also perceiving my incredible impact on the overall design nearly broke my spirit. We speak casually of the whims of fate, but we do not feel them inside our chest as I did for those terrifying moments. I have never been hungry. I have never been desperate. And I saw that these are not character achievements but merely accidents of cause and effect. Life has spun a comforting cocoon around me, creating deceptive beauty in much the same way that nature creates pearls from the irritant in the mouth of the oyster. Yet all might have been profoundly different but for the merest alteration in the beat of nature’s heart. The cocoon around me is as thin as a geometer’s imaginary line, as light as spider’s silk; it may unravel at any moment, revealing a vast gulf beyond.

         At the same time, I have unwittingly helped nature weave countless other such cocoons around other souls, and simultaneously facilitated the fall of numberless others into the abyss. How can one small human mind encompass the vastness of such endless buoyant shifts and plummeting vicissitudes? How can one strand of spume in a wave’s froth grasp the entirety of the ocean?

         I am as fortunate a man as any who lived. I spend my days with the woman I adore, and at night we repair to the bed that is the heart of our home, where we make sweet love with a passion that might seem surprising for two so damaged. She tells me she loves me and I respond that I love her. We shudder and we collapse together and we thank the gods for the blessings we have.

         But I also know how fragile this all is, and so, for as long as I live, I shall always feel fortunate that a man without eyes has lost not just sight but the capacity to weep.

Copyright © 2017 Adam-Troy Castro & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Adam-Troy Castro’s twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The final installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear (Grosset and Dunlap), appeared in August 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan) and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, and two Hugos. He lives in Florida with his wife Judi and either three or four cats, depending on what day you’re counting and whether Gilbert’s escaped this week. Alvaro Zinos-Amaro’s book of interviews with Robert Silverberg, Traveler of Worlds, was a Hugo and Locus award finalist. Alvaro’s more than thirty stories and one hundred reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared in magazines like Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Apex, Lightspeed, Nature, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, and anthologies such as The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, Cyber World, Humanity 2.0, and This Way to the End Times. Alvaro has a book review column at Intergalactic Medicine Show, a film review column at Words, and he edits the roundtable blog for Locus.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

WOE AND OTHER REMEDIES

by Michael Anthony Ashley

         Dejanira’s banquets were always fatal, and this made Dejanira popular.

         The lords and ladies who had befriended her father, who had gone with him on hunts for excitement, had become cloy with Spectacle and Scandal. They were exhausted in their souls by the flaccidness of Thrill—faces rigid, loins gone col, hearts stirring to beat perhaps once a fortnight.

         But these same nobles, thin-boned and cruel-eyed, crossed leagues on the backs of their slaves to guest with Dejanira. For Dejanira offered up their very lives for amusement, and she did amuse magnificently.

         She hosted her first doom-elegance on the spring anniversary of her father’s death, the theme one of wilt and denudation. The surprise of the evening came in the form of naked rose stems entwined among the decorations. The thorns were poisoned, and those who went touching and who were pricked and who suffered from weak constitutions died. The rest were left in awe at the quickening in their breasts.

         The rumors ran and the clangor climbed, and after a torrent of appeals Dejanira held her second event some months after the first. The ballroom this time was dominated by a platform in its center, upon which posed a bare-chested man of uncertain race. Stretched before him was a long stone table crowded to one side with knives of emaciated edge, to the other with mounds of a violet fish. The scent of brine drifted across the hall as Dejanira introduced the evening’s sole repast: kanket mumai, netted from the waters of arcane shores, death to the diner if not cut with meticulous care.

         As the bare-chested stranger set to the fish with swift hands, a train of laced virgins entered the hall from a north-facing door and kissed him upon his body relentlessly. For as long as he worked the maidens engaged their seduction, until he cried out half-mad when the last plate left his table. One thousand guests dined that night. Some forced their slaves to taste first and were spurned. Of the rest, no less than one hundred fell with closed throats.

         Dejanira’s later innovation of a ballroom floor stretched over an ancient chasm, laid with false tiles woven of gossamer and vulture down, made her popular with Her Majesty, the Emperor’s mother.

         On a later occasion it was the Emperor himself who granted her use of the palace on Mt. Aian during the eleven years’ storm, where she arranged two thousand voluptuous chairs that had, from the backs, copper rods twining up and through the palace roof.

         As the years passed Dejanira’s contrivances became more malefic, her invitations less frequent. Yet still the nobles came at her call. They shed their viper-skin boredom simply because they knew not whence the doom would fall, and in not knowing they feared. And in fearing they were, but for moments, pleased to be alive.

* * *

         On the night of the Winter Solstice in the two-hundred-thirty-second year of the Emperor’s reign, Dejanira hosted what would be her final sublim massaker. The invitations, the first in nearly a decade, were delivered by wing in the clutches of naked eagles—the haughty messengers invading antechambers and startling doormen with magnificent predatory disdain, for what modern household maintained rookeries anymore?

         Lord Gama III the Fellh-Meyn, eldest and most surfeited of the dead duke’s old companions, was as ever first to neaten his mortal affairs for the event. He met with his legist to arrange his titles and assets, should Dejanira’s artistry claim his life; madecontracts with the Guild of Child Clothiers, where his suits were fashioned by slim and nimble fingers; and set his stable grooms to gather the strongest slaves from each of his fourteen estates, attiring them in matching leathern halters and manacles of redoubled wolfram.

         On the night before the event, he sat in his ancient chair mulling the work of Anticipation upon his veins and discovered it insufficient. The moonlit portraits of his forebears watched as he retired to his chambers with a throttling mask, a boy, and a basket of gnaw-mice, and employed the later evening in pursuit of revived sensation, as new sensation had long escaped his ability. The mask, of the three, proved most effectual.

         He woke to break his fast just after noon, the quicksilver cordial tasting of sleek icy nothing, and lay for a time recalling the delicious agony of the mask. The sensation was withered now but had served to speed the turn of Anticipation within his breast, so that here, on The Day, the climax of its work fell upon him.

         His heart beat a single beat—a heaving, shuddered deuce of blows against the soft of his ribs—and he clutched his sheets in ecstasy.

         Here and gone was the moment, but the valets who came at his bell and dressed him for travel made remark of the animation in their master’s face. And he climbed into his palanquin with a strange tension in his mouth. He thought it another palsy until a delve into his memories revealed it as, possibly, the beginnings of a smile.

         “And why not a smile?” he asked of the morning as he lashed his slaves into motion. For east of his manor, east of the river, east for thirty leagues and a mile, east and east and east was Dejanira’s design.

         Gama III passed his journey in primed imagination, reposing in the deep embrace of his couches. “You could die tonight,” he whispered to himself in erotic terror and moaned as his heart beat for the second time in a day.

         True to their breed, his slaves devoured the land with their strides. And at last, when the sky ahead had purpled in royal disdain, Gama III watched the four towers of Braugholm Castle come into view. He passed beneath the portcullis and noted lawns made beautiful by a powdering of frost, the glow of tongue-colored lantern light, chimeric sculptures, and giant pearlescent snails that glided to and fro across the stones. Their ghostly scrollwork tracks glimmered and shone in the pale of the broken moon.

         The procession of peers was well underway:

         Theye XXI the Muut-Vang-Hewg in her slim wheelhouse.

         Norcous the Vang-Voord-Roolk-Meyn-Hewg-Schteb dismounting his litter with a flourish of his cape.

         Vischer XVIII the Grynck-Fellh standing atop his carriage, bowing in greeting to Rodl V the Hewg-Voord-Roolk-Aynx.

         All were of his stature or lower, Gama III having timed his arrival with practiced care. He directed his slaves along the paths, sniffing critically at the incense on the breeze, and ordered a halt beside Witting IX the Fellh-Jarg. The younger man was a blood relative of notable proximity, and his palanquin—perhaps appropriate, perhaps unimaginative—was of a style resembling Gama III’s.

         “Health, cousin,” Gama III called.

         “Health,” Witting IX returned, and they met between their rows of slaves to greet each other with a kiss.

         “The work upon your frame is artistry, cousin,” Witting IX said of Gama III’s palanquin. “The lanterns gave it life as you passed through the gates. And those slaves of yours—Ysbaddaden, yes, judging by their down? As it happens, mine own are Offruum, close tribemates to your Ysbaddaden.” He gestured to one buck who wore a collar of bronze and stood towering, sleek with sweat, shoulders steaming.

         Gama III’s slaves saw the Offruum’s great high mane of hair, drifting about him like a feathered headdress, and bent themselves round in meekness. Annoyed, Gama III stirred a musk from his underarms to put a fright in them. This broke their attention and turned them back to upholding their poise. “A fine breed,” he admitted.

         “Fine indeed,” crowed Witting IX.

         The boast was irksome. But Gama III was eighty years the senior and beyond the need to brag over property. Instead he brandished his recent achievement. He smiled.

         Witting IX blinked twice in a frank display of surprise.

         “You should be proud,” Gama III said, his smile creeping wide. “But I must admit, my thoughts are full of anticipation for the evening, with little energy to spare for projects so, mm, hobbyistic.”

         Witting IX refused to look a second time at Gama III’s mouth. “Of course you are correct,” he said in a tone coldly polite. “My time could be better spent.”

         “Spent, yes, but not wasted, for our host has appointed an hour for the start of this affair, and we had best see to our dress if we are to be timely.” Gama III kissed his cousin on the chill of his brow. “We will meet upon the path and make our entrance together.” And with a farewell he climbed to his palanquin, finally relaxing his face lest the ache in his jaw become a vex.

         Gama III dressed himself in scarlet, donning his custom turban—burnt-orange at the base and blending imperceptibly to an elegant pointed gold crown. To finish came the hereditary finger cymbals of the Fellh clan. These he fastened to his hand and stepped from his palanquin a living tribute to passions anticipated, a flame against the winter cold.

         With his bucks arrayed at his heels he walked the glittering snail arabesque to meet his cousin upon the main path near the doors. They awaited their introductions then entered the circular hall. The space was immense, chandeliers hanging heavy and ornate from chains that seemed infinite, the ceiling itself beyond reach of the light. The walls were decorated in primitive tribal art—the clubs and spears of the slave tribes—and curved away into the distance, the room a great circle with tall doors at four-points. A ring of a table dominated the floor, cleverly without head or foot, with seating for thousands and enough room from the seatbacks to the walls for every noble’s slaves to stand in waiting behind him. Gama III could imagine the hall when full resembling from above a wheel with long spokes. Just now, with many of the guests drifting here and there, greeting each other, gossiping, taking measure, moving on, he guessed it three-quarters full.

         He and Witting IX found their places at table before making the social rounds. Gama III’s flamboyant attire proved popular, his smile a positive sensation. He brandished it at every opportunity, doing his ardent best to rouse Anticipation. I have seen what you will see, it told. I have known Thrill.

         Soon the servants began announcing the single-clanned: Dancre the Hewg, Embein X the Schteb, and eldest of all, Anda the Aynx who had consumed years enough in her march through life to outnumber the combined age of any three peers. They were newcomers to the fêtes, like many others. And even in their presence, the likes of Gama III and Witting IX, as veterans, enjoyed a certain prestige. Anda herself aimed a raven-eyed gaze for Gama III’s regard. He dipped his head with precision.

         She approached in her immaculate walk. “May I have your ear, young lord?” she asked.

         “It is yours,” he said, “of course and always.”

         The nearby peers excused themselves with deference, and quickly she and he were in a bubble of privacy. She gave courteous inquiries into land, health, and rumor. Then—

         “You have displayed great quality with your achievement,” she declared of his smile. “Indeed, I find you worthy of your reputation.”

         “Reputation is a greedy thing and can grow larger than its worth,” said Gama III with care.

         “It is told that the lord of Fellh and Meyn is both a gourmet of fashionable pursuits and an instigator of the same. He is capable in extinct tongues. His compositions are eloquent. His dedication to protocol and his study of the Void and its dooms are both known and discussed even in the society of my lands. Further, his physiognomy and mentality have endured in steadfast health since the Third Dynasty of Saffraan II the Voord, a suggestion that the finest blood of both his superlative clans feeds his substance.”

         Gama III pressed a finger to his lip in the display of small-to-temperate embarrassment. “I must succumb to humility, lady of Aynx, and protest such a reputation. For what lone soul could play host to this panoply of qualities? None but the very exemplar of magnificence.”

         “But an exemplar of magnificence is precisely the man for my purposes.”

         “Purposes? Does the lady require some deed of me?”

         “The lady wishes a new heir, and an heir, as the dooms which form our realities have declared, requires a sire. Tell me, young lord, how fares your gonad?”

         Gama III had heretofore maintained a low-strummed pleasure at Anda’s attentions, the greater part of his focus alert to any shift in atmosphere that would signal the beginning of Dejanira’s plot. Anda now commanded him whole.

         He held himself with care in every particle. “I am a twain lord,” he said. “For one of your purity, would our mingling not be, in direct terms, a dilution?”

         “Do you know of my sons?” asked Anda. “Grippe, liver slough, dementia of seven sorts, bonebarbs, even a plague of the tissues our clan surgeons have yet to classify. My daughters have fared little better. Two of them, at the least, are yet living, though in such states of decay as to hardly be worth the distinction. Simply, and quite obviously, new blood is required.”

         “And so you would produce a three-clanned heir? I apologize, lady of Aynx, but my confusion remains.”

         “What matters the seed that sprouts the heir? Purity has always been a matter of record, not of blood. And you would of course be compensated,” said Anda. “First and of greatest immediacy, with my friendship. But furthermore, unfettered access to the Aynx libraries, a seat on the Council of Far Astronomers—at which one of my clan sits ever as chair—and first pick for thirty seasons from the Mellenmuhg Distillery.”

         Her breath shifted here to carry an alluring sweetness. “And to accompany the expression of your seed, my thinkers have devised a cunning tonic. It is not well known. In truth I have kept its existence secret. But for your charity I will authorize its use so that your... effort will be accompanied by notable stimulations.”

         “What manner of stimulations—” Gama III began.

         But at that moment, from each of the four towers, clear and sonorous bells pealed the hour. Anda the Aynx turned her gaze at the sound. “We will continue,” she said. “If we survive.”

         Gama III felt his blood gorge and throb. “If we survive,” he replied.

         Her nostrils flared erotically. Then she swept away.

         On rang the bells, and the guests, as if released from fetters, dispersed to take their seats. And here we are, Gama III thought. The table was full, the moment at hand. Anticipation moved as a wild fondle from seat to seat, bowel to bowel, quivers begetting moans and hoarse whispers, emotion stretching jaws with violence. Gama III felt another heartbeat and clutched his hands as the shudder passed through him, turned to his cousin when he was able, offered congratulations with a touch on the sleeve, for Witting IX stared off into the distance, new color burning in his cheeks.

         Gama III was swollen with feelings, and driven by those feelings he began to chant. Silver met crystal as he chimed his finger cymbals—thumb to leechfinger, the universal tone of admiration—and he cried out a single word: daufryd. His peers heard, and they too gave voice. Daufryd was repeated from this pair of blue lips then that, daufryd from a hand of voices, a score, a century. Daufryd, called Gama III, called Witting IX, called the single-clanned and the thirteened, called their echoes from the pale marble floor, the far walls, the rafters lost in shadow. It was a word left to them from Old High Istvael, a word whose meaning was beyond any one phrase in any of the eleven modern tongues. Daufryd, daufryd—at its most intense the mélange of terror, anticipation, and pride when regarding a noble death; but also a moment of abrupt awe for fate; or the ambivalence of mortality; or the ache between uncertainty and prescience; or perhaps simply the tension of the in-between. Here tonight, thrumming along the castle’s inner bones, it meant “we are ready.” Stun us, thrill us, slay us, please us—we are ready. Daufryd, daufryd, daufryd.

         As noble blood stirred to life, thousands of chilled scentless breaths grew hot. The dining hall warmed like the atmosphere upon an autumn dawn and chased the cold from Gama III’s skin. Perspiration sprouted in its wake, the humors of his very flesh. His nose took hold of the metallic tang. His fingers traced against the slick. He rose to his feet. He rang his cymbals. He called daufryd! in a voice grown thick.

         On and on he goaded the chant as he and his peers gazed left and right, looking for Dejanira. He was not alone in standing. He was not alone in searching. Smiles were in abundance as the welcome for their host reached its crescendo, for now would come her entrance, the artist sweeping into the midst of her art as she had so many times before, in memory, in legend, in rumor, her father’s nobility bequeathed to the poise of her spine, her own genius seething in her violet stare. All knew what came next.

         Daufryd!

         Daufryd.

         Daufryd...

         So wild was Anticipation that they chanted until the bells rang again. And in the echo of the new hour, the hall fell silent. The hall grew cold. Some who were standing reclaimed their seats, chairs barking against the marble. Others drifted into councils to decide the graveness of this slight upon dignity. Where was Dejanira? asked the rising murmur. Where was the repast? Where was the theater? Where was Thrill, whose caress they’d traveled the lands to feel hot upon their organs, when Discontent had for so long, and now on this very occasion, made its seat within their breasts? The hour stretched on without reply.

         “Disgraceful noise and furor,” declared Arfest VIII the Roolk-Vang. The ancient lord sat to Gama III’s left, half his visage sagging pendulously in the slack of a decades-old palsy. “Better an oblivion than such embarrassment.”

         “We are delayed,” replied Gama III, “nothing more, certainly. Perhaps of a part with our host’s design.”

         And though the clay-faced decrepit spoke beyond his standing, he had scraped bare a truth. About the hall, many a noble eye had taken the cant of irritation, lids down hooded, gazes aimless in disdain. And though the lords and ladies had gathered in their coteries, notably alone were Pellawurt XII, Witting IX, and Baliz—the veterans, the survivors, those who had spread the tales, had stirred Anticipation, had roused the gathering to folly. And Gama III realized there was no better word. Folly. For only in the throes of a beautiful threat had the raising of voices and the flushing of jaws become acceptable. And for an hour, without peril of any sort, they had excited themselves like fools. Fools! Someone must suffer.

         Gama III spied Anda standing aloof. She turned her back to him.

         He had to take action. With the barest of salutes to Arfest VIII, he pushed from the table then strode the curve of the great wooden ring.

         Between the east-pointing door and the south was a pair of wide chitin screens. Beyond was a passageway that curved a short span and terminated at the kitchens. Here Gama III found the servants surrounded by platters of tonics, beaks, and other fare.

         “What is this?” he demanded. “Why do you sit here quivering like pustules when your masters hunger? You, report. Why have you not served this food? Have you no ears astride that unkempt skull? Have you not heard your masters suffering without refreshment?”

         The female peasant knelt on legs of animal thickness and begged thrice for leniency. She groaned that the great mistress had ordered the servants to wait, ordered that they were to serve nothing until the lords came searching.

         Gama III made the peasant repeat herself, a sensation growing as if a dagger slid the back of his throat—what he judged, from memory, as disquiet—then he strode from that rank place.

         Gama III found Witting IX near their seats.

         “We are being plied,” Gama III confided in a low voice. He told his cousin of what he’d discovered.

         “Servants awaiting the effort of lords,” said Witting IX. “It defies sense.”

         “Except where an effect is desired, perhaps the stimulation of a certain mood.”

         “You believe this an intrigue of Dejanira. But you must know, cousin, that madness or even spite could be the motivation just as well.”

         “If we are forced to wager our reputations, and trust when I say we are doing exactly that, beside which possibility should we pile our lots? Upon the ruin of admitting this was all folly? Or upon the glory of participating in the plot? Risking, we ought risk for glory and set defeat at our heels.”

         “The better to trip upon,” muttered Witting IX. But he thought in silence for short moments then exhaled a scent of determination, his violet tongue flicking across his lip. “I bow to your wisdom, cousin. How do we profit from this snarl?”

         “We improvise.”

         Gama III made his way to the center of the hall, posed his limbs, rang his tallfinger cymbal thrice, the peals keening above the murmur of conversation.

         “Friends,” he pronounced into the spreading quiet, his diction drawn in the rhythm of oration, “I am Gama III the Fellh, the Meyn, lord of Rungblatt and its fourteen estates, serving term as master of Alfellein Harbor with all attendant honors and responsibility.”

         He paused, turning to give regard to the entire circumference of the hall, to its judgment of faces. Among them all, the gaze of Anda the Aynx was as striking as a pearl of wax on clean parchment.

         “We are vexed,” he declared, pitching a long hiss. “Our host is delayed, perhaps for good reason, perhaps for poor. But we are the peers of the Hohstuol. We are masters of principalities, of lives countless, of lands unending. Let us be masters of this night. I have roused the servants to deliver our meal. And to bide the time, I propose a diversion. My noble friends, I propose gant’lope.”

         Immediately there rose approving nods.

         Witting IX showed excellent timing and raised his voice. “I submit my own Offruum buck for first run,” he declared.

         Kurchen LX suggested instead of the usual crops and lashes they collect from the primitive weaponry decorating the walls, and the irony was pleasing to many. Gama III held himself aloof while the eldest among them took first choices of position in the columns then invited others in turn of rank.

         Not all went smoothly: many of the bitterest—Arfest VIII for one, in his contemptible flesh—took no part. The decorative slave bludgeons and spears proved too heavy to wield with any grace and so were returned to their fastenings on the walls. And there was the characteristic delay as wagers were announced, challenged, reiterated, and accepted.

         The honor to call start was afforded to Gama III. He lifted his hand, rang a tone, and upon the blow of Witting IX’s breath the naked Offruum charged between the two rows of noble thrashers.

         The lashes reared high, contorted, snapped, and the sound of falling strokes made a rhythm in the air, a chorus of sharp climaxes as of thick ice suddenly thawed as the blows landed upon the the slave buck’s shoulders and thighs and his upthrust arms. The buck pressed through in mighty oblivion to the pain until Thurva I the Wern, who had wagered against at three-to-one odds, aimed her blow for the ankle. The lick drew blood. The slave buck stumbled. Later blows down the line twisted him and sent him sprawling to the marble floor, well short of the finish. But all agreed it was Thurva who had achieved the felling, and it was to her that the chimes of esteem were rung.

         The climate was improved dramatically by the game, and that improvement continued at the appearance of the meal. But Anticipation was in no wise recovered, and Thrill was far away. And many, especially those eldest and most august, had not forgiven him for the embarrassment of the chant.

         Gama III did not go straight to her. He shared a tonic with one peer, listened to the complaints of another, watched as Kurchen LX’s slave buck ran the gant’lope to the finish. He finally approached her as she dined upon long morsels of wren beak, each sliver passing between her lips as delicately as a physic needle through a pore.

         “May I join you?” he asked.

         Strong acidic musks came pouring from the vented seams of her jacket. “That is undecided,” she said.

         Gama III took this blow with a nod. In the scalding embarrassment of their silly impotent chant, she was dangerous, for one of her status would be vicious when saving face. “I had thought the lady of Aynx might care to continue our conversation.”

         “That is undecided,” she said, and her breath added odors of enormous strength and threat.

         Gama III felt his eyes drying in the onslaught. He gathered the last of his courage. “Has the Lord of Fellh and Meyn, then, become disqualified for the lady’s purposes?” He asked this with his breath full of every particle of sincerity he could summon.

         She had not to that moment taken her eyes from her meal, and the look she gave now could never be confused for inviting. But she did look, and she did lessen the bite of her musks. “Sit,” she said.

         And Gama III would have sat. He would have gladly taken that enormous step toward greater fortune, toward true pleasure, toward the hurtle of esteem that might only come once in a lifetime.

         But for the second time in the night, the conversation was thwarted. For he saw then a high chair, mammoth in design, suddenly resting outside of the table ring where before there had been no chair.

         Upon it sat Dejanira.

         She posed with no evidence of motion, her limbs draping the chair’s angles as if they’d done so for many languid hours.

         A rush of gasps began and ended in equal suddenness as the hall of thousands took notice. The silence that followed was aching.

         Gama III’s heart had lurched with a vertigo that left him sick. His wrists fell cold, his face hot. A fumbling uncertainty took his mind, and he moved to regain his place at table. Arfest VIII was sitting tensed as if ready to leap. Witting IX returned agog.

         Dejanira remained silent, casting her gaze this way and that, violet eyes roving in a stony face.

         The others were correcting their self-possession, herding their slaves, regaining their places with some taut deviant of Anticipation, and it was not until the great wheel was nearly remade that Gama III was overcome by two realizations. The first: he had rudely and perhaps damningly abandoned Anda the Aynx with nary a word of courtesy. He wished to pull his gaze from Dejanira and find Anda, to judge by her manner what damage his slight had wrought. But his gaze remained fixed, for his second realization swept all other thoughts aside.

         Behind Dejanira came striding a slave, taller than any Gama III had ever seen and whose broad naked chest was not the leathery pallor of standard bucks but the gleam of noble flesh. And rising in wisps from the great male’s scalp was a mane of legend. If in the Ysbaddaden’s ink-and-paper histories their god-sire wore hair that stood like a flame, this male’s plumage was an inferno. Gama III’s shock at seeing such a specimen beside Dejanira, the infamous recluse, was immediately made small by the horror that this male, this half-naked magnificence, was the very person of his Lofty Highness the Emperor Roff III the Vang.

         The Emperor planted his feet wide before the chair and raised his hand to silence the rumbles of stupefaction. Had His Highness ever been so thick of the arms? Certainly never had his hair stretched so far. Gama III glanced about. The slaves in their rows were kneeling low, all around the hall, every buck of every tribe and sort.

         “Dh’ainm chim nobroy,” declared Highness Roff, his familiar voice wrapped around foreign words. “Sláinte agus dobry.” He pitched his tones expertly so that Gama III felt the reverberation in his bones. But of the words’ meaning he grasped nothing. This was slave language—or languages, he could not be certain. He passed a look with Witting IX. Behind them the slaves were shuddering, some weeping.

         It was long minutes later that the Emperor ceased in his strange proclamations. Dejanira then raised a scroll from her lap.

         “Health,” she said, the word born from a pique of her lip. “Hear the command of Emperor Roff III the Vang, declaring thus: every creature now within hearing of this voice, heretofore bound by the shackles of slavery, shall hence and forever be deemed free by the laws of the Hohstuol. Souls of noble blood likewise present are commanded to loose all restraints applied to these formerly in bondage.

         “His Highness the Emperor Roff III the Vang further commands that in the spirit of celebration, and to mark the commencement of these new lives, all laws, edicts, and penalties are, within the confines of this estate, hereby suspended.

         “His Highness the Emperor Roff III the Vang finally commands that all doors and passages allowing egress from this property be sealed until the dawn, when ends the solstice night and begins the lengthening of days.”

         Dejanira folded the pronouncement and fell as still as if she’d never stirred.

         The Emperor lifted his hands. Was there surprise in his face? Amusement? “Such is my word,” he declared. By those syllables was the pronouncement made law.

         And Gama III saw the design. Unshackling their slaves, and who among them would refuse? Who but the very purest clanned would defy the Emperor to his face? And who among that few would submit to Fear, would choose Boredom when all had come to prove that each of these was beneath their soles? No, the party guests would every one breach manacle and shackle, and proudly.

         This was why he’d come. This sickly spurting flush, this heaving of his ribs, this was what he remembered from Dejanira’s art, what he’d spend his nights weaving into dream. With his lips pulling themselves in a mask that was not a smile, Gama III rose to the task. The bucks were waiting, heads still bowed but each with his hands outstretched. Gama III summoned the precise combination of acids into his saliva, touched finger to tongue then stroked his mark upon the first pair of manacles. The lock smoked and popped and they fell away in a heavy clangor. Finger to tongue to metal, and the second buck was free, then the third, and on until the thirty-nine males were wreathed in the astringence of their liberty.

         Long minutes of clattering noise throughout the hall and it was done. The noble peers waited as their bucks, who were no longer slaves, paced or shook or stared or wept.

         Witting IX’s prize specimen, the Offruum, was the first to reach for the weapons upon the walls.

         The Emperor was once more styling slave tongues. The odors on his breath, centuries-trained, came flowing on his voice, his voice filling the hall with pressure demanding action. Action and now. Now. Gama III tasted the scent from the emperor’s breath and knew it yet felt nothing from it. It was not mixed to stir his blood.

         The Offruum came from the wall with club and spear. Still limping from the lash at his ankle he moved through the staring company, his eyes ever on His Highness. The slave, the former slave, roamed as if intoxicated and at last came face-to-face with Kurchen LX. He raised the thickness of his club, hesitated, sweat streaming down his naked back, shook himself, leaned close to lay the weapon against Kurchen LX’s shoulder. He pushed.

         Kurchen LX, though wet with gray perspiration of his own, showed nothing of the shock he surely felt. He kept his countenance. He regained his posture and blew a warding breath, thick with disgust and aggression, full in the hulking male’s face.

         The Offruum only flinched when he should have collapsed. He raised the weapon and jabbed Kurchen in the chest. This time the lord fell back, clutching the bruise. The Offruum shoved again. Then he stalked forward, raising the club, and brought the long blunted weight of it down on the lord’s skull. Kurchen made no sound. It was the Offruum who sang out, sang one long howling note and stamped his foot in the violet pool.

         From this the slaughter began.

         The murderer’s cry was echoed from dozens of heavy chests. Brute fists rose. Feet stamped. Swiftly came the rush and clatter of pale creatures snatching weapons from Braugholm’s eternal gray walls. Bare hands were enough for some, lord flesh and lady’s torn like low meat. The slaves of Norcous and Theye and Klonza stood guard by their masters, threw blows for their masters, spat words in combat against their species.

         Gama had reached for his cousin and found only an empty seat. He was still searching when his own thirty-nine came at him in a phalanx, shields and spears, one stab and a second and a third. Gama was cut. Grinding fire keened along his breast, and he threw himself backward, bleeding and screaming, and he fled into the press, for the torrent that had burst now swirled in crazy froth. Those bucks bent upon their freedom pressed at the hall’s four doors. Those bucks filled with rage circled, killing, slicking the floor in gray-violet.

         The greater part of the nobles had collapsed into the center space behind a screen of loyal slaves—former slaves!—the lords breathing, musking, spitting every caustic ward known.

         Gama was rushing for that garrison when he was seized with force at the elbow.

         “Cousin!” cried Witting. “Haste, cousin. Come.”

         Gama followed, the pair of them flinching and shying, darting a wild path across the hall. Witting grasped arms and cried out to others on his flight through the violence so that their party swelled from two to five to seven, but to what point Gama knew not until by the narrowest of timing Witting led them through a gap in the table, toward and past the chitin screens, and with a last frantic effort into the harbor of the servants passageway.

         The servants were nowhere to be found. With great difficulty Gama and Witting and the rest dragged clumsy tables and chairs and cooking items from the kitchens to stack as a barricade.

         They had obstructed the entry by more than half when there came screams just on the other side.

         “Pull me through!” cried Anda. Her hair was torn and her face bloody but the voice, even in its mania, was ancient.

         Gama was breathing with alarming difficulty. His limbs lay at his sides as heavy as leaden saps. “We can’t!” he cried. He looked Witting in his eye. “We can’t help her!”

         Witting nodded and nodded and nodded, faster and faster, as if to agree. But he suddenly screeched and scrambled flailing over the barricades. He tripped, stumbled, bruising himself with the sound of terrible thuds, and reaching Anda he grasped her by the arm and dragged her inside with desperate heaves. No sooner did he pull her to freedom than a great pale arm lunged through the gap and seized Witting by his leg. He screamed and spat venoms but the grip would not loose, not until Anda leapt to his aid and stabbed at the arm with a stake. The two fell into safety embracing each other, sobbing.

         “Thank you,” said Witting.

         “Thank you,” said Anda.

         Thank you thank you thank you and their lips met sloppily.

         Gama and the others finished the barricade only moments later, pressing a table to the final gap. Shuddering and hot, Gama crouched in the passageway on the stones. They were eight, hiding here in silence, passing the long night among the echoes of massacre.

* * *

         Gama had dozed. He came to himself now to a castle in quiet. And by instinct he knew dawn had broken. He rose to his feet stiff in every joint, his wounds crusted and tight.

         The others still slept, Witting and Anda there pressed close in a huddle. Gama woke them.

         “It is finished,” he said.

         Witting lifted his head, studying the silence carefully. Anda studied Gama much the same. Their color was returned, both of them, to the polish of good nobility. And for true, Gama III himself felt sound in sanity.

         It was unfortunate, the work of removing the barricade. The servants were yet nowhere to be found, and so it fell to the cadre of peers to sully themselves with the clumsiness. When at last they pushed into the great hall, they were met with the climax of Dejanira’s game.

         The hall stank of broken organs, the floor near impassable for the bodies. The walls were bare of the savages’ weapons. The table was smashed, here in splinters, here a piece braced as a failed barricade—the great wheel broken. And on every surface, pulsing from a torn neck in lilac, stagnant in a puddle of old black, splashed in every geometry possible, was noble blood.

         Besides the eight of Witting IX and Gama III and company, there were scant few others there surveying the work. Every slave was gone. Briefly Gama III wondered how he would travel home.

         But more he was taken with the arithmetic of a fast census. He took measure of the dead and of the living, and by estimation nine of every ten nobles was slain. The emperor walked the carnage with the rest, arms swinging, stride long, seeming a man much pleased with extra space.

         And of course, there upon her chair, sat Dejanira, cold and lovely and nobly poised.

         It was Anda the Aynx who first began ringing her finger cymbals. Then it was Witting IX, and Arfest VIII who had somehow survived. Gama III joined in and so did the rest, and soon the applause was ringing loudly across the hall. The Emperor only stood smiling his satisfaction. The cymbals rose higher and higher in their noise as the experiences of the night came flooding back again. There came cries of “splendid!”, “grand!”, “superb!”, and soon every throat was raised in celebration of this woman the artist.

         Dejanira swept the hall with her gaze, locking eyes with every surviving soul. Her mask of calm then broke suddenly, and there flashed across her face an explosion of emotion. Hatred, Witting IX would swear later. Rapture, would claim Anda the Aynx. It would forever remain a mystery, for Dejanira then began to wail in powerful laughter, her every fiber shuddering until abruptly the eruption ceased. She went still, her eyes staring at the far wall. The applause completed its great length and fell to silence, and it was the Emperor who at last approached the chair. He reached his hand, then turned to announce to the survivors that Dejanira, their host, was dead.

* * *

         Out in the light of the new year, where the winter sun had risen and rewritten the night’s frosts and the broken moon floated in its scattered pattern, a pale ghost of its nighttime gleam, the survivors paced the yard of masterless palanquins and carriages, each facing the terrible quiet.

         Already the Dread and Thrill of the night were vaporized into nothing, so far out of reach as to exist only as the information in Gama III’s thoughts, and he was facing that hollowness with no hope of reprieve. The artist was dead. Never would her like be seen again.

         He looked out beyond the castle gate, to the road where it wound through a field of white grasses that rippled to the horizon; tall enough, perhaps, to hide the hulks of the freedmen who had fled the castle and who could be watching with their pale eyes, like hunters, unseen. And he could summon nothing to his blood. Not now, when the relaxed jargon of his peers was too real, the threat too uncertain. He could not stir himself. Not here.

         In his desolation he studied his peers, eager to catch any emotion to spark his own , and by chance he witnessed Witting the IX and Anda the Aynx pass one another, shoulder to shoulder, with no flicker of feeling between them.

         And Gama III had a vision.

         He saw the survivors, the castle, the Emperor and the lands, old nobles and young and esteemed and reviled, all encased and immobilized inside a crystalline gem. They were, every one, as bubbles caught behind the facets, beautiful and eternal. The sameness of safe. The safety of same.

         Gama removed his chimes. The music of them rang out briefly, and the gaze of every survivor turned by habit. With the chimes in hand Gama took a step and felt a pressure in his breast. A second and felt a beat. A third and the beating broke loose. Witting saw him coming and began a bow, then saw his demeanor and froze.

         Gama extended the chimes in unsteady hands, in sweating, prickling hands. “For you, cousin,” he said.

         Witting only stared, so Gama laid the chimes at his feet.

         “I should feel jealousy,” said Gama out loud, and the beating became a thunder. “I do,” he said. “I am jealous. I would have liked to kiss you,” he said to Anda. There were gasps across the yard. His blood roared in his ears.

         Reeling, Gama turned his back to them and walked. Whose land was this? Where was his home? What direction was he going? He could remember none of it. He could hear the survivors muttering some ways behind him. Would any follow? Would any understand? But he gave no more mind to them. His only mind was for the aching in his breast, which he followed like a lode—under the gate and along the road then off the road into the wild white grass.

         To his bliss or to his death, unknowning if the twain were one.

         He only went out.

         Only knowing his heart.

         Excruciated by his heart.

         The hungry crushing of his heart.

Copyright © 2017 Michael Anthony Ashley

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Michael Anthony Ashley attended the 2011 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. Afterward, her poetry and short fiction started to get published by Strange Horizons, Apex, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Flash Fiction Online, among many others. She currently reviews local theater for The New England Theatre Geek. She can be found at your house party, petting your cat. You can visit her online to read her other work at gilliandaniels.com or say hi over at @gilldaniels on Twitter.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Riverhome,” by Veli Nyström

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

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press

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