Beneath Ceaseless Skies #93 Read online

  Issue #93 • Apr. 19, 2012

  “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade,” by Mike Allen

  “Pridecraft,” by Christian K. Martinez

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE IVY-SMOTHERED PALISADE

  by Mike Allen

  Dearest Eyan,

  If luck is on my side, I’ll have returned before you ever find this.

  If not, if Bryn is reading this to you, please know first and foremost that I love you and never wanted to leave your side. Nor did I leave out of fear. I’ve learned who slaughtered our peoples in the other three encampments. And I intend to stop it before it happens again. Before we’re all exterminated.

  If you read this and I have not returned, I beg you not to follow me. Leave your men behind, leave Calcharra, cross the mountains and never return.

  I know you better than that. You won’t. But you must at least find new hiding spaces. And never stop moving, though even that might not save you. If I’ve failed, if I don’t come back, you’re not safe. The muershadows will hunt down all who fight for Lady Garthand.

  They are nothing the tales say they are, not a cult of assassins or berserkers driven by sorcery or vengeful demons. You can watch for them all night with blades drawn. You’ll see nothing till their hands close around your throat and stifle the screams of your men.

  I must tell you how I learned who they are, and why I have to leave.

  As I write this, I’m sitting in the water room during the small hours. The sun will rise and set, and at dusk I will go to Manse Lohmar. I’m sure you know its grounds—that huge swath of land carved out of the middle of Rosepike Quarter, so overgrown with thornbrushes that their branches snag the sleeves of passers-by in places where the streets abut its boundaries. And I’m sure, like every living soul in all the seven quarters of Calcharra, you’ve grown up believing no one lives there.

  That’s a lie.

  I’ve told you my mother and father joined in the Cabal of Grace that bribed one hundred thieves to break all the locks of Auguste Urnath’s debtors’ prison, and that they were betrayed and murdered in the first of Lord Urnath’s Purges, and that I fled and fell in with the urchins hiding beneath the streets of Rosepike Quarter. Only the first part is true. I didn’t escape, but the armsmen who forced my parents to drink the poison broth lacked the stomach to murder a child. So they bound me and dragged me to the Rosepike orphanage.

  My first month there I cried and asked for my mother and father every night, and the nurses beat me for it and encouraged the other girls to mock me.

  I didn’t understand at the time what had happened to my parents or why I’d been taken. Over the years the nurses gave me so many contradictory answers that I learned not to trust anything they said. I wasn’t the oldest of the girls in my wing, but I grew into the tallest and strongest, and the other orphans learned that snickering behind my back or stealing my reward-sweets brought dire consequences.

  The three wings of the orphanage curl around a bleak stone courtyard, sealed on the fourth side by a black iron fence crowned with needle teeth. On warm days, when the Orphanmaster felt unusually generous, we’d be allowed to run in that space, though I angered the Keepers so often that I spent most such days locked in one of the oven-hot fourth floor cells. Yet I had the same view through the window grilles that the other children did through the fence.

  The back of the orphanage faced a flat stretch of thornflowers run riot, tall as a man, a half-mile deep and extending north and south as far as we could see from our vantage. Their blood-violet blooms with their reek crossing anise with onion taunted us as much as their spines and their burrs. Beyond that moat of brambles stood a palisade taller than the orphanage, taller than any buildings we could see, its immense stones so dense with vines you might at first glance mistake it for a forest. I wonder now, Eyan, if our vantage might not have been the only place in Rosepike Quarter where one can clearly view the palisade.

  We didn’t know the name of the place, only that it had to be centuries old. From my fourth floor cell, my face pressed to the bars, I made out the tops of trees beyond that wall, and past them towers, equally choked with ivy that didn’t quite bind shut the mouths of empty windows. The nurses told us many stories about that place, some that gave me nightmares when I was younger, but by my tenth year in the orphanage I no longer believed any of them.

  The day I escaped, I stole a knife and wore an extra tunic. In the courtyard, washing linens with the older girls, I simply set my work down, took my tub and washboard to the fence, placed the board on the tub propped against the fence posts, and stood first on one, then wobbly on the other, gripping the posts in my fists. Then I pulled my legs up, clenched the center post between my knees, and started to climb.

  The other girls didn’t follow me, but they didn’t make noise, either. They wanted to see if I’d make it over, or die.

  My arms trembled as I gripped the horizontal bar at the top. I swung my legs, hooked one bare foot into the space between two of the spikes, and pulled myself over with a yell. A spike tore my shin and I dropped headfirst into the thornflowers.

  I didn’t break a bone or lose an eye, but I hurt in so many places I could have just lain there until the Keepers snagged me with their mancatchers, but I made myself crawl. The girls starting shrieking, “Daeliya’s escaped,” and I heard the thumps of the armsmen’s boots. I stayed on my hands and knees, used the knife to slash through the knotted stalks.

  I’d forced my way through several yards of spiky tangle when I heard the Orphanmaster call. “I’ve told the armsmen not to waste their bolts. They’ll be ready whenever you lift your head out.”

  That made my options clear as water. None of them would ever hear me beg for my life.

  Perhaps the Orphanmaster hoped I’d bleed to death in that field. But I kept my head and chose my path carefully. When I reached the palisade the sun had set. Small slashes covered me, and bruises on bruises.

  From the courtyard, climbing the bluff of ivy had seemed dog-simple. As I stared up at the weave of vines that at that moment looked taller than the thornflower moat was wide, I wondered if a crossbow bolt could be a mercy after all.

  But I refused that fate. I found a sturdy stalk, with handholds and footholds, and started to haul myself up. The ivy proved to be layers deep, with some of the crisscrossing vines thick as tree trunks. Raw skin and bone-deep aches strove to bind my limbs, but I forged on.

  It felt like I climbed for hours in the starlight. In the dark, the thornflowers seemed as far away as the stars. Yet I kept ascending, until my arms and legs felt rubbery as gum.

  When I reached the top I hoped the width of the blocks would allow me to lie down, but the vegetation mounded at the wall’s crest made the surface treacherous. Nor did prospects improve on the other side. I’d thought that because I could see the tops of trees there might be a terraced garden and a short climb down awaiting me on the other side, but the trees loomed immense and ancient, and the grounds they shaded far below were lost in darkness.

  I heard something moving on the wall, an animal rustling, and when I turned, the mat of wood and leaves I stood on cracked and tilted. Before I even understood what had happened I was falling, the twisted trunks blurring past as I scrabbled at nothing.

  Perhaps it’s blessing that I don’t remember the landing.

  It should have been the end of me, Eyan, but it wasn’t.

  I lived in a dream state, awareness surfacing between waves of pain. Most of the time I floated in complete darkness. Sometimes I perceived a wavering light, its edges always shifting. At times I knew I was dre
aming. Once I stood before a doorway, the room beyond so bright I couldn’t make out its contents. People milled, the intense light reducing them to shadow. A slender woman stood in the entrance, blocking my view. A translucent veil covered her head-to-ankle, exposing only her feet, which were gray and wrinkled with age to an astonishing degree. Under the veil she raised her hand to her mouth, commanding silence, and a voice whispered in my ear, “At last. I won’t let him know you’re here.”

  I awoke. I lay in a large bed within a chamber that stretched off into cavernous dark, save for a lamp burning on a table. A slender boy sat in its glow, a huge book open before him. He let a page slide from fingers delicate as any girl’s.

  He could have stepped from one of the orphanage nurses’ creepy tales of changelings. Hair like thistledown, arching brows, ears curled almost to a point. Then he noticed my stare and shocked me with his whispery voice. “You’re awake. You must be thirsty.”

  I must have slipped from consciousness, because when I opened my eyes again his cold palm lifted my head. He pressed a flagon against my lips full of a drink like honey. Warmth spread through me and the pain receded.

  I woke again alone in the black. Dank odors fouled the air, mildew and worse. Somewhere beyond the bed I heard someone bumping around. I called out and the sounds stopped, but no one answered. I lay hardly daring to breathe, yet either I was hallucinating or merely asleep again, for I had a vision of a spiraling stair of gold, more ornate and bejeweled than anything I’d ever imagined from the tales the nurses told. At its top stood the woman in the veil. She didn’t speak, but I felt her gaze upon me.

  At some point I opened my eyes. The boy with the lamp had returned. He offered food, though at first I was reluctant to try it. Fruits heaped the platter by my pillow, none like I’d ever seen before, as well as mushrooms, lichens, and stranger things. None tasted unpleasant, though they were bitter or salty or sour in unexpected ways.

  I could move only my left arm to snatch morsels from the tray. Beneath the covers I’d been mummified in bandages, braced with wooden splints. I discovered this with furtive glances stolen as the boy absorbed himself in another book.

  I jolted as he spoke. “I’m re-reading the Cantos of Olderra the Witch.” The phrase meant nothing to me. He held up the tome so I could see its pages. “In these stanzas she twines her life with that of her mortal enemy, the warlock Elalef. So long as he’s alive, she can’t die, and if she dies, he will die too. I’ve hunted through many translations for hints to how she did it.” The rows of symbols looked ominous to me. He recognized my bewilderment. “You don’t know the story? This is one of the oldest versions, you can tell from the ridiculous number of repetitions of the ‘H’ rune.” Then his eyes widened. “You don’t know your letters.”

  A spike of anger jabbed through the warmth of the elixir he’d given me. “What’s it to you if I don’t?” That spike grew hotter. “Who are you anyway? Where am I?”

  “I’m Leonind,” he said. “You fell into our grove, but you didn’t die, and I didn’t let my stepbrothers kill you.”

  “Brothers?” I asked. “What brothers?”

  But he ignored me. “Was I wrong to help you?”

  I had no answer for that. Instead I asked, “You bandaged me?”

  Impossibly, he grew paler, and I couldn’t help but laugh a little, which appeared to humiliate him more. “I gave my stepsisters instructions and they did the work,” he said. “I’ve done nothing improper.”

  Eyan, you know me best of all, so you know his embarrassment just made me laugh louder. Though I learned then that in my condition laughing led to agony. My broken bones singing, I reached out for the flagon, and despite my mockery he brought it, his mouth pressed in a dour line.

  I dozed and dreamt of a voice haranguing me with questions: my name, where I came from, why I’d climbed the wall. I told the voice to leap off a tower and drown in a well, but it never stopped badgering.

  The veiled woman stood at the end of a long balcony, arched doors regimented along the wall on one side and on the other a filigreed rail with an abyss beyond. She walked toward me on those grotesque feet, her steps silent. “Not so loud,” she whispered. “Not so loud.” I woke as a heavy object shifted in the dark. I lay there and listened with a panicked heart, but the sound never resumed.

  My days and nights unspooled as one. I could only be certain I was conscious whenever Leonind appeared.

  Once I shouted at him to leave me alone and struck at him. My fist never reached him. An arm lashed out from the shadows and a stone-gray hand clenched my wrist, strong and immobile as an iron ring. And as cold. I stared at its flesh, withered as salted meat, and saw it belonged to a person, or a semblance thereof, that had arms and legs and a head, but I made out no face or features. The shape defied my eyes, wouldn’t condense into focus.

  “Are you done?” Leonind asked.

  Heart in mouth, I couldn’t answer.

  “Let her go,” he said. Within a second the creature faded into the dark.

  I understood then that he and I were never alone and knew what I heard moving whenever he extinguished the lamp.

  For a time after that, I was much less inclined to taunt him, though he never did anything to threaten me.

  Long months seemed to pass in the dark. Slowly, under his unasked-for care, I healed.

  He made it his business to attempt to teach me written words. He said he wanted to share the wonders locked within those leathery books. At first I scoffed and laughed, and savored the sour expression this induced. After my scare, I cooperated.

  And I took to it like fire to paper sheaves. Eyan, I don’t have time to account for everything to you, not now. We began with simple tales, the ones I knew from the nurses, but he required me to read them aloud from scribbles and if I tried to simply make them up—and several times I did—he immediately knew and his lips curled in a way that combined impatience, contempt, and an odd enjoyment, as if my rebellion entertained him.

  We moved on to poetry etched in centuries-old runes. Once I could flex my right arm he allowed me a tablet and a stylus. On occasion I contemplated stabbing him with it but then recalled all the amazing tales he had spun through my mind, the stories of Olderra the Witch, the sagas of the Ice Prince, the ballads of the Nine Child Serpents, adventures I’d snatched for myself from the very page. Forgive my confession, Eyan, but the thought of ending it saddened and shamed me.

  I trained another way, too, that galvanized my blood with fear the first time I tried it and every time after. When I was alone in the dark, when I heard nothing else moving in the chamber, I began to restore my mobility. I made myself crawl. I made myself walk. I couldn’t tell you how long it took, but those opportunities didn’t arise often. Sometimes, confronted with silence, I waited too long, too scared to move, and the lamp would light and Leonind would appear, my chance gone.

  A long time passed, I don’t know how long, the orphanage rendered a phantom of memory, before I could stand without collapsing. I started to range out into the room, which was vast and filled with detritus—rotted, splintered chairs, tables, shelves.

  After the first painful bruise, which forced me to invent a lie for Leonind, I learned to navigate at a snail’s pace on my hands and knees, one arm extended in front of me. That’s how I at last found the door. I listened at its crack and thought I heard voices outside, though I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t dare call out, and I shook too hard with fear to press further, anxious that at any moment freezing hands would seize me in the dark.

  The lessons continued, and if Leonind knew of my excursions he never let on. Reflecting back, I’m sure he didn’t. I think he was so confident I couldn’t escape that he never bothered to have me watched.

  He said he’d share an odd story with me when I could write out the tale of Olderra and the Antlered Man from memory, without mistakes. At last I presented it to him, and I confess I took delight in his delight.

  He claimed this story would scare me.
I dared him to try—he had before, without success. What tale from the imagination could weigh upon me in that ghoulish place?

  He told me that in the Goldbrook Quarter of Calcharra there once lived a man who by day was a powerful merchant in the quartz-mining trade and by night a lord of thieves, so brazen he’d wear stolen necklaces of platinum and bracelets of diamond when he called on other merchants. No treasuries were raided or ransoms demanded without his blessing. Those who defied his law suffered worse than those he targeted for plunder.

  He believed that one estate here in Rosepike Quarter held riches that dwarfed his ill-gotten hoard. Its grounds could have engulfed an entire town, and the walls enclosing it stood taller than any tower. Tales painted this place of fearsome spires as home to a dynasty of necromancers, but the robber-merchant dabbled in the dark arts himself and sneered at the notion that any such person could pose a threat.

  At this point in the telling I realized Leonind spoke of the manse itself, and I paused in my next writing exercise and listened in full.

  The inhabitants of the manse ignored his offers of parlay. A pair of cutpurses sent to scout the grounds never returned. The robber-merchant stormed through the halls of his own manor, terrorizing his much younger wife and the tiny son who had filled him with such pride not long before.

  A man like him had a web of favors to gather, and he reeled in the thickest of all. One of the nine Lords of Night had enlisted his assistance in eliminating a rival prior to ascending to that dark assassins’ council. The robber-merchant approached this fell wizard and requested an alliance against the sorceress rumored to rule the manse.

  No sooner had that pact been signed in blood than a caller came to the robber-merchant’s manor. A wan, willowy girl with snow-white hair, she presented herself as the lady of Manse Lohmar. It’s a wonder the thief king didn’t snap her neck right then, but they consulted alone, and afterward he announced to his stunned and cowed household that the lady would become his second wife and the manse would become their new home.