Beneath Ceaseless Skies #204 Read online

  When you give a thing a name, you give it power. I was given an extraordinary name and thus, an extraordinary power. I push away, past. I reach for everything. I root the body in the world it would have known. The world comes into focus like a stuttering filmstrip, black and white and then on fire with neon and gaslight. Popcorn and cotton candy pervade the air and dragging in a breath leaves me dizzy; somewhere, blood has been spilled, because its fetid layer lingers under everything, keeping everyone warm, filled.

  I pay no attention to the reflection of my body in the misshapen mirrors I pass. I am light and unbroken, and even spreading my hands brings no pain. I reach for everything I want. I have never been allowed to want, so I allow the world to flood me.

  I caress crones and angels alike; I dance with satyrs and share potions with a man in a black mask that shows me my own face—my face, writhing threads that refuse to be knit into any one feature. The potion steals my breath; the man drinks it down as if it is his own and grows into a huge dragon against the night sky; wings of stars and nebulous breath, and he’s gone, screaming in fire and longing.

  This circus fills my veins, delights like the traveling circus never did. We were freaks; homeless and wandering for eternity. Broken from the world, a fragment of glass pressed into a bleeding heel. This circus is life, rooted and fixed into the spine of creation.

  The lights drain from the world when I turn a corner; the calliope music grows distant and now there is only the scent of blood and tears. Sweet treats do not exist in these dark lanes. Within the cages that stack the alleys, small black girls have been dressed like daisies, their delicate petals splattered with blood. They are two-headed and three-legged and all watch me pass with silent, black eyes. Even smaller girls reside in jars, their lids spun tight, gifted with single air-holes. Farther on, girls have been crafted into strange and terrible things; bats, cats, rats. It is a broken poem, one that ends in the hideous display of what I know to be a siren; this beautiful creature is part woman, part bird, but here she is only all misery. She is pinned to a board, oil-slick feathers streaked with saliva, blood, ejaculate.

  “Agnessa?”

  She lifts her head, her familiar gaze defiant. I am struck as if by a fist, straight in my throat, and I run, refusing this nightmare. But I cannot go back, for the lanes have closed themselves away. I go forward into the unending labyrinth that leads me to him.

  Of course it’s him. Jackson, on display as he might have always been had it not been for me. Jackson was only ever a misunderstood horror. No longer did he possess any human aspect but was wholly as he had first been made: thick scaled body, slavering fanged mouth, countless tentacles snapping as he tries to escape the cage holding him. He is nearly the color of blood, suffused with fury as every attempt to pry the cage apart fails. He takes no notice of me, which allows me to get to the very edge of the cage where he greets me with violence. One tentacle coils around my throat and shoulders, effortlessly lifting me from the ground.

  “I know your face,” he snarls.

  His touch gentles, and in my pulse I can hear the click-clack of a train over metal tracks. It never happened here because I, because we never crossed threads. After his creation, we never saw each other again; he never asked me to bind him into a mortal body, and the world has fallen to ruin. I see the scars that mark his body, the evidence of humiliations which must be meager compared to those he has known on the inside. In this place where he cannot even see the sky.

  I have no sisters here, no sisters who might help me undo what has been done. In my terror, I reach for them. Across the years and unreal construct of this place—this place never happened, I tell myself. I tell Jackson. In concert we shriek as the world is undone, bodies flayed in a ceaseless, consuming wind. Within its heart, my sister Mae who bears all things; who waits, who holds even my thread and might end this torment.

  Jackson’s sleeping compartment is no more lavish than any other on the train, though it is possessed of a single curtain drawn across its entire width for a measure of privacy beyond that which the locked car door provides. Against this black cotton curtain, Mae’s naked body glows and I linger to see her back, am drawn by her breath.

  With Jackson’s ruined fingers I pull the burned marmalade spatters from my sister’s skin, from the long line of her neck. She is not burned, though her skin flushes pink every time I peel away another piece of candied marmalade. As I go, her skin smooths back to its ivory, the color of elephant tusk, the color of a dream turned inside out, and there is as always that low sheen, that shimmer that tells me to dip my fingers in and watch the ripples. I stroke a finger down Mae’s arm, starting at the crest of her shoulder, lingering in the concave curve of her elbow. Her pulse thrums hello.

  In the gloom that falls between us, I cannot tell the marmalade’s flavor until my tongue is on it. Burnt limes. My mouth works the splatter with a strange fervor; teeth and tongue glance Mae’s skin, lightly marking her, and that is when I feel the slide of her hand into my hair. I expect Mae to pull me away, for it rests with her to say when a thing is finished, but Mae’s hold only tightens. Does she know it’s me, her sister within Jackson’s body? I exhale, teeth closing on flesh and not marmalade, and the low sound that fills the curtained space comes from us both.

  The press of tongue becomes too much for the skin to endure. The skin that anchors Mae in this world parts, dissolves, and I fall into the reality of her. More coils of thread; familiar spools and spindles. I look for my own path; each of us must also have a thread. But I never find it, and understand that I never will (that I cannot, for some things are forbidden even us). I look until it’s Mae’s mouth I find—I want to kiss a willing mouth—and I’m kissing her, and she’s kissing me, and she knows me for her sister, for the beginning of all things.

  As if she can sense my questions, she licks them from my mouth, carries them away, and for the moment, there is only the blessed tide of her body rushing over mine. No gentle swell but a wave to knock me to my knees. Mae lifts Jackson’s ruined hands, and in her eyes they are whole again, unbroken and if not beautiful then usable. I slide them over breast and belly, fitting fingers into Mae one by one by one, until she breaks.

  “This isn’t the end,” Mae says.

  She strokes her fingers down the inside of my arm. My skin peels back under the gentle pressure. No muscle, no bone, only the threads wriggling like fish beneath a calm pool, blue until Mae touches them. Her finger is electric inside me. Her fingers plait me into sections for study, for love, for disposal—but the disposal never comes. I ache for it and it never comes.

  “Everything ends,” I whisper and the hot, broken metal of the train groans as cold rain pours from the sky.

  “Not everything.”

  After the rain, fog swallows the world. I emerge from the wreck of the train, into a cottony wall of fog that obscures everything but vague tree limbs above. A skeletal dog trots out of the fog; she’s following the line of the tracks, ignoring the hulk of the train, but draws to a stop when she sees me. Long legged and lean like she hasn’t eaten in—

  “Years,” I whisper and my voice sounds large in the dense air. The dog’s ears go up, like small bits of fabric in a sudden breeze. They gleam with wetness; she has been walking in the rain, this dog the color of fog. Everything is familiar.

  The dog pads closer, then sinks onto her haunches, watching. Her eyes reflect a shrunken world, though when she blinks, the landscape shifts, vanishes, then slowly returns. I watch her until she yawns, and then I head down the track, along the burned length of trains. The dog follows me as I poke through the rubble.

  The survivors do not see me, and when I find Jackson’s body in the rubble, I understand why. Yet, I still occupy this body; the hands I reach with are still his own, if under my control. His body is flattened beside the tracks, his cheek clammy beneath my fingers. Jackson is dead, the train is demolished, and I— Could go anywhere.

  This is the choice. It is mine to say, when never it wa
s before—though I am still the point of creation. This: the moment before.

  I lift a burned scrap of paper from the ground, a fragment of a poster, and the dog sidles closer. She stretches her neck to take a breath of air around the burned poster and I, moving slow, set the paper before her. She bends her head and the paper sticks to her nose. I pluck it free and fold it into my hand.

  “Walk further down with me,” I say. The fog keeps my voice close, and the dog’s ears perk. She watches when I gesture toward the caboose that seems to have turned itself inside out.

  The caboose’s contents litter the world. Jars of marmalade exploded under the intense heat, splatters of sweet having adhered themselves to the train, the tracks, the ground. Burned droplets of sugar and fruit drip from the meager canopy of trees. Oil-slick colors have melted into stained glass mockeries the dog licks.

  I find one of Lisbeth’s cooking knives in the debris, under a flood of orange marmalade which is burned to an amber lozenge. One of her mixing bowls rests on its side, clouded dreams spilling into the railroad ties; the stars are black now, the mass no longer churning out the starstuff that makes everything and everyone. A bell jar sits where the caboose’s back door used to be, a miniature Ferris wheel captured under its perfect dome. There isn’t a fingerprint on it, nor dust, and even when the fog reaches down, the wheel recoils from the glass. Untouchable.

  A marmalade jar rests against a railroad tie, whole and uncracked. I roll the time-heavy jar into my hand, and before me stand my sisters—Mae and Lisbeth and the ground is wet with rain and blood both. The sun is out and it is snowing and I push myself to standing. I offer Lisbeth the knife, Mae the jar. We could leave this place at long last, we three; we could allow the train to keep this broken fate, or we could choose one better. But to take this path, we must be bound as we were.

  This is the decision.

  Cold fog, the whine of a dog (the whine of a god), and the press of a willing mouth against my own.

  We are a train, tonight comprised of forty-seven cars. Our shape and size are dictated by the needs of Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade. Sometimes we are smaller, and sometimes we stretch long—as long as we ever have, tonight! We run slipstream rails alone under moonlight—it’s cold here, but growing warmer, sunrise on the horizon. Within us, cars expand for miles as needed: green with dense jungle, polka-dotted with blue-eyed lakes, deserts tonguing thorned acacia trees. Sometimes, glittering snow rushes in our wake; sometimes, warm seawater, gushing from hidden springs.

  I was a body.

  I am, once more, a train.

  Copyright © 2016 E. Catherine Tobler

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  E. Catherine Tobler knows something about walking tightropes, working as both an editor and writer. Her fiction has appeared in in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including six stories set in her traveling circus universe. The Kraken Sea, a novella set in this circus universe, is now available from Apex Book Company. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, www.ecatherine.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  UNDER SHE WHO DEVOURS SUNS

  by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  By the time Melishem returns to her birth-city Tessellated Talyut, there is little of her that anyone can recognize. Her gaze burns unhuman amber, her bare scalp glistens with meteorite blood, her articulated arms murmur with live moths. Antennae peek through the gaps in her joints, more delicate and superb than any lace.

  Her bare feet track salt across the earth, leaving shriveled worms and withered grass in her wake. She has been walking a long time, unresting and unseeing of any sight save her objective.

  She arrives before the Gate of Glaives at sunrise, the sky green and trembling behind her.

  “I’ve come back,” she rasps in a voice of burnt honey and rust, more bitter than sweet, “to fight Sikata Lantern-of-God.”

  The gate-guard, one of her brothers, looks down and fights not to flinch; he knew her well once, and so notices the change within as well as without: she does not see him, let alone recall that he is her kin. Still he tries. “First Sister,” he calls. There is no answer. “You’ve returned too late. Sikata is gone.”

  A flicker, something like an expression, crosses the ruin of her face. Her eyes track his movements with a predator’s edge, and despite the distance he can see razor-shapes flitting within her irises. They seem too big to fit and yet her eyes seem infinitely enormous, an ocean. “What do you mean?”

  He moves to climb down out of sibling obligation—family is family—but stops himself. This is not, quite, his sister. Instead he stays on his perch, a distance that grants him the illusion of safety. “Talyut was under siege. She perished in our defense and purchased us another year of peace.”

  Melishem’s head twitches side to side, as of a bird sighting an intriguing morsel. “There was a war?”

  “You have been gone a long time.” The guard draws a breath of the acrid, leaden air: dust and starvation, smoke and shrapnel. “She won the duel but succumbed to a wound in her shadow. I will show you her grave.”

  * * *

  Sikata Lantern-of-God. Named so for her accomplishment, her peerless skill with mirror-gun and sliver-knife: thus she is fit to be God’s light. The same chosen weapons as Melishem’s. The same age, and they grew hand in hand, learning forms and fighting routines side by side. They were equal, and Melishem was content.

  In Talyut, as all cities under She Who Devours Suns, the brightest and sharpest of duelists are selected as champions to decide the course of war and justice, policy and commerce. When Melishem and Sikata came of age, all believed Talyut would appoint two champions.

  Their match lasted three hours without reprieve, a feat far beyond human endurance. It did not conclude in a draw. It concluded with Sikata the victor.

  Sikata has been buried at the apex of the city’s potentiates, the possibility-pillars that converge in Talyut, and her grave is a work of art. The rarest substances have been secured to create her likeness: chassis of cured viscera harvested from the stomachs of dream-behemoths, limbs of anglerfish-steel and thunder-ivory, streaming hair spun from mourning threads and ballistic certainty. Her weapons rest with her, polished to star-gleam and oiled serpent-sleek.

  Melishem gazes at all this with her thoughts unmoored, her feet circumscribed by dead soil and her lungs filled with air purified by potentiates. She attempts to connect the shrine with what she has seen in her homecoming. In her passage through the city, she witnessed cracked concourses and jaundiced houses, calcified gardens and permafrost patches where once there were olive trees rich with fruits. But it did not occur to her to take notice.

  In her journeys, she did a great many things. She extinguished ghost forests and sank fox islets. She broke her body and put it back together, stronger and faster than before. She went under the earth, swam through its slow-moving capillaries, and drank of eternity. But her thoughts had room for one name and one goal only: Sikata.

  And now Sikata is no more, here only in shrine, in image. In memory.

  She is aware, as a mountain is aware of distant winds, of the guard murmuring questions. Where have you been, what have you done to yourself, God grant us Her strength for we have no champion now. She is aware that she has seen no children in Talyut, where once the streets ran thick with them, the day wealthy with their laughing and crying, the roof-tiles jangling under their fleet-footed runs. But she says only, “Give me a number of days; grant me a home where I may cook and be alone.”

  Talyut’s governor vacates his iron mansion, ordering his servants to stock the kitchen and pantries well before they leave, and to put all its rooms in immaculate order. When Melishem comes to its leopard corridors and lynx chambers, she finds them clean and perfumed, furnished with every luxury one could need. She pays it all little heed, for her attention is elsewhere, her will planted on Sikata’s grave like a flag.

  A number
of days pass.

  When it happens, the sky creases and pulses. The ground before Sikata’s shrine bristles, implosions of frost budding percussive through pavement. A body falls, producing no more impact or sound than a leaf. Fangs and cilia spring up, to protect or perhaps imprison. Melishem lets them bite and lash at her, though most fail to penetrate the alloy of her skin.

  The body is nearly weightless, its heft and substance that of a paper effigy.

  In the governor’s estate, Melishem lays the body on an iron bed. She covers it with a clean sheet, the fabric’s turquoise in bright contrast to the slate flesh.

  While waiting, she makes broth. Elephant meat boiled to soft mush, hard spices and condiments ground into thick paste: sunrise cardamom and snake onion, a pinch of squid-salt, the marinated peel of agate mandarins. The kitchen fills with their fragrances, which pour like spilled warmth through rafters and ceiling and ventilation pipes. She does not, as her mother used to, hum as she cooks. Here and there she pauses, considering whether to change her face to a façade more human-seeming; she decides against this.

  The window admits blue light as she begins cooking. By the time she hears the corpse waking up, the day has given way to the greenery of dusk.

  She fills a bowl with the broth and climbs the steps in quick long strides.

  The corpse has sat upright, dislodging the sheet. Gray and naked, face defined by precise symmetry: a jaw almost triangular, cheeks so gaunt they barely hide the skull underneath, a high pointed nose. The mouth is full to risqué ripeness and the eyes are immense, fringed by russet lashes. They blink as they settle on Melishem, a somnambulist’s bemusement rather than alarm.

  Melishem puts the bowl in the dead hands. “Eat.”

  This is obeyed. Jaw and throat work with reptilian appetite, swallowing spiced mush whole. When the bowl is empty, Melishem wipes the pallid mouth with a napkin. From the governor’s wardrobe she selects marble camisole and quartz tunic, compensating for the loose fit with a crocodile belt. It is not exactly what Sikata would have chosen for herself, but the wardrobe runs to frills and translucent fabrics, and these are the closest that match Sikata’s preference. Ever on the ascetic side. Faintly Melishem recalls having teased Sikata for that.