The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Eight

  And then, as Kavian pushes against the granite doors, as the mechanisms of gear and counterweight begin to open, Absu warns her.

  “You will find Fereyd Japur in the catacombs. He went ahead of you.”

  Fereyd. The scar man, the plucked flower. Her only rival. Why send him ahead? Why is he in the dark with her buried daughter?

  Kavian tries to breathe out her tension but it is a skittish frightened breed and it will not go.

  ~ ~ ~

  She goes down into the catacombs where eight children wait in the empty dark for their appointed day. Where her daughter waits to be reborn and used.

  Magic is bound by the laws a wizard carries. Day and night, air and gravity, the right place of highborn and low. The lay of words in language. The turn of the stars above high isu-Cter, the only civilization that has ever endured. All these are laws a wizard may know.

  This is why the upstart Efficate produces so many wizards: it fills its children with the mantras of fraternity and republic. Their minds are limited, predictable—but like small gears, together they make a machine. This is why the Cteri wizards walk the world as heroes, noble-blooded and rare.

  There are other ways to make a wizard. A child raised in a stone cell knows no laws. Only the dark.

  Fereyd Japur waits for her in white silk ghostly beneath the false starlight of the gem-starred roof. He is tall and beautiful and his eyes are like a field surgery.

  He was not always a great wizard. Not until he gave himself to the enemy, to be tortured, to learn the truest laws of pain.

  “Why are you here?” Kavian asks.

  Fereyd Japur’s eyes burn old and sharp and clot-dark in a young brown-bronze face. Whispers say that the thing he did to buy his power killed him. Left him a corpse frozen in his first virility. The whispers are wrong, but Kavian still remembers them. He’s a popular companion for those who want to claim dangerous taste.

  “You don’t know,” he says, and then, “She didn’t tell you. Absu didn’t tell you.”

  Oh.

  Kavian understands at once, and she steps forward, because if she doesn’t, she’ll run.

  “They’ve given her to you,” she husks. “Heurian. My daughter.”

  “And mine to you.”

  “What?”

  “My daughter Irasht.” An awful crack opens in his face, a rivening Kavian could recognize as grief, if she believed he was human, or as rage, if she were wiser. “The warlord prefers to spare us from attachment to our charges. So I will have your daughter as my abnarch. And you will have mine.”

  She wants to weep: she will never know her daughter. She wants to cry out in shameful joy, she will never have to know her daughter, and that thought is cowardice.

  Kavian says the rudest thing she can manage. “You never told me you fathered.” Women have bragged of having him, even made a sport of it—he is beautiful, and his lowborn status makes him scandalous, coercible, pliant. But Cteri women don’t conceive without intent. Who—?

  His full lips draw down to one narrow line. The fissure in him has not closed: grief and hate cover him like gore. “The mother wanted a wizard’s blood to water her seed. The child was meant for the catacombs. That was all.”

  “You did this to hurt me.” Her anger’s speaking for her, but she has no hope for any kind of victory here and so she lets it speak. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? Fifteen years ago you planned this? You made a child to be given to me, so that you could take my daughter, so that you could say, at last, I have something Kavian Catamount wanted?”

  He lashes out at her. The word he speaks would kill any lesser wizard, the third-best or the fourth or maybe even Fereyd Second-Best himself. But Kavian turns it aside without thought, an abject instant no. He must have known she would.

  “You have everything I wanted,” he hisses, and it feels as if she can see through the dusk of his skin and the white of his bone into the venom of his marrow, into the pain he learned beneath the enemy knife.

  She turns away.

  They unseal the cells and decant their children.

  The girl Irasht, daughter of Fereyd Japur, waits wide-eyed and trembling in the center of her cell. When Kavian comes close she rises up on narrow legs and begins to make soft noises with her lips: ah, ah, ah.

  She doesn’t know what a person is. She’s never seen one before.

  By the time Kavian has coaxed the girl into a trembling bird-legged walk, Fereyd Japur has taken Heurian and gone. The closest Kavian comes to her daughter is the sound of footsteps, receding.

  Kavian protests to Absu, bursting into the war council, scattering the tiny carved owls that mark the enemy on the map and raging for her daughter Heurian.

  But the Warlord says: “Without your two abnarchs on the front, they will break us this summer. They will open our reservoirs, take our men for their fraternity, and use our silk to wipe the ass of their upstart empire. You are a soldier first. Look to your charge, Kavian.”

  So: a night that belonged to the second kind of pain.

  ~ ~ ~

  Go to the front. Train your abnarch on the march. Summer is upon us, and the enemy moves on the dams.

  Kavian curses Absu’s madness—train her on the march? Irasht could go catatonic, overwhelmed by the sweep and stink of the world beyond her cell. She could lash out in abnegation and blot herself and Kavian and their retinue and a mile of Cteri highlands into nothing.

  But Kavian’s known Absu since childhood, and for all the rage she’s hurled at those golden eyes she has never known them to measure a war wrong.

  She finds she cannot sleep until she snaps something: a branch, a lyre-string. Sometimes it takes a few.

  Every time she looks on Irasht, teetering around in tentative awe like a hatchling fallen from a nest, she thinks: where is my daughter? She thinks: I could go to that lowborn boy and take Heurian back. He could not stop me. But she cannot go against Absu and the Paik Rede. Cannot defy the ruthless will that keeps isu-Cter safe.

  So she hardens her heart and begins the training.

  “Hssh,” she murmurs—Irasht freezes when touched, and must be soothed. “Hssh.” She draws a cold bath while the abnarch girl watches the motion of the water, rapt. When Kavian lowers her down into the ice cold, arms around her tiny neck and knocking knees, she reacts with only a soft ‘oh’. From then on the temperature doesn’t seem to trouble her, even when Kavian leans her back to wash her knotted hair. She sculls the water in small troubled circles and stares. Kavian thinks she is trying to reconcile two things: the sight of the water rippling around her palm, and the feeling of it on her hand. Whether she succeeds, Kavian cannot tell.

  Irasht is at the peak of her power as an abnarch. All the logic she learns will confine her. When she sees the difference between sunrise and sunset she will diminish. When she understands that the chattering shapes around her are people like herself, she will be a lesser weapon. So Kavian keeps to the strict discipline of the handler. No language. Simple food. Strict isolation, when possible.

  But for Irasht to be useful, she must learn to trust her handler. (Or dread and fear her handler, Fereyd Japur would remind her. Or that.) So Kavian reaches out to her—touch, meaningless sound, small acts of compassion. Holds her when the world becomes too much and she retreats to clawing frenzy.

  Irasht is a burnt stump of a person, like a stubborn coal pulled from a fire pit. She stares overmuch and needs housetraining like a stray dog. To Kavian’s frustration and shame—this is what I am reduced to?—she finds that Irasht cannot chew. So she crumbles the girl’s food by hand.

  This would be easier, all in all, if Kavian could think of her only as a weapon.

  But in the villages and terrace farms along the path to war she sees Irasht do things that take a chisel to her heart. When Irasht finds doors she goes to them and waits patiently, hoping, Kavian imagines, that someone will invite her in.

  When it grows too dark in their tent Irasht panics, tangling herself in her bedding
. Kavian is moved: Irasht fears going back to the dark. Somehow this is a comfort. It makes Kavian feel she has done a good thing, bringing her out into the light.

  She takes Irasht out to see her first stars, and holds the girl, rocking her, thinking: we did this. We made her this way.

  No. The war did this. The war makes demands.

  In the Efficate they make wizards in vast numbers. Bake them like loaves of bread. Kavian knows this because she’s slaughtered them by the dozens. All they can do is make little shields and throw little sparks—the laws of their society leave no room for heroism, and Kavian suspects the quality of their blood gives rise to no heroes.

  But there are so many. And they are winning.

  And this is not her daughter.

  ~ ~ ~

  They pass through everything that will be lost if they fail. The terraced farms and waterfall mills of the highlands. The gulls that circle library-ships on reservoirs raised by wizards of centuries past.

  For all remembered history, isu-Cter has been the still eye at the heart of the world. Kavian still believes with patriot fire that, for all its faults, high green isu-Cter must stand.

  Fereyd Japur travels with her. It’s distasteful company but a military necessity. She tells herself it’s good to be close to Heurian. She’s lying. Fereyd keeps his abnarch to himself, and the space between Kavian and Heurian feels like forever, as wide as grief and deep as duty.

  As they come down from the highlands towards the dams and the war-front, he walks into her tent to take a meal and brag. “Heurian is active. Ready to be used. When I give her an image, she changes the world to match it.”

  Kavian sets her cup down with soft care. She has not even begun to push Irasht towards useful magic. “Oh?”

  “You think I’m lying.”

  “No,” Kavian says. The firelight makes Fereyd’s beauty almost painful, a scrimshaw thing, etched into his face by acid and tint, worked into his bones by years of hungry eyes. She touches the edge of hate and it feels hot and slick as a knife coming out. “I believe you.”

  “And Irasht?” The kohl on his eyelids turns his blink into a mechanism of dark stone. “Is my daughter ready for the war?”

  Kavian lifts her chin. “I will need more time.”

  Fereyd watches her across the fire. It might be something in his face, or the set of his muscled farmer’s shoulders, or the way he holds himself so properly as if to remind her she is higher born—it might be one of these things that screams of mockery. Or it might only be her imagination.

  But Kavian breaks the silence with a hiss: “What did you to do to her?”

  Fereyd Japur looks away.

  “What method?” Kavian insists, leaning across the fire. The heat is harsh but her arms are a cage for it and the pain only makes her angrier. “How did you reach her so quickly? Was it some secret of knives? What did you do?”

  “I did what I’ve always done. I obeyed my orders.” The softness in his voice, the tilt of his eyes—for a moment he could be the boy of impossible talent Absu plucked out of the laborers’ quarter. But the rage returns. “Heurian will be ready when the enemy comes. Why are you angry? What more would you ask of me?”

  She waits there, hunched across the fire like her namesake, and he sits in quiet deference, trembling with a need to flee or yield or kill (she does not like to guess at his thoughts).

  Shadows move across the inside of the tent.

  From the sleeping-tent Irasht begins to howl. When Kavian rises to go to her she catches Fereyd’s eyes and sees something shattering under that howl, something long ago broken, something still coming apart.

  “Keep my daughter safe,” she says. More than anything else she could say, she thinks it will hurt him most.

  ~ ~ ~

  Irasht takes up collecting. She does not much care for the idea of property, but after silent rebukes from Kavian, she focuses her needs on waterskins. Soon she learns to show anger by pouring water on the earth.

  Kavian laughs in delight, and then sobers. The girl is ready for a test.

  On the riverbank, she finds three small stones to show Irasht. The abnarch perches, head cocked, and waits for Kavian’s command.

  Kavian waggles her fingers. This is the counting game. Count three stones, Irasht.

  Three, Irasht indicates: three fingers.

  Kavian holds up four.

  Three, Irasht insists, brow furrowed. She waves her raised fingers and makes a high chirp. Three, three. There are three stones.

  Kavian answers with stillness: four fingers. Four stones.

  Irasht’s eyes narrow in bafflement.

  And a small weight moves in Kavian’s palm. A fourth stone, conjured from nothing. Irasht’s abnarchy at work. Faced with a gap between reality as it is and reality as Kavian says it must be, Irasht has rectified the discrepancy.

  Kavian hugs Irasht tenderly, kisses her gently on the brow, and conjures her an air-picture of the night sky, crowded with stars. It makes Irasht tremble in joy, to see those lights in the dark.

  ~ ~ ~

  The war begins again. Twenty thousand Efficate spearmen and four hundred wizards under the stripling Adju-ai Casvan march on a southern dam.

  Word comes by rider from Warlord Absu:

  I have judged your reports. Fereyd Japur will use Heurian against the enemy. Kavian, your abnarch is unready. Keep her safe.

  She sees it happen. Sees all this:

  Fereyd carrying Heurian (she is a small dark shape, limp—but her hair moves in the wind off the reservoir) across the bridge beneath the dam. Fereyd raising his arms to the sky. The two armies beneath him looking up in awe as he draws against the dusk an image of the Efficate soldiers broken into bone.

  Then he puts his hands over Heurian’s ears.

  Through her own art of sorcery Kavian hears the shriek he puts into her daughter’s mind, a shriek like a nightmare cracking. Horrible enough to make the screams of battle sound less than a lullaby.

  Kavian, unable to protect her daughter, breaks a tree in half with a killing word.

  The noise Heurian makes is so low and awful that it stirs snow to avalanche when it strikes the distant mountains. When that sound rolls over the first rank of the Efficate army their wizards’ shields flare with lightning.

  Whatever gets through is enough. Men fall, drowning on ash and water, on the mud that suddenly grows to fill their lungs. Adju-ai Casvan, shielded by his elite cadre, survives to pull his decimated forces out—fleeing west, chased by the sound of Cteri soldiers beating their shields and crying: the water washes out the filth!

  On the bridge beneath the dam, Fereyd Japur lifts the fallen girl. She puts her arms around his neck and tries to hide against him.

  The battle is won. Heurian functions. All it takes is bone in the sky and a scream in her skull.

  When Kavian goes to the center of the camp and asks to see her daughter, Fereyd Japur looks at her with cold contempt. “You saw her today,” he says. “You saw everything you need to see. She is a weapon.”

  Warlord Absu writes:

  Fereyd Japur has field command. Defeat all Efficate incursions you encounter. Use the abnarch until no longer practical.

  Kavian, you must bring your charge to the same standard.

  ~ ~ ~

  Campaign season rolls down in rain and thunder and blood. The Efficate’s wizards try ingenious new defenses. Under Fereyd Japur’s guidance, Heurian breaks them. The Cteri win again and again and soon their defensive stand becomes a counterattack.

  Kavian pursues her own method with stubborn, desperate resolve. Fereyd’s technique—an image to achieve, a goad to drive the abnarch to fear and terror, the promise of relief—is direct. Crude. She has a more elegant solution.

  One symbol: the dark. The empty black of Irasht’s childhood. Bad.

  And another—she should have chosen something else, something less fragile, less desperate, but Irasht responds more strongly to the promise of love than anything else—


  A starry sky, like the sky that covered them when Kavian held her and kept her from the dark. The only goodness Irasht knows.

  Some of the soldiers in Kavian’s retinue pool their talents to make Irasht a set of dolls. She plays with them in silence, and Kavian watches, wondering how much of a person is still left in her, and how much has withered away. How much waits, stunted, for some healing rain to fall.

  The abnarch technique came from legends of ancient ascetic kings. Transcendent and serene, they locked themselves away, to forget the laws that chained them. They chose confinement.

  What would Irasht choose, if given a choice? Does she know how to choose?

  Kavian shakes her head and gets to her feet. The philosophy must wait. Irasht needs to be made ready. Until then, Fereyd Japur doesn’t even need to taunt her. His abnarch carries the nation’s hope while hers plays with toys.

  She comes upon him in the night after a victory. It is too dark to see his face but through the smoke of a joyful camp she smells wine. “Kavian,” he rasps. “Kavian Hypocrite. Come. Sit with me.”

  She crouches across from him. Makes no light to lift the shadows. “Have a care.” It comes out a threat, a purr.

  “You are gentle to my daughter.” He raises something and she opens her mouth to defend herself, but, no, it is only a cup. “My traitor heart is grateful.”

  “I will make her ready yet.”

  His eyes flash white in the dark. “Mercy to a broken thing? Too late, Kavian. Years too late.”

  “The war broke her.” That desperate mantra. “Not us.”

  “Did Absu tell you that? No, no—it is our choice. The Paik Rede chooses to sacrifice its children. We choose to bury them.” A wet sound, like gathered spit, like a sob choked. “Is it not said—the mother has the child for nine months, and the father for nine years? They took that from me. They made my choice, and took Irasht.”

  “Treason. . .” she whispers. But she cannot put any heat in it. Her honor hates to see a man so beautiful brought so low.

  He rises unsteadily and she uncoils to match him. “You are the traitor. Your mercy to Irasht is the real treachery. She died when Absu put her in those cells. What came out was a weapon. And now you are too weak to use her—as if you could protect her in place of Heurian. Is that your secret, Kavian Catamount? Do you want a warm doll to hold in place of your daughter?”