The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Eight

  Irasht tilts her head.

  “Ah,” she chirps. “Ah.”

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Seth Dickinson is the author of the novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Tor, 2015) and a lot of short stories, including in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and three previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, and threw a paper airplane at the Vatican. He teaches at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. He can be found at sethdickinson.com.

  FIRE IN THE HAZE

  Mishell Baker

  THE WEEK the Haze Precinct burned, Neiu had been my lover for three years, and even she had never seen me during the day. My schedule was not so remarkable as it might have been in the city, since Ru is a nocturnal goddess and Seeresses on the whole do their work between sunset and sunrise. Even so, the singular strictness of my habits had drawn their share of gossip during the decade I had studied and taught at the Starlight Temple.

  Neiu had learned not to trouble herself with knocking before sunset, but on the fifth of Silver that year, I refused to answer the door a full hour into twilight, and her patience snapped.

  “You have someone in there, don’t you,” she said; I could hear her slap her palms against the antique elm wood that separated us. “Open this door or I will disintegrate it.”

  Neiu tremendously overestimated her skill, but nothing good could come of an attempt to tamper with the architecture. As Starlight Temple was devoted to a goddess of chaos, it had not been built to any particular plan, and more than once in its history minor attempts at renovation had caused entire wings to collapse.

  “I’ll be there directly,” I said. “I’m having trouble with a spell.”

  This was not precisely a lie. I stood in front of my full-length glass drenched in terror-sweat at the idea that the spell that had been protecting me for ten years had suddenly and without warning expired.

  “Let me in,” Neiu said. “Let me help.”

  I hardly heard her. My transformation had seemed late the evening before, but I had passed off the delay as a small error in the predicted time of sunset. Now there was no question that the spell was failing. There wasn’t so much as a sliver of sun above the horizon, and yet I remained male. The presence of a man at a Temple of Ru was not a mere inconvenience; it was a capital crime.

  Tuo, why did you not warn me? After ten years the name was a war-wound, a faded ache that came and went with the weather.

  The door opened. I snatched up my robe and held it against me, but it was too late. Neiu stared between my legs as though she could see through the heavy black silk.

  “What was that?” she said.

  “Surely you’ve seen one before.”

  “Is this the spell you’re working on?” she said, aghast. “By the Void; you’re sweating like a stevedore.”

  She closed the door behind her and came to me, grabbing my forearms and lifting them, robe and all. I shuddered as gesture triggered a vivid sense-memory: my standing at the wind-chilled edge of a canal, staring into the pale round eyes of a Child of Ru.

  “That’s miraculous,” Neiu breathed. I looked down at the razor-straight part in her black hair. She was a full head shorter than I was; Tuo had changed as little as possible about me when he had shaped my female version. “How did you do it?” she said, prodding the organ in question. “Your whole frame is different; you smell different. En, it’s brilliant. And horrible. Make it stop.”

  If only I could. I clung to the hope that if I drew out the conversation enough the situation might resolve itself. “I thought—you could try me this way,” I said.

  Neiu looked at me as though she’d found a worm in a peach. “Oh, Void no. No, no, no. No.”

  “What if I could give you a child?”

  That gave her pause; talent was known to run in families. Only on the female side, said the Seeresses, and any boy who claimed otherwise was summarily executed. But I could read Neiu’s too-expressive face without need of telepathy: what if I had discovered a way to cut the seeders out of the process altogether?

  I hadn’t, of course. The magic at work here was Tuo’s, not mine, and it worked the wrong way round. I could feel it now, in fact, belatedly catapulting me into that nauseous moment of transitional nothingness that should have happened precisely at sunset.

  Before Neiu could answer my intriguing speculation, I was a woman again, and she laughed in relief. She leaned in to brush my hair aside and kiss the smooth pulse of my throat, then tilted back her head to catch my earlobe between her teeth.

  “Don’t ever do that again.”

  ~ ~ ~

  My lover was drowsy afterward, and I carefully insinuated my way back up the mattress to look into her face. Despite my earlier offer, Neiu was likely near the end of her childbearing years; the skimmed-milk skin beneath her eyes was touched with shadow. Her mercurial temperament was what had drawn me to her, but it had etched deeper lines around her mouth than a properly impassive woman should have. I kissed one of them, and she opened her eyes: the exact shade of ripe blueberries.

  “I love you,” I said, still tasting the salt of her on my tongue.

  She turned her head, petulant. “So you always say.”

  Now was not the time for a reprise of this conversation. I rolled over and out of the bed, then squatted to open the trunk at the foot of it that held all the things I rarely used. I had to empty out half of the trunk’s contents before I located an old city dress, now ten years out of fashion. I removed it, gave it a shake, and draped it against me, watching the ash-gray cotton cling to subtle curves I would soon eliminate with undergarments.

  Neiu pushed up onto her elbow. “You’re not thinking of leaving the temple?” she said, shocked, then just as abruptly delighted. “We should spend awhile at the lake; it’s the autumn festival now. Have you ever been? On one boat, these boys put on a puppet show that you would swear was one of the Whore’s illusions. They use wires as fine as silk—you’re going alone, aren’t you.” The last words were laced with frost.

  “I have an errand I need to run. A dull errand.”

  “I want to go,” she insisted. “I want to see goblins.”

  The cheap cotton slipped through my fingers to the floor; I stooped to pick it up.

  “En, you’re trembling.”

  “I don’t like goblins.”

  Neiu drew in a quick breath at my blasphemy. “Goblin” was the colloquial term for the children of Ru: quasi-immortal creatures, holy avatars of wit and chaos who only emerged from the water at night. They were the goddess’s children alone, not adulterated as humans were by the meddling of the Betrayer and the Whore.

  One of those shapechanging fiends had been my first lover. Tuo had infiltrated and rearranged me in every imaginable way, and I still wasn’t entirely certain I’d survived it.

  But I had to find him, because I had sold myself to him for a spell that now appeared to be fading.

  “I’m going alone,” I told her, and she recognized my tone as final.

  ~ ~ ~

  It took an hour to descend the mountain to the water taxi station at its base, another half hour for the boy to paddle me west across the dazzling lake. Barges and boats, some as many as four stories high, were decked with paper lanterns in autumn hues; the air was haphazardly pierced by the smoky hiss and profound, heart-stuttering crack of white Wou sky-paints. I wrapped my arms around myself and stared at the approaching Jiun-Shi city wall.

  As we passed beneath Starlight Gate, I looked up at the thousand-year-old mosaic that the crushing city taxes went in small part to maintain. It was said contemptuously of the citizens of Jiun-Shi that they traded bread for paint, but outsiders’ sneers melted like candle wax the moment they penetrated the city’s forbidding exterior and saw the beauty within.

  On one side of the Starlight arch, the mosaic depicted the demigoddess of magic Alexira with upraised arms; opposite her stood Ru herself against an onyx backdr
op of her own windblown hair, a single amethyst tear on her cheek. Both were depicted as women of the Empire with pearl-white skin, but I had visited Kyreth, and Alexira’s living descendents were without exception brown as walnuts.

  The great clock tower in the Mayor’s Precinct began its melancholy toll. I counted out eleven bells as I alighted just inside the gate and joined the queue for another ride into the city. In three hours all the shops would close, the merchants would pack up their stalls, and the streets would be quiet for the remaining hours of the goblin watch. This was done out of concern for the goblins, a few of whom in ancient times had become so distracted by the pleasures of the city that they had forgotten to return to the water and had perished at sunrise, leaving only wrinkled, empty husks.

  “To the Silver Fish teahouse,” I told the boy when my turn had come, and he helped me into the slender boat without a word, careful to touch only my cotton-clad forearm.

  Anxiety writhed in my gut as the boat made its swift way west along the Lunar Canal, the main artery of the city. I wondered if anyone I had worked with at the Silver Fish would still be there. Likely not after ten years; third-shift turnover was high.

  “Look,” said the taxi-boy proudly, pointing with the flat of his hand. “A goblin.”

  Every hair on my body lifted, and I followed the boy’s gesture with my eyes.

  The fog-gray creature was in its native form and sat perched on the eaves of a tailor’s shop, its knees bent to where its ears would have been if it had had them. Like all goblins, its features were so smooth and monochromatic that they were difficult to make out, tricking the eye into seeing only two dimensions. Its large pale eyes were fixed on the street below. Something about its air of wariness struck me as callow.

  Tuo’s natural form had been as dark as the ink he used for his poems. A memory waylaid me: the chill wet tease of his writing brush as he traced elegant couplets on my thigh. I looked away from the roof, skin flushing hot.

  ~ ~ ~

  The sameness of the Silver Fish after all the intervening years gave me a sense of vertigo. Pale blue papered walls, neat rows of cloth-draped tables, and the smell—a clean, almost medicinal mingling of tea, linseed oil, and fresh-cut lilies. I scanned the interior, pulse racing, but if Tuo was there he was not using the same human form he’d worn in my day. On a closer look at the teahouse the mist of nostalgia dispersed, and I began to suspect that my former employer’s golden age had come and gone. The place should have had twice as many customers at this hour, and I spotted faint stains on one of the tablecloths.

  The current shift manager was a handsome, thin-lipped young woman I didn’t recognize, a bit older than I had been when I’d held her position. She looked up at me blandly as I approached her station, not recognizing me as a Seeress without my robe.

  “How can I help you?” she said.

  “I am—looking for Tuo.”

  She gave me a knowing smile. “Of course,” she said. “Would you like a table by the window?”

  The air grew thick in my lungs. “Do you expect him soon?”

  The manager looked at me for a moment, her expression fading into something fashionably opaque. “You are visiting Jiun-Shi from elsewhere?”

  “Yes,” I approximated.

  She nodded, obviously filing me away into a different category. “Tuo doesn’t really come here,” she said gently, as to a child. “At least he hasn’t in the time I’ve worked here. Interesting story, though.”

  “Tell it to me,” I said.

  She glanced behind me, but there was no one else waiting. She gave a fluid shrug and leaned on her elbows. “They say he came here for centuries. He always took the form of a beautiful boy poet—quite a tempter of women, he was, and a destroyer of them, too. Until he met the Seeress Jal En, who was a hostess here at the time.”

  No, I was a manager, like you, I did not say.

  “We know they had a love affair; the owner says she saw them together on several occasions. But eventually En left her position here to join the Temple—”

  I was fired, I did not say. That crone fired me. Why is she of all people still alive?

  “—and after that Tuo was never seen again. Some say En murdered him. Some say he murdered her and took her shape, and that Seeress Jal En is not a Seeress at all but Tuo in disguise. Some say he still comes here, only in a different form and in secret. If you wait a moment, I can give you the very table they say he used to sit at. Apparently he was peculiarly regular, for a goblin.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, trying not to remember his tangled hair across that table, the gaunt lines of his face, the way his eyes took in every detail of me as though preparing for an examination. A perfect mimicry of human eyes, the same deep violet-blue as Neiu’s but a shade darker. “I have—another appointment.”

  ~ ~ ~

  There is a local joke that does not translate well. It asks, what is the difference between gossip and fire? The answer is never spoken aloud; the joke is familiar enough to have become a rhetorical question.

  It is difficult to understand the joke if you do not live in Jiun Shi, a city crowded with buildings of wood and thatch. It is impossible for an outsider to understand the superstitious, terrified care with which everyday cooking fire is treated—flames are seen as the minions of an angry god, yearning to escape and devour.

  If by some rare, unthinkable negligence—almost without exception perpetrated by tourists— a fire should escape its enclosures on a dry day, all activity is suspended as a mass exodus ensues via the waterways. The winds are not strong inside the city walls, and so the cross-hatching of canals creates an effective perimeter to what would otherwise be a city-wide holocaust. Once the fire-god has been sated, often many days later, the citizens of Jiun Shi return to the devastated precinct to search weeping through the ashes for the remains of what they left behind.

  What is the difference between gossip and fire? Fire stops at the canal.

  ~ ~ ~

  I returned to the Starlight Gate and made my way to the front of the queue. I asked a question of every taxi-boy who arrived at the station, waving a passenger ahead of me each time I was told no. At last I found the right boy—an old man, to be more accurate—and he gave me a long sober look before answering.

  “Yes, I know the Mirror,” he said. “I know where it is. But it will cost you seven crescents. And that is if I leave you there.”

  “Take me,” I said, and climbed into his boat. He shook his head slowly and then, after a moment’s prayerlike pause, began to row me toward the Children’s Causeway.

  The shallow, man-made section of the lake north of the causeway was sparsely populated, and always had been, as it was consecrated to the Children of Ru. As my oarsman ducked to let us drift under the bridge at the center of the causeway, the chill became too much for me, and I trembled until my muscles ached with it.

  “It’s somewhere around here,” said the old man after a third of an hour. Every so often the sky-paints showed me a livid flicker of his face, time-etched and tired. “Or at least it was. But without him to tell me, I don’t know where you’d board.”

  “Wait a moment,” I said. The Mistress of Shrouds had not named me the temple’s youngest Secondary for nothing. I rolled my eyes up toward the stars and swiped my fingertips across their whites, drawing tears. Catching them in my hand, I flung them with a flick of my wrist in the direction the old man had gestured, murmuring Kyrethian focus words under my breath. In mid-air the tears burned out of existence in a feeble flare of violet light.

  “Seeress,” the old man breathed, and went to his knees in the boat.

  Tuo’s work was fiendishly subtle, and even with the aid of my Sight it took a moment’s headache-inducing concentration to counter his Shroud, to approximate a vague unstable outline of the object from which my mind was being deflected.

  I directed the old man to row closer, and eventually he bumped into the vessel. This broke the spell completely, and my heart with it.
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  The Mirror loomed above us, rocking subtly on the lake, two decaying stories of intricately embellished wood. Its blue paint was weather-abused, its hull worm-eaten; it showed every sign of having been forgotten. The ramp that had once been anchored to the lake bottom was missing; I had the old man row me to a place where I could get a good enough handhold to climb onto the lower deck.

  “Wait here for me,” I said. “There’s another seven crescents in it for you.”

  I walked a quarter of the way round the deck until I found the main entrance doors. I tried one and found it locked, but the other yielded to my touch with a dolorous groan. The interior was slightly better preserved than the outside; the murals Tuo had painted in the main lounge were lightly mildewed in places but not faded. The smell was hard to endure, though: a choking miasma of damp neglect. I scanned every corner for some sign of his presence but found nothing.

  And yet everywhere I looked, my periphery supplied ghosts of him: lounging indolently on a couch, reaching up to add a final stroke to a poem, bowing over my hand. And there, of course, pausing at the foot of the narrow stairs to the grand bedchamber. Looking over his shoulder, a half smile adorning the human face he wore even when we were alone.

  I had never been far behind.

  Careful to soften my footfalls, I climbed the narrow stairs. They were not as thick with dust as I felt they ought to be. With each step my legs felt heavier, my hands colder. I reached the summit of the staircase and opened the door.

  The room was empty, the windows open. Mildewed silk bed curtains writhed and sighed in the draft. And at last I found proof that he had not ceased to exist the moment I bid him farewell.

  Sometime in the last decade, he had covered the walls of the bedchamber with fragmented images and dark erratic clouds of poetry. The longest wall represented the interior of the Silver Fish in muted colors. The remaining three walls were more abstract, but the eyes that stared back at me from atop an impenetrable explosion of text by the headboard were decidedly mine, black and heavy-browed with down-tilted corners that gave them a look of perpetual melancholy.