Beneath Ceaseless Skies #100 Read online

  Agani saw that they had forgotten their hatred. The people had forgotten that they had lost this battle. They had forgotten how they had called on the gods and the gods had not spared them—these broken, bloodless bodies, hacked and spattered across the meadow.

  He hated the gods, and he hated us.

  The women fell back to tending their own dead and did not notice when the first chalky body rose from the ground on unsteady legs, its head lolling to one side. They did not see the second, as it lifted its head from where it had lain face down, or see its black eyes snap open—unseeing smoky holes in the mask of mud that covered its face.

  The dead man lurched toward the living, and others began to rise. Their wounds from battle were horrifying to see, and their eyes looked nowhere, but they turned toward our people as if they could see their loved ones or smell them as the animals do. Soon a battlefield of risen dead stood and faced the people, their hands on their weapons, on spears and knives, axes and stones. The grotesque army of Agani’s puppets began to walk. Their families screamed and ran for their lives, chased back into the forest by the very people they had come to mourn. And the enemy, seeing this, grew bold and chased them too, shouting their anger and grief at the retreating backs of our people.

  But this was not the end. The dead turned back, and as the enemy survivors followed them into the forest, the dead struck them down, while Agani laughed.

  When nothing was left alive beside the Three Lakes, the dead went into the hills, where the enemy lived. The enemy was afraid at the sight of the lurching dead, and they prayed to their own gods to save them. The mouths of the dead opened, and they spoke, saying, “Pray to Agani, greatest of all the gods,” before they struck down all who remained.

  * * *

  “And this is why when our people die we send their spirits into the afterlife on the smoke of the pyre: so that Agani cannot raise our own against us.

  “We tell this story to remind us that all nations grieve, all nations feel loss, all widows mourn their husbands, and somewhere there is a girl like you who misses her father.”

  The old woman stirs the fire as the last rays of the sun disappear behind the hills. “It is the burden of all men and women to know these stories, to understand them and keep them safe. It is a much heavier burden for a child such as yourself, who has not known your first blood. But you are marked now as one braver than the rest: you are a woman before your time, and you will light the pyre. Your father’s spirit will go safely into the next world and dwell there forever, and it is your honor and your duty to send him there.”

  She has listened with the all dutiful attention she can manage, but something about the stories troubles her.

  “But Agani always did what was right,” she says. “He did those things to protect us.”

  “Agani took matters into his own hands, child. He did not heed the wisdom of the gods. He thought he knew better than they did. He rebelled, and so he was outcast. This teaches us to listen to our elders, and always heed their counsel.”

  But they were wrong, she thinks. Why should he heed them if they were wrong? But she can still feel the heat where the old woman struck her before, and this time she does not speak.

  Her father’s body lays on the pyre, still and ashen, his arms resting at his sides, his knife on his chest, wildflowers tucked amidst the kindling so that it almost looks as if he floats on a cloud of petals, already on his way. She thinks that she would give anything to see him sit up and smile again, to reach for her and call her by her name—even if it is only Agani playing a trick, even if her father were only a puppet.

  The girl touches the torch to the pyre, and the air fills with the scent of burning pitch and blossoms. She watches the flames rise, and her father’s body disappears behind them.

  She thinks about how she begged the gods to not let her father die, and how they did not answer.

  She thinks about the story that is too dangerous to tell, and wonders if the old woman could tell a girl from a god.

  Unheard in the crackle of the fire, she whispers a prayer to the only god who matters.

  In answer, from a distance: the roar of a bear.

  Copyright © 2012 Christie Yant

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer and habitual volunteer. She has been an Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine, audio book reviewer for Audible.com, occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, and remains a co-blogger at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside Magazine, and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, and Armored. She lives in a former Temperance colony on the central coast of California, where she sometimes gets to watch rocket launches with her husband and her two amazing daughters. Follow her on Twitter @inkhaven.

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  VIRTUE’S GHOSTS

  by Amanda M. Olson

  It was ten days past her coming-of-age ceremony when she came to live with us, after a week of urgent telegrams and hushed dining room conversations between Mother and Aunt Lily. This was a boarding house, Aunt Lily pointed out, and Victoria would take up one of the rooms without paying rent.

  Aunt Victoria was bad for business. In the early days, more than once, we would find her in a room with a knife, hacking desperately at the ribbon around her throat. It never took the slightest damage, though Aunt Victoria managed to cut her fingers more than once. Other times, she would stand at her window and stare out, causing more than one potential boarder to start at the eerie sight and promptly take themselves over to the less-respectable Mrs. Harper’s. I hid behind Mother’s skirts when Aunt Victoria came into the room. I remember wishing that I, too, could move in with Mrs. Harper.

  In a burst of inspiration, Mother let me run rampant in the attic as she cleaned it out for Aunt Victoria, who would be using it as a bedroom to free up the extra one downstairs. Aunt Victoria drifted up to inspect the proceedings. “See?” Mother said to me. “Watch how her skirts pick up the dust. Could a ghost do that?”

  Aunt Victoria contorted her face into an almost supernatural grimace. I bravely stuck my tongue out at her.

  Before Aunt Victoria, I hadn’t realized that a virtue could be a curse. In the schoolyard, my friends and I had always pretended at being grownups, putting on old necklaces of our mothers’ and aspiring to the greatness of colors we had heard of or invented—things like deep purple Valor and moss-colored Genius.

  None of us were excited for the pinprick that would decide our glorious futures, but Tib’s older brother said that it didn’t hurt any worse than a vaccine. We all figured he wouldn’t lie about that, although he had gotten much nicer since he’d gotten his pendant.

  There were boring virtues, like Temperance and Tolerance—and Tib’s brother’s Benevolence—which I didn’t want at all, but the world would hardly end if I were given either of them. A virtue like Aunt Victoria’s, though....

  Before her coming-of-age ceremony, Aunt Victoria had wanted to be a singer. Aunt Lily was the one who told me this—Aunt Lily’s pendant was a pale yellow color that became almost clear in the sunlight, so even a small girl could depend on her for accurate information.

  Aunt Lily liked to tell me that my melodramatic behavior would one day see me brought up on sedition charges, which I didn’t like at all, but when she told Aunt Victoria that she would never sing again, Aunt Victoria broke a teacup and fled the room. Later, Mother found her in the garden, throwing small rocks at the side of the house.

  Life with Aunt Victoria became routine, even with her ghost behavior—until the night after the fourth of July, when she broke something in the middle of the night.

  This was odd, because Aunt Victoria usually consigned her vandalism to daylight hours. If left to her own deciding, she would sleep from eight at night until two o’clock the next afternoon. As for me, I had run out of
things to do at midnight and seized my chance to be the first to the scene.

  The sitting room was strange in the dark, all lumpy shadows where the furniture stood, with Aunt Victoria grim and pale like moonlight above it all. Another shadow lay at her feet. For a moment, I became sure she was a ghost, and everyone had been wrong—even Aunt Lily, who could not tell a lie.

  Then Mother swept in, Aunt Lily behind her, and the flickering light of the candle put everyone back to normal again. Everyone, that is, except the man sprawled on the floor.

  Mother rushed to the poor soul and determined that he yet lived. “Victoria, did you break a vase over this man’s head?”

  Aunt Victoria’s eyes swept heavenward, and even to my eight-year-old self, it was clear that she was not sorry. She mimed slashing off her hands at the wrists and her head at the neck.

  “I hardly think he meant us such harm,” Mother protested. I, on the other hand, had feasted heartily on ghost stories and was not in the least surprised that someone might come to dismember us in the night. But I would have expected the dismemberer to be Aunt Victoria—not the young man who was now coming round to consciousness and whose face was screwed up with pain.

  He said a word that made Aunt Lily cover my ears and had Mother insisting that I go back to bed immediately. I pleaded with her not to make me leave, but her scowling attention was solely on the young man. He noticed and smiled at her. But then he swore again because Aunt Victoria kicked him.

  “My name’s Brandon,” he gasped, looking warily at Aunt Victoria, even though he wasn’t speaking to her.

  As soon as she heard his name, Mother sprang into action. “Lily, take Rose to bed!” she ordered. “Victoria, you too.” With that, she whisked the unlucky thief into the study, where there was nothing of value besides the letter opener with the pearl handle and the locked drawer that I was never allowed to touch. She kept letters in that one, the ones that came without a return address.

  * * *

  Brandon claimed he had really only come for the silver. Mother, with her virtue of Kindness, must have taken pity on him, because he was at breakfast the next morning, between her and Aunt Victoria.

  They put me next to Aunt Lily, who looked fit to have a conniption. Brandon seemed oblivious to her ire and complimented Mother on the sausages, slicing each one into small pieces before eating it. He had somehow failed to understand Aunt Victoria’s virtue, because he addressed her directly after he swallowed his first piece. “Unusual hue, that pendant. You must have gotten it recently? I’m afraid I’m not quite up to date with anything outside the reds—although people normally pick me out for Charm right away.”

  “It’s a new color,” Aunt Lily explained for Aunt Victoria, who seemed to be trying to tear her napkin to shreds in her lap. “It’s Silence. The chaplain had to consult two books to find it when the mage brought in this year’s batch. He mistook it for Sympathy; it took another three days before they could understand why she went mute when they put it on her.”

  Even the mages who make them don’t know what a person’s virtue will be, not until the stone is finished. They bring them in on racks for the ceremony, all labeled. We always try to guess from the color, although it’s hard to see from a distance. They sell pamphlets for a penny with the most common colors. I hadn’t needed mine in years. They were for babies, I had decided, who were too young to know the difference between reds and blues—although usually people with a son or daughter in the ceremony would buy them, too, as a keepsake.

  Aunt Victoria made an angry gesture and savagely sliced her toast into two halves, buttering them with a fury that suggested she saw the mage’s face in one and the chaplain’s in the other.

  Aunt Lily scowled. “I wish it had been Sympathy, too, dear—you could certainly do with a bit of it. They should really have a woman reading the colors; men have absolutely no eye for them. Everyone knows that sympathy is lavender.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Brandon volunteered, to which Aunt Lily responded with a knowing look and a case-in-point gesture with her fork.

  “Our grandmother was Sympathy,” Aunt Lily said. “Loveliest woman you’ve ever seen, if a bit melancholy. Very popular with the neighborhood. She always said that it was for the best; she’d been a cold and calculating child.”

  Aunt Victoria bit into her toast and chewed it, staring grimly over my head as though I were the ghost and she the haunted one.

  “You always were too loud,” Aunt Lily told Aunt Victoria.

  Victoria thrust herself away from the table and, without pushing in her chair, left the room. Her dress caught on the doorframe, but she paid it no mind and let the fabric tear.

  Aunt Lily sighed. “That silk will run, and so much for another month’s rent.”

  Mother looked ready to burst thunder and lightning; her pendant almost seemed to glow.

  “It isn’t as if I said something untrue,” Aunt Lily said. Her voice shook a little.

  Brandon looked between Aunt Victoria’s second slice of toast and the door. He snatched the toast so fast that I was the only one who saw. This was our new boarder, and it seemed he had his bright Charm pendant to thank for it.

  * * *

  He had no funds with which to pay rent, and with Mother off during the days for suffragette rallies and meetings with the Women’s League, she soon hit upon a solution that Brandon found completely agreeable.

  “What do you think?” she asked me, having sat me down on the floral explosion of a sofa in the sitting room for this purpose. “How would you like Brandon to stay with you while I go out for the day?”

  I certainly wasn’t opposed.

  Aunt Lily flipped open her lace fan, waving it to better supply herself with air. “You’re hiring a man as a governess. Justine, you have gone out of your wits.” Aunt Lily had been gifted with Scrupulous Honesty, but I heard someone mention once that she had always been cantankerous. That part wasn’t from the virtue. The virtue just kept her from lying.

  “And I should leave her with Victoria?” Mother suggested angrily. It was the one time I heard her lose patience with her younger sister.

  “The man has no morals.” Aunt Lily sniffed. “Are you sure they didn’t give you Gullibility?”

  Aunt Lily might have been more fun if she lied sometimes. I had to ask Brandon what “gullibility” meant. I didn’t like the answer.

  * * *

  For reasons I didn’t understand, Aunt Victoria always stayed around while Brandon and I played. She did have a tendency to drift into rooms with people in them, and given that her other option was Aunt Lily, I shouldn’t have been surprised. She was unusually well-behaved around Brandon—that is, she wouldn’t direct her ire at anyone else as long as he was in the room. He would include her in our conversations, as though she were sitting down to play games with us and not standing in a corner looking eerie. It wasn’t long before she did start sitting with us.

  We were drawing that day, and I was practicing horses while Brandon told me a story that ended in him getting away with quite a lot due to his natural charm. He had a whole repertoire of those stories. “I hope I get a virtue like that,” I said, when he finished.

  It was then that Aunt Victoria reached out and knocked my pencil box from the table. My usual response to such behavior was to stick out my tongue and go pick up whatever it was of mine that she’d displaced.

  Brandon’s chair scraped against the floor as he lurched to his feet. “For God’s sake, Victoria!”

  She launched into a series of sharp gestures that proclaimed her innocence and blamed me.

  “She hasn’t done anything!” he said. “And even if she had, you could try to tell her—you can write, can’t you, if it comes to that? I think you just like making a show! You can’t perform in a concert hall, but by God, you can have fits to excess around your family!”

  Aunt Victoria drew back her hand as if she would slap him, and I shrieked, because there had to be some sound made. Otherwise, it would be like
nothing at all had happened.

  She did not slap Brandon, but spun around so only I could see her eyes grow wet, almost to tears.

  “Don’t yell at her,” I said to him. “Show me how to draw a horse again.” I offered him my pencil and paper, but he was too much taller than me to notice.

  “I’m right, Victoria,” he said.

  She flung her arm out, pointed at me. I pieced this together the only way I could. “I can too read!” I cried. I read very well for my age, having practically devoured books of all the most sensational ghost stories I could convince Mother to buy for me. Until Aunt Victoria came, of course; then my habit was discouraged.

  “None of these people have done anything to wrong you,” Brandon said. “I haven’t—”

  Aunt Victoria was not impressed.

  “Oh. The—right. Look, maybe I was going to take the silver, but I haven’t, have I?”

  While staring at Brandon, Aunt Victoria stood on one foot and made a sweeping motion at his legs. You haven’t got a leg to stand on.

  I giggled. They both sighed, and Brandon laughed—Aunt Victoria joined in, in her spooky way. Brandon stopped laughing and, in the silence that followed as she fought to control herself, simply watched her.

  She must have thought he had a point, after all, because after that, she rarely knocked anything over at all.

  * * *

  Aunt Victoria guessed before I did that something was amiss with Brandon, although at the time, I was convinced that she was sweet on him. She had taken to following him around at times when he wasn’t watching me, often dragging me along. She would press a finger to her lips, then grab my wrist and pull me after her.

  There were small sounds that I had never quite appreciated before Aunt Victoria started the Let’s Spy on Brandon game. The crush of dewy grass underfoot, the sound of my own breath—so long as Aunt Victoria held onto me, these vanished.