Chapter Four.

My Land Begins at the End of the Sky

My unconsciousness ended with the vision of pink light filtering through unfamiliar shades. I found myself in a room with silence uninterrupted by even the settling of my bed. I automatically moved to elicit some sound, partially to ensure that I hadn’t gone deaf. The bed was silent, and as I could clear my throat audibly, I decided that it had no springs and I was not, therefore, in any inn or hospice.

“Where?” I asked, simply to speak, and found my throat sore and my voice rasping with violence. I coughed and didn’t have enough saliva to wet my tongue.

My mind was a horrifying blank. I only knew that I had woken up, and thus inferred that I had been asleep or beaten into unwilling sleep. My last memory was of working the bellows of an elderly, ornery blacksmith, and of a lovely girl whose name I would never know, but my soul felt as if it had taken a beating even if my head had not.

My flesh felt dirty, but the clothes I wore were pure in whiteness. My skin looked all the dirtier for it, and I instantly wanted water, not only to drink but to bathe in as well and, if circumstances warranted, attempt a drowning.

The banging of my door against the wall startled me into momentary blindness and an instant leap in my heart. It was almost painful in its rapidity. I jumped back against the wall. It was a painful slam.

The woman was lit in the pink light of the doorway. She was short, wide, and bore a stern expression that I could only guess had to do with the state in which I’d been found.

“Who are you? How long have I been here?” I instantly demanded, uncaring whether my words were welcomed in the tone they were presented.

“Well aren’t you a little upstart?” she cooed in a manner that thoroughly belied her harsh brow. Alarmed at this, I sat even taller and pulled the tunic I wore closer together, for all that did. “Adorable. It’s alright, I’ve already seen more than you’ve liably shown anyone in the world.” She winked and I cringed a little. “But you’ll be wanting a bath, wouldn’t you.”

“Definitely,” I said with no little relief. I didn’t recognize the smells on my body, and I really, really never wanted to remember from what horrible event they had come. That wish, of course, would eventually prove ineffectual.

She led me down a long, empty and featureless hall to a large room with a shallow pool reaching from one end clear to the other. It was completely empty, and the water only rose to my knees when I stepped in. The woman remained there while I bathed, and I doubt I’ve ever felt more uncomfortable.

“How…how did I get here?” I stammered, blushing hotly once I’d gotten dressed in another set of clean, white clothes.

“Oh,” she said dismissively, turning and leading me back to the room in which I’d awoken. “None of us lesser staffers know. The Headsir brought you to me and told me to care for you. If I had to guess…but no, I’m sure I don’t know.”

I wanted to demand that she finish her broken thought, but I didn’t. “Where am I?”

“Sy’dai, for all I’m guessing it means to you,” she said in irritation. “But I doubt you’ll be staying here long. This is the hospital wing. You’ll be going back to the Headsir for your final assignment.”

“Assignment?” I was sick of these half-responses that didn’t answer me the bigger question. “What is this place, please tell me.”

I think it was the please that convinced her to ignore my tone. “This place,” she said, opening the door to my room and ushering me inside, “is Klineclothoa. It’s more of a center of life than a palace, though that’s the literal translation. The Headsir is responsible for the smooth operation of every single legal job in the kingdom. He’s a priest…of sorts. More like he converses with forces none other dare.” She shook her head in firm disapproval.

Her reply, while illuminating, didn’t tell me why I had been brought there. The hole in my memory that only an hour before I feared to fill with knowledge became an irritating gap. Would I remain ignorant of that piece of my past forever?

“Why can’t I remember what happened?”

“Ah, that’s something I have no ideas about,” the woman said briskly. “Now, eat some food and I’ll be showing you to the Headsir.”

I noticed for the first time that a try full of sumptuous food stood at the foot of my cot. Not entirely sure I could trust these people and not at all sure I was hungry, I pushed some rolls around and tasted some of the fruit. It tasted innocuous enough.

“Is he…imposing?” was all I could think to ask. She only smiled and ducked out of the room.

I don’t know why I took it in my head to wander. I’m the sort of person who always sets off imagining the discovery of some marvelous place or object and winds up getting lost in boring, whitewashed surroundings. This place, for all I knew, was just the one hall down which I’d already traversed; it might also be filled with patrolling guards.

But what I found, once I reached the end of the hall, tugging my clothes closer around me as a light chill slowly seeped through the air, was an empty hub. Five different halls, including mine, opened into a circular room with a raised platform in the center, created of soapstone if the dusty prints and uneven pits marking its surface were any indication. I wondered if it was a sculpture.

The room had a feel of wasted industry, as if it should have been full, but it had been left behind when work was still to be done. I noticed for the first time the carvings along the base of the raised platform. I traced them with my fingers. They were strange hieroglyphs, indecipherable but nearly familiar. Perhaps sometime in my youth a visitor had had scrolls filled with this scribble. A strange, perfectly cut star met my fingertips, which I dipped inside and traced as well.

Because the room was swiftly growing chillier, and because the feel of ghosts grew strong as well with the time I spent next to that shimmering platform, I chose one of the other halls, and I followed it.

The walls were lined with the same hieroglyphs, but they faded eventually, ending completely at a sign that read ‘Antithron.’ The wall turned a pale pink from then on, and I began to consider that this hall might never end.

But end it did.

“Understand this,” a voice boomed so loudly that I crouched and slid back into the now welcoming embrace of the hall behind me. The incredible brightness of the light in the enormous, airy room beyond blinded me for an instant, like all light, it seemed, was to do in my weary state. I didn’t see the speaker for an instant because of it, but then I spotted him within the depths of the stream of sunlight. I only saw him because he was a brighter white within the white. His robe was seemed multi-faceted, and it was only when the man flickered slightly that I realized it wasn’t a true being, only the image of one.

“While out in the bustling city of worlds that comes together here, your responsibility is to the standards we uphold within these walls, and any—“

It was the way the light hit the glass. But it couldn’t be just that. I craned my neck to the glass above me, and while the cacophony of colors that shimmered—almost moved of its own volition—seemed capable of some strange projection, it could not possibly make the image move. It could not possibly give it a voice.

“We cannot achieve our goals when our people do not take responsibility.”

“That’s the Headsir, that is,” someone said. I jerked my head down with a click of my neck, and the speaker watched me amusedly. I didn’t react, beyond that, and it disappointed the girl. She was slim and pretty, but her brown eyes were drug-bright, and the way she stood uncomfortably missed the sensual ease she attempted to emulate. I almost, through the mist in those eyes, could see the way her brain worked. The intense light in the chamber made for a strange effect of translucence. I couldn’t imagine but that magic’s influence had some part.

“How is it possible?” I asked. I edged away from her when she stepped closer conspiratorially.

“The light puts the image on the surface there, in the center. It’s made of Thyr, they get it from the quarry over the mountain. He created a device that moves the light, and there’s a Woundstone up there.” She pointed, and her arm spasmed with a brief series of tremors. “That’s what holds his voice.”

“Is he a magician?”

She laughed. “He’s the Headsir. Godsgifted, though it’s best for everyone if it’s still a mystery how he’s been touched.” She was obviously reciting something well taught her.

“Why here? What’s he saying?” I asked, ignoring the bits of her speech that made no sense to me, and getting more curious despite my desire to escape this girl’s presence.

“He’s just warning us off going crazy once we enter town. Are you a visitor? You must’ve come by here, unless you came through…servants’ entrance.” With a giggle, she came close enough that I felt the emanations of her heat and smelled the occasional whiff of light-beads that escaped the corners of her lips.

Light-beads were something the sailors in Cape Town brought in from the far-off lands like Beschia and Noreland, but they were always bound for the richer cities. They, the sailors, didn’t touch the stuff, more in favor of the welcome relief of ale than because it was dangerous, though it did do things to the mind. It made it impossible to get pregnant, which was why the whores nearest the wharfs would save the occasional gold coin they received so that they might afford a bag the size of a silver half-head. Some of them even tried to make their own, but there was a mistaken idea that the light-beads were made of gold, and a lot of them whores go crazy. A lot of them die when their brains burn and hiss behind their skulls.

It packed heat into the ears, set images against the insides of the eyelids, and could drive a person crazy. The lingering taste was bitter, and there was an ever-present feel of fire inside the nose, and the lingering smell of death. Sight got worse with repeated use—the eyes gained a gold sheen visible from both sides, the lips crusted over with tainted saliva and blood until just talking could split them in half, but light-beads meant that the touch of any person except themselves could set off pleasure that doubled every second, until it didn’t matter that the rest of the time the world seemed yellow, because for almost five minutes, it would be pure white and there were visions of Skysea. But touching the worst ones could be like touching moist feathers and the skin was frail enough to tear. It could get to the point where they’d kill just to have a body to rub up against. It was even worse when these people were ones who’d only been dying from the need of some salvation in the image of what would come for them after.

My knowledge came from those darkly lit times when I was allowed to visit my mother. Those visits stopped after her skin slid off but before she clawed out her stomach. I can only imagine she might have gotten them from my father, who would in his turn have gotten them either because it would be something entertaining to do or just from some rich woman come into the docks. They seemed to like him, and it was a rich-person drug.

“I don’t know.” I moved away from her and didn’t look back.

My wandering somehow took me right to the place I was supposed to go. Halfway across the entrance chamber, my steps faltered, and my gaze lifted beyond the blinding light and up to the tower just visible through the colored glass. The apparition of the tower wavered behind the imperfect glass as I continued across. I found myself at the base of a staircase that opened directly into the entrance chamber.

I climbed them without contest, for there were no guards. The stairs curved over and out as if I walked the edge of a circle, and the oaken door at the zenith stood before me as the spike of a dead tree in the middle of a soft landscape. It did not just sit there, it reared; there was an impression of dynamism, even then as it just stood. And then it opened.

“The Headsir will see you now,” said the gargoyle crouched in the antechamber that greeted me. In a bemused daze, I passed by it. I heard the gritty rasp of my clothes catching against it as it shifted away from me, and then I was through into the Headsir’s room.

It was not a room. It was a sweeping grassland of a balcony. It opened up into the sky as if it proposed to catch within a grip of stone and mortar the eternity of hot, boiling blue above it. The glaring white of its own surface endeavored to challenge nature’s might. It failed, but only, from where I stood, by a little.

The way it bore out into nothingness seemed impossible. It was even stranger to me that this might be considered someone’s room. It was a plateau of man’s design. Wholly unnatural.

“Yes, it strikes many as impressive,” a hissing, sibilant voice murmured from behind me. From the recesses of the collapsing veranda that seemed shunted up against the building from whence I’d come, a figure drew. There were few shadows, but he seemed to radiate his own. Yet, once he stood before me and the light hit him fully, the entire presentation seemed ridiculous. There was much splendor and yawning precipices of magnificent construction, but the sort to which only little minds aspired so that they might fit all the better into the worlds first constructed in their minds as a bulwark or cradle.

Again my mind bombarded me with leaps to opinions that might ruin me. I didn’t know why, right then, I thought that thought in resignation of a lesson unlearned, but my memories did not fill in until some time after. I determined to give away nothing—a wan prayer to my subconscious, in truth.

There had been a gargoyle in the antechamber—it finally registered.

No matter but that at hand.

“Yes,” I said.

The Headsir circled around me until the sun met his back. He was a little shorter than me, though not diminutive. He was not imposing, but he disturbed. A lot about this place was disturbing. His head was shaved but he would otherwise have had a full head of hair—brown. Under a heavy brow his dark eyes were quite sunken, his cheeks sallow and drawn tightly over sharp cheekbones to stretch like a drum-skin at his jaw. His dark skin was oddly discordant with the gray of his long cloak.

“Did you bring me here?” I finally asked after a few stretching moments of nothing but muffled whistles of wind. He ignored me by turning around and facing the wide-open space in front of us, and he was so close I could see the stalks of hair struggling to grow back along his skull line.

“I have the difficult task of placing you somewhere where you belong, Amaranth.”

“My name is—“

“But I already do have some requests, though how they know about you would be quite interesting to find out,” he continued.

“What do you mean requests?” I demanded louder. “Requests for what? Who? Why the hells am I here?” My final shout echoed only slightly before disappearing forever. I didn’t like this wide-open land of sculpted stone; it was unnatural.

Headsir turned back to face me, his lips pursed but not with irritation. He turned his face upwards toward me so that the shadow momentarily fell from across his eyes, and they stared directly into me. “Quick temper. They’ll want you broken, and that’s not something I’m allowed to allow. I’ve been told nothing of your talents, except that they might someday make themselves apparent. What am I supposed to make of that?” His mouth was thin, and when it twisted wryly, the tips of his eyeteeth were visible against his bottom lip.

“Who told you these things?”

For once, it seemed he heard me. “This is not, despite appearances, your concern. Your concern is to obey everything I demand of you.” Headsir circled around me, and I felt the path of his gaze like a prickle across every patch of skin in quick succession. “I could put you in the Warrior Melt, but they would want to beat you.” I felt his hand brush over my shoulder and I felt an uncomfortable coldness just below my breastbone. This man was like ice. “You’re the sort of man they just love to beat.”

A headache loomed behind my eyes, the confusion dizzying me and infusing my body with a call for sleep. I had the impression that if I soon did not obey the forces of my mind, my body would shut down. And when I glanced quickly down at the Headsir, I understood that he was doing this to me. I ripped away from his cold hands.

His eyeteeth flashed again, more feral this time. “You are Godstouched,” he nearly snarled. “Do not believe for an instant that we will allow you to walk away from this place. Ereininhothen will have your soul, whether you can stand to lose it or not. If no one here will have you for personal use, you will be used like a slab of stone, and it will be painful. And believe me when I say that men like you live great lives as housewhores; men like you die badly elsewhere.”

“Men like…me?” I repeated, my legs shaking and my stomach shrinking back against my spine.

Headsir plucked at his bottom lip, hummed briefly in consideration, and then drew his hand across the bald surface of his head as he looked skyward with closed eyes. The flare of his nostrils was almost artistically beautiful, and I wondered.

“Beauty is easily created. But men who move like women are quite different,” he murmured without moving from his reverential position.

The insult that played on my masculinity was acute, and I stepped backward before he reached out, slowly but inexorably, and latched onto my wrist. When I looked up from his grip on me, his eyes were direct on mine once more.

“Housewhores service women as well if you cannot accept what you are.”

Some surge of strength allowed me to rip my wrist from his grip. “I am not a whore.”

“Of course not,” Headsir said indulgently. Spurs of wind played with the ends of his cloak. They brushed against my bare calves and I stepped back once more, out of their grasp as well. “But it will be hard to place you otherwise.”

Was I indeed effeminate? I wondered. I couldn’t imagine I was, but then the looks of people like Gamine, like Ape, would be more easily explained. Less easily dismissed. “Why do you need to find a place for me at all?” I pleaded. “Why not just let me go?”

“These are more orders. I do not disobey. You will not disobey. You no longer own yourself. And if your mind can’t quite grasp it, then that, at least, can be ripped from you. Why you are here is of your own doing, that much I know.”

“But I don’t—“

“Remember? Well, that is not requisite.” He had withdrawn from me, he no longer truly cared to waste his time on where I would be put to be beaten, whored, or not. “I will put you with the Guard offices.” Headsir glanced behind him at his eternity of whiteness, and then back at me. His half-smile was almost pitying. “You may stay here as long as you wish, but before sundown, you will be out in the Tower.”

The way he moved was not human. He vanished, though I could hear him walking away and I could see him from the corner of my eye. But for all I knew then at the moment I spent staring at the space that dared to challenge the vastness of the sky, he had disappeared in smoke and sorcery.

There was immense quiet, the sort that sounded of the beating heart. I concentrated on the breath that filled me, that I released, that I drew back in unevenly, then evenly as I gained control over myself. Control. I never had control. Control was something for people who could still that beating heart until it faded into the other noises of simply living, like the water laving the docks. An incessant sound but an invisible one. But I always concentrated too much on the living, not trusting my body to make itself move and continue beating with life.

The grassland of glassy stone began to threaten the longer I stood there. The wind no longer whistled. I was alone up there, beyond the world and its noise. And then a strange noise began to filter back in.

I think that moment is the one where I started to become crazy. The noise was a whisper of something more than simple shifting of air. It sounded—sounded like words; unrecognizable, irresistible.

They called the Headsir’s room the Slate of Becoming. It was not his. It was Tierhothen’s. It was quarried over the mountain, where the Headsir claimed to have ripped the stone below in the entrance chamber. But if he believed that tiny, petty stone below to be Thyr, then this must have been as a slice of Skysea to him.

This thing I was standing on, this was Thyr.

I don’t know what crunched itself inside me then, perhaps it was the words that whispered but didn’t. In my new white clothes that bunched uncomfortably, I slowly eased down into a crouch, and I did the unthinkable. I reached down for the Thyr.

Before this, before this we were stone stone, we could think like sky, we could breathe like grass, we could, we could flow, surround, this place was ours, ours. Don’t touch this sheet of life. No grime, no no purity, no purity because no grime but now. Sloping back of infinity, we were, we were. No blood because no knives, now now now knives knives, no more than slice, slice do not touch our infinity, rip, tear, pain pain but nothing, no pain leave. Leave. Towers of rot like white but stained with dirt, dirt and souls no souls. Dirt and blood but different, we did not do this, we do not not want this, no leave. Leave. We saw gold like stars in beast but man is tarnished no perfection. No no but we wish we wish, no souls have we but seen they are ours. They are us and man breaks them, tears them, torn like limbs but worse nothing left to build from, we lurch like universe but beaten down down down like breath and sight, no invention of purity even when they touch us, do not touch this is ours. No breath breath, memory of creation but not enough against forgotten and glamour, shine, filigree laid why should we should not even know these words, why we would know? Know? No. Ruins of ruins of ruined earth, us, stone, us, life, us, death, ours.

My breath was like rent screams in my own ears. I could only imagine the sight I made, hunched as I was and clutching, or trying to clutch at, my mind.

I had been Amaranth for mere hours, and I would remain so for some time after, at least to the people who did not know. Who couldn’t know. But to myself, I was no longer Amaranth. I was nameless because I was lost inside my head. I was Stone in the sense that I was no longer utterly human in a way that destroyed the one difference between us and unalive earth.

Baneborn is a bastardization of the Vedlai word basbertne. It means “to be stoned to death.” I don’t think even Kulhoac knows that.