Beneath Ceaseless Skies #149 Read online

  Gasbray flushed with shame and nodded. He took his glasses off and wiped his eyes.

  Now she just had to figure out how to get her hands on the key.

  * * *

  “Gasbray needs to speak to you,” she said.

  He glanced up from his book. “What about?”

  “You don’t want me talking to him, so I didn’t ask.”

  He grinned at that. “Good girl.” Then to himself: “What could he have to talk about, eh? More bad news?” He hefted himself from the tub, hitting the deck with a wet slap. The old scars from the second accident rippled gray and pink up his side, where the ribs had flashed bluish-white and the meat of him red. Distracted like this, she could have stuck him with her spear, but he was too big and strong and would tear her to pieces, and there seemed a kind of betrayal in that, a kind of back-stab he deserved but that she couldn’t bring herself to land. The anticipation of bad news and fear at his impending trip out and back had turned him nasty, though, and when she got in his way he shoved her.

  “Make yourself useful and bring me some sparkly stuff,” he said. “Earn your keep.”

  She eyed the pair of locked boxes under his tub. “I will.”

  “And re-tar the walls. I found another leak.”

  “I will.”

  He caught something in her tone and leered at her. “That’s my girl,” he said, and with any luck it would be the last thing he ever said to her. He slid into the water and vanished.

  Her heart beat so fast as she followed. The crump of it filled her ears and drew the tender flaps of her gills so tight she struggled to breathe. The cold water gripped her. There he was, just outside the hatch, but she knew where he was headed so she had no need to follow, not just yet.

  First things first.

  She cut for the cliff, where the big monsters were found, because that’s what she needed now: a monster bigger than the one she’d lived with as long as she could remember. She caught a water fox with her spear and used a sharp rock to rip it open, turning the water milky red around her as she swam for the drop-off where the world turned to bottomless ocean and the shapes of big horrifying things lurked, waiting for a reason to venture in, a reason like blood in the water. She took a piece of string and tied one end through the fox’s gills and mouth, the other round her wrist so she could toss the lure away if needed.

  She swam beyond the protection of the cliff, and with nothing below or above her (the surface lost in haze above) the vertigo mixed with her terror and turned her movements jerky. The fox trailed behind, still billowing, and those huge shapes almost lost in the green shadows ahead seemed to shift and turn towards her. Good enough.

  She spun back towards the cliff and swam as fast as she ever had, as fast as she could while still holding her spear (which she couldn’t bring herself to toss away), turning every arm stroke, every cupped hand in as close to technical perfection as she could. If they hit the lure behind her there was every chance the force could snatch her arm clean off before she had a chance to think, but looking back would cost too much, cause too much drag, so she plunged on, imaging teeth and fins and cruel black eyes closing in on her feet as they kicked, kicked, kicked.

  Then she was above the sand of the cliff. The water turned warmer around her. She risked a glance back and found a barrel-bodied monster almost on top of her, mouth open to swallow the lure. She spun and cut and the shark followed, more nimble than something that size had a right to be. She had to yank on the string to keep the fox from it as it lunged again. The shark flicked its tail and washed right by her, so close the sandpaper skin down its flank burned her.

  She dropped into a shallow crevice for protection, lungs on fire, and watched the beast trace a leisurely curve through the water before closing in again. Every instinct told her to raise her spear, as if such a thing was any protection against that much muscle and teeth, but she needed the shark to follow, not vanish at the first sign of prey fighting back.

  So she played out her string to let the fox float up like a buoy, high enough overhead to keep that cavernous mouth well away from her. The shark lined up, surged, and she yanked the lure away again, almost misjudging this time so that the fox glanced off the shark’s lower jaw and swirled clear in its wash. Then she was gone, no more air left in her, even with the help of gills, heading for the surface where she would be the most vulnerable.

  Up, up, up, the shark following, smiling now, the power of it transmitting up through the water, and she panicked, released the lure, rolled away, twirled as the shark shoved past and swallowed the bait. They both broke the surface together. She gasped for air. The mackerel-blue back of the shark rolled too close and she had no choice but to stick it with her spear. It flinched and she dove.

  No chance to think. Pure need: she needed the shark to follow, so time to offer her own meat and bones. She poked her bicep with the prongs of her spear and squeezed blood from the wound. Now she was the bait, and she swam. She swam for the beach, the meeting point, knowing that if she passed that nest of clams there, followed that alleyway between rocks there, past the sunken wreck of that old galley beyond them both, then she would find the man who stole her, and the shark would too.

  The thing came after her, curious and hungry still, the water fox barely more than a quickly swallowed bite. She might have been a wounded seal caught too far from Widow’s Rock, delicious and full of rich fat, and she swooped and swerved like one, drawing the shark in closer and closer.

  There he was. A shadow through the water, now more than that: a target. Something to aim for. Ambling along like a sea cucumber, no clue what was coming. This was for everything he’d done to her, to her mother, to anyone else hurt by him. If she looked back through her flashing feet all she saw was teeth and white gullet.

  She swooped over him, past him, slapping him with her hands, and then he was screaming, the sound muffled and somehow even worse under all this water as that impossibly toothy mouth clamped over his shoulder. Blood everywhere. A shake of the head and the shark let him go, hoping for seal or turtle and finding something else distasteful, but that one bite had opened him up from clavicle to waist with a string of perforations the size of fists, so that it looked as if his entire side could simply be torn off with a sharp tug. He twitched in agony as the shark slunk away.

  She hid behind a rock to watch him die, feeling no guilt or satisfaction but more a sense of relief at having done a thing that needed to be done. He seemed to lose all shape, and the current washed him against a bank of overgrown rock. Even now the smaller sharks and larger fish were coming, drawn by the blood, so she had to move fast.

  She kicked into the red mist, groping for the mass at the center of it and finding soft flesh, still warm and slightly rubbery, blood still pumping through her fingers. An arm brushed her, his one arm, still there even having been deep inside the shark’s mouth, and she followed it to the shoulder, searching for that hidden pocket in the armpit where he kept his keys.

  She found two hard sharp shapes buried in the softness and shot away just before the smaller sharks swarmed him.

  * * *

  Gasbray opened the box and began counting the rows of stacked coins. “Are these stolen, or are they yours now?” he said, his mouth a tight line. He meant: Did you kill him?

  She said nothing.

  He eyed the bandage round her arm. “He was a good man once. Not that it means anything now.” He studied her face. “The poison, it gets inside your brain and makes you less than you were.”

  There were insinuations there, if she cared to find them. But she was tired. Bone tired. She now understood the phrase, feeling it deep inside her, a fatigue halfway to death.

  “Is that enough?” she said.

  “Close to. You are smaller than he, so the cost scales too. Smaller doses required, you see. Any shortfall will come from my pocket, as agreed.” She sensed the shortfall was more than she had. Gasbray closed the box and locked it again. He returned the key to her. “You may thi
nk this presumptuous, but you are always welcome back here, whether or not the guild specialists are able to do what you wish them to do, or undo, as it were.”

  “I don’t think so.” She would leave all this behind and never come back.

  “But you have no family left, nowhere else to go.”

  “I haven’t had any family for a long time now, ever since he stole me from my mother.”

  “But... but you do understand?” Gasbray said. “He was your father. Why else would he have taken you?”

  She flinched. A final twist of pain. But no. Lies. She was her mother but he was just a man, no matter what Gasbray said; a cruel, damaged, deranged man.

  Bones on the reef; let Selessi have him.

  Copyright © 2014 Greg Linklater

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Greg Linklater lives in Sydney, Australia, where he crunches numbers in an office so he can indulge his writing habit on the side. When he’s not scrabbling at the keyboard he’s either reading, tending to his pregnant wife, or wondering why he continues to support certain sporting teams despite the fact they only ever break his heart. A novel set in the same world as "Memories of Her" is occupying a large amount of his time.

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  COVER ART

  “Kaybor Gate,” by Alex Ries

  Alex Ries is a Melbourne-based illustrator and concept artist. His artworks have been featured by publishers including Clarkesworld Magazine, Pearson Education Canada, and the Discovery Channel. He worked with THQ’s Bluetongue Entertainment studio and contributed to four published titles. His studies in diverse visual media such as painting, 3D visualization, and film, coupled with an interest in biology and real-world technology, have fostered an artistic style that can not only accurately illustrate life from the real world but fictional life as well. View his work at www.alexries.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.