Little Calendar

Mina Ramirez

The air in the page’s office stank with sweat and mildew, rancid from the heat outside. When the Perpetuum had commissioned the local construction guild to erect the squat wooden annex, tucked away facing the rear compound wall of the Third Cathedral Outpost, they evidently did not account for the heat retention issues an unventilated interior would raise in the middle of a salt playa. It was no surprise, then, that the pages, commissars, and infantry regulars who passed through the building began referring to it as the Casket.

Psalm had passed through worse heat in her day; in fact, she rarely registered any temperature at all. She had been sealed away from such things. It was frivolous.

Her fellow pages avoided her when they could. Maybe the burn scars cascading down the left side of her face, splashing into a rippling red basin across her arm and torso, appeared all the more prominent on such a diminutive halfling; maybe they couldn’t stand her mouth breathing, her only real way to regulate the heat she couldn’t feel but would still steam her insides, especially in the Casket. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered.

She preferred her solitude. Archival duties necessitated quiet. Psalm scoured scrolls, tablets, the odd tome, ledgers and receipts, geographic surveys and personal missives. Everything she read, she notated in shorthand, compiled into her own colossal grimoire, indecipherable to any but the arch-scribes in Cathedral and herself.

It was decent work. Today Psalm was patiently recording a series of letters from a priest, traveling with some sort of large trading caravan, to his student in a lonely priory near the Miasmal Sea. One sentence became a symbol; the next, a profound theological question, became a series of wordless vowels.

She had transcribed as far as the student’s third reply when the Knightbrother entered.

The other pages in attendance ceased their duties as one and bowed, their cleaning and administrative instruments clattering to the floor. The Knightbrother’s plate gleamed even in the shade of the Casket. His head nearly touched the ceiling. A scar lazily snaked down his cheek across his mouth; one of his tusks stopped, shorn clean, along its path.

His eyes lingered on Psalm, who had looked up, disinterested, and returned to her labors.

“Scribe,” he said. The other pages turned away from her.

The Knightbrother crossed the distance to her desk in the far corner in three steps.

Psalm finished her letter, tucked her pen away, and regarded the Knightbrother, palms folded atop one another.

“You are the scribe Psalm Merrick, yes?” The Knightbrother’s eyes narrowed, or maybe softened.

Psalm nodded.

“I am Knightbrother Altai-Beren, leader of the Third Paladin Gestalt. We have need of you in the field. Can you transcribe while afoot?”

Psalm sat silently, considering.

“She’s—wait!” Another page took a furtive step towards Altai-Beren, eyes wide. “She’s here on special bequest. She’s been relieved of fieldwork. Indefinitely, sir.”

So it was pity. Psalm stood and began collecting her tools.

“She has been reassigned,” said Altai-Beren. “Knight-Commander Wilgold selected her by name.”

Psalm stood with her arms full in front of Altai-Beren.

“I’ll need a bag,” she said. Her voice scraped against her throat like coals. Altai-Beren began striding towards the door.

“You can use one of my saddlebags,” he said. “But it’s a ways to the barracks. Until then, you’ll just have to make do.”

The other pages looked at Psalm, finally, as she left after the Knightbrother, eyes forward.

#

Stretching out in all directions beyond the Third Cathedral Outpost was a world spanning desert. Sand swallowed the horizon. Above the Gestalt column, marching as the legs of a vast centipede, winding between the peaks of ancient dunes, hung the white sun, as bright and leaden as the Perpetuum’s holy star.

Altai-Beren rode an armored camel at the head of the column, Psalm in front of him in the saddle; his Knightsiblings flanked the infantry regulars and support wagons behind. They marched silently, heads hung low beneath the wind or angled high into the cloudless sky.

For three days the column marched without stopping. The sun’s lidless eye watched on its wheeling track, its expression somewhere between scornful and jesting. Carrion birds rode the high thermals; stranger shapes, jittering and lonesome, flew even beyond them. Psalm tracked mountain ranges so distant the light they reflected seemed to betray bodies of water, an entire world’s worth, an entire world away. She couldn’t imagine even half that much water in one place. Only once did she see a single cloud. It drifted cluelessly away from the column, busy going nowhere.

At last, long after the sun had set for the third time and the sky was peppered with frail lights, Altai-Beren signaled the column to stop and make camp. The paladins and their retinue wordlessly disembarked.

Psalm sat down on the bare sand and began transcribing. Her fingers had ached for her pen. She felt Altai-Beren’s heavy footsteps behind her, his boots displacing the sand from the top of her small dune.

“Is this the farthest you’ve been out?”

Psalm did not look up.

“Your colleague mentioned you had been relieved of field duties,” he said. “No doubt the result of those burns.”

“That is what people tend to assume,” said Psalm. She envisioned herself snapping her fingers.

Altai-Beren snorted. “You think yourself underestimated.”

“I think,” said Psalm, continuing to transcribe. “That I was brought along to work, and not to talk.”

Altai-Beren paused for a few moments, silent beneath the stars, and turned to leave.

“Do not tarry where the light does not touch,” he said as he walked down the dune. “There are lizards about.”

Psalm looked up from her tome and blinked. Far away in the darkness, turgid forms crept across the desert floor, languidly carrousing as inkblots on slate. Psalm made a quick notation, stood, and hurried down the dune towards the camp, where the aroma of goat stew was beginning to take shape.

#

Another day and a half passed before the landscape began to change.

Only a few flowers could be seen among the dunes at first, and they were hard to spot, as golden as they were. In the next instant, the column found themselves amidst a gleaming, humid meadow. The camels and regulars yelped together; the Knightsiblings cursed, ever stoic.

“Company,” cried Altai-Beren. “Forward!” His voice thundered across the column.

Psalm couldn’t look behind her but heard the searing hiss of fifty blades leaving their scabbards. Altai-Beren’s command flew after him as a banner beneath which his companions rallied. She watched him smoothly draw his morningstar in his right hand. Their camel lowed.

“Do you know these flowers, scribe?” asked Altai-Beren.

Psalm nodded. “Calendula.”

“I’ve never seen these before.”

“No one living has. They’re extinct.”

Altai-Beren grimaced.

One of the Knightsiblings rode up beside them astride their own camel, spear in hand.

“Your orders, sir?” they asked.

“Scout ahead,” grumbled Altai-Beren. “Use the sun as a guide. This place will try to deceive you. Return in twenty minutes.”

“Sir.”

The camel snorted and lurched into a canter, faster than Psalm expected. She nearly jumped as she felt Altai-Beren’s hand at her belt. He was clipping her into the reins.

“Write,” he said. “You will not fall.”

She began to transcribe.

Time stood still in the gelatinous prison of the meadow’s heat. All around them grew golden flowers, their green stalks shifting, revealing an emerald understory, when the wind bade them. Low moans, hollow and indistinct, wound their way across the land, snaking through the column. The steeds and beasts of burden bristled.

Psalm’s eyes darted across the meadow, searching for something that could not be found. The creaking wheels of the wagons began to spin in her mind.

The calendula regarded her with unthinking eyes. Each petal beckoned Psalm off the camel, onto the ground, into the pillowy weave of flowers. She felt a call deeper still, through the soil, entangled in roots.

Her head lolled on her shoulders as the sounds of the column waxed and waned. The presence of other people stretched away into the distance. They were dunes themselves, spewing sand into the sky, eroding, until the world was flat. Then she could see over the horizon; it distorted, and darkened, and around its rim golden petals reached up in a mindlessly joyous chorus. They were blotting out the sun.

“Hold!”

The column rolled to a stop. Psalm snapped upright and heard movement behind her. The paladins were forming a ring around the wagons. The regulars marched alongside their steeds.

She had almost dropped her tome. Her hands were shaking.

Altai-Beren’s grim gaze was locked straight ahead. Psalm heard him swallow. She followed his eyes to the horizon.

An armored camel loped towards them, alone. It bellowed once and vanished.

Altai-Beren cursed and charged. Six of his Knightsiblings, riding at the front of the column, thundered after him. The wind fell apart at their approach, the meadow bending beneath their might.

In one moment they rode under the sun; in the next they were surrounded by darkness and stone. A wall appeared before them, four more around them, a dark ceiling closing in above. Altai-Beren pulled hard on the reins; the camel nearly toppled, hooves clattering on more stone. His Knightsiblings followed suit. Psalm heard a crash and a guttural scream.

“What in all the hells is this?”

Five paladins maneuvered their frightened, bucking steeds to avoid the four smooth white stone walls that now encircled them, dancing around what Psalm could now barely see was another Knightsibling crushed under a dying camel.

“Bors is down—”

“A light! We need a light!”

“I can’t hold—”

“Silence.”

Altai-Beren’s voice boomed with supernatural volume. At once, the commotion ceased; Knightbrother Bors moaned quietly at his broken legs.

Psalm’s head spun. Behind her, Altai-Beren whispered and produced a bright mote of sunlight. It hung in the air, bobbing gently. The Knightbrother dismounted and signaled with a single hand for the rest to follow suit.

A few of the paladins tried slamming fists and shields into the wall. The din made Bors’ camel groan.

“We cannot leave,” Altai-Beren said. “We will waste our strength trying. I do not know where we have traveled to, but we no longer walk in the Perpetuum’s light.”

Psalm walked shakily to a wall. She had lost the direction they had come through. A faint bellow emanated through the stone.

“We’re still in the meadow,” she said, turning to Altai-Beren. “The first camel—I can hear it. Maybe the others outside can hear us.”

“Listen well, scribe,” growled one of the Knightsiblings. “We cannot trust this profane place. Get back before you hurt yourself.”

Altai-Beren joined Psalm at the wall and placed his ear to the cool stone.

“It certainly sounds like a camel.”

Psalm placed her hand on the wall and the smooth stone split, sinking inward. She stepped back as a plume of dust spewed over her and Altai-Beren. Darkness spilled from the nascent crevices as the stone pulled away and down, grinding on unseen tracks, until a staircase formed, yawning into nothingness. The din of grinding stones persisted far, far below, echoing wistfully.

The Knightsiblings shifted on their feet. Bors lay silent. Altai-Beren turned to face them.

“Halda, Wren, stay up here and tend to Bors—see if you can rouse the company outside. Shout, pound on the walls, anything. Fleur and Corman will accompany me.” He faced Psalm, coated in dust.

“Lead the way, scribe.”

Psalm couldn’t hear anything from outside. She nudged one foot to the edge of the first step, bracing the tips of her fingers against the wall, and descended.

No matter how far she went down the stairs, her view never changed. The same steps followed the same steps followed the same steps. She glanced over her shoulder at Altai-Beren, Fleur, and Corman—and couldn’t see the chamber they had arrived in. Her stomach flipped.

“We shouldn’t stop,” said Altai-Beren.

So they continued.

For the most part the stairs led straight down. Occasionally they twisted slightly. Always the steps were the same. Psalm tried to swallow. Minutes, hours, unending steps; time had lost its meaning. Her feet ached. Altai-Beren’s light, that thaumaturgy, pulsed slowly, casting shadows that grew and diminished. Psalm, growing and diminishing, flat black dust on a white wall. Ash, even.

Psalm stepped twice on a flat floor. She looked up and found herself at the beginning of a narrow corridor. Altai-Beren strode past her, morningstar drawn, shield raised.

“Stay behind me.”

They walked even further down the corridor than they had down the stairs. The walls on either side were recessed every meter or so. The depressions were shallow and narrowed towards the ceiling.

“Doorways to nothing,” Psalm muttered.

“I think—” began Fleur, before her sword clattered to the ground.

She had vanished. Psalm whirled around. Corman trembled, backing away towards the stairs.        

“Stars guide us,” he whispered.

Something half-moaned, half-hooted behind him. Psalm registered a blur in the darkness beyond Corman’s torch and a quick gulp of fear before he, too, disappeared. The torch lay smoldering on the floor.

A bright lance of holy light shot out from Altai-Beren’s hand, arcing over Psalm’s head down the corridor; illuminated in the beam, for an instant, were humanoid shadows, simultaneously gaseous and barklike, golden eyes glittering in their featureless faces like petals, all arrayed perfectly still as they emerged from the recesses in the walls.

“Coffins,” said Psalm.

Altai-Beren grabbed the halfling around her midsection, tucked her under his arm, and ran.

She couldn’t notate like this; the shorthand wrote itself clear across her eyes anyway. Here dwelt the dead.

The stone beneath them softened into amber flowers, reaching up with invisible, jealous hands. Calendulas crowded the ceiling, choked the walls. Altai-Beren kept running as the flowers grew thicker, closing in. He stumbled and they both crashed to the floor. A vine was creeping up his sabaton.

“Run,” he grunted. “Go! Run, scribe!”

Another vine, resplendent with flowers, gently wound its way around Psalm’s neck. She wheezed, reaching her scarred hand towards Altai-Beren, wildly swinging his morningstar.

“Psalm! Run!”

She felt a ripple of force through her arm and a wave of heat from her heart to her face. Psalm closed one eye and snapped her trembling, ruined fingers towards Altai-Beren.

A wild flame sparked just beyond her hand and shot down the corridor, dancing off a wall once, twice—and exploded.

Psalm went blind as the unbearable heat and noise hit her. She tasted copper and acid, smelled only smoke and grease. She collapsed coughing. The vine around her throat was gone. Blood oozed out of her ringing ears.

She could see Altai-Beren motionless in the smoke and darkness; only scorched stone walls otherwise.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped, crawling towards him. “I’m sorry. Left me alone. Should’ve left me alone. Happens… always happens…”

He was unconscious, his green skin blistered red, eyebrows vaporized. A thin breath rattled out from his burnt lungs.

Psalm lay still there for a moment, prone over Altai-Beren’s cuirass. Shadows scraped along the corridor behind her, wary of the new light. She stood, groping for Corman’s dropped torch.

Her hand found the hilt of Altai-Beren’s morningstar, its leather wrap shriveled and sloughing off the hot steel. Ahead, a pale yellow glow began to creep up the corridor.

She walked, dragging the morningstar behind her, until she entered a small chamber barely tall enough for her to stand. It resembled a shrine more than a room, as if Psalm had shrunk to fit inside a tabernacle. Calendula adorned the room as if they had been lovingly decorated. Their alien undulations and arrhythmic pulses told Psalm otherwise. Across from her, between two small canals of trickling water, sat a man, cross-legged and still. He was completely dessicated. A peaceful, enlightened smile adorned his face.

The calendula began chanting wordlessly, pulsing in waves. Psalm felt her feet dragging her towards the mummy. Hot air spiraled around her.

Invisible hands reached out from beyond the stone, grasping for Psalm and the flame buried in her chest. The heavens foamed and roiled as the dead stomped their feet in anticipation. The long wait was nearly over. Psalm stumbled slowly. Shorthand burned behind her eyes. She tried to plant her feet. The calendula beckoned sweetly. She was so close now.

A lone word streamed out of the placid, skintight smile.

“…ssslaaavesss…”

Psalm swung the morningstar in a full arc from the floor into the mummified face, shattering it almost entirely. Dust exploded into the air. She wrenched it free from the dessicated remains and swung again. Psalm swung until the white stone walls were coated in ash. Nothing else remained.

It always ends in ash, she thought. There would be no revelry underground tonight.

She limped back down the corridor until she found Altai-Beren, whose face had bubbled with severe burns. He wheezed out a weak, one-note laugh as she approached.

“I’m assuming,” he croaked. “That little trick of yours didn’t go so well the first time.”

Psalm put a burnt hand on either side of Altai-Beren’s gorget and began to slowly pull him back towards the stairs.

#

Night had fallen again by the time Psalm made it to the surface. Altai-Beren was asleep, half out of the stairway. There were no walls; there was no column, no paladins, no wagons. Withered flower stems littered the dead sand as far as the moon shone.

It was cold in the desert at night. Psalm laid back against the wall leading underground. Silence regarded her.

She couldn’t tell where the lands of the Perpetuum lay. The stars seemed unfamiliar. Altai-Beren took ragged breaths. She had seen healing light before; she wouldn’t pass her scars on to him.

As Psalm felt the odd warmth of the stone ease her screaming muscles into slumber, she remembered a passage she had transcribed days earlier—something about a traveling caravan, or bazaar. The old dialects could be tricky to parse.

Psalm suddenly realized she had no idea where her tome and pen had gone before she fell asleep.