What Remains: An Inked in Gray Anthology

Victory at all costs. Even at the price of our own life, the desire to survive transcends all rational thought. 

What Remains brings together fifteen tales

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inked in Gray LLC
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781952969034

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David-Christopher Harris

David-Christopher Harris’s fantasy publications include "Olam Ha-Ba" in speculative fiction and poetry magazine Arsenika, Last Call  in The Arcanist Magazine, Falselight  on PageHabit, and Children of Ozymandias in 50WordStories,  among others. He received his M.A. in Medieval Literature, which he uses exclusively to teach his cat Latin. He is currently querying.

He can be found on Twitter and at www.dcharriswriting.com

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Migration

Andy Dibble

Miriam stood hunched near the peak of the sloping cavern floor, driving a chisel against the bone ceiling. A scrim of pale dust coated her shoulders, sleeves, and the front of her vine-weave shirt. Her snarled hair, entwined with blackberry sprigs, fell slipshod to the small of her back.

Rain struck the floor of the cavern above. When last it rained a month ago, the ceiling was khem, dark and porous, so drinking water just trickled through. But the clan had to eat. They planted blackberry in the fertile ceiling, let it grow, harvested.

But nothing comes free. Grow crops in black khem, and it becomes white and unyielding, good for nothing. It becomes bone.

Miriam cursed as the chisel slipped in her sweaty grip. She let her hammer arm drop. This wasn’t her job. She had told Sippora to open a route for rainwater a week ago, but the slack woman dodged the work until it was almost past doing. Miriam could delegate to someone who would obey, but they would grumble. That wouldn’t do. She was only clan leader until morning. Then her six-month term would be over and leadership would revert to her husband Aaron. Making demands in the eleventh-hour was no way to bow out.

Everyone would rather laze about than do what it takes to survive. Only two others in the clan wore vine-weave. Everyone else flashspun fabric with alkhemy: drawing slip-signs on khem to make it flake into layers and flex-signs to make it hang. Scrawling signs was easy, but why squander khem when there was vine chaff at hand?

More than once, she fancied ordering everyone to wear vine-weave. They’d obey, but only because Aaron would, and then everything would go back to how it was when leadership reverted to him, leaving only her neighbors’ grudges to show for it.

Miriam looked over one shoulder and then the other. Joshua, stay away from there.

Joshua darted back from the narrow passage, the hood of his gratuitously-pocketed cloak flopping over his shoulder, a replica of the Lilah cloak from Aaron’s stories.

Joshua peeked into the passage without technically entering.

"Leave the warren alone."

I wasn’t going to go inside. Her son was a terrible liar, but what eight-year-old isn’t? Most children believed their parents when told warrens are haunted by the Luminaries—the people who prospered when the world was young and khemical enough to dig new caves by drawing compress-signs. But every sign ossifies khem. Now migration is a way of life: move into a fresher quarter of the world’s viscera, grow crops on the dark scalp of khem, then move on when all is wan and fused into the skeleton of the world.

Just stay close, Miriam said.

Joshua plopped down, fixed elbow to knee and planted chin on palm. He knew better than to protest. But just moments later, he fidgeted, brandished his own chisel and scraped at the gray ground, only partway ossified because the clan hadn’t planted so near the warren.

Miriam watched warily as Joshua etched four arcs, the quarters of a circle turned inside out: a four-pointed star. It woke, like a bed of coals breathed upon, lambent beneath ashes. Joshua wasn’t sloppy. The surface was just too far gone, so the light from his sign sparked and sputtered. The only way around that was to compact many signs together, but that made khem ossify faster. Joshua gouged the light-sign, and it winked out.

He started on another sign, drawing one lobe and then another. He completed a second arc; the ellipses fused together.

No heat-signs, Joshua.

Heat-signs ossify as much khem in an hour as a light-sign does in a week. Their clan would migrate tomorrow, so maybe it didn’t matter if Joshua idled away a patch so far gone. But he needed to develop good habits.

Help me. Miriam thrust a callused finger at the bony ceiling. At eight, and small for his age, Joshua couldn’t chip the crust. But chiseling would focus him on things that matter.

Footsteps. She knew that gait. Miriam, can we talk?

Miriam wiped sweat from her brow and faced Aaron.

He tilted his head to the side toward their tent.

Joshua, stay there, she said.

She turned to follow Aaron, down the rise where amaranth stalks lay in windrows. With amaranth, from planting to harvest to winnowing, it is all about season. Never harvest when the flowers burgeon in burgundy or purplish ropes, racking the stalk under a sluggish load of blooms. Wait until the petals are a third browned. Then harvest before insects pilfer the seeds.

She and Aaron had a season too, but that season had passed.

Inside their tent, Aaron poured saffron spice into two cups from a canister he kept in his belt. Spices were the product of multi-step processes, which involved not only sweet- and bitter-signs but slip-signs as well. The khem they were derived from had to be virgin, untouched by signs, or the process couldn’t be completed. Botch one step and the intermediate product had to be scrapped. It was sport to Aaron. There was even a bit of competition between him and others in the clan to see who could make this or that spice the fastest. But their haste only made for error.

Miriam wanted to refuse, but Aaron was already pouring water from a bone pitcher.

He waited until she took a sip before saying, I’m hoping you can lay off Joshua, even just through the night. It’s New Year’s. Let him have some fun.

I’m raising him right, even if you coddle him. He’ll lead the clan one day, him and his wife. And because you encourage him, he pretends he’s a storybook character adventuring after an ever-glowing lantern. I think he actually believes he can find it.

Today it’s Lilah, tomorrow it’ll be a new game. It’s just a phase.

And what has Joshua’s Lilah phase done for the clan? Haven’t you heard Sippora call me Gebira?

Sippora pretended it was a compliment because, in stories, Gebira was a great alkhemist. But the stories also said she was a one-eyed hag too aloof to care for Lilah and her other children.

Heh-uh. Aaron swallowed his mirth. No, I hadn’t heard, but it’s not Joshua’s fault. Or mine. If you’re a leader, you have to look the part. Cut your hair, clip your nails, shave, wear what they wear.

She planned to do all that when she didn’t have to do everything, oversee everything. How long since she bathed or even washed her clothes?

After a primp and fuss, there was no man better-groomed than Aaron, and he got hairy when he let himself go. He kept two flashspun shirts, less than some, like Sippora. But whenever one tore or frayed, he gave it to one of the children and signed a fresh one. Both buttoned-up, an affectation Miriam never understood. But now a method sewed those steely buttons: his brand.

Look, I’m sorry for coming after you, said Aaron. Stash the chisel, Miriam. It’s New Year’s. Get ready for the celebration! There’s water enough until we migrate, and once we move on, we’ll find more.

How could he be so glib about things that matter but berate her about hygiene? They might not find the next river, not in strange territory so removed from Inside. Everyone would be thirsty after drinking at the celebration. Maybe rain doesn’t come with the new year out here. The clan’s survival could not be gambled with.

And just where are we migrating? she said.

Farther out, I think. But if you have other ideas, I’m glad to hear them.

Under Miriam’s direction, they’d been milling about from cavern to cavern, weaving inward then out again. Farther out, there were Outsider barbarians. Just last migration, they came across the brutes’ hand emblems. How long until they found the savages themselves? She could cry dire warnings, but Aaron would just yank them steadily outward like he did during the first half of the year.

No ideas. Come tomorrow, you’re in charge. Her own words proved peoples’ grumblings: she lacked vision. Some of the younger generation even whispered that Aaron should lead them perpetually, instead of he and Miriam trading off at Midsummer and New Year’s. The traditionalists wouldn’t have it, but generations wither as surely as khem ossifies. Maybe she didn’t have Aaron’s vision, but better no vision than charging into the unknown after a dream.

You can still advise me, Miriam. Just because tomorrow it’s my term doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak your mind.

There were virgin spaces here, moist and supple as clay. But those untouched caves—khemical, bountifully black—invariably fostered inedible vegetation and insect life, transforming the landscape into more of themselves and their offspring, their fruitfulness blighting everything. Steady policing almost eradicated these cancers Inside, where khem was scarcer. If they could stoke that vigilance here, these between-places could be their home.

But Aaron wouldn’t listen, no more than he had before. Just how much farther do you think we can go? We’re already on the fringes. Farther out there are Outsiders and eventually the walls.

A scowl overset Aaron’s features. He thought the walls at the limit of the world were propaganda endorsed by fools, but she couldn’t bear the walls in mind without existential compression: She stood within a shadow, one so immense it had no periphery, and it was cast by a vastness, distant but just as huge. It pondered the moment to crush her.

She shoved the thought and its finality aside. If we turn back, go inward, at least we know what to watch out for.

But if we go outward, it might be better, with seldom a thing to watch out for or deny us. Have a little hope, Miriam.

You know the stories. Outsiders scavenging on the margins of the world, godless, guzzling the blood of their enemies. And the walls—

Enough, Miriam. You’re working yourself up over stories, just stories.

Just stories? How could Aaron call any story just a story? "How much have you fear-mongered with stories? Were it not for your stories, we’d still be Inside."

Aaron scoffed. Under the benevolent supervision of our Leader?

At least Inside, it was safe. Though she didn’t believe what she said. The Leader didn’t respond kindly to runaways straying back into his fold. That was why she hadn’t led the clan inward when Aaron’s term ended and hers began.

Safe Inside? His lips twisted dismissively. For now, maybe, but for how long? The Leader just wants to keep everyone in line.

That was the real reason Aaron led them outward. He knew that eventually—ten years? A hundred years?—Inside would be a wasteland too bony to support the clans that pecked at it. Territory skirmishes would ignite into war. There’d be no containing it.

Aaron grimaced. I know you don’t believe his nonsense about renewing khem.

The Leader spun tales about how we could renew the world through devotion to the god Khem, that if folk only drew signs for heat and light, planted frugally, and migrated often, Khem would take mercy and renew the world, turning bone everywhere into khem. That was a pious lie. But why lead everyone outward on another baseless hope that wilderness will house them when civilization can’t? At best it was premature, an act of desperation.

You know I don’t trust the Leader any more than you do, Miriam hedged. When they were Inside, she wouldn’t have dared say that aloud. "But rushing about is risky, Aaron. We don’t know the land, whether we’re heading toward or away from water. Out here, do the rains even come this time of year? If you would at least insist on conservation, we would have time to plan our next move, instead of just ossifying one cavern after another and pulling up the tent stakes every other month."

Miriam, you can’t lead by always telling people to do things they don’t want to do. Austerity isn’t a solution.

And blindly hoping is?

It is, if we hope long enough. If we keep migrating and keep hoping.

Miriam left the tent. Aaron followed her. He flashed a smile. I figured we’d fetch Joshua together before New Year’s.

Joshua wasn’t at the entrance to the Luminary warren.

I told him to stay here, said Miriam.

He probably joined up with everyone else. Aaron faced the lower stretch of the camp past the well where dry amaranth stalks lay, ready to fuel the New Year’s fire. Though summer expired months ago and the harvest was in, ruddy-red petals speckled the heaped stems.

Most of their clanspeople hunched over wafers of drab khem, carving clocks. Miriam could just make out Puah, the oldest woman in the clan, eyes infested with cataracts but dexterous enough to round off her wafer into a circle and engrave ten neat digits around the rim. In the morning, the first day of the new year, Puah would draw a spin-sign on her clock, its sweeping lobes rotated to avoid obstructing the digits. The spin-sign alkhemically compelled the inner circle of the clock-face around twice each day, seven-hundred thirty-times a year.

Miriam knew this could be Puah’s last clock, her last New Year’s. How many more migrations could a woman over seventy endure, even with Aaron and the other men to support her? That question suffused into: how many more migrations could the clan endure until their luck croaked, and they boxed themselves in and hit a dead-end in a labyrinth of bone and lost their way, like a mouse caught in the deepest pocket of her satchel? They would backtrack, hoping they somehow missed a vital cave. Then they’d fracture, like when they first quit the Inside under Aaron’s leadership. The young and foolhardy would cling to Aaron, but a hardy few would stick with Miriam.

Their all-too-curious son had gone where she told him not to. She said, No, Joshua’s not with the others. Miriam wrenched the knob on her lantern, and it flared brighter. Knowing Aaron would follow, she marched into the dim gullet of the warren.

The Leader didn’t approve of folk scrounging around in warrens. If people wandered the deep roads and galleries—intestines of history—he assumed the inscrutable writing and contraptions would draw them to the same wastefulness that doomed the Luminaries. They were out of the Leader’s reach, this far from Inside. But they’d been under his prohibition a long time. Miriam hadn’t been in a warren since she was a girl.

She recalled a realm of delicate bone arches and pillars of fused stalactites, a monument to antique glory. This warren was the same, but now the sign-wrought architecture seemed decadent.

She glanced inside a bone crucible for smelting khem into base metals and metals into alloys. That, at least, was useful. Its inside was worked with a dense pattern of intermingled heat-signs. So many! Did it evaporate khem? And it was wide, a cauldron really. Surely they didn’t need that much metal. Her gut soured further when the path bent into a declining flight of stairs. How many compress-signs did it take to carve those? And for what?

Maybe the Luminaries deserved what they got. She laughed bitterly, prompting a sidelong glance from Aaron. He looked away when she withheld comment.

What gets me is the smell, Aaron joked.

The smell? Aaron didn’t mean smell but its opposite, no-smell. Virgin khem is earthy, loam shot through with cumin. It rots as it ossifies; farmers gag taking in the last harvest before migration. But bone—true white-as-death bone—smells of nothing. How long did the Luminaries suck the rot, burrow deeper to escape it, only to nourish it with their compress-signs? How long until they abandoned their homes or at last triumphed over rot by ossifying their livelihood entirely?

Aaron walked briskly on her left, but not so busily as she did because his stride was longer. His gaze roved over the neat rows of writing alongside them, serenely coveting secrets.

Or that was how Miriam assumed Aaron judged it. For her, writing was just more waste. Beneath the indecipherable script were the grayest parts of the warren—the least ossified—but that was only because writing rendered its host surface useless for signs. Why did Aaron care? He couldn’t read a lick of it.

When the path leveled and widened into a storehouse, Aaron’s pace slackened. Miriam didn’t let up. She didn’t care whether the weapons about were for battle or ceremony; whether the instruments were for music, science, or torture; or how many pairs of binoculars, contorted flasks, and wardrobes full of gaudy robes leaned atop one another just outside the pool of her lantern light. However genius their alkhemy, the ghosts could keep their treasures.

She needed to find their son.

Miriam. His voice was tinged with awe.

What... The rest shriveled on her lips. Her glare softened, tracked upward, and she beheld the prismatic spray of their lanterns’ light.

A statue rose with ozymandian majesty into the vault of gloom above. It wore breastplate, girdle, and flowing cape and wielded outstretched spear, diving headlong into battle. Aaron sighed, twirled his lantern, and the statue’s mighty legs flung rainbows that looked like the ribs of an empyrean whale.

Glass like this is possible? The Luminaries crafted spy glasses, spectacles, and—legend said—microscopes keen enough to spot the signs on the husks of seeds. But all those were trinkets, a lens ground this way or that. This monument stood more than twice as tall as Aaron. And it was made entirely of glass.

Aaron gaped again but not upward where rainbow and twinkle tapered into unseeing. He pointed to the warrior’s foe, a second statue, greater in dread, no less in majesty, one scrupulously ossified. It was a woman but so wound with snakes, it could be snake and human hybridized. Silvery earrings hung from her ears. She stared past the shoulder of the onrushing glass warrior, seeing some threat the other did not.

And at its base, a heap of shattered clocks. There were hundreds easily, thousands maybe. How many years of clocks? The tradition of shattering clocks on the last day of the year was old, but being in a warren, this mound meant it was Luminary-old.

That must be Bone, said Aaron, still pointing to the glass woman.

It had to be. Khem’s elder sibling, the mother of dragons, the serpents that worm through the fringes of everything, guzzling khem, sapping the world.

Which makes this one Khem, Miriam added. The god-that-is-the-world, Bone’s younger brother, her cosmic enemy. Inside an unadorned khem pillar was marker enough for Khem; a femur or twisting snake or both together meant Bone. But these Luminaries raised grand icons.

Miriam shook the sight off. Let’s get on, or Joshua will get farther ahead. By now, he could’ve fallen into a crevasse, broken his neck, suffered any number of horrible deaths in the darkness.

I’ll go this way. Aaron pointed past the twin monuments. He was younger than she, his eyes surer. He must see a way she could not.

We meet back here in an hour, she said. The interval would persist seconds longer. The spin-signs on their clocks ran slow after ossifying for a year.

The path curved abruptly, and Miriam stumbled over a sprawl as wasted as the clocks at the base of Bone’s statue. There wasn’t much of worth among the insect husks, shreds of vine chaff, razor shards of glass, and mounds of ash, but a slim bone flute caught her eye, whole amidst all the squalor. Why not seize it and use it, just for the celebration? Better that this flute pine and sigh one last time than leave it slumbering here until the end of time.

Taking it wouldn’t be grave robbery, more like accepting a baton from a spent runner, like one of a crew dedicated to Khem, sworn to run in a relay for a year and a day. She pictured herself rushing onward—toward...toward what? An image of the walls at world’s end erupted with her thrashing against them.

She stuck the flute in her trouser pockets.

Echoes of Aaron’s baritone ambushed her. Miriam, I found him!

And Joshua’s shrill, Come back, mom!

Miriam turned on her heel and dashed the way she came, only curbing her pace enough to avoid obstacles and depressions as they zoomed into the range of her lantern.

When the path widened into the storeroom, Joshua was there, gripping his father’s hand, smiling guiltily.

Miriam hugged Joshua, lifting him off the ground, the folds of Joshua’s Lilah costume bunching in her embrace. Joshua relaxed when no rebuke came.

But she couldn’t let him off so easily. I thought we decided you weren’t going to come in here.

I wanted to find Lilah’s ever-glowing lantern. Momentarily, Miriam believed it, could believe anything after beholding the glass monument to Khem. But commonsense set in, and it couldn’t be. Maybe there were ever-glowing lanterns according to boy-logic, but nothing could burn forever, nothing could shine or move without ossifying khem, which was finite, however vast the khemical honeycomb might be.

Did you find Lilah’s lantern? Aaron asked.

Why did Aaron lead Joshua on, coddle his fantasies? Joshua was getting to an age where he had to face facts.

I think so, said Joshua. He held out a thing of brass and glass, all curves, vaguely lantern-shaped, with a handle. But it wasn’t shining. It needs some work. He regarded Miriam warily. He probably thought she’d make him leave his ever-glowing lantern behind.

Let’s get back to camp, she said. We don’t want to miss the celebration.

By the time the three reached the camp, the New Year’s festivities were already underway, dancers whirling in pairs, parting and coming back together. Reuben kept beat on a drum made from a sheet of khem worked over with flex-signs and pulled taut over a kettle. He was the stoutest in the clan, a bruiser who made opposing clans think twice about raiding. But they were Outside now; rivals were scarce. He farmed and supported older folk during migration.

Puah, hunched over, hummed to the ditty that Sippora played on her flute.

Miriam and Aaron approached the celebration, Joshua loping around them. Their feet crunched on stray amaranth stalks and browning flowers.

They’re back! Reuben shouted, and Aaron hailed him.

Sippora frowned at Miriam but said sweetly, You playing this year?

Miriam hadn’t considered the flute-shaped bulge in her trousers. Did last year. But she wouldn’t play, not tonight. Sippora was a better flutist than she was.

But last year was before Aaron set us on our path.

Aaron planted himself between them, hands raised to ward them back, though neither advanced. You two sure you want to go through New Year’s like this? A command formed on his lips but fizzled. He wasn’t leader yet.

Sippora snapped erect.

Miriam offered her hand. How about we bury the hatchet?

Sippora regarded it as though it wasn’t attached to a human appendage. Her grimace slipped when she caught Aaron’s eye on her.

She shook Miriam’s hand, hard. I won’t have to take orders from you until Midsummer anyway.

So much for forgetting old wrongs on New Year’s.

Miriam surveyed the feast, a spread of brown-speckled amaranth seed patties fried in amaranth oil on a bed of maroon-veined amaranth leaves. Beside was a spiced garnish of pulped blackberry. Aaron pried the seal off a pot of blackberry beer, brewed last New Year’s. It had been nestled in the clan cart since they left Inside.

The clan’s table was indistinguishable from the ground until they reared it with emboss-signs, much like the feast was just pliant khem until it burgeoned from the walls and ceiling. They’d let the blackberry crop ripen thoroughly so that it encrusted the cavern ceiling into a skull. The berries weren’t any more nutritious, but they were plumper, juicier, singularly sweet. After chiseling for more than an hour to pay for the luxury, she might as well enjoy it.

Miriam watched Joshua over with the children, muddy khem smeared on his face. He scrawled light-signs in the muck on his cheeks, conjuring an ailing neon glow. After sprinting up the incline, he launched his palm-sized clock over the descent. It arched, plummeted, and burst on the cracked ground.

Joshua sprinted back down the slope, knelt down, and set upon gluing clock shards together with khem. He formed them into the shape of a man holding a slender shard, a spear. He picked at the end of his fraying Lilah cloak, tore free a gauzy layer, punched a hole with his finger, and tied it around the man’s neck. Next he assembled a winding snake, a dragon. He set the man upon the dragon, struggling in front of the firelight, like a puppet in a philosopher’s cave. When the dragon was rubble, he raised the victorious slayer high. But its shadow on the cavern wall was skewed.

The dancers—Sippora, a few others of her generation, and a gaggle of children—looked dizzy from whirling. The musicians exchanged wry smiles, then picked up the tempo. The dancers faltered as the tempo picked up again, but at last succumbed with a flight of breathless giggling.

The musicians rose to fill their plates. As they returned, Aaron signaled he was about to begin a story. Everyone quieted.

Who wants to hear a story about Lilah and her ever-glowing lantern?

All the children cheered, Joshua loudest of all. He giggled and flailed his limbs, even after other children had quieted. Come morning, Miriam would have to talk to Aaron again. So what if it was New Year’s? It was time for Joshua to grow up, and Lilah stories weren’t helping.

It was New Year’s in Lilah’s clan, Aaron began. "All their old clocks were shattered, just like ours. But in her clan, they called it the Timeless Night because they know what a New Year’s without clocks can do. In fact, in her clan they had a rule against drawing spin-signs on the Timeless