Beneath Ceaseless Skies #166

  Issue #166 • Feb. 5, 2015

  “The Wizard’s House,” by Stephen Case

  “The King in the Cathedral,” by Rich Larson

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE WIZARD’S HOUSE

  by Stephen Case

  Goya found the blade. I should say that first. He pulled it from the silt at the bottom of the creek bed, where its hilt sliced through the reflected clouds on the water’s surface as though it were itself one of the emperor’s great airships. He reached into the stream and pulled it free.

  I was bigger and older. I took it from him. Were I not able to admit that, I might still be climbing the terraced balconies of the wizard’s house, staring down at my father’s fevered form below.

  By all rights, the sword should have been Goya’s. He was the mayor’s son. For all I knew, his line traced back to the barons, maybe even to some of the captains whose airships once warred above, before the ruins of those ships washed down from the hills into the creek. He would have shown his father, and his father would have taken it and hung it on the wall in their manor or sold it to a dealer of antiques in the city.

  But was I was a boy and I wanted it for my own.

  This sword that I brought to the wizard’s house was not mine. I must write that now, looking down out of the windows onto the white plane of the clouds we ride within. My father is gone, and when he left, I gave him the blade and told him to take it back to Goya.

  He may not remember. The wizard says he will not.

  * * *

  The morning after Goya found the blade, the priests of the Unborn God came to the door of our mill.

  I had been up since dawn. I had studied the blade by the glow of my lantern until the winds dropped, then hid it under the straw of my mattress and climbed the tower at the roof’s peak to winch down the kites.

  “A good night?” my father yelled up from the courtyard. He yelled the same thing each morning.

  “Looks to be.”

  It did indeed. The clouds were piled high in the western sky, catching the sun’s early glare. Even in that light I could see the glow of the jellies caught in our wicker nets.

  I cranked the wooden winch. It took several minutes to draw the kites all the way down. They grew from points of darkness against the sky to canvas squares that showed clearly the places where my father had mended and patched their fabric, to wide bats with outstretched wooden arms thrice as long as my own. When they were low enough, my father poled down the wicker basket-nets while I collapsed the kite arms and stowed their frames in the loft.

  “A fine harvest,” my father hollered when I joined him in the mill. He had lugged in the baskets and was already stained to his elbows in the jellies’ sticky-sweet juice. He did a lot of hollering.

  I nodded and joined him. As we worked, we fell to our standard disinterested arguing.

  “They must be larger higher up,” I muttered. “That’s the only way to explain it.”

  Each was about the size of a hand and as heavy as a soapstone. Their glow was more pronounced in the dark of the loft than it had been against the morning sky, though they were already fading.

  “Explain what?” My father tossed another into the vat behind him.

  “How they can fly,” I said. “They’re too heavy.”

  He grinned. “Birds are heavy.”

  “But these don’t have wings.”

  We had argued about this before. I thought they expanded at higher altitude and had some way of generating heat. My father contradicted casually and carelessly. It didn’t trouble him how they flew. He knew they would be there, in the rich downdrafts, if we could get our kites into position each evening.

  “You went to Swords Creek again.”

  It was not a question.

  “It’s not a good place,” he continued, taking my silence for assent. I readied myself for the lecture that was sure to come. “Look out the window.”

  I did. The clouds were still piled in the west.

  “Those clouds would make good cover,” I mumbled, figuring I would cut to the chase and anticipate where today’s argument would go.

  He glared. “That’s right. But you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to look for gunships dropping through those clouds. You don’t have to spend the day whenever the sky isn’t clear wondering what might be waiting above those clouds.”

  I had heard this before. About the wars during his great-grandfather’s time, when all the barons had fleets of airships and the emperor’s thunderheads could launch broadsides that would level an entire town. There were cities up there—maybe entire flying countries, if you believed what some said. But they all had fallen.

  Except the wizard’s house.

  “The largest, the last battle was north of here.” My father had told me this tale so many times that I knew the words as I knew the jellies’ flesh under my fingers. “It rained bodies, and it rained swords. Bodies don’t stick around long, but the swords do. Time washed them all into that creek. Used to be the banks were lined with blades and bones.” He sighed. “Don’t go back there.”

  Mother called then. There were priests at the door.

  The Sky Wars were a faded memory for most. The Unborn God and his blue-robed priests were much more recent. I had been nine years old when we lost the War of Sixteen Saints and the god was planted in the city. We did not think it would touch us here in the Shallows, but I learned that morning that roots grew in strange and unseen ways.

  We went back through the house to the front door, where I waited to see what my father would do. When he just stood there, watching them, one of the priests asked if they might enter. My father nodded and stood aside.

  It was hard to tell how many there were. They seemed to blend into one another. When I looked at them straight on, I was sure there were only three or four, but when I watched them from the corner of my eye, there were more—maybe six or seven. When I turned my back, I was sure the room was crowded with them.

  “Greetings in the name of the New God,” the first priest said. Mother had set out bread and cheese, and one of the priests and my father sat down together. The rest of them waited behind.

  My father inclined his head at the greeting. The priests were protected by the barons, but they did not yet compel assent to their doctrines. They figured such would be resolved when the god was born.

  I wanted to ask the priests about the city they had come from and about the god rooted and sleeping at its heart, but my father would do the talking. The priest said they had been on the road for several weeks doing the god’s work. My father asked what that business was.

  “You are a trader in the glow-ink harvested from the sky?”

  My father nodded. He was one of many, but his mark was known throughout the Shallows. “Trader and harvester. We process it here and take it into market.”

  “But surely the soil is fertile. Surely there are other ways to make a living.”

  At this my father gave a blank stare.

  The priest tried again. “That is, were the jellies, for instance, to disappear. One would still have a mill here, a good plot of land. One would still be able to, as it were, make a way?”

  My father pulled at his mustache thoughtfully. “There’s always a way to make a way. We make a good living from the jellies, as my father did before me. What interest do priests of an unborn god have in how I make my living?”

  The priest spread his hands. His fingers were almost impossibly long. “An unborn god growing. A god reaching into the fabric of his world. The walls of the chamber in which he dwells are laced with a thousand eyes
. Soon his sleeping form will fill the palace of his conception.”

  My father made a low noise that sounded vaguely disgusted.

  I remembered the arguments my parents had had when Tertius’s men passed through the Shallows about whether my father would join them on their march to keep the god from taking root in the city. He did not go, and we lost.

  The priest ignored my father’s tone. “But his roots run deep, both in the earth and in ways we cannot perceive. There is a certain species of lichen that grows on the spruce of the forests to the east. It is now of the god, and his awareness inhabits the march of shadows and seasons upon bark. There is a blindworm found in certain sands of the southern deserts. The god now hears—in its unborn sleep—by their ears and knows the passage of caravans on the dunes above.”

  There was a glow in the priest’s eyes. His fingers were still outspread, as though he could by holding them open somehow augment his deity’s growth. The two or five or seven figures standing behind him did not move.

  My father was not impressed. “I see,” he said, taking a bite of his bread. “And now the god is in the jellies too? Now it feels the passage of the winds across its world in the motions of their nightly migrations?”

  The priest closed his hands. “Yes,” he said, taken aback. “That’s it exactly.”

  My father waited.

  “And with that understanding, we assumed that you would want to know and that this might cause a certain reevaluation of—”

  “If your god can be in moss and worms,” my father interrupted, “then it can be in the ink that I take to market. The ink that is burned in lamps all across the Shallows.”

  “Absolutely not.” The priest stood. “It would be blasphemy. It would be deicide.”

  My father added cheese to the bread and took another bite.

  “We harvest grain,” he said absently. “We catch fish. Eat eggs. What happens when you priests decide that your god has added these to its divinity as well?”

  The priest smiled apologetically. “I know this must be difficult to understand.”

  My father understood. I saw it in the set of his jaw. The priests did not stay long, but I wondered how soon we would see them again.

  * * *

  We argued about it on the trip in to the village the next day. Partially, I was arguing to keep my father distracted. I wanted to get the sword into the village without my father seeing. I had wrapped it in rags and wedged it beneath the planks on the underside the wagon.

  I was also worried about what the priests had said.

  “What if they’re right?”

  My father grunted as he swung the wagon onto the main road. “There are millions of jellies. The god is big.”

  “But it would feel it. It would know. And the priests. They’re gaining influence each year.”

  “The priests are new to power. They don’t know what to do with it.” He spit over the side of the wagon. “And like I told them. If it starts here, where does it end?”

  He was quiet for a minute.

  “Septimus was the only saint they were able to take alive,” he said softly. “They summoned the emperor from over the mountains to stand at his trial, to play the role of Justice. They say that when Septimus stood before the emperor, he told him his only regret was having but a single life to give in the god’s defiance.” My father chuckled. “They say the emperor paled, for he never spoke of the god. But when he had fled back over the mountains, the priests planted the god in the city.”

  “I don’t understand. We’re nowhere near the city. How can the god be in anything so far away?”

  “You didn’t see the priests bring it to the city and anchor it in the cathedral they had built. It was just a seed, but it took a dozen oxen to pull the wagon. Even then, it was covered with eyes.”

  My father coughed and spit again.

  “We’ll keep harvesting,” he said.

  In the village, I slipped away as soon as my father finished unloading the first of the barrels. He would be there the rest of the day, dickering about prices and trading for the supplies we would return with in the evening.

  I wanted to take the blade to R’esh, who worked at the port just beyond the village’s edge. There was not much traffic now, but R’esh spent most of his time studying the winds anyway. At one point he had a royal stipend and a title to go with it, but both had been forgotten for years. His research continued though, and whenever we came to town and my father did not have enough work to keep me busy, I would find R’esh and make him take me up in one of his ships and tell me stories of the old days.

  Today he was readying a dirigible when I burst in.

  “Diogenes?” he said, not turning from where he stood untangling ballast cables.

  “I found a sword!” I pulled the rags away and extended it toward him, hilt first.

  “Splendid, splendid,” he said absently. “Stow it aboard and we’ll take a look when we’re aloft.”

  It was to be a tethered flight, the long rope of seal-silk spinning out as we ascended. There was not much of a breeze, but towers of cloud were forming here and there over the patchwork countryside below. We rose until we were nearly level with the lowest. R’esh released several loads of his painted wind-markers, which spread in all directions from our vessel like drops of colored ink in water while he mused and took notes.

  “It was from Swords Creek,” I offered.

  “Ah, yes?” He took a final glance at the anemometer spinning on the rail, set his notebook down, and obligingly took the sword. “Ah, yes, indeed.”

  His fingers traced the markings up and down the blade. In this light, the whole sword looked blue, the same shade as the sky seen over the edge of the basket in which we rode.

  “It’s definitely from the wars,” he said. “But not the sword of a sailor. Not even the sword of an officer.” He tapped one point, halfway down the blade, where there was a mark that looked like an eye and a hammer. “A captain.”

  I whistled slowly. Goya would be thrilled. And jealous, because I fully intended that he never hold it again.

  “And this is a...” He trailed off, then flipped the blade over and traced some marking on the opposite side.

  I waited.

  On the horizon there was a thin strip of deeper blue I knew to be the River Eis winding down the center of the Shallows. There were some birds in that direction as well. From our vantage they were small as snowflakes.

  “You know something of the Sky Wars?” R’esh finally asked. “I’m sure I’ve told you stories. This would have been in your great-grandfather’s time.”

  I nodded.

  “And you know why they ended?”

  “Everyone knows why they ended. The emperor sent his wizard.”

  “The Emperor Theodorus,” R’esh said, getting the faraway look that accompanied his best tales. “But it was not magic that did it, though his wizard had plenty. He was a stratego. A master tactician. And fabulously wealthy.”

  “The emperor?”

  R’esh shook his head. “The wizard. The emperor’s wizard. Real power. Not like these priests.”

  I could still see some of the wind-markers. The green ones R’esh dropped earlier had risen and were mixing with the red ones of his most recent drop. They hovered in the air to the east and south like a spangled cloud, gradually dispersing.

  “He bought off captains, entire crews. He picked them carefully and seeded them among the barons’ air-fleets. He had them fighting each other, fighting shadows, forming alliances and counter-alliances that sprang up and collapsed like the clouds they were fighting among. But they had to be told his plans, his mercenaries did.” He steepled his fingers. “They had to be able to find him. And none could find the wizard without his aid, because—”

  “His house!” I interrupted. This was the best known part of the story. “The wizard’s house was invisible.”

  R’esh shook his head. “Not invisible. Camouflaged. You could sail past it and never know it w
as there. It was always aloft, sometimes floating through the midst of the fiercest battles, sometimes alone in an empty sky, and his captains would come and go in secret, because only they had the key and only the key would let you find it.”

  “What did it look like?”

  He pointed to where a particularly impressive cumulus was rising a mile or two behind us. “Maybe like that one.” He pointed in another direction, where a column was beginning to cap off into a thunderhead. “Or maybe that one. No one knew. It looked like a cloud, but how could you find one particular cloud out of the thousands crossing and recrossing the skies of the Shallows? I have watched certain clouds for hours, looking for one that kept its shape as it drifted across the sky. At times I was sure I had found it, but I was always wrong.”

  “Because he never went home.”

  That was the other part of the story. “The Sky Wars ended, the fleets of the barons were scuttled or scattered, and the emperor called his wizard back over the mountains. But he never came. He disappeared from history.”

  R’esh stood and took the spyglass that hung from his neck. After watching the now barely-visible wisps of the wind-markers, he made some final notations in his log and activated the tiny, chugging engine that would winch the dirigible back to the ground.

  I was nearly too excited to speak. “This is the wizard’s sword?” I held it now, and the scrolled markings seemed to dance.

  “Not the wizard’s.” He shook his head. “One of his captains. I would tell you to keep it secret, but I doubt anyone would know what you held.”

  I did keep it secret, though. I stowed it again beneath the wagon, and my father and I rode back to the mill at the day’s end in silence. I felt certain my father would disapprove, as he disapproved of anything hinting at our land’s stormy past. I also felt—and I am not sure why—that he would know I had forced Goya to give it to me and that I had no right to it.

  * * *

  I did not fully understand what R’esh meant about the blade until a few nights later when moonlight and wind rattling at my window conspired together to wake me sometime near midnight. I slept with the sword under my thin pallet, and I took it out then as I did several times each evening to stare at and wonder who might have worn it and in what battles. When I slid it out of the rags it was wrapped in now, it flared like a beacon.