Beneath Ceaseless Skies #212 Page 3
It takes me time to realize the power has come from me. Instead of dwelling on what this means, my eyes run along the curve of the land below us, hungry for green and the ribbons of blue sketched out on it like veins. The landscape is beautiful.
We drop toward Cor Capitulus on the River Is. The city, enclosed in its ivory walls like broken teeth, rises up around us, and we come to rest in a field of short-cropped purple grass in a wide courtyard of the Emperor’s palace. I feel the sky above me, tensed and waiting. I can feel it in the wizard as well, his face a mask that seems even harder, more opaque, than before. Only his eyes are alive. When they glance in my direction I see fear, and my anger falters.
But not enough.
I will kill him, I repeat again to myself, and escape.
I assume we will walk into the palace, perhaps return to the Blue Hall, but instead we move farther into the courtyard. There is a low wall of crimson hedging, and I follow the wizard through an archway of leaves to a circular lawn. The Emperor—his face a mirror of the wizard’s—sits at a low table at the lawn’s center. Officers stand behind him in uniforms of pink, grey, and blue. Guards line the inside perimeter of the hedge.
“Well met, brother,” the Emperor says, smiling with his eyes alone. The officers with whom he has been conversing bow low and fall away.
“Well met, sister,” the Emperor says, inclining his head as we approach. “She has passed the test?”
The wizard nods slowly. “I did not bring us through the wall of cloud. It was her anger. It unraveled the cloud-binding completely.”
The Emperor raises a single eyebrow. “She is stronger than we thought.” He pauses. “Or angrier.”
My mind reels, and I can feel the sky tensing again. I think of the old clockmaker and my grandmother. I think of Aeolius dead and bleeding in the hills.
I had done it? With my own strength? With my anger?
“The black cloud?” the Emperor asks.
The wizard shakes his head. “My eyes?”
The Emperor nods.
The wizard pulls from his cloak a tightly rolled parchment. “Do you know the lands to the south?” he asks me, turning from his brother.
I shake my head. The Emperor eyes the parchment.
The wizard touches the parchment to his lips to unlock it and throws it down on the ivory table before the Emperor, where it unfurls to a surprising size, one end rolling down upon the grass. It is a map, and in the air above it, shapes spring up of dozens of tiny crafts.
“Galleons and city-ships,” the wizard says grimly. “Palaces. Dreadnoughts. The Barons of the south build entire fleets from the gas they harvest in the desert. They war among themselves. They refuse my brother’s sovereignty.”
They seem to be waiting for me to say something.
“Why don’t we crush them?” the wizard goes on, when I say nothing. “Why don’t I call storms down to wreck their wooden fleets?”
The Emperor stirs but says nothing.
“Because it’s not enough,” I venture. I remember what the wizard had said about gods. “Conquest alone is not enough.”
“Because it lacks elegance,” the wizard says. He moves to the map and surveys it with its floating ships as though preparing to sample a banquet laid before him. “Because the Emperor rules by right and by nature, not by force alone.”
There will be no more patrician families, I realize. There will be no more gods in the hills.
“Enough,” the Emperor says. “You have made your point.”
He sighs deeply, a sound like a spring loosening within him. It sounds like the clock in the wizard’s house.
“It is time,” he says. “With your servant, you have the power. I will send you south.”
The wizard’s eyes are hungry. “With my eyes?”
“It will be painful, brother.”
The Emperor stands.
“You may regret it,” the Emperor presses. When the wizard says nothing, the Emperor continues. “Here? Now?”
“You have given your word.”
I can feel it. I will have a moment. Whatever task they bend themselves to will be grim and fraught with power. I can already feel it pricking up and down the back of my arms and legs. I lean into it, letting the wind lick at the back of my neck, letting my anger build slowly.
“Bring water,” the Emperor says to one of the soldiers edging the greensward. “Bring the stones,” he tells another. He turns back to his brother. “I will call a golem. Only such a one can touch you.”
The wizard nods. His eyes are bright.
“Once I give it the word, it will not cease. Even I will be unable to call it off. When the blade descends, you cannot flinch.”
“It will not happen, brother,” the wizard whispers.
The grass is whispering at my feet as well, bowing toward me. The Emperor and his brother do not notice.
Or rather, the wizard does not. The Emperor looks to me—the glance of an instant—and nods.
He knows. He is giving me this moment to escape.
Why?
A soldier returns, bearing a silver bowl, which the Emperor uses to wash his hands and rinse a long, slender blade he pulls from a sheath at his side. Another soldier brings a bundle wrapped in a golden shroud. What is within is glowing, pulsing, and all attention slides toward it so that we do not see the silver figure, the golem, step from behind the Emperor, half again as tall as he.
There is a dark spot in the heavens, twisting and fluttering like a bird.
It is my black cloud. It is coming.
No one below notices. The stones are unveiled and in the Emperor’s hand, the wizard’s eyes fastened on them as though they were bits of bread and he a starving man. The Emperor places them in one of the huge hands of the silver figure, the blade in the other.
“You are sure, brother?” he asks.
The wind is growing. The cloud is nearer.
The wizard nods, impatient, his eyes still on the stone. They do not see the cloud or care. It will be upon us, and I will escape. I will break through the crimson hedge around the garden and lose myself in the Capital. I will find a boat perhaps and drift out of the city, down the River Is, and through the broken ivory teeth that mark the wall. I will find my way back to my parents’ valley.
And the wizard’s wrath will follow.
For a moment my determination falters. The cloud stumbles in the air.
The silver giant grips the wizard by the forehead and leans him back, over his silver knees. The thin blade is close over his eyes. The stones glow.
I bring the cloud, plunging us all in darkness.
The guards cry out, but we are lost to them. I have placed us in a chamber of winds. I can feel them in my veins, rushing in sympathy with the currents, with the cloud, that I have called down around us.
The blood of Aeolius.
Now is my time to run.
But the wizard is screaming. Beside me in the darkness, someone twists in the grasp of the silver golem and I hear a sick, sucking, wet sound.
A word is bellowed, and the cloud shatters into transparency.
The winds die. My blood quiets.
The Emperor is standing at his throne, his clothes disheveled, his face livid. The anger in his eyes says something has been stolen, that he has been outwitted.
For a moment I do not understand.
Beside me the silver giant is helping the other to stand. The tears on his cheeks are crimson. His eyes are bright and hard. They are stone.
“Peace, brother,” he says, though the Emperor has not spoken.
“You . . .” The Emperor looks at us both, and I fear the anger I see there. “You . . .”
“I see,” the other says. “I have the sight.”
“It was to be mine! You stole it from me!”
Now the guards are around us. Anxious, clustered faces surround the Emperor like planets around a sun. They ignore the wizard and me.
He takes my hand and puts his lips to my ear.
Then I understand. The man at my side is Theodorus, the Emperor. He has stolen the wizard’s sight, and he has left the wizard chained where his fury can do the least damage. The wizard always held the true power, and with his sight and his house he would have held even more.
This was a trap of the Emperor’s devising.
We are halfway across the verdant lawn when his brother’s bellow halts us. His face is a continent of hatred and suspicion at war. The guards watch with confusion, but the wizard knows he is trapped. He must maintain the illusion or fear losing all power in the chaos that would ensue.
“You will leave me here, brother?”
“I am your wizard,” Theodorus says. “You are the Emperor.”
“And her?” He points at me.
“She is as powerful as we hoped.”
He needed me. He needed this moment, and my fury, to betray his brother.
The wizard gives a last glare of anger and sinks to his throne, holding his hand over his soft and human eyes.
“I speak the word of unbinding,” he hisses.
It falls on me like a blow.
* * *
There is a vine of roses growing up the side of the wizard’s house. Someone has piled soil into the stone gutters along the wall, and the hungry loam holds rain from the clouds we pass through. I will cut the vine down soon. There are no roses in the clouds.
“We must be invisible,” Theodorus tells me.
But he is Theodulus now. He has stolen his brother’s name, as well as his sight, his power, and his house.
The setting sun glances off the walls of the carved house just as it does the true clouds we sail within.
“We fly south,” he says, “at my brother’s command.”
“You planned it all along,” I whisper. “You were building this house for yourself.”
I can do nothing more than whisper. The word of unbinding has taken hold. I am losing myself. I try, in the evenings, to hold him, to press my face against his chest, but he slips through me as though I am air. When I cry, the breezes beyond the open windows of the house carry my calls.
Before the winds take us south, I bend them to the north and we pass over the hills of my childhood. Our sheep dot the slopes like clouds themselves, and for a moment think I hear the sound of my father’s hammer on stone. We pass overhead, carved of the aeroliths he quarries.
I will not return home a ghost. I will stay with him, in the house he has stolen.
“We must go south,” he tells me.
I sigh and let the winds have their way. Soon there will be deserts beneath.
“The Barons?” I ask. “You will conquer for your brother?”
He laughs, but his laughter is sad. “The Barons are nothing. My brother would have destroyed them and missed the greater danger they obscure.” His eyes of stone are on the horizon. I can read nothing in them, but they catch the light like diamonds. “The god is coming.”
The timepiece ticks on the wall behind us, its dozens of hands sweeping like blades.
We are going to war.
* * *
I lower the scroll and look out the open windows. The land here is carved and broken, with mountains as jagged as the bones of brittle giants. The Emperor has built his kingdom on the back of corpses.
But those gods are long dead.
Sylva has given me the wizard’s secret. This was never his house. He was Theodorus, the Emperor. How long did the true wizard fume in his brother’s palace, his power broken, his vision snatched away? After his brother’s departure to the south, the power of the false Emperor waned and he became simply a figurehead. As the wizard, Theodorus (who I knew by his stolen name) scattered the fleets of the Barons and then slept until I stumbled upon his house in the clouds.
And then he fell to face the unborn god.
The house is mine now. The timepiece speaks to me. The winds would do my bidding, were they but guided.
Sylva has still not returned.
I roll up the scroll and set it in a pile with the others cast down by the storm. Then I speak the word that will return them to their places in the shelves high above. They fall upward like leaves until they are lost in the faint lamplight.
I follow them, my footsteps ringing on the metal of the spiral staircases. There is no end to the measure of the house’s height. I could climb for days. The house holds mysteries for a hundred lifetimes.
But I seek only one.
She was waiting for me to finish the scroll, silent and unseen, perhaps in the house itself. She finds me when the great hearth on the lowest level is only a spark in the darkness below.
“Where are you going?”
“I read it, Sylva,” I tell her. I cannot push her away. Her hands are the breeze on my neck and chest and back. “How you were taken. How you were lost.”
She is quiet.
“The wizard is gone. The Emperor is dead. The house is mine.”
“You are a boy, Diogenes,” she says. “You do not have the power.”
“Not yet.” I reach out a hand but grasp nothing. “I am taking you home. To your family. To your valley.”
“I will not be a ghost for them.” Her voice has moved away.
“You won’t. I will reverse the word of unbinding.”
Her laughter comes from below. “Not even the wizard could do that.”
“I’ll find a way.”
She blows the fire out far below and then is around me again in an instant, pushing me against a wall of woven carpets.
“You are a boy, Diogenes,” she tells me again, forming lips that smell and taste of rain.
I hold her as best I can, a sylph, a thing of air, a twisting form of wind pressed against me.
In the morning she is gone once more. She will not be far. She cannot leave.
But the winds have returned. They answer again to my bidding, and I turn the house into them, back toward the valleys surrounding the Emperor’s city, where sheep dot the hills like clouds and patrician families still mine stones lighter than air.
I am taking her home.
Copyright © 2016 Stephen Case
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Stephen Case holds a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame and will talk for inordinate amounts of time about nineteenth-century British astronomy. His stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and several other publications. His novel First Fleet is a science fiction horror epic in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft, published by Axiomatic Publishing. He lives with his wife, four children, and three chickens in an undisclosed suburb of Chicago that has not yet legalized backyard chickens. Find him on the internet at www.stephenreidcase.com.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
THE UNCARVED HEART
by Evan Dicken
It’s hard to tell what someone is really made of, at least until you crack them open. Some have hearts fragile as spun glass, quick to break and impossible to put back together; others have iron in their chests heavy enough to weight the whole of their being. Hearts of diamond, hard but brittle; hearts with tiny cogs, tiny wheels, tiny dials counting down. Only the Volant knew how many they’d carved, or what they did with the old heart when they put the new one inside us. It wasn’t our place to ask.
I used to dream of the heart our masters would give me; spend my days sketching rough cordiform shapes in the corners of Father’s quota sheets and the backs of letters Mother sent from the front. I’d lay awake at night, one hand pressed over the bundle of meat pulsing behind my ribs and wonder what I’d done wrong. I was sure all the other girls back at the Roost already had their hearts, that the Volant had carved each of them for a special purpose just as they’d carved my Mother, my Father, everyone but me. Uncarved, I was little better than the native workers we used to harvest nightweed from the sump.
Izavel didn’t look like a spy, didn’t act like a killer—I suppose that’s why she was so good at it. We used to play together as children. It was forbidden, of course, but Hamaw was far from the Roost and with Mother away fighting rebels and Father, well, being Father, there wasn’t anyone to keep an eye on me. I’d slip from the manor, careful to walk with the grain of the speaking grass, past the stockade and its sleepy guards, and down to the sump. It was easy to stay hidden. Those few Carved overseers unlucky enough to draw shift went about masked to keep from inhaling the haze of dead dreams that seeped from the boiling mash tubs. The natives weren’t bothered by the fumes. Maybe they were inhuman like Father said, but I like to think since it was their ancestors buried below, the dreams just made more sense to them.
Looking back, it was probably a mistake to give them so much freedom, but there were no Volant about and Father had always been a soft touch. Besides, the people of Hamaw had been quiet for decades. Mother called them cooked savages, but like most soldiers she thought about food more than was proper.
There was a stand of mangrove, far enough from the sump that the fumes wouldn’t drive me insane but close enough I could watch the natives work. I’d crawl down into the roots with the bugs and muddy water and pretend I was one of Mother’s scouts taking notes on rebel movements. That was how I noticed Izavel.
She was about my age, with the burnished copper skin and pale red eyes of an islander, her sun-bleached hair cropped short and her ears just a little too big. She would queue up with the others, moving here and there about the plantation, but when the time came to take her turn at the pumps or tend the fires, someone else would always fill her place. The more I watched, the more I noticed little things, like how her hands weren’t rough from straining pulp and her legs were unstained by the mash tubs.
I told Father, but he just waved me off, saying he couldn’t care less if this or that child didn’t work so long as the nightwine quotas were met. He was half-wild from the stuff already, spending his nights dreaming in the arms of whichever manservant caught his fancy and his days painting pictures that gave me headaches if I stared at them too long. Mother must have known, but she never did anything. Maybe she felt responsible.