Beneath Ceaseless Skies #166 Read online

  “You’re hurt.” I rushed to his side and tried to get him to sit back, but he pushed me away.

  “We need to get out of here.”

  “And go where?”

  The effort to rise exhausted him. He fell back into the chair.

  “They can help you here,” I told him. “The wizard will know what to do.”

  A fit of coughing nearly bent him double. “At a cost,” he said, when he found his breath again. “Everything has a cost.”

  “Then I’ll pay it.” I pulled away. “I’m not going to argue. I’m going to find him.”

  “You can’t go upstairs,” Sylva gasped, though she seemed pleased.

  The timepiece agreed. “There are warding spells. You would never find him.”

  I glanced at my father, whose eyes were now closed, and started for the stairs.

  * * *

  The climb seemed to take days. No staircase rose more than a single level, so I had to cross and re-cross the curving balconies to continue upward. There were more birds perched on the higher railings, some from species I had never seen before. Preserved creatures hung from the unseen ceiling by chains of interminable length. I passed what looked like a shark, then an infant whale, and finally the bones of some vast flying lizard. Each level held more shelves, more brass instruments and unlabeled vials, more books and scrolls of all possible description. No matter how far I climbed, I could always see the table at the center of the room below and my father sitting motionless beside it.

  I lost count of the levels I passed through. It was impossible that the wizard’s house could be so tall. Even the highest column of thunderhead could not have extended this far upward, and the cloud upon which we landed had seemed not much higher than the peak of our mill. I felt no unseen force, nor did I became confused or lose my way. I never descended staircases. I simply kept climbing upward through an endless array of circular balconies.

  Maybe other people had found the wizard’s house as well. Maybe they were still here, like me, climbing upward forever and never reaching the house’s summit. Maybe I would find their bodies in these upper levels, mummified by the winds blowing in open windows or pecked clean by the patient, impassive birds that watched me as I climbed.

  I thought of bleached bones in the sky, and then I thought of Swords Creek, where they were said to have fallen once, long ago.

  Goya’s sword. The sword that should have been his but that had brought me here instead. It was still slung through my belt. I pulled it out and held it before me.

  “Wizard!” I shouted.

  My voice echoed in the stillness of the house.

  “It’s not mine,” I whispered, lowering the blade. “I’ll give it back.”

  On the next level, I found a narrow door opening off the balcony, something I had not seen before. It had a latch in the form of two human hands, which unclasped one another as I approached. Beyond was a small room with wide windows looking out over the cloudscape below. In a seat at the room’s center, the wizard reclined, asleep.

  It was obviously the wizard, though I had never seen one before. He wore a blue robe reminiscent of those worn by the priests who had come to our mill. It was impossible to tell his age, but he did not look one hundred years old.

  There was a small table beside the chair, with a tiny gong and hammer. I picked up the hammer, struck the gong, and jumped backward as the wizard’s eyes snapped open.

  “Where did you get that sword?”

  He was blind. Where his eyes should have been there were only two polished grey stones.

  “You are not who I was expecting.”

  He stood. In the house’s main chamber, the birds were calling to each other along the endless well of balconies. The wizard stepped to the railing and without hesitation dropped over the side. When I looked below, he was on the main level, standing over my father and holding one of his hands in his own.

  The wind was gleeful in my ear.

  “He’s awake.”

  * * *

  By the time I descended from the upper levels of the house, the wizard had carried my father, who was now completely unconscious, to a hammock slung between two bookcases beside an open window.

  “This poison is deep,” he told me. “But I can save him if you agree.”

  I told him that I did.

  He shook his head. In this light, the wizard could have been my father’s older brother. His face seemed ageless, but his hair was flecked with white.

  “You came uninvited to my doorstep, though you bore a key. I do not render my services without charge.”

  I waited. The breeze seemed excited, though it may have been only the unruly and unwitting ones spilling in through the windows.

  “I awaken to find all my winds have deserted me, save one.”

  For a moment I had fears of becoming a disembodied servant in return for my father’s life.

  “Not disembodied.” The wizard’s stone eyes were blank, like carved marble. “You will promise to remain in my house and serve me, and I will heal your father.”

  I hesitated.

  “You may take your time. He will die without my aid, but he is not so far gone that I cannot bring him back.”

  “Why did the jellies attack us?”

  “Because the unborn god is growing.” The wind whispered around me, but the wizard raised his hand. “Sylva. Let him be.”

  I thought about Mother alone in our mill, waiting for our return. I thought about Goya beside the creek, about R’esh and his notebooks. I looked at my father’s drawn, feverish face. He had been right. I tried not to imagine what he would say were he awake. I glanced at the clouds outside the windows.

  I told the wizard I promised.

  He shook his head. “You must say it. Say, ‘I promise to remain in your house and serve you until time or word release me.’”

  I said it.

  The words started to take form as I spoke them, hanging in the air like a silver smoke. Before they could drift away he had snatched them up and slipped them into a fold of his cloak.

  * * *

  When my father awoke, I told him goodbye.

  “He can hear you,” the wizard explained. “But he will not remember.”

  My father stared at me as at one in a dream.

  “What will he tell Mother?”

  The wizard shrugged. “His memories of the night will be confused. The jellies attacked. You were lost. You fell from the skiff, perhaps.”

  My father shook his head and gripped my hand. “You were right,” he said.

  “About what?”

  He held his hands apart. “The jellies. They expand higher up. Like an air-sack.”

  I embraced him.

  “This is Goya’s.” I handed him the blade. “I took it from him. Tell him I’m sorry.”

  He nodded slowly.

  Later, I watched from the carved white stone of the wizard’s lawn as he boarded the skiff and cast off. He moved like someone sleepwalking, but the wind was fair and the wizard said he would be safe. I stared at the departing ship until I could no longer make out my father’s form. The wind came up beside me and curled around my hand, and presently the wizard called from inside the house.

  “We have work to do,” he said. “The god is growing.”

  Birds were coming and going through the windows, and beyond them the sky was piercingly blue.

  Inside, the wizard was already bent over his table, surrounded by maps and devices I could not name. He sent Sylva to find certain texts in the upper balconies and told me to stoke the fire.

  “The timepiece will tell you when I take my tea,” he said, pulling at his chin absently while he studied the map. Clouds covered the table like steam. “Sylva has difficulty carrying the cups.”

  And so it was I found myself a servant in the wizard’s house.

  * * *

  I write this now looking out over a sea of fog that is in truth the clouds covering the Shallows. The house drifts among them on a stiff
morning breeze. I worry about my parents. Have the priests returned to our mill? Does my father glance up from his table at their knock, struggling to recall the evening when we ambushed them and he returned home with arms scarred?

  The wizard says I was foolish to send the sword back, but he let it leave. Perhaps he is right. I fear he plans to confront the god, and he has given me no weapons. It seems to me though he will need more than a single wind and an unarmed servant to stand against such a thing, if that is indeed his plan. He will need captains. He will need generals to join him in council around his table. Perhaps there are more blades waiting to be found. Perhaps Goya’s will summon others.

  Roots grow in strange and unseen ways.

  I leave this scroll for now. Sylva is whispering in my ear. The clouds are broiling. There is work to do.

  Copyright © 2015 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 first collection, Trees and Other Wonders, is available on Kindle. 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.stephenrcase.com.

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  THE KING IN THE CATHEDRAL

  by Rich Larson

  In the pale rippling sands of a nameless desert, there stands a derelict cathedral, a tribute to the cunning of its ancient architects, or, as others believe, to the cunning of the Illusionist, who has made this cathedral a prison.

  For there is one man who lives within its weathered walls. His days are spent in immaculate meditation, staving off hunger unsated and thirst unslaked. His nights are spent in agony, being tortured each sundown by an iron-boned gaoler. His every waking moment is spent plotting vengeance for his slain brother and liberation for his people.

  He is the only man the Illusionist fears: the Desert Lord. The Crowned Exile.

  The King in the Cathedral.

  * * *

  “Appears you’ve won again.” Fawkes leaned back, running a hand through springy hair, and surveyed the game board where two-thirds of his encampments were emitting miniature wisps of smoke and the remainder thoroughly cut off from supplies. “Well done, Otto.”

  The automaton inclined his iron head.

  “What was the wager, again? An hour?”

  Otto unflexed three clacking fingers. Automatons never did forget, and Otto wasn’t one to rescind a bet even when Fawkes wheedled.

  “May it rain and may you rust,” Fawkes said. “Heavily.”

  Otto only sat back in his chair, imbuing the gesture with a familiar smugness.

  Knowing neither of his wishes were likely, Fawkes stood, tucked a leg up under himself, and hopped on one foot, as agreed, to where they kept their tallies. The cathedral’s stone floor had already regained its usual layer of shifting sand despite Otto sweeping it out that morning, as he was honor-bound to do all week after a particularly grueling duel in minstrel chess.

  That hard-won victory was represented in one of several scratches etched onto the left side of the marble altar. The right side, considerably more decorated, was Otto’s.

  “I’ll skewer you next match,” Fawkes said, as he often did. “Puffing your ego up first, is all. To make the bang that much louder. The crown will never be yours, Otto.” He picked up the worn chisel to begin gouging out their latest result, but as he set it to stone the altar began to shiver.

  Fawkes jumped back. Sand surged around his ankles, rushing up onto the plinth, swirling into a dust devil. Otto had stood up and now made his way over, joints rasping on familiar grit.

  “Did you know about this?” Fawkes demanded, as the dancing sand gained a distinctly human silhouette.

  Otto gave a creaky shrug.

  “I know as much as you do, eh.” Fawkes snorted. “Typical.” He licked at his chapped lips. There hadn’t been a visitor for over a year now. In the beginning the Illusionist himself had often come to gloat, and he’d sent Fawkes a barber once or twice in the early going, but all of that now seemed eons ago.

  The curtain of whirling sand began to lift, exposing first an ankle, aristocrat pale save for what looked like a small purple tattoo, then legs wrapped in a soft blue shift, tighter than the style Fawkes remembered. By the time the girl’s wasp-stung lips and overly-kohled eyes were revealed, he realized he’d been sent a whore.

  “Delightful,” Fawkes breathed through clenched teeth.

  The girl was slender, smooth-skinned, beautiful, shaking out her dark hair and seeming surprised when it produced no dust. Fawkes watched her eyes go wide with wonder as they roved the vaulted arches and decaying stone of the cathedral. Then she caught sight of him, and they changed all at once. She slid down from the altar, more gracefully than he would have thought possible, and prostrated herself on the sand.

  “My king,” the girl said, in a voice that was rawer than he’d expected, not the breathy trill he’d heard from his brother’s courtesans.

  “Please get up,” Fawkes replied.

  She did, and as she raised her head a gasp shuddered through her. Fawkes followed her gaze to where Otto stood behind him like a hulking iron shadow.

  “Don’t mind him. He’s just moody.”

  The girl stared, then gave a choked laugh. “Gods’ blood, you’re brave. I mean. They said you were. But you didn’t look how I expected. And...”

  “Why are you here?” Fawkes asked flatly, suddenly self-conscious for his stained overshirt and bristly uneven stubble. Otto still wasn’t the best at shaving.

  The girl recomposed. “His Regency sends me as a gift to Your Majesty, in hopes of sating the loneliness of your... your sequestered protection.” Her voice had turned melodic and uninteresting. “Two years is too long for a man to be alone, Your Majesty.” She angled her head and dipped her ink-dark lashes with admirable precision, though her gaze still darted once towards Otto.

  “I’m afraid it’s not in the stars.” Fawkes folded his arms. “You’re a child, for one.”

  Confusion with a dash of indignation parted her perfect lips. “Do I look like a child?” she asked, deliberately unpinning her shift and letting it slide off with an insolent flourish.

  “Not anatomically,” Fawkes admitted. “Is he pulling you away again come morning? His Regency.”

  The girl looked at a loss. “I’m to stay as long as you wish it,” she said, then: “What you need is privacy in which to whet your appetites. Away from that metal monster. Your Majesty.”

  Fawkes rubbed his temple. “What’s your name?”

  The girl put her hands on her hips. “Eris, Your Majesty.”

  “Eris, you were sent here as a pestilence,” Fawkes said. “The Illusionist knows the particulars of my ‘appetites’ very well. Your presence here is a jest on his part. Nothing more.” He saw recognition in her pretty face and went on. “I’m sorry to disappoint, if it was, in fact, your most ardent desire to satisfy the carnal urges of a criminally unwashed exile.”

  Eris’s eyes flicked to Otto once more, like a thrown knife. “Is the automaton enchanted to hear as the Illusionist’s ears? Like they say?” Her voice had changed again, and she was repining the fabric of her shift with dexterous fingers.

  Fawkes looked over to his gaoler. “Nothing in my experience suggests that, no.” Despite himself, he felt his curiosity piqued. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m not really here to fuck,” Eris said. “More to help you escape.”

  * * *

  Since she insisted it was best to speak where Otto wouldn’t hear them, Fawkes led the way down eroding stone steps to the cellar, hopping dutifully one-legged away from the automaton’s baleful gaze.

  �
�Cut your foot?” Eris asked.

  “Nothing that won’t mend itself in a couple hours,” Fawkes replied, pausing to steady himself against the wall. He felt rather guilty abandoning Otto halfway through a tournament, but this girl had become significantly more interesting than any barber. He found his lamp and set to relighting the others.

  “This is where I come when the sun’s high on hot days,” he explained, as the swathes of shadow peeled back to reveal stacks and stacks of ancient books, a small army of various game pieces, and a nest of plump pillows. “Which is most days.”

  “Does the automaton only truly come alive at night, then?” Eris asked quietly, tucking her feet under herself as she sat on one of the cushions. “When it... tortures you?” Her eyes traveled over Fawkes’s bare skin, and he had the impression she was searching for scars.

  “He plays my violin sometimes, if that’s what you mean.” He paused, seeing her confusion, and decided to elaborate. “He won it from me last week. I thought I could put a rock through that high window in three throws. Otto thought otherwise.”

  “Otto.” Eris’s perfect brow had darkened. “You named the automaton Otto.”

  “Appellation is not my strong suit,” Fawkes said. “I go blank.”

  “You’ve started to go mad in here,” Eris said. She exhaled, nodded to herself, relieved by the conclusion. “Alright. Is there water?”

  “We have a well in the back.” Fawkes gestured with his thumb. “Food in the larder, if you’re hungry, though I’m afraid it’s a little lacking in variety.”

  “Knew you didn’t eat sand,” Eris muttered. “Alright. Alright. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll get as much food and water as we can carry.” She produced Fawkes’s chisel from behind her back. “Then, when the automaton’s sleeping, we’ll smash out his eyes. Its eyes.”

  “Automatons don’t sleep.” Fawkes grabbed at the chisel. “And when did you take this? And why would I want to leave?”