Empire of Sky

by Gabrielle S Awe

  “What’s wrong?” Zair finally asks. A half an hour has passed and Kjiersten hasn’t moved, hasn’t eaten, hasn’t said anything. I take a giant drink of water to wash down the salted deer meat.

  “The path isn’t working,” she says absently, and points in the direction she’s been looking. “The Undying is in there but I can’t make the path go the right way. It keeps veering away from him.”

  The princes and I are at a loss. “Is there anything we can do to help?” I ask. Kjiersten shakes her head. She turns and looks at us, looking us over.

  “I think I’m going to have to take you into the Forest.”

  I panic. “I thought you said it’s not safe?”

  “It’s not. It’s not at all safe. But we want to be there,” again she points forward-left, “and the path goes there.” This time she waves off to the right. “The path veers further and further from here. This is the closest I can get it.” She looks troubled. I don’t want to meet anything that would give the Archer pause.

  “My mother warned me,” Alexsi says in a quiet voice. We all turn to look at him, sitting on his bedroll and drawing trees in the dirt of the path that has kept us safe. “She said we will walk into danger before this is done; that our quest requires us to leave the safety of known paths. That if we want to change this world, we have to be prepared to make sacrifices.”

  “The way will be guarded,” the Archer says. She is shedding Kjiersten like a skin. “We are not meant to leave The Hollow World; they will not make it easy.” Her eyes are silver and swirling now; it’s like looking at the Joker, like gazing into the crystal ball he has for a head. She unslings her bow and notches an arrow.

  I take out my dagger and check all of my throwing knives. The princes each draw long knives from their belts.

  “Alinya and I will take forward point,” the Archer instructs us. “You two will guard our rear. If anything circles around, tell us - we can shift if need be. But the bulk of them will be in front of us.” I do a quick stretch of my legs and then loosen up my back muscles. This should be interesting.

  ◆◆◆

  As soon as we step off the path they are there. Giant owls and small furry things with claws and teeth. They harass and annoy us, biting at our ankles and slashing at our faces but they don’t seem to be trying very hard to hurt us. The Archer lowers her bow and cocks her head, listening. “They’re waiting,” she says.

  “For what?” I grunt, ducking an owl diving at my head.

  A man steps out in front of us; his face is shrouded and his hands are flames.

  “For that,” she says.

  The Flaming Man is the stuff of myth and legends, but here he is, blocking our way to The Undying. In the stories he’s the emissary of the Gods, sent to punish those who violate their will. I never thought he was real; why would The Joker create the Guild if the Flaming Man were real?

  My eyebrows are nearly singed off as he leans forward and breathes out a jet of fire at us. The Acher lets loose a barrage of arrows but he burns them out of the air. After the last one he draws an arc in the air and a wall of flame shoots up between us and him. The great owls and the things with claws and teeth attack us in force now. We’ve been inching forward but the Flaming Man has that way blocked, and the forest creatures have us hemmed in on all sides.

  We concentrate on staying alive, all forward progress abandoned. The animals are harassing us, diving and slashing and biting and dodging back before we can hit them. I feel a strange reluctance to kill them. It doesn’t feel right. We need to find a way to get past the Flaming Man. We’re covered in blood and feathers from our scalps down to our legs and I don’t know how much longer we can do this.

  “You three stay here,” I tell the Princes and the Archer. “I’ll deal with the Flaming Man.” I put my dagger away and take out another weapon, just as familiar in my hands. The wall of fire isn’t burning the trees but we can feel the heat from here. I bend my knees and then sprint forward; the Flaming Man’s shrouded face watches me run toward him. At the last minute I turn toward a tree and run up its side, then vault off the lowest branch and jump over the flames and land behind the Flaming Man, my garrotte around his neck. I quickly twist the handles and there is no force on this world that will get me to let go.

  He tries to reach me with his hands but my leathers can resist the heat; these are my assassin’s clothes, after all, and the Guild wizards have woven a number of spells into them. I don’t know how long they’ll hold out against direct fire but I intend to find out. I choke the air from him as he tries to break my grip, to burn me, but nothing he does works and as the air dies in his body so do the flames. The wall of fire dissipates and his hands are normal hands and then, as soon as the flames are all gone, so is he. I’m left holding my empty garrote and his shroud falls, empty, to the forest floor.

  I wind up the garrote and stow it away and take out my daggers. I run back to my friends and we move forward again, slashing at the creatures in our way. This goes on for far too long; we are covered in cuts and blood and feathers and fur and then, suddenly, all the animals are gone. They’ve disappeared.

  We are facing a hill. It doesn’t belong here. I look around at the trees and the forest. Then I look at the hill; there is no forest around the hill. But the forest is all around us. It isn’t possible.

  “Don’t think too hard about it,” the Archer suggests. “It’s not supposed to make sense.” Standing in front of the hill - the hill that’s clearly in another place, and yet is very much here - are dozens of people. They look like the Archer but they are smaller, even fiercer, and their ears are pointed and so are their chins and teeth. Their eyes are long and narrow and their pupils aren’t quite right. They bow to the Archer and she bows back. They are holding bows, smaller than hers, and short swords and blow pipes.

  They say something to her in another language but she answers them in ours.

  “The quest,” she says. “I am bringing them to the Undying.” She points at me. “The Joker has appeared to this one; he has given her guidance, and directed her to find the Undying.”

  These are the Forest People, I realize. I bow to them, since they are all looking at me. They do not bow back. They talk amongst themselves in their own language and then one of them, taller than the other, walks up and takes Kjiersten’s hands.

  “Daughter, are you sure? You have taken the vow too, to guard the Undying and to keep these in the Hollow World.” She points her pointed chin at us.

  “The time of the gods is ending,” the Archer says, an echo of what I heard in the Winter City. “The Joker has set things in motion and we must see them through. He has sent his Hand to be the instrument of change, and I am the Guide.” Her mother nods thoughtfully and then gives a short whistle and a complicated hand gesture. The Forest People are all watching me now, as if they expect me to do something, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.

  The Archer bows to them again and they leave, fading into the Forest, leaving the four of us alone with the hill that shouldn’t be there. And there, at the edge of the hill, is what we couldn’t see before with the Forest People in the way; a shimmering in the hill, roughly the size of a door, just like the portals we used in the Winter City.

  Kjiersten puts her bow on her shoulder and sighs. “That was close.” We wipe off our blades and put them away and then we all face the shimmering doorway. “Let’s go,” she says, and steps through.

  CHAPTER 21

  We are not inside the Hill. Kjiersten told me not to think about it but the sense of displacement is twisting my head. There is no floor here; no up, no down, no sides, but when we walk we are somehow moving. So we make the walking motion until we get to a man sitting in front of a fire, and the closer we get the more things take shape and we see he is in a study, or a small library, a room filled with chairs and books and a fire and a field of stars that blaze in the sky.

  The man is tall, with white hair and a tidy little white beard and a blanket and a
tree cat in his lap and a book in his hand. He pets the tree cat and it gnaws on his fingers and they both seem quite content.

  “Hello, father,” Kjiersten says. “Mother sends her love.”

  The man, the Undying, blinks at us as if only now noticing we are here.

  “Very nice,” he says. “Still growing, are you?” he asks her.

  “No, father, I believe I am about done with that,” she answers.

  “What time is it?” he asks owlishly.

  Kjiersten leans over and gives him an awkward hug, avoiding the blanket and the cat. He pats her absently on the shoulder.

  “It is now, father,” she says softly.

  “Ah, ah, ok then, I wasn’t prepared for company because I didn’t think we were then yet, give me but a moment,” and he shifts slightly and picks up a different book. “There we go. Please introduce me,” he commands.

  Kjiersten smiles and introduces us in turn. “This is Alinya, the assassin. Zair, Prince of the Air. Alexsi, Prince of the Forest of Nevel.” The old man’s eyes linger on me.

  “The Joker’s instrument? Are you quite sure?” he asks.

  She nods. “I know, I know, but yes. He sent her, and she has collected them.”

  “Please sit,” he directs us, and we settle into the collection of chairs that could only be described as eclectic. “How did you find your journey from the Hollow World?”

  “Disorienting, thank you,” I answer politely.

  “As it should be,” he says, and pets the cat.

  Alexsi and Zair look as disconcerted as I feel. Whatever we were expecting, this isn’t it.

  Kjiersten looks tense, but only as tense as a girl bringing friends home to her family for the first time, not the tension of finally finishing a god-given quest. I have no idea what’s going on.

  “Well, and I hate to be rude,” he says, “but did one of you bring me something?”

  The princes look stricken as they remember. “The train,” Zair says, and slumps down in his chair.

  The Undying looks baffled.

  “I have it, I have it,” I tell everyone, and I open my pack, and take out the travelsack from the airship, and then remove the box from the Old Master. I turn it over and open it and pull out the crate of books from the Night Train and set it on the table that is suddenly in front of the old man’s chair. The note from The Joker is still sitting on top of the books. The Undying peers in the crate but doesn’t touch anything. When he leans back, he has a small smile on his face and all traces of confusion and befuddlement are gone.

  Alexsi, Zair, and even Kjiersten are giving me looks; I will have to explain later.

  “Now I will tell you a story,” the old man says. “Please get comfortable, grab a cat, whatever you need, and do not interrupt me.” He takes a drink of water and clears his throat.

  “I assume you all know what a colony ship is,” he begins. We all shake our heads. “Do not interrupt, I said!” he shouts. His tree cat glares at us.

  “We came from a small blue-green planet that we loved very much. It turned when it was supposed to, and it had a gray little moon that circled around it, and the planet itself circled a yellow sun - just one. We called the planet Earth, because we weren’t very imaginative with names back then. The planet, you see, was 75% water so the name was ridiculous on a number of levels.

  “But, no matter. The planet wasn’t doing very well. We had done a number of terrifically stupid things, not thinking they would have much impact, but unfortunately they did, and the planet needed quite a few of us to leave, and so we did.

  “We built giant ships and filled them with sleeping colonists. Each ship had a few sets of people crewing it, and those people slept in shifts of twenty years or so. We aimed the ships out at the stars that looked promising and we hoped to find planets on which to settle and hopefully do better than we had with our own.

  “Our ship was one of the first to set out. We traveled for a long, long time. It’s hard to know exactly how long because we passed enough suns and through enough curved space that time stopped working the way we were used to. The computer - the artificial mind that ran the ship - skipped decades here or there, so the crew’s sleep shifts were all messed up, and the ship’s logs sometimes ran backwards.

  “None of the planets we passed had everything we needed; air, water, land. Something was always missing. We passed so many suns and planets and we waited, and waited, and waited. Until we got here, to this planet with its twinned suns and triple moons. We tested it; breathable air. Less water than our own planet, but water that was identical to ours. Land masses that were large enough to support people and crops. Later, we found out that the planet had a few extra things, but at the time we were just relieved to have found a viable planet, a potential home.

  “The crew woke up the next shift and, per the protocols, left them in charge of the ship while the captain, the navigator, the biomed officer, the head of communications, and security officer came down to explore the planet. The first mate stayed on board with the B crew for continuity.

  “Scans had been run, of course, and the planet showed no signs of intelligent life. No radio signals, no satellites, no industry. No fire. Just a big, empty planet, waiting for us. We flew around in a shuttle and found that big city in the mountain - empty and cold. Not abandoned, either; empty, like it had never been used.

  “We found houses in the trees; empty, never used. And then, as we flew around, we decided that, as strange as this place was, it was meant to be our new home. So we flew to the desert and started making arrangements to bring down the big ship with the colonists.

  “While we were there, in the desert, the Gods appeared. The Joker, with his crystal ball head, gliding above the sand. And the five others,” here he pauses and shakes his head. “We couldn’t understand the other gods. The Joker was the most like us. The others were too far beyond, but they made their will known.” He winces.

  “They were in our heads. They asked us what we wanted. We told them about Earth, but they already knew. They told us we could only stay here under certain conditions. And then they - you may not know this word, but there is no other - they programmed those conditions into the five of us. They coded it into us, you see.

  “The five of us must split up and claim a different part of this world. We would never be able to come back together. We must maintain exactly the same population, never growing. We must never build machines, or go to war. We would each rule our own city-state with our own colonists.

  “You must understand, we didn’t know what we were agreeing to. They were giving us everything we thought we wanted, you see. We didn’t know better. Instead of machines - they hated the thought of our machines - they would give us wizards.

  “We’d intended to set up a democracy. And yet here we were, on a new planet, agreeing to rule over the colonists we were meant to serve; completely by accident, or so I thought.

  “In truth, nothing was an accident. The gods had identified the captain as our leader. The gods read our hearts, not knowing the darkest truth about human nature; the worst of our desires lie in our hearts, ruled only by our brains. In our best moments our minds and hearts are aligned in a higher purpose, such as the one we set out with. Unfortunately, for many of us, our worst desires live in secret in the hidden parts of our hearts.

  “The captain had gotten used to power; the officers had gotten used to obeying her. Some of the officers had set out in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. All of the crew had stopped thinking of the colonists as people at all, really. All of these desires the gods of this world read in our hearts, and they gave us what we wanted, whether we knew it or not. And then, they made it permanent.

  “The one glitch in the system involved the captain and her wizards and the floating island, and the punishment imposed on the first mate who had forced the wizards to carry out the captain’s will. But the captain got to be queen of her own new kingdom, the island she’d ripped out of the ocean, while the rest of us
settled for the places the gods had already created for us.

  “And so it was that the Five Families made a bargain with the Gods, a bargain set into our very genes now, a bargain enforced by the rulers and the guardians placed by the gods to watch over us.”

  Kjiersten leans forward, enthralled. “Father, which one were you? And why are you here?”

  “Of course, of course my daughter. I was the navigator. I loved my star charts and my books, I loved flying through the galaxy. The Gods had created this Hollow World and set it up as a bit of an experiment, and then we came along to fill it with people. We thought we were creating an empire; the gods were just setting a stage and watching us play.

  “When the gods read my heart they saw my true desire; I didn’t want to be part of any world again. I rejected the Hollow World and so they set this up for me. I am truly undying, or as close as it gets, for they have created this singularity for me, this bubble that exists outside of time and in its own space. Here I can watch the stars and ignore my fellow humans and read all the collected knowledge of the worlds.” He waves at the bookshelves and the piles of books and the crate I just delivered from the loremasters. “Here I can continue my studies, in peace, disturbed only occasionally by the natives or my progeny or the odd quest.”

  I sit for a moment and digest this story. I’m sure most of it is true; there were only the smallest signs of lying, but it is not my place to call out an immortal for lying about himself. I’d known we weren’t from here, but there are certain things that trouble me about his story. I look at the stars overhead and picture our ancestors, fleeing a dying world, looking for a new home.

  “So I am descended from the colonists?” I ask, and he nods.

  Zair leans forward. “This is all very interesting, but why did The Joker send us to you? Not just for that story. There must be more.”

  The Undying looks up, scratches his chin. He pets the cat.