by Capps, Chris
Life and Limb
Chris Capps
Part 1
It was on an idle stretch of desert sand, cracked and dry that we rode on. Not one family, not a home, but a whole city carried by eight tremendous legs fashioned by hands now centuries dead. The plate on which I stood was a solid steel slab, reflecting a harsh sun's light back to the sky in long flickering waves.
The city crunched history to dust beneath those legs, lording over the expanse of enviable nothing in every direction. And it was on the back of this monstrous god that I stood in front of the courthouse, waiting for my bride's carriage to arrive. The clock tower next door read a quarter past three. And beyond it, I saw the shooting star.
It wasn't like the shooting stars I had come to expect over the years, staring up into the night sky and catching a momentary glimpse of the cosmic spectacle. It was sustained, a slow moving flame with a long fiery trail behind it that hung suspended in the sky for several seconds. It trailed over us like a missile, accompanied by the low roar of apocalypse as it traced into the distant hills, just beyond the horizon.
It was at that moment, with the black trail still hanging above us that I heard the bells of a horse drawn carriage closing in. The driver tipped one of the corners of his hat over his eye and smiled at me. He knew what a well dressed couple at the courthouse meant. He was delivering my bride to be.
As she emerged, Tyche smiled benignly, veiled in silk and adorned with flowers. Nimbly she descended the stairs of the carriage as they protracted and held out her hand to me. I humbly leaned forward, doffing my cap of course, breathing in the scent of her perfume and kissing her gloved hand. It was a moment I could have relived for all time.
And then that moment collapsed with the sound of thunder. I hadn't noticed it, but somewhere in the distance, the sky had exploded. Fire crawled from the horizon. She saw it, but I did not.
Later we would be in the magistrate's office, the events of the sky and the earth safely now in the realm of memory. She sat perched on the edge of her chair fanning herself against the warmth spilling in from the large windows, occasionally blowing off the flower petals of tradition that had been sprinkled over her before her departure. At the head of the room we watched another couple whisper excitedly amongst themselves, sharing a secret joke between them.
The ancient oak doors leading to the magistrate's office opened then, and a man in powdered wig and rouge emerged, bowing submissively as he called out,
"Would the honorable Mister Adon Still please appear before the magistrate?"
We rose. Both of us did. Glaring up with a single eyebrow perched, the man held out a hand. It seemed nearly acrobatic the way he performed the gesture, as he was still engaged in a steep bow, "Alone, please. Adon Still shall come to the magistrate alone."
Tyche and I shared a glance, but when I saw the worry creasing her delicate brow, I gave her my most reassuring smile,
"Please, love. I'm sure it's nothing. I shall speak with him and we will be wed within the hour."
"Adon," she said, "hurry quickly. I'm afraid."
I considered telling her again that everything was alright, but she had reason to be afraid. The hypocrisy of the city magistrates knew no parallel. If something were about to go wrong in our destined life together - the only thing that mattered to either of us - it was going to happen now. A look from the wigged fat bureaucrat above us as I entered confirmed my worst fears. The man's jaw was set forward, his corpulent face stern as a marble pit bull. With a single twitch of his head he motioned for me to stand at the podium seven feet beneath his bench - a command I readily obeyed.
"My lord," I said, "I, Adon Still, have brought dowry for my proposed bride to be, name of Tyche."
From my ash grey suit's innermost pocket I produced the bag of silver. It had been a hard three years earning the dowry, hiding its existence away, and foregoing several meals as best I could to save for more. The result had been a well dressed man forever riding the edge of personal famine with a modest bag of silver.
It was just large enough to purchase my lady Tyche from the rectory. I upturned the bag, spilling its contents in a wide arc around me. Silver coins tinkled and clanked dully on the shining white tile floor.
"Unfortunate timing," the magistrate said grimly. He eyed another man seated near me, a clerk wearing a suit and tie, "For a cartographer and his bride to be. There will be no wedding. Tyche is to be returned to the rectory and her dowry price is to be inflated to twice her value. For a time."
"I beg your pardon?" I said, now trying to locate the void that had opened up inside me, "She was purchased as agreed upon. The paperwork has been filed already."
"The paperwork was lost, my boy," the magistrate said coolly, banging his gavel once, "You forget yourself," I watched the magistrate with eyes wide and mouth hanging in disbelief. He had a calculated look on his face, one I couldn't identify. Whatever the reason for this bizarre turn of events, he hadn't finished, "One silver will be removed from her dowry price for every day that passes hereafter."
I stood staring at this corrupt stateslave, watching every dream I had of marrying Tyche die in the mind of that bureaucratic guttersnipe. One silver off of her dowry daily was a matter that would soon gain the attention of the tabloids. There would be much excitement as nobles and paupers admired her through the printed page. Of course that would increase her value to the brothels as well. It was a simple matter, deducing what her ultimate fate would be thanks to this sick miscarriage of justice. At my left hand, the suited clerk, head resting idly in his hand smirked,
"When's your wedding night? You could still have it. A full hour if you need."
Hate. That's when my hand shot out and connected with the clerk's face. I kept pushing after the blow, grinding my knuckles into his bony cheek and pushing his mouth to one corner of his face. I knew losing my temper in front of the magistrate was a sign of low breeding, a near guarantee that I would leave the office with the slave sign carved in my body. Beyond the oak doors I could hear a woman scream. It was accompanied by the gavel of the judge snapping like a twig as he hammered it into the desk.
"Paperslave!" I screamed at the clerk, "Just because they dress you like a man doesn't mean you are one!"
Guards entered the room then. Eight strong men with faces covered by thick steel masks. In their hands they carried rifles.
With the rage still freshly dripping from tiny cuts in my knuckles, I grabbed for the nearest one, my fingertips gripping the material of his armored jacket, ready to pummel meat and bone into that impenetrable shell of steel. Behind me, I felt the butt of a rifle strike me between the shoulder blades. Rage turned to terror as I realized I was facing a horde of enforcers far more adept at violence than me.
Pain shot through my spine, knocking the wind from me. I grasped a rubber boot as I tried to pull myself up from the ground with my arms draining of life. Beyond those doors I could hear my blossom's voice screaming my name as she was dragged back to the rectory. The sound was enough to pull me back from the delirium of impact, but I was seized and pulled up by thick gloved hands.
"Oh good," the magistrate said tossing his fragmented gavel from the bench to clatter on the floor below, "I see that I have acquired your attention, Mr. Still. Lucky for you, something just opened up. And it pays enough for you to both pay for your bride's dowry and retire early as a rich man."
"So that's it," I said as the hands holding me in place tightened their grip, "A job I would have otherwise said no to, then?"
"Not inevitably," the magistrate said, gazing over spectacles and rolling through his papers, "But the nature of this task requires a level of discretion. I couldn't very well post i
t in the town square. That shooting star you may have seen before you came in a few minutes ago. There's a clock in my office that runs backwards, and it just ticked itself to zero, zero, zero. We've been expecting today."
"Is that a joke?" I said. If my circumstances hadn't deteriorated so quickly, I would have laughed at the prospect. With all of the technology the lords had at their disposal, there was no way they could actually predict the falling of meteorites. It was a random affair, a nightly occurrence without calendar or ceremony.
"We've been in contact with it for some time," the magistrate said, "But I won't speak in riddles for you. Guards, leave us. If there are any more outbursts from Mr. Still we will deal with it ourselves."
The guards released me, and I realized I had been held with my feet not touching the floor. With their insect-like voices, and ventilators bursting behind me in exertion, they huddled around the exit. I turned and watched them leave. When they opened the door I could see the front hall I had been sitting in with Tyche. Where she had been sitting on the bench moments before there was nothing but what must have been a scattering of flower petals.
My eyes traced the floor tiles all the way to the bench where the magistrate now stared down at me from beneath thick and black furrowed eyebrows. The clerk who I had struck was rocking back and forth cradling his nose, a thin stream of blood sneaking between his fingertips. I asked,
"What do you mean you've been in contact with the star?"
"Obviously not an actual star," he said, "But something else. It's a product of a bygone era - an enigma built in space and dropped back to Earth. It sends and receives numeric bursts of information transmitted via radio. Much more than that we don't know. Oh, except for one thing. We want it."
"So go get it," I said, knowing already that my words would be shut down as soon as they reached his ears, "Can't you do that?"
"Not yet," he said, "Standard protocol for this type of situation hasn't been consulted for centuries. Realize that this is a rare event - once in a region in a lifetime. Maybe twice. I'm not putting the whole city at risk by moving to it until I know it's safe. At that time we will go to collect it - after one enterprising individual assuages all potential fears on the matter."
"But what could it be?" I asked. I admit although I was still feeling the throbbing in my knuckles, and there was a deep rhythmic pain to each beat of my heart, I was intrigued. I had heard stories of objects from long ago falling back to Earth, but I had never believed them. I still didn't at that point.
"It could be a lot of things," the magistrate said, "It could be anything a society more advanced than our wildest dreams might have need for. You're not going to get much more than that. You know more about what's on the ground than we do. You're one of our better cartographers. You've broken limbs on the surface of their world, contracted their diseases, fought off the barbarians with tooth and knife. While you're far from what we need, or even what we want, you're what we have."
Actually, it wasn't as bad a compliment as it sounded at the time.
What followed were the usual niceties. I bowed submissively and realized that I was bound to this contract that had been hoisted on me. I had no choice in the matter unless I was prepared to be haunted by the thought of my Tyche working the rest of her days in the brothels being passed around until she was an old woman with a life full of regret and tears.
I envisioned myself an alcoholic, no longer able to pay for the luxury of sharing time with her even then, wiling away my days in a fugue and seeking fantasy at the bottom of the drink. Or maybe in one act of rebellion I would plunge over the side of the plate, to be forgotten before I hit the ground. Action was all that could banish those apparitions from my mind. I collected my silver and left.
Silver and gold would be paid for this deceptively simple journey. And with silver and gold came power. Not only would I recoup my losses, I would be richer for it.
Retirement would be nice, but it would be even nicer to see the magistrate's head on a spike after I bought his life from the public servant's guild.
And of course there was always murder.
The life of the magistrate would eventually cost me either a man's life in gold or fifty cuts gouged from the torturer's whip. Fifty lashings for a life of gold and all my enemies accounted for. And Tyche, my blossom, would be there sitting in silky parasol shade to soothe my long striped back with warm ointment and the cool breath from her lips. Yes. Murder would be my choice when I returned.
Soon I was in the stables standing before a slick haired and bespectacled man named Atus and a row of stalls. He hurried briskly toward me, passing off a clipboard to one of the stable boys and tipped his hat at me. As he did so he smiled and I couldn't help but notice a thick spill of dust trickle down over the edge of his cap and fall to the ground with an audible hiss.
"Mister Still, it's a pleasure," he said, "What can I do for you?"
"I need a fearless horse that won't get tired. I need to take him over the horizon and back again without either of us dying. Do you have anything like that?"
"I do, yes," the man said, licking his thumb and reaching in his jacket with
magicians hands to produce a cigar, "Stallion so fine I named him after myself."
He motioned with the cigar hand to a stall next to us containing a proud and sleek creature, already kicking the stall door with its front hooves. It looked healthy, unlike many of the melthorses I had ridden on cartography runs.
The frail and diseased creatures were known to tumble to the sand and die at a moment's notice, to contract illness and blight through the long running sores in their rumpled skin.
But not this one.
His coat was smooth, free of tumor. Of course that would also make me a target if ever I ended up running into bandits. Then again, I would be a target anyway once I reached the ground.
"Should be a two or three day journey," I said, "Will my feet touch the ground?"
"This isn't a disposable creature," Atus said, "Not for the price I'm asking. He's worth a year of a man's life at the least."
"Sold," I said pulling the silver from my jacket and tossing it over, "Have him waiting for me at the drop room in one hour with waterbags and provisions. Basic provisions."
As he caught the bag I saw him weigh it in his hand with satisfaction. He grinned, the cigar hanging loosely in his teeth as he lit it with his pocket lighter. As I opened the door to leave, he spoke around the cigar, puffing it against the lighter's blinking flame,
"It's the shooting star isn't it? You're the one they picked to take a look at it." I didn't respond, and he knew I wouldn't. I had an overwhelming feeling - as long ghosts snaked from his nostrils - that I would regret speaking about this job if ever the magistrate found out.
I did, however, pause. It was ambiguous enough to provide me pardon if it came down to trial. I turned, looking over at him as he finished his thought with a casual spit on the hay below, "You know I've heard stories of those things before. I have poisons. Painless. Strong enough to kill a horse if you come across one of those interrogation drones."
"You think they'd interrogate a horse?" I said wryly with a grin I couldn't feel, "What do you think they know?" His laughter followed me as I stepped onto the street,
"That's a good one, Mr. Still. What do the horses know?"
My next stop was my home, a small house on the now oriented south side of town near the meat market. The simply furnished old house was by no means opulent, but it was comfortable. And it was home.
Inside I reached my old oak journeyman's cabinet and opened it up. My suit jacket and dress pants were replaced with the rugged coarse material I always wore on expeditions. In addition to looking quite low class, the outfit had the added benefit of being mobile and light in the harsh sun. And though it was hot on the trail, I would need my coat, as the nights in this land were as cold as days were hot. And there was the hat, a simple affair designed simply to keep the sun off my face on an often unchangingly flat l
andscape.
I would be armed with a simple pistol, a tried and true design as ancient as the city itself, designed to keep working even with a barrel full of dust. Bullets were in short supply, as they often were for a man of my means. But that didn't matter. My preferred method for survival was avoidance, enlightened cowardice.
The same seven bullets I now loaded into my revolving pistol were the survivors of the same family of twenty I had purchased at the beginning of my career. A single pistol. Add to that a compass, my mapping case, and my old hunting knife, and you can get an idea for how woefully ill equipped I was to take on the waste.
"Two days. Maybe three. Stay alone, stay alive."
The mantra still hung in dead air as I turned and looked at the simple elegance of my home, perhaps for the last time. Next to the old ticking wind-up clock, a real luxury in those times for me, I caught sight of a brass framed mirror cached in soot from the extinguished camphor lamp beneath it.
And I saw the dirty man therein adjust his collar and avoid his own gaze. My thoughts returned to earlier. Would I really murder the magistrate when I returned? I was captive to my nature in that moment, willing myself to deny it and knowing full well that I would feel the man's throat in my hands if I lived. And that would be it. That would be all.
I would live the rest of my life with many titles. Husband, father, redeemed free man, ex-vagrant, ex-workman, ex-murderer. I would spend my nights idly, playing music to my lady on one knee, a song to last forty or so years. Or else however many I could expect to follow. And after that, forever.
All I had to do was catch a falling star. And then I would have life. I looked back to the mirror, smiling and casually flipping my pistol in my hand, holstering it without a care in the world like a dirtwalking mercenary.
I'd kill for that life. Without a tick, I'd kill a lot of people. For Tyche.
For my blossom.
At the turn of that hour I met Atus in the drop room of the city's lowest level. The door opened into something part room, part machine, bathed only in a thick, smoky red light. With the factory pistons leading up onto the upper levels still chugging away loudly, Atus walked nimbly with his horse by the same name behind him. He was still smoking his cigar, grinning in the gleaming red that covered everything. Over the sound of the machines I could hear his cackling and the beat of shod hooves on the steel floor.
