Beneath Ceaseless Skies #166

by Stephen Case

  I nearly dropped it in surprise. When I turned, the light drained away. I stared down at the blade in the moonlight. Turning back toward my bed, it flared again.

  Only they had the key, and only the key would let you find it.

  Trembling, I unlatched my window and climbed out onto the cold tiles of the roof. Over my head, the moon looked down on the huge silently spinning sails of the windmill. Beyond its arms I could hear the flap of canvas of our kites high above and beyond those, nearly invisible against the moonlight, the luminous specks of the jelly schools riding below the clouds.

  I stood where the windmill’s strut jutted from the peak of the roof, braced myself against it, and turned slowly. When I was facing just south of east, the blade flashed to light, dimming again when I overshot. I fixed the direction, then raised the sword until it was pointing several degrees above the horizon. It grew even brighter as I kept it aimed at one particularly dark patch of sky.

  The wizard’s house.

  I must have stood like that for an hour. My arm would tire, and I would drop the blade to switch hands. Then it would take me a minute to find the spot again, always moving slightly, following the wind.

  Sometime during the night, as the moon began to lower toward the west, a jagged silhouette sailed across its face. I had the glowing blade pointed right at it, but it seemed no more than any other cloud, ragged in the night’s winds and listing south.

  It would have been impossible, but in my memory of that evening I seem to see windows in the cloud, and I wonder who was staring out of them, perhaps looking down on our mill as it passed below.

  * * *

  I winched the kites down in the morning, too tired and distracted to comment on the fact that it had been perhaps our largest catch ever. The baskets groaned with the weight of the glowing forms. My father had a grim look in his eye. He muttered again about the priests having no jurisdiction, as though he was still trying to convince himself.

  “If it is really growing toward omniscience,” I said, “it is sending roots backward in time too.” It was something R’esh had said once. “The god could be able to influence the past as well as the future. It could change the course of events.”

  “Yes, yes.” My father had heard it before and was not impressed. “Until we all become mindless appendages of an infant deity. I’ll take my chances, thank you.”

  “It could explain why the Saints lost the war. Maybe we don’t even remember it like it really happened.”

  My father paused for a moment in unloading the bulging baskets. There was a pained look in his eyes, and I realized that without thinking I had gone too far.

  The next night the harvest was even larger, but the night after that one of our kites tore free, and we spent most of the day searching for it. When we found it, it was clear that its tether had been cut. The canvas was slashed in several places as well and its frame broken.

  “This was not an accident,” my father growled.

  “The priests.”

  He shook his head. “They wouldn’t do it themselves. Likely hires from the next village over. We’ll keep watch tonight. They won’t need much beyond a good scaring.”

  “From below?” If there were any clouds, we wouldn’t see anything.

  “No. We’ll rent an airship of our own, from R’esh.”

  I tried to talk him out of it, but he was adamant.

  “We should talk to other harvesters,” I told him, after he had chosen a tiny skiff and it was clear he wasn’t changing his mind. “If the priests are serious about the god and the jellies, then we’ll all be in trouble.”

  “They’re trying to make an example. Once they’ve made their point, they’ll claim that a tithe on each harvest would keep the god appeased.”

  I had my doubts. It seemed too arbitrary. And risky. Unless the priests genuinely believed their god was growing into the jellies, they had come a long way to make a show of flexing their muscles or drumming up new taxes.

  The air-sack of the skiff was small, designed for maneuverability. We released the remaining kites as the sun set. The skiff, we would launch from the field south of the mill.

  “We’ll need to go high,” my father said. “There’s no moon tonight, so we’ll stay against the clouds where we can watch the kites and come down on top of them when they make a move.”

  I made one more attempt. “We can petition the barons.”

  “We can look after ourselves.” He paused in filling the air-sack. “This will be a lot easier if I have someone to work the sweeps while I keep watch, but I won’t make you do it. You can go back to the mill with your mother.”

  He was being honest, but I also knew he said it partially to shame me.

  “I’ll come.”

  He smiled tightly. “It might be dangerous.”

  The only weapon he carried was an ancient flintlock I had never seen but which I suspected was more effective at generating light and noise than anything else. I had no weapon but the sword, and my desire to keep it close to me warred with my fear of what my father would say if he saw it. I left it swaddled in the same rags I had used to smuggle it into the village, and in the bustle of launching I slipped it behind the low sweeping bench. I felt better knowing it was there.

  We circled for what seemed like hours. I used the sweeps to tack back and forth against the wind and then let us drift until the kites slid away below us, when I would start tacking again. When I tired, my father took over and I took his place straining in the darkness for any sign of an approaching ship.

  The clouds began to glow around us, and slowly the schools of jellies dropped and came into view. I had never seen them up close like this before. As the air cooled, they drifted farther down, toward the level where our kites rode with their wicker scoops. They were larger at this altitude, just as I had anticipated, some nearly as wide as my outstretched arm. None of them came close to our craft. They were completely silent and shone with the feeble orange glow that would burn a clear yellow when their ink was concentrated and distilled.

  “They’re spotted,” I said, swinging my spyglass up to examine a cluster as it passed. “You can’t see that when we catch them. They can change their patterns.”

  “They’re here,” my father said. I thought he meant the jellies, but he was pointing below.

  An airship had risen from the north and was making its way toward our kites.

  We vented gas and slipped downward, spiraling to approach from an angle that would leave us hidden behind their own air-sack and sail. The ship was not much larger than ours. It looked like there might be three or four men aboard.

  When we were within shouting distance my father did exactly that, asking them in language I rarely heard from him who they were and what they thought they were doing with his kites. Then he fired the flintlock.

  There was a shower of sparks and a scramble aboard the other ship. They dropped suddenly, though even a direct hit would not have caused such a sudden loss of buoyancy. Someone on board was nervous.

  I caught a flash of blue.

  “There’s a priest with them.”

  My father grunted. He was working on getting the flintlock ready to fire again.

  The jellies were thicker at this level. As we circled, they passed on every side, some drifting between the lines of our rigging. I ducked my head to avoid one.

  From this angle our kites looked like giant hooks scraping the night. The wicker nets that hung below them were almost too bright to look at, thick with tangled jellies. The kites left long furrows of darkness downwind, empty rifts in the jellies’ flow across the sky.

  My father fired again. Obviously no one on the other ship had a weapon. I heard a raised voice and assumed it was the priest giving orders. The crew, however, appeared to have no desire to face my father. Their ship kept dropping. But the priest was not speaking to them. He was praying.

  And they were scared.

  We had dropped below the level of most of the jellies now, but many w
ere trailing both ships, swept along in their wakes. Their light was still bright, and I noticed that the hue was changing. I glanced upward.

  The flow above us had become a river of fire. Our kites were lost to view, and the jellies seemed to fill the sky. They were changing colors, flickering on and off in long waves of red. And they were moving, almost as one, toward our ships.

  “Vent,” my father yelled. “Vent, vent!”

  I heard the priest shriek something about dreams of a sleeping god.

  Much more quickly than I would have thought possible, both vessels were surrounded. The jellies tangled in the rigging and rapidly stopped the vents of the air-sack. It was difficult to turn the sweeps.

  “Cut them out,” my father said. “Use my knife.” He was fumbling at his belt.

  I had already reached below the bench and drawn out the sword. My father’s eyes widened as the rags wrapping it fell away. I could tell by his scowl that he knew where it had come from.

  He turned away, struggling to open the vents that would allow us to land. I moved toward the sweeps to cut away the jellies, and the sword flared brighter than I had ever seen. The flash of light made me again glance upward, and the line of clouds above gave me an idea.

  “Take us up!”

  My father stared.

  I yelled it again, hacking at the jellies lodged against the altitude sweep.

  The other ship was now completely lost to sight. Around us and below there was only a swirling mass of seething red.

  I pulled the ship up sharply, and we began to rise, slowly at first but gaining altitude more rapidly as the air-sack heated. My father strained at the sweeps. He kept reaching back and pulling jellies from where they were gumming the gears and oarlocks.

  I stood at the bow, swinging back and forth at their clustered forms. They were cool to the touch, but when they met bare skin they burned. At each swing of the sword, the blade shone brightest on the right of the arc.

  It was working. The jellies were thinning. As I suspected, it was harder for them to gain altitude in the night’s chill than it was for them to drop lower.

  There was a row of cloud-hills ahead, separated by gullies of stars. I swept the sword in that direction, and it flared again.

  Behind me, my father’s breathing became labored. I glanced backward as the last of the jellies fell from the hull. He was slumped over the sweeps, his arms and face a livid red. When I tried to stir him, he moaned.

  There were certain creatures, so I had read, in the seas of the south that floated in water as the jellies did in air and could kill a man with their sting. We had worked among the jellies for years, never suffering more than skin stained from their ink. But we had never flown in their midst, and a priest had never called them down around us, red and broiling and angry.

  I looked at my own arms. They burned, but I had been using the sword and touched few with my bare skin. My father had been in the thick of them. His skin was beginning to blister.

  “The wizard’s house,” I whispered.

  It would take too long to get to the ground and seek help, even supposing the healer in the village knew an antidote for the jellies’ poison. But surely the house of a wizard, even one empty and drifting for decades, would have medicines or potions to cure him.

  I swung the blade back toward the clouds until it glowed white hot.

  It was difficult to push my father out of the way and take the sweeps and much harder to steer while keeping the sword pointed like a compass needle at one particular hill of cloud. Several times I thought I had lost it, but each time the sword would eventually light again, and I would realign the ship. Soon we were among the clouds, scudding against the rising light of dawn. Several times I almost gave up and turned back. Once I heard my father moan what sounded like my name.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll find help.”

  He was lying on the deck, his breath coming shallow, when I finally saw windows in the clouds. They were carved in the side of a white hillock we were approaching, almost hidden among its pale furrows. No light came from within.

  I circled the cloud twice before finding the courage to land on a flat bleached lawn that stretched out on its southern edge. The ship touched down as if on rock. The blade dimmed immediately, and I put it back into my belt and struggled to lift my father. A carved white door was clearly visible a dozen paces away.

  The surface we staggered across—my father putting most of his weight on me—was the same shaped stone as the door: perfectly white and intricately carved into the whorled and billowed surface of a cloud. But the wind did not shape it. I watched the walls of the house, which rose up before us like a hill, and they did not grow or drift.

  At the door I held the sword out again, hesitantly. It no longer glowed, but the door swung back silent and obliging. The room beyond was dark. As soon as we were across the threshold, a voice from the wall spoke.

  “Greetings, Diogenes and Bartolomeo Shell.”

  Lanterns came to life along a wall that curved away in both directions. The floor was wide and carpeted, the ceiling so high it was lost in mist and moving shapes above.

  I could see no one.

  “How do you know our names?” I called into the empty room.

  “Everyone wears one’s name at the top of one’s mind,” the voice said. “It is not hard to read them off.”

  “Are you the wizard?”

  The voice sighed with the sound of a spring relaxing. “I am the timepiece.”

  It was. I could see it now, in the warm light of the lanterns. It was like no clock I had seen before, rings within concentric rings of symbols and at least half a dozen hands.

  My gaze wandered the rest of the room. It was circular, and the walls, when they were not broken by windows looking out on the cloud bank or by other mounted instruments, were crowded with shelves. The shelves in turn were crowded with books, scrolls, carved wooden boxes, and jars, many of which contained jellies suspended in fluid. What looked like an albatross slept on the railing of a balconied second tier. There were more balconies above that.

  “You bear a captain’s blade,” the clock continued, “but you are certainly not one of my lord’s captains.”

  I shook my head. My father moaned again.

  “We were attacked by the jellies. My father is hurt.”

  The clock chimed, and a breeze picked up in the room.

  “This is Sylva,” the timepiece said apologetically. “She is the last one left.”

  It was as if someone had opened all the windows at once. A wind swirled around us, brushing my cheek, and then wrapped around my father. His clothes flapped as in a gale, and he was half-lifted out of my arms.

  “Oof. He’s heavy.”

  The voice was not the clock’s, and it lacked the sharp edges of human speech.

  A pair of wing-backed chairs waited beside an enormous round table that stood in the room’s center. I pushed with the wind, and together we got my father into one.

  “He’s poisoned, I think. We were attacked.”

  I felt vaguely foolish, talking to the air.

  The wind had quieted, but it swirled around my face and again brushed my cheek.

  “There are vials on the second level,” the voice said, “on an oaken shelf behind glass. Look for the blue one.”

  “Are you Sylva?”

  If she was still there, she did not answer. I found a winding staircase that led to the second level and followed the balcony around to the shelf she mentioned. When I returned, the voice came again. If you were not listening for it, you could fancy it the play of the breeze about the windowsills.

  “This will help. Put it on his arms and face, wherever he touched them.”

  I did and then put some on my own.

  By now it was full daylight outside and the lanterns within the house had dimmed. Each window faced a landscape of cloud with breaks of brilliant azure between.

  “That’s all that we can do now,” the wind whispered
.

  “Where is the wizard?”

  The table at the center of the room had come to life with the light. An entire map of the Shallows spread out on its surface, with detail as clear and crisp as though I looked down on it from the sky. Above its surface, like tiny piles of smoke, the clouds we rode within were arranged in perfect miniature, keeping pace with the shifting mountains outside the windows.

  “This is where my master and his captains made their plans for war.” The voice was in my ear, and this time the wind tousled my hair. “There is a lens beneath that makes the whole house a camera obscura, though I don’t expect you to know what that means.”

  I did not.

  “Magic makes the clouds though.”

  I asked her about my father.

  Her voice was soft. “I have done all I can. I have never known the jellies to sting so deeply.”

  I told her about what the priest had said.

  “My master would know what to do.”

  “The wizard? Where is he?” I asked again. “I know this is his house.”

  When she said nothing I asked if he was dead.

  “He is asleep.” This was the voice of the clock where it kept a dozen unknown times beside the door. “He has not come downstairs in years.”

  “In ages,” the wind sighed.

  “Why don’t you go wake him up?”

  The breeze skittered around the table and brushed at the pages of some books lying in a heap. “I cannot go upstairs unless summoned.”

  I looked toward the ceiling. The balconies seemed to pile one on another until they were lost in a cloudy haze.

  “Does he know we’re here?”

  “I chimed your entrance,” the clock said, “but I have chimed his meals for a century, and he has ignored those too.”

  “Then he’s probably dead.”

  “He’s not dead.” The voice was my father’s. He was sitting up in the chair and struggling to rise. Sylva’s medicine had helped, though his brow was still beaded with sweat and his face was pained. “He’s up there.” His eyes rolled toward the house’s upper levels. “I can feel him. He’s waiting.”