Beneath Ceaseless Skies #193

by Dean Wells

And then Moot saw Peavey as well. The boy shouted something; Peavey was unable to hear in the distance, but he could see what had been said.

  I will make you proud.

  Moot began to climb the gatehouse, one labored step at a time, strain and determination clearly etched into his beautiful face.

  “Moot! Stop, Moot! Please stop!” Old Peavey clawed his way through the faithful, trying to reestablish a bearing on Moot’s position every time his view was blocked. He spotted him, higher upon the gatehouse now; then lost sight again.

  At the top of the gatehouse, a simple altar had been built of stone carried down from the mountains decades before. It was upon that cursed place that the angels had first appeared. Old Peavey remembered it well; he’d long been witness to the altar’s dark history. The thought of Moot willfully putting himself in danger filled him with terror. It was there that the faithful came to offer their yearly sacrifice, and it was there that the men and women condemned to Perdition had given voice to the greatest lie of all.

  * * *

  Then came the most fateful year.

  Blight had nearly destroyed the earthborn crops, and the desperate souls who’d resorted to native meat were dying.

  Only one-fifth of the pit’s surface area—a modest 700 square miles—rose above the level of the great noxious lake, of which a quarter of the already confined space was claimed by snow-fed ponds and meres. Crops had been planted as closely to fresh water as logistically possible, but clear-cutting brambles, scrub tanglewood, and deadly night-thorn for every precious acre was laborious, and the shallow volcanic soils were prone to blight. And now the crops and people lay dying, while the Engines of Heaven did nothing but propel the World impassively and in silence along the great arc of its rails.

  Heated prayers and entreaties to the Lords-Mechanical went unanswered, acerbating the scientists’ crisis of faith. And so at last, one Elsabeth Harper-Smythe climbed the camp’s wall to split the air in anger. The Sun was a ghostly disc behind her, blotted out by volcanic ash and steam.

  “Why have you abandoned us?” she cried from atop the wall’s gatehouse. “Are we worthless to you? Is human life of no value? We reject you! The lot of you!”

  She was a senior fellow in the Alchemists Guild, considered the best and brightest of their lot. She’d given birth to a critically undernourished daughter some months before. Young Peavey strongly suspected the little girl to be his own, but he would never know for certain. Comfort was offered freely in the camp and, times being as harsh as they were, was rarely refused.

  And then, for the briefest of stays, the tenebrous sky opened and the great lamp of the Sun shone free.

  The angels appeared amidst that supernal light, first one and then the next in quick succession, backlit by the sudden brilliance round about them, wings burnished like Pentecostal flame. The scientists had never seen their like.

  The angels fell upon the woman without warning, latched onto her, one at either shoulder, and ascended with her back into the sky.

  “Bess! Stop, Bess! Please stop!” Young Peavey had called after her and ran as a man possessed.

  In a trice nothing could be seen but the great soaring wings, and then they too were gone, lost in a halo of light.

  The blight expired soon thereafter, and the crops, while greatly depleted, were no longer in peril. The scientists (Peavey excluded; still deeply in the throes of shock) maintained that the blight had simply run its course, though assays and examinations into what had killed it proved inconclusive at best.

  But a groundswell among their number (too many; zealous and reeling from their betrayal by the Queen’s Instrumentality) proclaimed the cleansing of the crops to be a miracle. A gift handed down by the Elder Gods of this World—a blessing, in return for the now-sainted Elsabeth’s execration that the Lords-Mechanical were dead to them forever. Through her they’d been washed in the blood of the lamb. Through her sacrifice, and the manner thereof, the angels had shown them how to survive. And, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the scientists were nothing if not logically pragmatic. The culture within the camp changed overnight.

  * * *

  “Moot!”

  There were no guards posted on the gatehouse. Why would there be, when all eyes were focused on the field? Peavey watched, horrified, as Moot climbed upon the altar and dropped his crutch over the side, on his good leg, standing upright and strong.

  Then Peavey saw the angels, and the faithful saw the boy, and a hush fell over them all.

  They descended in ever quickening spirals, sightless but unerring, their preternatural beauty striking awe into all who beheld them.

  Moot closed his eyes.

  The angels fell upon him, their claws digging deep, and lifted him into the pall of the sky. The faithful cried aloud their hosannas, and Peavey collapsed to his knees, croaking “It’s a lie, Moot, it’s a lie. The blessing is a lie...” until he could speak no more.

  They were dark and without ocular capacity, these angels of the abyss, guided by unknown senses, with scabrous black wings that cast back the light. Each was a figure of mephitic darkness, of talons and spines and misshapen crests of bone, beneath which their young were affixed and suckled from barbed fetid teats.

  Then the angels tore Moot to pieces, high in the firmament above one and all. They ripped open his torso, wrenched his limbs from their sockets, their young tugging at his remains with their mandibles, learning how to feed. Moot’s blood rained over the faithful, as Elsabeth’s had before him, and every offering since; water to their parched lips and tongues.

  A mindless frenzy descended upon the arena as the people leapt and danced in the boy’s spent vitality, scrambling over one another to catch the falling scraps. This unholy blessing received; their survival assured for another year, washed in the blood of the lamb. They howled and shrieked in monstrous inhuman noise, taking one another then and there in wild abandon as Peavey lay mute and unmoving, and the gods of the abyss flew free.

  * * *

  The tourney’s coveted store of meat, smoked and salted and cured for the season, was presented to Old Peavey as Curate of the Cartographers Guild; awarded to the Ascendant’s household by the Archbishop and all of her assembled Orders of Science. Peavey accepted on his grandson’s behalf, because Moot hadn’t been securing the angels’ favor for himself. He’d done it for Peavey. Of that, Peavey had no doubt.

  I will make you proud.

  What had been born atop the gatehouse so long before was a travesty perpetrated by a dying people, Peavey knew, had always known, who believed that the Great Machines had abandoned their lost children. All that mattered was survival in the never-ending Now.

  He understood now that Moot and the faithful accepted Perdition for what it was. The boy was of Perdition, in a way that Peavey could never be. The lie was not a lie to him; his sacrifice had revealed the truth of it. His ascendancy would indeed ensure Peavey’s survival, even if only for a while.

  The faithful shared no memory of the Before Time; Old Peavey was the last to have known any place but this dark and cursed orb, where the holy orders were as false as their piety. Peavey understood that, yet he’d condoned it just the same. All those lives lost. All that time, slowly suffocating to death with guilt.

  He wept for his illusory blessings and the boy he’d failed to save, and gave thanks to the angels whom he would forever despise, accepting full well that he’d go to his grave despising himself more. Then he jabbed his fork into the plate of flesh filled to overflowing—human flesh, the flesh of the faithful, retrieved from the arena—his gut heaving, his hand trembling, and ravenously tucked away.

  He was so very hungry.

  Copyright © 2016 Dean Wells

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Dean Wells is author of the ongoing post-steampunk series “The Clockwork Millennials.” His short fiction has appeared in Ideomancer, 10Flash Quarterly, Eldritch Tales, ShadowKeep Magazine, and The Nocturnal Lyric, as well as m
ultiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He’s also written for the performing arts in various capacities. Dean is an active member of SFWA. Visit him online at www.dean-wells.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  SALT CIRCLES

  by Andrew F. Sullivan

  Boils sprout along my arms during the night. I try to pop them over the fire in the darkness; they spurt puss into the flames. My arm hair sheds itself over the fire. Heath and Mitchell remain asleep within our salt circle. For now, we are protected. I pop another blister and let the fluid course down my arm until it drips from the knot of my elbow into the heat. The forest around us is filled with oaks and older things. America—this is a new world slowly polluted by weaker faiths.

  Cold embraces me as I lie down to sleep again. In my dreams, all I find are children with wet voices asking me why they couldn’t swim.

  We filled your pockets with rocks, I tell them. We dropped you off the docks and waited until no bubbles broke the surface. We waited until the water was still.

  You did not have a chance.

  They ask me why we left them there to drown. They ask me what we wanted from their mothers. They ask for fathers who we locked up in churches and siblings we dragged behind our horses until they all confessed. Each village was the same. The wet children ask me why.

  I tell them it’s a silly question before they drag me under once again.

  * * *

  “Dennis, do you want to eat?”

  The sky above us is purple. Heath is shaking me with his scaly hands. Each of us has been afflicted in one way or another. Mitchell hides a tiny tail beneath his cloak. He won’t let us cut it off, afraid it will only grow back twice as large. Breakfast is usually just hard biscuits and salted pork. Each meal preserves our insides a little longer. We live off salts and preserves. I am being embalmed alive.

  “No, I think I’m still trying to undo last night’s supper.”

  Mitchell straps a pack onto his back. His pistol is tucked into a holster on his leg. The salt around us glows violet in this new light. He kicks at the circle.

  Heath swallows a biscuit whole and spits a raisin out into the dying fire. We leave the coals to burn; our spoiled circle remains behind as a warning. We bring the fury of this new inquisition with us. We wear the broken crosses around our necks and rub salt into our fresh wounds. We lap up our mistakes.

  My hands are wrapped in rags to hide the ravaged holes. Our craft is not one of half-measures. We are raised to remove the weed and all its roots. Every plant has its defense mechanisms—poisoned leaves and hidden thorns. These are the risks we take under the banner of the broken cross, of the hanged man’s tree.

  We believe in the resurrection and the harrowing. We bring it to bear across new and old lands alike. We spare only the soil—only the dirt.

  * * *

  The first village had been under the sway of a woman they called Altera Henderson, according to those who fled before her brief reign began. Their church was tilted and sinking into the wet ground when we arrived. No one emerged to greet the three of us. The town square and its pillories were empty. Only pigs and dogs lingered around its dirt roads. You can trust a pig. As we approached the well our horses whined and tried to pull away. The water down below shimmered with some unnatural tint. It blinked at us and we stared back down. We expected it to rise, but there was no response from below.

  “All of it’s polluted with her craft,” Heath said. He wore gloves over his scaled hands. The gray scales came from some catacomb in Italy, some hidden hole beneath a church that had been corrupted. After three days of exorcism, Heath had emerged from below with one partially blinded eye and those dry, dry hands. They whisper whenever he rubs them together. He was selected by the older priests to bring about this new wave of reckoning. We followed his words.

  “All of it must go.”

  House by house, we broke down doors. We found them in cellars and under beds. We found them in sheds and in piles of hay. Some chanted curses under their breath, the words half-formed and benign. Novices and failures. Their faces were pale and their flesh sagged from the bones. We bound their hands—small children, fathers, siblings, grandparents.

  All of them were polluted.

  She had poisoned the well against them; she had spread her tainted water through their bodies and into their stomachs. They were all bile and piss now. None could be saved. This was a new and deep infection. The wound must be rinsed, Heath said.

  He had us herd the children toward the lake. A few small fishing boats bobbed on its ebbing tide. We dropped them off the dock one by one and waited. There was no resistance. A few malformed words hurled in our direction. We were protected by the broken crosses around our necks.

  Through the stained glass, Heath spotted Altera sequestered in the swaybacked church. He did not bother drawing her out. He told us of her suckling a youngster at her breast, of the seeds she had planted in this town. The child’s mouth was a sieve. It was a wound. Heath spread his salt around the church and herded the men inside. There were only twelve. The women would burn individually. We would listen to their skulls pop and their fat sputter in the dark later that night. We would not eat.

  I never saw Althea Henderson. No child from the docks recognized her name as we questioned them. Even so, Mitchell claimed she cursed him from inside the flames when he peered through the broken stained glass window—an angel bent at right angles. All the men were bent in supplication, according to his eyes. All were huddled in their pews and moaning as the flames rose around them all. Their faces were running wax. Altera caught Mitchell’s eye and spat some fluid through the air. He said it turned to steam as the fire rose inside the church, but flecks still reached his cheek. They burned their way deep down inside his open pores.

  Mitchell still blames her for his tail.

  * * *

  “Someone called this place New Amsterdam—this is what happens when the Dutch arrive first, you know. They breed broken things in the dark. They deny a trinity and put forth some empty cross,” Heath said. You cannot trust a people who consider eel a staple of their diet. Snakes of the sea—would you eat a snake Mitchell? Would you swallow it whole?”

  Mitchell does not answer.

  Heath suggested removing his tail again today. He offered to cauterize the wound with a silver blade.

  Mitchell declined. He claims he will grow used to it—a badge of honor in our order.

  The halls of our cathedral back on the island are filled with old men damaged by their calling. Twisted hands or furry pelts instead of skin. Some have lost their tongues. Others, their spines severed by curses we could not prepare for, roll about in wooden chairs. Nature is always evolving against the order, always seeking an advantage so it can swallow and infect us all. Mitchell will be the first with a tail. Heath claims there is a Spaniard with a set of horns who left the order after a brush with some warlock in his youth. He lives in the hills outside Barcelona and has probably never heard of Pennsylvania.

  “We do not want any amateur business this time around,” Heath says. His horse flicks its tail at the flies which seem to follow us wherever we travel. They gather above us like a warning cloud and buzz without pause. Our horses ignore them. We try and do the same. “No Salem business, do you understand? No trials or tests. It makes a mockery of everything. They know what they are. We do not need to record it for posterity. We are tossing rocks into the water. We are burning deadfall. We are clearing out the underbrush. We are making the way for something.”

  We landed in Philadelphia a month ago. The seeds of corruption were deep. In our first week here, Mitchell and I watched a man battering his horse with a whip outside the inn where we were sheltered. His face was soon splattered with its blood, but his hands remained dedicated to their task. He shrieked and moaned in the animal’s direction, calling out for some woman barricaded on the third floor behind a wooden door. He called the horse Jessica, bleating it out into the dark. The whip cracked at the e
nd of every shriek.

  From this window, we watched the man’s whip rise again and the back hoof of the mare collide with his thin throat in the same instant. The man crumpled down into the festering street as gouts of blood spouted from his neck. No one came to claim his body. Below us in the alley, rats and dogs or rat-sized dogs emerged slowly. They began to sip at the red puddles around him. This city could sustain itself for now. It would regenerate according to its own laws.

  The mare went back to eating its hay.

  “Remember,” Mitchell said, “if you see a cat, crush its skull. Don’t let it keep you trapped behind its eyes.”

  Heath told us we were not seeking out the darker hovels of this city. We were looking for the stagnant places, the ones barely placed upon the map. This is where the darker arts still reside, he told us. We sat alone with candles in his room. He pointed to half-finished maps and leylines leading off into unknown realms. He warned us about the villages we could not put into order, ones with no true leaders, no representatives. It was in these stagnant places that the baser bits of magic could reside. They fed off the isolation and the unnamed nature around them. They fed off doubt and a lack of explanation. They would feed on us if we weren’t careful.

  “When we get to the next village, remember to wear your gloves, Dennis.”

  The day is growing colder. We have no end point for this journey. Mitchell and Heath ride ahead. I have fallen behind. I lash my horse with its reins and try not to think about Philadelphia.

  * * *

  The second village was where they burned my hands.

  We arrived to find the road strewn with cats and kittens—black, white and orange. They followed us like a herd through the single intersection. There was no sign to name this village. Only five families resided along its beaten path. The chapel they had constructed decades ago was bent by the wind. Its spire tilted toward the ground. Heath said nothing. A lone well stood at the center of the intersection. Old trees and tangled roots groped at the stunted buildings around us. They were made of thatch and manure and stone. The water in the well below was clear. Heath only nodded at us before climbing down from his horse. There were no birds in the trees.