Beneath Ceaseless Skies #212

by Stephen Case

  Issue #212 • Nov. 10, 2016

  “The Aeroliths,” by Stephen Case

  “The Uncarved Heart,” by Evan Dicken

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE AEROLITHS

  by Stephen Case

  One night there was a storm, a big one that raged through the windows of the wizard’s house and set it swaying at anchor in the sky over the Emperor’s ivory city. I had not spoken the word to close the heavy copper shutters. (I admit that for a time I could not recall what the word was.) Some scrolls were torn from their places in the upper levels, and the next morning I found them scattered about the stone floor like leaves.

  This one was among them.

  Sylva wanted me to find it.

  “Your name is a lie,” Sylva had told me, before she departed and took the winds, leaving the wizard’s house silent and becalmed.

  “I am the wizard Theodulus now,” I said. “I wear his cloak. I bear his ring. I know the words of power.”

  But I did not know the words to either free her or compel her.

  “His name was a lie.”

  She would not explain what she meant.

  I knew she had been bound to this house to serve the wizard, as she served me now who had taken his place. But when the house returned to the Emperor’s capital and I had taken the wizard’s name, Sylva laughed once, harshly, and departed.

  Now I waited for her return.

  The scroll is coiled and damp with tears or rain or both. For Sylva, they might be one and the same.

  She is the wind.

  She has gone again, out in the empty blue beyond the windows, though she cannot go far, bound as she is to the house.

  As the sunlight slants through the tall windows I spread the wet parchment across my knees and speak a fire into the hearth.

  “Your name is a lie,” I hear her say again.

  I bend and begin to read.

  * * *

  There had been in my great-grandfather’s day no rebellion, yet when the Emperor came to power the patricians opposed him in their own way. Emperor Theodorus, they said, did not wish to begin his reign in blood, so he banished all the noble houses to the mountain valleys of the north to mine the aeroliths.

  We found our nine-hundredth aerolith that spring. I was wandering the lower slopes when I heard the sharp high cry of my eldest brother’s horn signal a find. When I arrived, my father and brothers were already there, chipping away the rock face at the sharp mouth of a gully.

  “A shallow one, Sylva,” the youngest of my brothers said when I joined them. “Not far from the surface.”

  He pointed to where a few slivers of rock drifted upward in the breeze.

  By law no more than three aeroliths could be stored together outside the Emperor’s own storehouses. There were two of the stones in our lodge already, tugging at their leather straps in my father’s workroom like docked barges on a river. This find would mean, after it was fully unearthed and shaped, a trip to Cor Capitulus.

  I told my father I was old enough to come with him.

  “No,” he said. Then he sighed. “Not yet. Not this time. Soon.”

  He had taken my brothers before. But I was different. I could tease motion from the buoyant flecks carved from the corners of the aeroliths. I had always known the coming weather from the mute breezes gusting at the valley’s edge.

  And I was his only daughter.

  I did not realize then what that meant.

  Mother must have had words with him, though I never learned what they were. The next evening, as my brothers and father returned from the day’s work with the fully unearthed aerolith trailing behind them, she told me that when the stone was shaped I would travel with him to the Capital.

  The stones gained potency as they were shaped. My father chipped and shaved at the rock—tethered now to the floorboards of the workshop—until it was the size dictated by the golden rods my great-grandfather had carried from Cor Capitulus: a length of nearly my father’s full outspread arms, and a height and width of half that. By the time it was finished, my father and brothers could all sit astride the grey carved boulder where it floated a few feet above the wooden floor and it would hardly settle at all toward the ground.

  Two other stones were nestled against the rafters of the workshop. They would be winched down and, along with this one, fastened to a large wooden sledge of my father’s design, built so ordinary stones could be loaded into its bottom half. When the weight was balanced perfectly, a single mule could pull the buoyant sledge down out of the valley, with my father and whichever son he had chosen to accompany him riding on top.

  This time it would be me.

  Had I known what waited for me there though, what words would pass between the Emperor and his wizard upon my entrance to the Blue Hall, I would not have been so eager for the journey.

  * * *

  We saw the low white line of the walls of Cor Capitulus not long after lunch on our second day out of the mountains. Truthfully though, as my father explained, we were not out of the mountains at all. The wide, green fields we rode through were a valley, though one so large the mountains were simply now a low line on the horizon. The ranges continued to the south, he said, before falling away to vast red deserts. Even those did not mark the edge of the Emperor’s domains, which extended to the immense mesas of the far south known as the Shallows, where the Barons waged their petty wars.

  When we were within sight of the walls my father pulled a wrapped parcel from beneath the sledge. Unwrapping it, I saw it was a blue robe I had never seen him wear before, with stiff bronze epaulets at the shoulders.

  He saw my questioning look.

  “The mark of a patrician,” he explained. “And one I am permitted to wear within sight of the city.” He climbed down from the sledge. “We walk from here.”

  The Emperor’s Capital, in my father’s words, was a city of green boulevards and canals spilling out along either side of the River Is. The white walls resolved as we approached into monoliths of marble, huge vertical slabs rearing upward at regular intervals along the city’s perimeter, but no more a true wall than a row of ivory headstones. No army had ever marched across the Emperor’s plains.

  “Not in the ages of the patricians,” my father said, pointing up at the stones as we passed between them. “Nor in the age that followed.”

  We walked between them and led the mule and the floating sledge down a wide smooth avenue leading to the center of the city. Traffic parted on either side around us, and the mounted soldiers we passed periodically gave respectful salutes, which my father returned. At the beginning of a row of huge houses along a wide blue canal, my father turned the sledge down an equally wide side street.

  We stopped at a set of bronze doors set in the face of a windowless stone warehouse.

  “This is the Hall of Delivery,” my father explained.

  He knocked, and the doors swung open silently.

  He unhitched the sledge from the mule, and a team of men came from within and pulled the sledge inside. I followed my father after them. They pushed it to the center of an immense chamber, darkened but for where a central beam of light came down from windows high above. At the center of this chamber, a man in a long grey robe waited beside an immense coil of chain.

  “Patrician,” the man said in greeting when we stood before him. He bowed, and my father bowed back.

  “I bring these gifts to the Emperor.”

  “The Emperor is grateful.” There was a narrow desk beside the man, upon which sat a huge ledger, quill, and silver and gold rods identical to those in my father’s workshop.
The man applied these rods to the stones we had carried from the mountains, nodding approvingly and making notations in his ledger.

  “And now their buoyancy,” he said.

  My father bent to affix the huge chain to the bottom of the sledge.

  “Stand back,” he told me.

  He hit an iron lever on the side of the sledge that dropped the ballast stones from the lower half. Like a cork released in water, the sledge with its three secured stones lurched upward. The clerk read off measurements from the chain as it spiraled upward until the sledge and stones slowed to a halt far over our heads in a beam of sunlight above .

  “These may be your strongest yet, Patrician,” the man said with what sounded like true mirth. “The blood runs strong in your hills.”

  My father grunted but said nothing. The clerk made some final notations in his ledger and closed it in satisfaction.

  “Your family’s debt to the Emperor is nine-tenths paid, Patrician.” At this it was my father’s turn to bow again. The clerk’s eyes fell on me. “You bring a new member of your family to court this season.”

  “This is my daughter, Sylva.”

  The man’s smile widened, and he pulled a bronze instrument from within a fold of his robe. I felt my father stiffen beside me, but it was simply a wide-faced timepiece. He clicked it open and stared. I could not see its face.

  “Wonderful,” he said after a moment. “It pleases me the patrician families prosper, even in exile.”

  With that we were dismissed. I stared upward again at the far reaches of the room. Our stones seemed bricks against the vastness of the chamber’s wide vaults. I realized our own were suspended among many, that there were dozens of floating stones in the upper chamber.

  My father’s gaze followed mine. “This is where they are all delivered, from all the patrician holdings. When enough are collected, they’ll be carried to the Emperor’s quarries in the hills.”

  “What are they doing with them?”

  My father shrugged as we left the room. “It is not for me to know. Come, we will stay in the guesthouse maintained for patricians in exile. It is not far from the palace.”

  On our walk through the Capital, my eyes wandered upward at the buildings we passed and the empty alleys of air above them. I imagined the Emperor lining his palace with our aeroliths until it rose and drifted over the city like a cloud.

  It was not like that at all.

  * * *

  A runner came to the guesthouse the next morning as my father and I were breakfasting before a long wall of flint-glass windows that looked onto the market square below.

  “Your daughter has been summoned for an audience with the Emperor,” the runner said. I saw my father’s face pale, and his eyes glanced toward me. “He will await her presence in the Blue Hall at four of the clock.”

  The runner bowed quickly and was gone.

  It had been, I believe, my father’s plan to deliver the stones and show me—as he had my brothers before me—the holdings beside the river that remained ours by right. I could not read his expression now.

  “The Emperor?” I asked.

  My father nodded. “Emperor Theodorus, and his twin brother, the wizard Theodulus. I have never met them.” He rubbed at his chin. “I have never been summoned to the palace in all my years in exile. My father saw the Emperor once, but it was years ago. Before I was born.”

  “Why does he want to see me?”

  Again my father’s eye flicked toward me, but he quickly turned his gaze to the crowds milling in the square beyond the windows. “I don’t know. I don’t know much about them. That is one way the exile has been effective: the patrician families have been removed from the environs of Cor Capitulus. We cannot form alliances. We cannot practice the swift games of politics. We rusticate.”

  He sighed heavily.

  “We are still of the old blood.” He looked at me again. “The Emperor who reigns now—it is he who exiled your great-grandfather.”

  I felt my own eyes widen. “How is that possible?”

  “The Emperor and his family are of the purest blood. But another benefit of the exile—” my father inclined his head “—time for anger to cool. I doubt the Emperor wishes to see you to discuss old enmities. They have hobbled the old houses, but they know they cannot do away with them completely. They need us.”

  “Why?”

  My father cracked his knuckles and looked uncomfortable. “Come, let’s spend the morning seeing after the estate. We will return for the midday meal and prepare for your meeting at the palace.”

  The day passed quickly. We walked through the empty, echoing corridors of my family’s manor. I stared at the crest of three blue feathers that dominated the great hall, while my father talked in low tones with the steward who still lived in the servant’s chambers and coordinated the caretakers. I watched the Is flow by the manicured gardens where my ancestors had walked and dined. Through the wide windows of the manor’s upper levels, I looked for the shape of mountains in the distance, beyond the ivory teeth of the Capital’s broken walls.

  I wanted to go home.

  * * *

  The Emperor at least was kind, though the kindness never left his eyes to touch his words or his visage. I stood alone before the Emperor and his brother in the Blue Hall and felt them weighing my fate.

  “Your father will return to the valley of your birth,” he said. He did not raise his voice, but it carried throughout the Hall. “With our thanks. The exile of your family is nearing an end.”

  He wore the same face as his brother, the wizard, who stood at his shoulder. In the wizard’s eyes though there was a darker hardness. This was the cost, I would learn, of his power. He wore it around him like a weight.

  The wizard leaned toward his brother and whispered a single word: “Aeolius.”

  His voice was an echo of the Emperor’s, though edged with a power I could feel along the back of my arms and neck. Something moved beneath the surface of the syllables, waking memories.

  I had heard that name before.

  An image flared like a candle in my mind, and suddenly I sat once more beside the fire with my grandmother in my parents’ lodge in the mountains. My mother was of the shepherd villages that dotted the hills, and for a time when I was young her mother lived with us. I asked her one night about the aeroliths, about whether they had always been found among the stones of the hills.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  She was smaller than my mother, and grey, though around her eyes and mouth it was possible to see the woman she had once been. It was also possible, with effort, to see the woman I might one day become.

  “They came to be in time before,” she said. “A story all the villages tell, and every village tells it differently. Every mountain valley saw it from a different line of sight.”

  “Saw what?”

  “The battle. When the last of the sky-giants was killed, the one we called Aeolius the Walker. He had been worshipped. The men who made the stone ruins you see on the peaks would in days of dark summer sacrifice a virgin for the shepherding of the winds, long ago.”

  It was impossible to tell whether she spoke from true memory or whether she seasoned her story to fit the glow of the fire and the howl of wind beyond the walls.

  “Long ago. The patrician generals had driven him into the hills to die. But he was angry, and he broke their ships like firewood, snapped them like dry bones. His anger made him blind, and a wizard dove from above and drove a sword of lightning through his skull. But he was old, and his age made him weak, so instead of growing another or shaping one for himself of the clouds, he died.

  “His body was only air though, so that when it fell it fell forever and is still falling. You feel it when the winds come down off the mountains. But his blood spilled out across all these valleys, and where it touched the rocks you find the sky-stones.”

  My grandmother’s voice faded as the wizard leaned forward and spoke again into his brother’s ear.
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br />   The Emperor regarded me from his throne. The ceiling of the Blue Hall arched up around him, with painted clouds adorning the huge pillars and the stones of the dome high above. The wide doors inlayed with azure marble closed this chamber off from the rest of the palace, and me from my father waiting beyond them, like the entrance to a tomb.

  “Your exile is at an end.”

  He could tell I was frightened. His eyes said that. But they also told me he could offer no words of comfort, that he could not speak to me as he would a child.

  “You will remain here.” The Emperor stood. “You will be my brother’s charge. You will be taught. You will be tested.”

  He watched me for a moment more, and his eyes said something more as well, but I could not understand them. Then he turned and left me alone with the wizard under the blue dome of painted stone sky.

  * * *

  “Clouds,” the wizard told me, “are born and wait all their lives for a day such as this.”

  We were rising among them in the wizard’s tiny skiff. I was sullen. My fear had given way to resignation, but there remained a bitterness against the wizard for the assurance he had that I had indeed become his servant, and for my lack of strength to prevent it. It smouldered inside me like the thunderheads rising on the horizon.

  “Clouds are not born,” I said.

  His face was flint. “They are born,” he said. “They are engendered of the sky and of the earth’s vapors, the waters, her exhalations.”

  It was true, but I wasn’t going to agree with him. I had seen enough cloudscapes to know they emerged from invisible layers of air like ghosts rising from the surface of a pond. We rode low among them, the wind whipping strands of my hair out of the elaborate braids the Emperor’s ladies-in-waiting had arranged earlier that morning.

  I missed my father. I had not seen him again since they turned him away at the door to the Blue Hall. Then I had only time to grasp his hand for a moment before the doors opened and I faced the Emperor.

  I had not seen them close behind me.

  I glanced from the edge of the sky-ship to see if I could spot him—a solitary dot on the auburn thread of the road stretching from the city. The sledge that had brought the aeroliths to the Capital would be empty, as would my seat beside him.