by Nick Mamatas
Dominique stayed in the back of the crowd, too shy to come forth and ask her questions. Even her desires grew clouded, and for a while she could not remember why she was there. Snatches of thoughts and images floated before her dark beady mouse eyes: a jug of grain, the thick arm of her father clutching across his wife’s pregnant stomach as they slept, a stretching neck of a new chick. An old man with the eyelids like funeral mounds.
The mice stopped their chanting, and lined up to partake of the Eucharist. The mouse who was a priest by all appearances held up a thimble Dominique recognized as her own, lost some time ago, and let all the mice sip from it. Dominique joined the line. Several altar voles helped with the ceremony, distributing grains of wheat and helping the feeble with the sacrament.
Dominique shuffled along, and waited for her turn. No one seemed to notice that she didn’t quite belong there, and the vole shoved a sliver of grain into her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully, as her eyes sought to meet the gaze of the priest.
Finally he turned to her, his work completed. “What do you want, daughter?”
Dominique found that she could communicate with the mouse priest easily. “I’m looking for an old man.” She stopped and wrinkled her face, trying to remember. “He died, and became someone else. I have to find him.”
The mouse priest moved his sagging jowls with a thunderous sigh. “We dreamed of the others coming into our midst, and we prayed for signs . . . none came.”
“But I smelled him here!”
The priest turned away, mournful. “It was God you smelled.”
Dominique sighed and followed the mice, who filed out of the main chamber into a complex system of burrows. She found a tunnel that led upward, and enticed her with the smell she sought.
The snow had fallen while she was underground, and she sputtered and shivered as the white powder engulfed her, its freezing particles penetrating between hairs of her coat. She half-struggled, half-swam to the surface.
Buddha was outside with his dogs, running weightlessly across the moonlit snow. His dogs preceded him, their noses close to the ground. They followed a chain of danger-scented footprints. A fox, Dominique guessed, mere moments before seeing the fox.
It looked black in the moonlight, and it dove into the snow, coming up, and diving again. It seemed puzzling at first, but then Dominique heard muffled squeaks, pleas, and cries of pain. The fox was hunting mice, too busy to notice that Buddha’s dogs were stalking it.
The fox sniffed the air, and turned its narrow muzzle toward Dominique. Her heart froze in terror, and her feet screamed at her that it is time to run, run as fast as possible. But she remained perched on two hind legs, looking the fox straight in the eye. “Have you seen my grandfather?” she asked the fox.
The fox stopped and tilted its head to the shoulder.
“He’s not a mouse,” Dominique explained. “At least, I don’t think so. He died and was born as someone else.”
“Ask the mice,” the fox suggested, yawning. Its teeth gleamed in the moonlight. “They would know—they get everywhere.”
“I tried. But they are only praying, and—”
The dogs she had forgotten about pounced. The fox shrieked, trying to shake two small dogs that latched onto the scruff of its neck.
“All things die,” Buddha commented.
The pale petals of the stars came out and the moon tilted west. Dominique alternated between burrowing under the snow and running on the surface. She followed the trail of the fox who ate so many of her brethren.
Dominique did not need to sleep; her dream fits were but a distant memory. She wondered if all mice were sleepless, and realized that she had never seen a sleeping mouse. She also wondered whether they spurned Buddha because he only came to those who slept.
As she contemplated, she realized that the smell that was urging her on was growing weaker. She turned her snout back, and caught it again—back where the fox full of mice was being rend to pieces by Buddha’s dogs.
The old mouse told her that it was smell of God, and she turned back to the mouse burrow, to the church. To her horror, she found the burrow desecrated, dug up, and the surviving mice huddled in the ruined passages.
The old mouse priest was among them. He shook and cried. When he saw Dominique, he hissed. “It was all your fault; you brought the fox to our church.”
Dominique shrugged, unsure if she was able to take on a burden of another responsibility. The smell of her dead grandfather was overpowering around her, emanating from all the mice, and especially the old priest. Even her own breath carried the scent of him. “You told me that was the smell of God,” Dominique told the priest. “But where is it coming from?”
The priest still wept. “His flesh was made grain, and this is what we take as our Eucharist. The flesh of God.”
Dominique remembered the taste of the grain sliver on her tongue, and squeaked with frustration. Why did she think an old man would come back as a mouse or a bird? What better destiny was there than to be wheat?
She remembered the golden expanse of the ripe ears of wheat, the singing of women, the even thumping of the threshers. She thought of her grandfather, when he could still leave the house, walking behind the reapers, picking up stray ears fallen to the ground, smelling them, chewing their milky softness with his toothless mouth. And then, she missed home.
She comforted the mice the best she could, telling them of Buddha and his protective dogs, but she never told them that the flesh of the grain was her grandfather’s, that he came back to her in the taste of wheat and the communion of mice.
She spent the night and the next day digging new burrows, and collecting what grain was left in the field, so her mouse brethren could have shelter and the Eucharist. But her heart called for her to go home, until she could resist the urge no longer.
Dominique was tired. Her small feet screamed with pain as she crawled back into the village. She wanted to be human again. She remembered vaguely the words of a round gentleman, punctuated by sharp barking sneezes of his small needle-teethed monsters. But she could not recall their meaning, she could not remember how she became a mouse, her feeble memory overpowered by the taste of wheat.
The only recourse left to her was to do what all mice did in a situation like that. She skittered along the row of straw-thatched houses, listening, looking. A sharp, salty smell attracted her attention, and she circled a small house, its doorway decorated with wilting, frosting garlands of wheat and oak boughs. Newlyweds.
She found a narrow slit between two planks by the door, and squeezed inside. It was warm and the house was filled with smoke from the dying embers in the woodstove. Two people lay in the bed, asleep, naked.
Dominique’s nose twitched as the smell grew stronger, and she followed it up onto the bed, light on her feet, scampering across the folds of the sheepskin covers.
The sleeping woman shuddered but didn’t wake up as the tiny mouse claws ran along her thigh.
The smell was overwhelming now, and the mouse closed her eyes, and squeezed into a narrow, moist passage that smelled of sea. The woman moaned then, and the soft walls that surrounded Dominique shuddered.
She reached a widening of the burrow, and entered a warm, unoccupied cave. There, she curled into a fetal ball, tucking her long tail between her legs. Soon, her tail would fuse with the walls of her fleshy cave, and she would become a small person, with the black liquid eyes and restless jaws of a mouse.
Ekaterina Sedia lives in New Jersey with the best spouse in the world and two cats. Her second novel, The Secret History of Moscow, came out from Prime Books in November 2007, and her next book, The Alchemy of Stone, is due from Prime in 2008. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Fantasy Magazine, and Dark Wisdom, as well as Japanese Dreams and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies.
Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com
THE BEACON
Darja Malcolm-Clarke
My children are dying.
I learn
this as the airship SS Arthanthropia eases past the lighthouse towards the Khalreg Cumulesce and the docks hidden behind. I am watching from the lighthouse gallery when it happens: dancing like aurora over the cloud-churning paddlewheels, the beacon’s blue-green light falters.
It means only one thing.
I quit the gallery and charge up the spiral stair to the lantern room. A touch of a button stops the slow rotation of the great fresnel lens, the crèche where my children are nestled. I throw open the glass door behind which they lie, their slick white segments lined up like pale vegetables in a market bin. Their light has become so dim I don’t need the visor hanging nearby to shield my eyes. My babies sense my proximity and squirm in need. As I draw back the flap of my robe to free up the row of teats, I fear yesterday’s suspicion is about to be proven correct. I give a teat a squeeze. It excretes milk tinged with yellow. I try another, and it’s almost dry. Another: the turbid fluid.
Well then, it is so. I have the sunpoison.
I swallow against the only possible option. There is talk in the stilt city Overcloud about the threat of sunpoison, but no plans yet of what to do about it. They in the city have time—after all, they are protected. The lighthouse is not. And the city cannot afford the lighthouse to go out. My children must be nourished.
First things first. I close the crèche-lens door to keep in the heat and hurry down the spiral staircase to the nursery. The wife is there, chewing the egg-casing from the hatching babies. Like all wives, mine does not do much other than gnawing. That, and of course, impregnating.
The wife looks up from the casing; the nymph-child’s face is just visible. A piece of shell hangs off the wife’s chitin lip. Near-sightless, he sniffs the air. He could never see if the children had ceased to glow and light the way for airships, in case one were to come perilously near the Cumulesce. So this is where he stays, in the nursery, out of the sun and away from the beacon, chewing.
He sniffs again. “The sunpoison really has come,” he says.
“Yes. The heliomancers were right—the sun’s eyes are multiplying.” I survey the hatchlings.
“What do they say in town? Do they still think there is time?” he says.
“There is time for them,” I say. “The city canopy will hold long enough for it to be refortified.”
“Maybe the sun’s gaze will be the end of us,” he says.
“What do you know of it? Leave it to those who do.”
He is quiet a moment, then says, “The littlest will need milk soon—within a day’s time at the latest.”
“Yes,” I say, impatient. He is oblivious to my expertise. To feed one’s offspring from her own teats is the obligation, duty, and pride of every goodman; to share this responsibility with another would be the height of disgrace. Better a child die than bear the shame of having been fed from the teat of one who did not lay her.
I turn to go, now that I know the youngest are well enough for a short time. I hope it is time enough.
“Perhaps if you return to the city canopy,” he says, “so you’ll be where the sun’s gaze doesn’t reach?”
“It’s too late,” I say. “The poison has already reached my milk.”
The wife cradles the hatchling in his arms. “She doesn’t mean to harm us, the sun,” he says. “Her compound gaze—”
“She loves us. I know.” This nattering is why I usually leave the wife to himself.
“There are—” He hesitates. “There are rumors of something that could help. A plant.”
“Fatherteat,” I say. “Undercloud. I know.”
His blind eyes widen. “The wives speak of it.”
“I hope that’s not all it is—wives’ tales. The familiar fancy and foolishness. Yes, goodfolk have been discussing it.”
There have been times when the talk in Overcloud was not so far off. This I know: without milk, my babies cannot glow, and the lighthouse cannot warn ships. Vessels will soar through the Khalreg Cumulesce as though nothing lay just behind it, collide with the docks—and careen on to Overcloud. Bring it all crashing down, stilts folding upon each other, dropping into open air—
“I’ve got to go to find it,” I say. “So, it’s a risk, but you’ll have to tend the children alone. If there’s such thing as fatherteat, they can’t live without it now, and the beacon cannot shine.”
“You could ask someone in town to nurse for you . . . ?”
I meet this insult with the glare it deserves. Another day I might reprimand him further, but today there is no time.
The wife drops his eyes and takes a breath. “I’ve been thinking,” he says. “These are my babies as well as yours. I will go to fetch fatherteat.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say, suppressing a sour chuckle. “Tend to your chewing.”
“I wish to go,” he says. “I won’t stay cloistered in here while the sun’s eyes multiply and gaze upon us.”
“I won’t have my wife venturing undercloud alone.” Now he is beyond irking me. “Besides, feeding infants is fathers’ prerogative. Our duty.”
“But some of the other wives have been talking about going undercloud—”
I settle the matter with uproarious laughter.
In the kitchen, I pack a rucksack with half a loaf of the brown bread the wife makes. He stands watching—listening, rather—as I take it from the cupboard.
“You won’t come back. You’ll be burnt to a crisp. Or gutted by bogles,” he says.
“Don’t try to dissuade me,” I say. “Especially not with nursery tales.”
“That’s why Overcloud is here, you know. That’s why we built it. Bogles,” he says. I snort. “They are still down there. Don’t you want something, just in case? Take this with you,” he says, and draws a kitchen knife from the block and wraps it in a checkered cloth. “And this,” he says, and makes his way to the closet, emerging to present me with a red umbrella. “For the sunpoison.” His antennae work; he puts his glossy-shelled head far into the cupboard. From its nether-regions he withdraws a loaf of the brown bread. He hands it to me and says, “They say fatherteat has purple—”
“I know what they say it looks like,” I say and toss the bread into my rucksack. I shoulder the pack and leave him standing by the cupboard.
I catch a lepidopter to the stilt city’s ferry-elevator undercloud, located on the docks behind the Cumulesce. Below, goodmen come and go in the streets. We pass through the patchwork shadow of towering claptrap buildings that sway on tall legs. Since the city cannot expand out, it is built ever upward.
Around the far side of the Cumulesce, airships crowd around the harbor; it’s the windy season and thus busy. As we glide overhead, I recognize the docked SS Arthanthropia, its paddlewheels lazily turning. The lepidopter descends and I climb out beside Bezzy’s Cloudside Tavern. I expect to have to wait a while for a ferryman—it’s not as though goodfolk line up to go undercloud. At least not yet. But someone appears from within a sloping shanty even as the lepidopter’s wings still fan the air over me.
“Goodman,” she says, waving me over to the ferry.
“Ferryman,” I reply with a nod. She extends a knotty claw for the toll. I give her the two coins fee, as well as an extra to speed our passage, and step into the wooden ferry-elevator. She closes the door behind me and turns to work the contraption. The ferry kicks into gear.
Descent begins, and the sky flies up against us, pressing against my shell like it’s trying to break through. A round hole in the floor lets me watch as we careen towards the wall of cloud. When we hit it, the diaphanous white coaxes a nagging cough from my throat. Light wanes, and the clouds take on a ghostly pall.
The ferryman pulls on the winch. The ferry slows but land is too close too soon, and we smack into the ground. I hit the wall and spin on my back like the lighthouse lens. The ferryman collects herself, coughs once, and helps me to my feet. She opens the door. As is custom when leaving an enclosed vessel, she says, “Luck of the lighthouse worm go with you.” It does not ha
ve the intended comforting effect.
Undercloud is warm, flat as far as eyes can see, and covered with high reeds and brush. What a wonder: solid earth. So much vegetation I have never seen. And where the land is not muted green it is black, and wet, and stinking of rot. A hot wind blows. Somewhere high above, airships come and go, guided by the light of my nymph-children; but I cannot see the ships for the roiling silver cloud cover, which casts a peculiar twilight over the plain.
With a mechanical clamor, the ferry ascends behind me on ropes and pulleys. High overhead, its clanging still echoes into the false dusk. A tingling upon my shell indicates the clouds do not keep out the sun’s poison, but trap it in. How the wife could have known this would be so, I do not know. I take the umbrella he gave me protruding from my bag and open it, a strange bright flower blooming on the bland plateau. The tingling abates somewhat, though I know the sunpoison still pours down from the sky. She does not mean to harm us, the sun: she cannot help but watch over us, even though her gaze brings suffering.
Beneath the cloak my teats are brewing sunpoison in concentrate; a shiver of shame runs through me. What if I cannot provide for my children? I hope against hope the solution is here somewhere.
I have gone two steps when my legs stick in the black sludge. I try to pull out one row by sheer strength, but the mud sucks and slurps at me like a grub-child. I strain; I’m exhausting myself two steps into the journey. Gazing out over the plateau, I wonder how far fatherteat might be. If it really exists.
Then I remember the bread.
The long loaf is hard with age and likely weeks old, forgotten as a tomb at the back of the cupboard. But why else would the wife have given it had he not known I’d need it, and not for eating? With the loaf I push the mud away from my feet experimentally, and it spreads easily, like kidney cream. I clear one row of my legs that way, then the other, and a slow-going rhythm develops: step, sweep, step, sweep. I can walk. The petrified loaf is the perfect tool.
