The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year One

by Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  She took a gulping breath. “I mustn’t drink things from Faerie. If I do, I’ll have to stay here for always.”

  “Ah, but in this corner of Faerie it is different. Here, you must drink a bit of our brew, or else we cannot allow you to leave. And you have had enough adventure for now, have you not? You would prefer to return to your home and your bed?”

  “Thank you ever so much,” Caroline said, “but I mustn’t drink it.” Her voice was firm but her hands trembled in her lap.

  “Just leave her be, why don’t you?” Jabey said.

  Sloan hushed him with a wave of his hand and crouched to look Caroline in the eye. “Ms. Morrowbridge, I shall be frank. I cannot allow you to remember clearly the things you have seen here.”

  “I won’t tell,” she whispered, shrinking back.

  “That is not enough, I’m afraid. This brew—which is, I assure you, a most pleasant and warming potion—will leave this night’s happenings a dream, and no more. If things have frightened you here, then you will remember them as only a nightmare. If you have been disappointed,”—he gave Jabey the barest glance—”then this brew will dull the sorrow. But I cannot allow you to leave until you drink it.”

  She turned frightened eyes to Jabey. She’d reason to be afraid, little rich’s girl in this down-and-under city. Something would have scared her sometime if she’d hadn’t come here.

  Still he didn’t like seeing it in her eyes. If forgetting was all Sloan’s drink would do to her, maybe it was just as well. Jabey nodded to her.

  “All right,” she said. Her eyes still on Jabey, she picked up the mug with both hands, lifted it to her mouth, and did not lower it until it was empty.

  “Excellent,” Sloan said. “Now, perhaps you will find the getting out of our district a simpler matter than the getting in.”

  He led them down a long casement of steps to a room with all the damp, dark odor of a cellar. At the far end was a rounded bronze door with a mechanism on its face. “We have our own uses for runners, on occasion,” he said. “Jabey, when you return we can discuss the details of your employment. I believe we can find a mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

  Jabey nodded, mute.

  Sloan pressed at one knob and twisted at another, and the whole door swung in—bringing the sewer stinks with it.

  “Right. Come on,” Jabey said, taking Caroline’s arm and helping her climb over the door’s edge. It clanked solidly behind them.

  The trek back to the west hill was slower because of Caroline, but less tentative now that Jabey’d begun to see the pattern of these new sewers. They’d just crossed a plank into familiar lines when Caroline sniffled. Another three steps, and she sniffled again.

  “That wasn’t Faerie,” she said.

  “Could have told you that,” Jabey said.

  “I knew it wouldn’t be. I know there’s no such place as Faerie.” Another sniffle. “I’m not a baby. But when you talked about it, it sounded like Faerie, all full of magic. And it was. Some of it was so very pretty, like the lamps that told the street names, and those creatures we saw dancing. I couldn’t have imagined half the things I saw. It was just like I thought Faerie would be.

  “I always knew why people wanted to go to Faerie—it was beautiful and strange and full of things that you couldn’t explain with ordinary words. But now I think understand why they should want to leave.” A pause. “That’s why I drank what Mr. Sloan gave me. Was I foolish?”

  “Maybe you don’t want to remember all that,” said Jabey.

  Caroline wrapped both her hands around one Jabey’s. “And I always knew you weren’t an elf,” she said softly. “But you’re still small, like me. I’m sorry Mr. Sloan and those people did those things to you.”

  “Nothing for you to do about it,” he muttered. It was just her istocrat manners talking, he told himself. It didn’t mean anything. “Come on, we gotta get you up there before dawn and people start watching.”

  She didn’t say any more, and in another ten minutes he was half-carrying her. It came to him, as they climbed the last few blocks uphill, that there’d be questions regardless. Her dress was streaked with slime and she smelled like a runner. They’d probably think she’d fallen in someone’s privy.

  At least she wouldn’t have to worry about explaining, if that muck Sloan knew his business. She wouldn’t know any better than anyone else.

  Finally, the right storm drain. He left her leaning into the wall while he clambered above to look for passersby. The faintest hint of dawn hung at the horizon. He boosted her up and got her the last few steps to the side door, where she fell into a heap, already dozing.

  Much longer and the whole world would be waking, not just the milkmen and the lamp-dowsers. Regular folk, and Yol, too, hunting his runaway runt. He knew a side drain down the hill where no one would bother him, where he could sleep a while before reporting in to Sloan.

  He turned towards the drain, glancing back once to the girl huddled at the door. She was just a rich’s girl, and anyway she was safe now. She was no worry of Jabey’s anymore. He crawled below and headed towards that side drain.

  Terribly small for her age. . . .

  It was somewhere beneath the dark quarter, not quite to Sloan’s street, that Jabey realized what he was going to do. It didn’t feel like a decision, like when he’d stood at the door of Yol’s shop, thrown the severed slave collar behind him, and run. It was like the tide washing into Upper Inlet, each wave a little higher until the grounded ship rocked on her hull.

  He was going to save Caroline. They’d gimmick no more growth from her; he’d see to it.

  And, like a ship knew which way the ocean was, Jabey knew how. Maybe.

  He didn’t crawl up the same drain this time. He hadn’t been watching the way they’d come to Sloan’s laboratories, but his feet knew, even here below. When he was under the right street he started sniffing for that peculiar bitterness of a tinyman’s vatwater and followed it to an incoming pipe hardly wider than himself. He squeezed into the drain and edged upwards. Those drain holes in the corners of Sloan’s laboratory, they were big enough for him. He’d be fine. As long as no early-rising gimmicker spilled something and no one mopped the floor and no one had bothered to secure those grills that covered the drains, he’d be fine.

  Finally the pipe turned upwards and dim light filtered down. Jabey wedged himself against one side and wriggled up, wedged himself against the other side and up again. He reached the top and pressed against the grill, nearly slipping as he did. It didn’t move. He shoved his shoulder up and it unstuck. Carefully he slid it aside and heaved himself onto the laboratory floor, cringing as the grill scraped against cement.

  Across the room something skittered away. Jabey dropped to the floor, lungs tight. There was a squeak, more scuffling, and then he just saw a rat’s tail as it disappeared around the door.

  Just a stupid rat, and he was jumping like he’d never seen one before—him, a sewer runt. He took another breath and started walking.

  It was a few moments’ careful skirting of the benches, twisting of doorknobs almost above his reach, creeping down silent hallways before he found the laboratory they’d first come to, where Sloan had laid Caroline’s glasses. Jabey hoped—it was all he had, a hope, a suspicion—that Sloan would not leave a token there unless there were other tokens about.

  Caroline’s glasses still lay on a bench; whether that was good sign or bad, Jabey couldn’t guess. He walked down the row of cabinets, opening them one by one and searching for any collection of oddments that might be tokens. He found squat beakers and glass bulbs with long slender necks, matches and vials of fluid. Tiny white crystals like salt—maybe they were salt—sat beside stones the size of his fist.

  At the end of the row stood a block of steel taller than Jabey with a wheel in its front and the slit outline of a door. If he were a clubber with gimmicked pretties to keep, he’d keep them here where would-be thieves like him couldn’t snatch them. He ran a finger dow
n the groove, felt the solid inflexibility of the thing. He rummaged a blunt knife from one of the cabinets and poked at the groove, wedging the blade in until it began to bend. The wheel, now, that was how it opened properly, wasn’t it? He tried it and it rotated smooth and silent under his hand, but the door did not suddenly swing open nor a lock click free.

  He shoved at the immobile, immovable mass. No good; the thing was solid as a sewer wall under twenty feet of rock.

  Sloan. If he could get a jump on Sloan, make him open it -

  “I meant that you should report to me personally.”

  Jabey twisted, already backing against the safe.

  It was Sloan, of course, in the same cheap suit, though a rat was now draped over one shoulder. In the half-light Jabey caught a glimpse of its eyes and shrunk from their glittering brightness.

  “Perhaps you will explain why you are attempting to deface my safe?” Sloan’s voice was cool, mild.

  Jabey straightened as tall as his body allowed and kept his mouth closed. He wasn’t going to snivel even if he was going to get gimmicked one last time.

  Sloan dropped to a crouch and looked Jabey in the eye—as did the rat. Jabey pressed just a little harder against the edge of the safe. Sloan noticed. “Go,” he said, and the rat hopped down and scurried into the shadows.

  “Now, if you will kindly explain. . . .” The voice hardened.

  The words burst from him. “You got no right!”

  “Undoubtedly,” Sloan said, “but to which wrong do you refer?”

  “That girl back there,” said Jabey, “the one growing up for some crack-kettled rich—it’s her father, isn’t it? Caroline’s.”

  “Ah.” Sloan nodded, stood. As he lit a lamp on the workbench he said, “I may not violate the privacy of my clients, of course, but allow me to compliment you on your astuteness.”

  “Caroline ain’t been left on your doorstep like some cellar queen’s kid. What do you think, you can do your gimmickry on any muck you like, like they’re just air, free to take?”

  “Better that she be abandoned before we use her? Better that she slip into the sewers afterwards, like so many sources do, to become couriers and pickpockets for the city’s underlife?” Sloan smiled faintly. “You of all men know our business here in the quarter. You sought employment nonetheless, did you not?”

  Jabey stared for a moment, his teeth clamped so hard his jaw ached. And then, “You go on talking like that, like maybe you’re sorry about her and the others, when you made us this way. Look at me. I can’t even reach to punch you in the apples. I can’t go abroad for fear the right-living folk’ll catch me. And it’s not just me, either, nor the other bastards folks leave in your alleys. You do this to rich muck’s girls, just for coin.

  “I’m some dumb runt, is what I’m thinking, because I’d take those kid glasses and lay your head with ‘em—I know the place, you learn that kind of thing running for gangers, which is all you left me to. All that, and -”

  But the words were getting caught and his eyes burned with tears. He could only stare blurrily all the way up to that pale face, those eyebrows sardonically raised.

  “All that,” Sloan finished, “and you still find whatever I might offer you preferable to running for Yol Stulbrend, avoiding that cur of his and the stings from his slave collar.”

  “Sure don’t. Sure don’t.”

  Sloan turned away. “Very well, then. Kindly step aside.” Jabey shuffled away as Sloan walked to the safe. He spun the spokes once, twice, back again in some pattern Jabey couldn’t see, and then pulled the door open. Inside were shelves of jars, each with some oddment or two, although not what Jabey had expected: curls of hair, pilings of dull white clippings like maybe istocrats’ fingernails. Sloan plucked a jar from the array, swung the door shut, and twirled the wheel. He held the jar out for Jabey to see. “This, I believe, is what you came for?”

  A ringlet of brown hair curled at the bottom. It looked like Caroline’s.

  Sloan set the jar on the bench and crouched again. Jabey did not shrink away this time.

  “How badly do you want that the contents of that jar?”

  Jabey waited.

  Sloan sighed. “I planned to offer you our usual compensation: food, clothing, security from all but accident and your own stupidity. But I see by your face that this isn’t enough. Suppose I offered you that jar and its contents as well?”

  “Don’t make sense,” Jabey said. “I’m just another no-account runt. What do you want me for?”

  “You shall run my errands and my messages. You shall travel among your old circles of petty criminals and would-be gangster kings and report on all you hear. You shall be a spy, an envoy. In all these things I will require absolute obedience.”

  “That’s dumb. You can have any muck you want for a coin or two.”

  “But I cannot hold their loyalty as I hold yours. It would be a simple matter to obtain a few more strands of hair from the girl if I wished. If you acted against my interests.”

  “You give me that jar, and I gotta trust you won’t gimmick Caroline anymore?”

  “As I must trust that you will not betray me.”

  “Why won’t I run out right now and shout to all the coppers and the gangs about you?”

  “First, because they won’t listen. Second, because you don’t yet have anything to tell them. But most importantly because you would not be standing in my laboratory if you didn’t care more for that young lady—whom you’d never met until last night—than for your own convenience.”

  “She’s just some rich’s girl,” Jabey muttered.

  “Yes.” Sloan folded his arms and looked down at Jabey, his expression blank. “She is but one of many projects. There is the wife Caroline’s father requested, for example. I make you no promises about her fate, nor about that of any other creature in my laboratories. Think carefully, Jabey Tinyman. Do you trade your liberty for one little girl’s height?”

  That was it: a job and Caroline being all right. Everything he’d wanted—more than he’d wanted—when he’d crawled out of the west hill sewer, looking for a pretty.

  “The glasses, too,” Jabey said.

  Sloan raised an eyebrow, nodded in what maybe was approval. “The glasses, too.”

  Jabey pushed away the picture of the little gimmicked girl sleeping in her little room. He couldn’t help her. He couldn’t help all those others either, people and beasts and some in between. This was all he could do.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “You got me.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Sloan left him to attendants with instructions to feed him and find him a place to sleep, and when he woke again Sloan sent him with a message to a dive across town. “You needn’t hurry on the way back—just see you don’t get caught. You’ve no security yet from rabble like Yol.”

  Jabey heard the hint—though he wondered why Sloan would give it—and after he’d delivered his message to the gape-mouthed serving girl, he ducked beneath the streets and walked the sewer line up, up, following his feet along the turns.

  A few candles still lit the windows of Caroline’s house. He knew the window he wanted this time, and he climbed up and out to it, remembering how the catch hadn’t been quite closed. It wasn’t now. He jogged it until it scraped loose. Frozen, he waited, but there wasn’t a sound. Silently he swung the window open and crawled in.

  There was no sleek head on Caroline’s pillow, just a lump of quilt.

  “Caroline?”

  Nothing, for a moment. Then fingers slipped out of the quilt and slowly it slid down from Caroline’s eyes, just glints in the dark.

  “Wh-ho are you?” she whispered.

  The potion. He should have remembered. “A tinyman,” he said. “Like an elf, kind of.”

  The head disappeared. “I don’t want to see an elf.” The quilt muffled the words. “Go away.”

  “I’m Jabey. Don’t you remember me?”

  But of course she didn’t.

  She pee
ked out again, the cover still pulled up over her nose. “I dreamed about you.”

  “Yeah?” He took a step forward.

  Again the head ducked out of sight. “It was a bad dream,” she said, her voice wavering. “Please, go away.”

  Stillness. No sound but quick, sniffling breaths beneath the quilt.

  Finally Jabey said, “I won’t bother you again. But I’ll be seeing nobody else does, you hear?” He whispered the last words. “I’ll see you’re all right, Caroline.” He unwrapped the cloth from the opera glasses and laid them on the table by her window, and then he slipped out again, and down, and into the seeping streets known only to the rats and the tinymen.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Sarah L. Edwards writes science fiction and fantasy, reads a lot, knits, and wonders what to do with her math degree. Her fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future XXIV, Aeon Speculative Fiction, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

  FATHER’S KILL

  Christopher Green

  THE DOOR HAS THREE LOCKS, and I am their key.

  I was nine before I could open all of them without help. Father’s game of teaching me how the locks worked had become a desperate trial when Mother passed. When Father hunts, the door must be kept locked throughout night, until the morning drives the wolves away.

  He cannot go into the night without having the door locked behind him.

  The lowest lock is the first one I learned. Little Stefan can touch it if he stretches. I have only to press my index finger to the front piece, curl my thumb behind, and twist my wrist and the lock will spring open in my hand.

  The second is a knot of metal and gears. This lock must be wound, or it will seize. Marta is old enough to be trusted and tall enough to reach it, and she is always helpful. Winding the lock is her job. One spins the toothed gear the same number of hours that the sun has been in the sky that day, and the lock will open. The lock will not work if the sun is not out.