Beneath Ceaseless Skies #150

by Richard Parks

  “And where would we travel to find and kill these trees?”

  “I lived through a time where trees grew for a thousand miles in every direction.”

  “This is a great distance?” she asked.

  The Inked Man nodded. “But I also watched the last tree ever to grow in Lacuna fall.”

  Morinae traced the tattoo on her forearm. “Lacuna. The Missing Letters,” she said, the letters cut and rubbed with lampblack, wrapping her arm from elbow to wrist.

  “The City of Missing Letters.”

  She jumped off of the throne. “We will find these missing letters and make them do our bidding.”

  The Inked Man laughed again. “You may find the letters, but making them bend to you will be difficult. Some say impossible.”

  Even though Morinae was considered an elder by her people, she still had the fire-glint of adventure in her eyes. “Difficult, yes. Doubly so without paper.” She toed a rock across the soil until it fell into a little hole. “And now I will grow a stone weed.”

  The Inked Man fell forward with the weight of her words. For the first time in decades, he felt the Unsight return and propel him toward the End of Time again.

  Morinae shook him awake. He was lying at the foot of his throne. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Morinae, I can give you paper. I can give you trees.”

  She smiled. “I would give anything for paper.”

  He nodded. “You will have to give everything for paper.”

  * * *

  Chernyl’s pick fell against the rock with the weight of his sorrow. He had sent Trinia another batch of letters and hoped she would understand his delay. If she even wrote him back he would feel better.

  Hunks of coal the size of his fist jumped off the wall. He tossed them over his shoulder. If he got them into his cart, good, but it was difficult to care today. The cart clanged and he knew at least some had hit their mark.

  “Thanks for the boost, Britches.”

  Chernyl turned around and nearly dropped his pick. It was him: the greenhorn who had stolen his money. Or at least, who Chernyl thought stole his money.

  “You,” he said.

  The greenhorn smiled. “Most call me Lorch, but I’ll let it slide.”

  “You stole my money,” Chernyl said.

  Lorch’s eyes bulged and his mouth opened, but all that came out was a hiss.

  “Where’s my coin?” Chernyl asked. He didn’t like how this kid’s face was turning blue. Why wouldn’t he stop hissing?

  Looking down at his hands, Chernyl saw the handle of his pick against Lorch’s throat. He let his arms drop.

  Lorch dropped to his feet, coughing. He tried to say something, but his voice hadn’t recovered.

  “I want my money back.”

  Lorch motioned for Chernyl to come closer. As he leaned in to hear Lorch, steel flashed into Chernyl’s vision and everything went white and then black. A second-type of blackness overcame him, darker than the first. This one was accompanied by throbbing pain and an eye crusted over with dried blood.

  Had he heard laughter, or had that been a dream?

  Chernyl stood up and wobbled a bit. His cart seemed emptier than a moment ago. Had Lorch stolen some of his coal?

  No, Chernyl thought, He stole all of my coal. The greenhorn took my cart.

  Chernyl grabbed his pick off the floor and wound up over his head. He put every frustration of the past few weeks—the company’s shoddy policies, the harassment from the older miners, Spec’s death, Lorch’s theft, Trinia’s silence—and struck the rock face with all of it. The strike echoed up and down the mine, but Chernyl couldn’t hear it as he fell through his shattered life and felt the stone pile on top of him.

  * * *

  It had taken Morinae and the Inked Man a full year to collect the supplies to seed the land. He had written plague notes on scraps of his skin. Morinae slapped them onto every seventh person. Within days, those people fell ill. The plague was back in Lacuna. The plague was in Lacuna for the first time.

  The victims suffered little. The Inked Man had constructed this plague to leave the body intact. Instead of large flakes of parchment sloughing off, the victims turned quickly to something like rot-wood.

  Morinae—playing the part of concerned elder—asked for volunteers among the healthy to take the sick far across the dead plains; to put their hide-wrapped corpses on the backs of camels and to bury the body only after the animal fell. Volunteers always came forth, even though they knew it was a one-way journey. The Inked Man gave each volunteer a prayer card written in his own blood, to be read at journey’s end.

  In this way did they seed the land. The two leaders of Lacuna made sure never to touch too many, and the population of the village grew and grew, until the Trickle Ars became the River Ars, and even Morinae’s great-great-grandchildren were bent with age.

  The Inked Man looked from his throne atop the Lampblack Mountains and saw the first saplings in the distance, with the shadow of larger trees darkening the horizon. Sighing, he got down off of his throne and made his way to Morinae’s palace.

  By this time, she had lived longer than anyone had ever lived on this earth. The Inked Man had made sure of it, with recipes for tinctures and salves he had brought back from the other Lacuna. Even with his medicine, though, Morinae could no longer walk, no longer feed herself. She could hardly speak but for whispers.

  He crawled in through her bedroom window. One of her great-grandchildren—the greatest healer in the village—stood near her bed. When she saw his giant form, her lip wavered but she didn’t flee.

  “She’s dying,” Tes-Morinae said.

  The Inked Man nodded.

  “You can’t do anything for her.”

  The Inked Man nodded again.

  This seemed to satisfy Tes-Morinae. She started for the door, but before she exited, she whispered once over her shoulder. “I know where trees come from.”

  The Inked Man didn’t nod this time. He didn’t think he had time to nod. With his Unsight, he saw Morinae’s heart beginning to slow.

  “Morinae,” he said, brushing a wisp of white hair from her dark forehead. “I need one last thing from you.”

  She didn’t whisper. She didn’t even open her eyes. All Morinae did was smile, and he knew that she was ready.

  The Inked Man bit his lip with jagged teeth and pressed them to her forehead. There were no words, no incantations, no prayers to utter. From the moment he pressed his bloody lips to her forehead, from the moment his pulse traveled from his wood-pulp heart to her skin, the mark glowed white and she breathed no more.

  The Inked Woman’s eyes opened as her skin mottled brown and yellow. Where once skin sallow and wrinkled by age had hung off of eroding bones, now flesh of vellum and paper, muscle of pulp and parchment, filled her frame. Even her hair returned to the black of a bottomless inkwell, hanging in sheets to the bottom of her pointed chin.

  The Inked Woman sat up. Her eyes traveled down her calligraphied arm to where her fingers intertwined with those of a man-sized paper doll.

  Lifting him in her arms, she made her way to the library in the mountain, to where her people had stored their first clay stories.

  It only seemed fitting.

  * * *

  Chernyl knew he was awake because it was so dark; darker than the inside of his eyelids. He knew he was alive because of the pain. His body was mostly intact, cushioned by something like wood pulp, but his ankles were shattered and his body itched. When he raked his fingers down his arm, papery skin came with.

  Trying not to panic, Chernyl got to a sitting position and searched in his pocket for matches. He could see where he had fallen through the wall of the mine by the patch of lighter blackness above him. It was too far to reach, even if he was able to stand up.

  “Why ain’t I dead?” Chernyl asked. Slabs of stone surrounded him but for the rot-wood below him. Chernyl probed the rot and felt something solid.

  “If I can get a c
ouple sticks, maybe I can make a fire.”

  He pulled at the rot, but it wouldn’t budge. It didn’t feel like a stick though; more like paper rolled tightly into tube.

  “Paper?” He itched his arm again. An entire sheet of skin came off in his hand.

  Bracing himself, he pulled harder. The paper gave way and he jerked backwards, slamming his hand into one of the stone slabs. He felt warm blood drip down his wrist and pool into the bundle of rot and paper.

  He couldn’t keep the panic at bay anymore. Sobbing, he put his head in his hands.

  Chernyl, balling rot, paper, skin, and blood in his head whispered into the darkness.

  “All I want is some Light.”

  The ball of blood and paper glowed.

  And there was Light.

  Copyright © 2014 Adam Callaway

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Adam Callaway’s Lacuna stories, which include “Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin“ in BCS #73 and “The Magic of Dark and Hollow Places” in BCS #96, have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, nominated for the Million Writers Award, and named to the Locus Recommended Reading List. He lives in Superior, Wisconsin, with his wife and two dogs.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE UNBORN GOD

  by Stephen Case

  There were black kites of the god’s priests aloft in the evenings, fabric dark against the sky. I could tell that it troubled the wizard, though he said nothing. Sylva had volunteered to leave the flying house, to scout them where they hung and carry them away, but the wizard had refused.

  “He thinks I would not come back,” she explained to me, spilling around me like mist. “If we fly too far from his house, we lose our way. We forget.”

  “Is that what happened to the others?”

  Papers shuffled on the desk before me. Her hands were the wind. “Perhaps.”

  I was writing with a quill the wizard had fashioned me. It was a tail-feather from one of the large black birds that roosted in the upper levels of the house. I had been his servant for less than a week (though time quickly became stretched in odd directions inside the house’s walls, and the only way to mark it was the inscrutable concentric rings of the timepiece by the entrance) on the day he sent me to find a bird and pluck its feather.

  “Here are the words you must say,” the wizard told me then, leaning over the map table in the center of the house. He made me repeat them.

  It was my first taste of magic, and it felt metallic on my tongue. The words hummed as I shaped them, setting my teeth on edge and numbing my throat as they passed.

  “He must see you when you speak. You must look him in the eye.” The wizard’s own were on mine now; or rather, the polished bits of marble in the place of his eyes by which he somehow saw.

  The interior of the wizard’s house was shaped like a domed rotunda, though viewed from without it drifted through clear skies as a lone cumulus, its windows and doorway invisible to anyone observing from below. The first floor was dominated by the map table at its center and its walls broken at regular intervals by tall, narrow windows. Each level above formed a balcony running the circumference of the house and was usually lined with books. It was impossible to tell how many levels there were, and each overhung the next as the dome arched toward its peak. Mists hid the highest reaches, and enormous skeletons and preserved creatures were suspended from the unseen ceiling.

  There was a single spiraling staircase connecting each level, but these rose at different points along the circumference of each floor so that moving upward between balconies was never direct. In addition, no staircase—and the staircases were the most ornate aspect of the wizard’s house; silver and carved of bone or ivory—seemed fixed in location. They moved, in fact, according to a specific pattern, though I did not realize this until the wizard fell from the house.

  On the day I fetched the quill, I found one of the large black birds after climbing through at least eight levels of the house. It was perched on a railing opposite a wall of shelves filled with glass jars each containing a human hand suspended in colored oil.

  I cleared my throat, hoping the bird would look toward me. In response, it took wing and circled the suspended bones of a rock-whale to perch again on a railing three balconies higher. It might have been a raven or a rook but for its a bright azure beak.

  I sighed heavily and started upward once more.

  When I reached it the second time, now opposite a wide desk of scattered scrolls and spots of ink, the bird cocked its head to study my approach. I spoke the words the wizard had given me. I could not tell that they had any immediate effect, save once again feeling heavy and deadening in my mouth, but the bird remained impassive as I approached and tugged from its tail a long, black feather.

  It was only when I broke eye contact that the bird screeched and speared the back of my hand with its blue beak. I was still nursing the gash when I returned to the wizard.

  “Good,” he said. He took the ebony feather and notched it with a tiny silver knife. “It must taste blood before it takes ink.”

  I showed him my hand.

  “Hold it out.”

  I did, and then shouted and tried to pull away when he pushed the shaft of the feather into my wound. When he withdrew it, the barbs of the feather were streaked with red as though it had drawn up blood as a tree takes water.

  “Sylva will bring you something for the wound,” he said, releasing my arm. I held the wound with my other hand, pressing down until it throbbed.

  “You must learn to write.” The wizard moved back to the table in the house’s center.

  When I had first come to his house (by night in the airship with my poisoned father, fleeing the god’s ministers), the wizard, if what Sylva and the timepiece told me was correct, had been sleeping in one of the upper levels for years. Now he seldom left the circular map table. Sylva whispered it was where he had taken council with his captains in the old days, when the emperor had sent him here into the Shallows from over the mountains. But none came to take council with him now that I could see, save perhaps the winds and the birds that passed in and out of his windows.

  The table was enormous. It seemed as wide as the room I had slept in as a child in the mill beside the stream. It was a map of the Shallows, detailed so that every river and field appeared. Sylva called it by a certain name when I had first come to the house, but now I could not recall what it had been. (I may not have been listening, distracted by trying to catch a glimpse of her whose voice I heard and hands I felt but could not see.)

  Besides the map, the features of which shifted so it always remained centered on the location of the wizard’s drifting house, the most noticeable aspect of the table was the clouds. They floated above its surface like smoke, in perfect miniature of the clouds above the Shallows, portraying the shifting aerial topography through which the wizard’s house passed.

  When I stood beside him clutching my hand, the table showed tiny flecks to the far south, building into hillocks and furrows moving northward, until the center of the map was a cluster of white columns with scything blue canyons between. I could see those columns outside the windows as we passed among them, blinding white and flattening at the tops.

  “There are scrolls in the third cabinet of the third level,” he was telling me. “Begin your lessons with those of the third shelf. I do not have time to teach you myself, but you must learn nonetheless.”

  “I know how to read and write.” My parents had sent me to the school in the village until I was old enough to help my father at the mill.

  “Not the languages my books are written in. Not enough to be useful.”

  “Why?” I pressed. I was bitter about my hand.

  The carved stones that were his eyes turned toward me for an instant before shifting back to the table.

  “Because I wish it.” He paused as though waiting for me to argue. When I was silent, he continued. “The books themselves and the
quill will assist you. Begin copying the third scroll, and continue to the next when you are ready.”

  I sighed heavily and started for the nearest staircase. I assumed in my ignorance that studying would be less labor than scrubbing the flagstone floor with rainwater. In this, as in much, I was incorrect.

  * * *

  I found a desk on the third level, not far from the shelf the wizard indicated. I wanted to be alone but not too far away. I still understood little about the upper levels of the house, but I knew that one did not climb into them without having been sent on a specific errand.

  The house had a tendency to resist casual wandering.

  Sylva found me where I sat on a weathered oaken stool. “I brought you something for your hand,” she whispered, “and some parchment and ink.” A bandage coiled through the air like a serpent.

  One could not see Sylva. I wished I could, because her voice was kind. Perhaps because we were both servants of the wizard, she treated me at times like a younger brother. Not like the birds, who ignored me, and the timepiece, who only answered my direct questions, and then only as though I were a particularly uninteresting piece of furniture.

  Sylva, according to the wizard, was a wind to which he had provided an anima. She was a living breeze. She could carry things and take messages, and she could clean the wizard’s house, but like the wind, one only saw the effects of her passage. Depending on how hard she concentrated, she could manipulate objects with surprising dexterity. She must have been rather focused now to carry the parchment and ink to the table so steadily in her twisting fingers of air. I thanked her and when she said nothing assumed she had gone.

  The parchment of the third scroll smelled of age, but the ink inside was dark. I realized why the wizard had selected this particular volume, for it was written in the language I could read, interspersed with lines of an unfamiliar text. It told a story of two brothers and a tree and a dying king. I soon learned that the unknown script told the same story; that the scroll was a tool by which I was expected to learn the language.