Beneath Ceaseless Skies #191

by Chaz Brenchley

  It would never have been hard to put a woman in Rulf’s bed, even from this distance. I wondered which woman and whether he had kept her, whether she worked her spells yet or one time had served for all time, a curse-bane lurking at the root. He had tried witches of his own, I knew, but Croft’s must have been the stronger. No surprise, if he found her here in Skander.

  He went on, “In the end, I knew he’d want Toland back. Adopted by the new king, sired by the old: that speaks of dynasty, what better? And what better way to push him into it than sending him my bones, letting him think me dead and the boy adrift? I knew you’d be the one to come, the king’s windmaster. Perhaps you’re right, perhaps this is still vengeance after all. I have stolen his posterity, and now I steal his friend.”

  Croft seemed content to smile and wait—not for the first time—for me to catch up with his meaning. I looked at the younger man, and back through time to when he had been younger yet; and spoke to him for the first time, said, “Well, then. If Croft has gone from crippled exile to beggar king to chancellor, what are you now?”

  He echoed his master’s smile and said, “I am the chancellor’s legs. As you have seen.”

  Which was to say that he was more than that, much more; but he would never be Rulf’s son and never king in Sawartsland. I wondered if Croft had taken other measures to be sure of it, besides stealing the boy’s heart and keeping him close all these years. I had taken him for a eunuch at first sight; I might not have been wrong.

  It didn’t matter, and I wouldn’t ask. Not here, not now. I said to Croft, “I have the Skopje here, and I can find a crew, buy a crew if need be. I can go home, with this news or any. I don’t see how you have stolen me from Rulf.”

  “A man can shrug a burden off,” he said again. “And should do, where it has no value. My legs, your loyalty. The ship’s your own; so should your life be. What do you have to go back for? Grown children and a bitter king, neither in need of you. A draughty longhouse cold all winter long, an ice-needle in your bones, and too many people always at your ear. They’ve had the best of you already; enough, now. More than enough. Stay here, and keep what’s left.”

  “You’re saying this was a trap for me? Not for Rulf at all?”

  “Rulf would never come, you know that. A king without an heir, without children to marry off to build alliances? He hardly dare leave his hall. You, though: of course he would send you, and of course you would come. And once you were here—well. Harlan, stay. Find a new crew, sail new waters. Learn a city, the way you learned the sea. Woo the harbormaster.”

  I startled. Perhaps I glowered.

  He laughed. “What, did you think that she imagines all those children to be her own?”

  Ramin crouched once more in his corner of choice, quiet and still, shrugging off his bruises. Who owns whom is always a question; in his mind, I thought, perhaps he owned me. Or perhaps he had traded me, or given me away.

  In my own mind—well, I could see a small house, a quiet house. A great and welcome change from what I’d left, all that bustle and labor and noise. A boy to run errands and make a nuisance of himself, a girl who would know where my boots were; I shouldn’t need more of a household. A house not too far from the harbor, certainly. Convenient for the Skopje, for a new life on and off the water; convenient for friends to visit, back and forth. Or to stay, either way. The harbormaster, if she eventually would; my blond farm lad in the meantime...

  I said, “Why, whyever would you want that?” Apart from causing Rulf a deal of worry and frustration, which was no more than bread beer against the fiery spirit of what Croft had done already to trouble Rulf.

  Sometimes, theft is an act of simple honesty. Everyone belongs to someone else, elsewhere as in Skander; but he said, “I miss more than the sea, and my legs. I have my legs,” tweaking Toland’s ear, simply to see him smile. He said, “I miss my friends. One friend,” and so he stole me from my king.

  Copyright © 2016 Chaz Brenchley

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  Chaz Brenchley is the author of nine thriller novels, most recently Shelter, and two fantasy series, The Books of Outremer and Selling Water by the River. His most recent books have been ghost stories, of a sort; his collection Bitter Waters won a Lambda Award last year. As Daniel Fox he has published a Chinese-based fantasy series, beginning with Dragon in Chains; as Ben Macallan, an urban fantasy, Desdæmona. A British Fantasy Award winner, he has also published books for children and more than five hundred short stories in various genres. He recently married and moved from Newcastle to California, with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO HAVE SEEN AND DO NOT BELIEVE

  by D.K. Thompson

  Despite my profession, I have never considered myself to be a holy man. Curious about all things supernatural, certainly—ever since I first lowered Darwin’s goggles over my wide-eyes and could see for myself the world I’d been blind to. When I saw the ghosts that day as a boy, I believed. But belief does not equate holiness. Even the demons believe.

  No, I am not a holy man. But I have always prided myself on being a practical spiritualist.

  * * *

  My vampire friend knocked at the door, only a few minutes late.

  My coughing fit subsided, and I dabbed my mouth with the already-stained handkerchief.

  More knocks—harder, and with less time between blows.

  My shoulders brushed against the grounders and other amulets strung from the ceiling and walls to protect me from uninvited spirits, sent them clinking against one another. I looped the vial around my neck. Such a simple tool, carved and molded from salt crystals. The dead find grounders to be rude wards, but they view the vials as a particular evil.

  I see it as a necessary one.

  I twisted open the door handle and found Magdalena waiting on the other side.

  The powder-blue hat at a fashionable angle was the most traditional thing about her. Magdalena’s trousers puffed out just above her boots, and both her jacket and vest were unbuttoned, revealing the pale hollow of her neck.

  Contrary to superstition, there is no supernatural law requiring vampires be invited into the house. They will not writhe in agony at the attempt, or burst into flame. However, it is courteous and respectful, and so I made the formal invitation to Magdalena. She strode in past me, doffed her hat, and set it on an unlit candelabra.

  Then she took my hand in hers, the red-dappled handkerchief still balled in my fist. She lifted it to her face, inhaling as if it was the most expensive of perfumes.

  I should explain there was nothing erotic in this exchange, at least not from Magdalena’s perspective, though I admit my own body experienced some confusion at the way she reacted to my bloodied handkerchief. Confusion is natural whenever the physical and the supernatural come into contact, of course. But Magdalena, despite her pixie-like face, was at least half a century my elder, and possessed levels of maturity and experience that my meager life couldn’t fathom. I was very much a child in her eyes, a prodigy perhaps, but still a child. Something that needed to be coddled and doted on, not anything so coarse as a lover.

  I looked at the curling papers pinned to the walls of my apartment—studies of unhinged jaws and long, cruel rows of vampiric teeth, and did my best to cool my body’s appetites. Above all else she was my colleague, as well as my subject.

  Magdalena let go of my wrist. “I’m worried about you, Elijah. You’re getting worse.”

  “Life usually does.” Before she could begin again about the alternatives to death, I asked, “Were you successful in your acquisition?”

  Magdalena favored me with a crooked smile and dug through her satchel. Glass vials chimed against one another. She tossed a linen bundle to me, then went to the special decanter I kept for her, and poured herself a glass. She tasted the Primate Red and made a face. “I do wish you’d keep a better vintage for me. This stuff from the iron
vineyard leaves such a bad aftertaste, no matter how well they maintain the chimps. There are willing humans, you realize?”

  “Illegal,” I said, and unfolded the white cloth. The whittled bullets looked surprisingly plain. ”Are you certain of their authenticity?”

  She tipped back the glass, finishing it off in a swallow. Then she pointed an index finger at me as if it were a pistol. The tip was black—burned. “Unequivocally. What is this all about, Elijah?”

  “I’ve just come from Fossick’s. He confirmed it. There’s an angel in London. A real one.”

  She laughed, and poured herself another glass. “A real angel,” she repeated, sounding like a professor mocking a pupil’s thesis.

  Darwin had proved much of the supernatural in his Origin of the Spirits. Due to the breakthrough with his goggles, he’d had less trouble seeking out the world’s other paranormal creatures. In certain instances, such as the vampires, they had sought him out. But angels, although long suspected by Darwin, had never been proved. There were tales, of course, but no specimen had ever been secured. With my mortality as evident as the crumpled handkerchief on the floor, I wanted to change that. To leave my mark on the world.

  Something in my expression must have caused Magdalena to frown. “You’re serious?” she asked. “Why would Fossick suggest that? One dying man’s secret to another?”

  “Precisely.” I removed the salt crystal vial from around my neck, handed it to her, and recounted the whole grisly ordeal in detail—my questioning of Fossick, the map he’d provided me of the Underground, the confrontation I’d had with Upton Salazar, my rival, and how I’d escaped.

  “And the bullets?”

  “A contingency.” An unnecessary one, I hoped. I was desperate but remained practical, even if the thought of using the weapon—something of an artifact itself—made me taste bile. But angels were an unknown quantity.

  Magdalena didn’t argue the point. One of the reasons we worked so well together was that she understood the virtue of practicality. “Salazar knows of its habitat?”

  “It’s highly probable.”

  She sighed and took another drink, then rolled off of my couch, dusting off the sleeves of her jacket. “I wish I had been with you. I would’ve like to have tasted whatever passes for Salazar’s blood.”

  I chuckled, cracked open my pistol’s cylinder, and loaded it with the wooden ammunition. “Don’t worry, my dear,” I said, and tucked the gun in my waistband. “There’s plenty of time before sunrise.”

  * * *

  Ghosts floated above the cobblestones, slowing as Magdalena and I passed. Rain slashed through them, caused hissing trails to mist up from their ethereal forms. They stared at us, perhaps struck by how the sway of Magdalena’s trousers looked both unladylike and utterly feminine.

  I wiped away droplets beading across my goggles’ lenses and tipped my hat at a pair of ghosts looking for a host.

  Magdalena’s cheerful giggle broke off when another coughing fit seized me. She waited until it passed, then wiped my mouth and hands with the tips of her fingers. Sniffed my blood before licking her hand.

  I looked away as she sighed.

  “Dear Elijah,” she said, laughing again and taking my arm in her own. “Don’t hold such things against me. I cannot be anything other than I am.” Her teeth were no longer retracted, and her smile was sharp and splintered, shark-like.

  “Of course not.”

  “It would be tragic for something so petty as life to come between us and our studies. Imagine having a certainty in seeing every tomorrow, in having the comfort of an eternity to conduct your studies and experiments. Imagine knowing you’d never have to give up these walks with me.”

  It’d used to be me who asked the questions of the supernatural: what happens next? Is there something more than what the goggles allow us to see? Is there something wondrous, beyond this world?

  But ever since I’d been diagnosed, my subjects had taken an increased interest in their examiner, dissecting my ambitions and what was left of my life. It was a courtship of sorts, I supposed, and Magdalena fancied herself my favorite suitor.

  Perhaps there was something of a vampire in me. It appealed more than any of the alternatives. But the ghosts and vampires already had several spiritualists themselves, and—if my studies suggested nothing else—I was certain that the afterlife of a ghoul left quite a lot to be desired.

  I had months left to live, possibly only weeks, and the thought of leaving this world as nothing more than a footnote on its history made me feel sicker than coughing up bits of my own lungs.

  “I appreciate the offer, but I’m hopeful I’ll overcome my circumstance. There may be a miracle yet.”

  Magdalena cocked her head and made a show of twirling her cane. “Is that what this is all about? You think this angel will somehow cure you, so you can make your mark on history?”

  “Don’t hold such things against me,” I said.

  Magdalena snorted, tired of arguing the point.

  I was dying. But I had no intention of becoming dead. As fascinated as I was by my subjects, I had no desire to become a ghost, or a vampire.

  Rain spattered off the low roof jutting out over the Underground station’s subterranean entrance. I traced my gloved fingertips over the soaked wooden tiles and thought of the bloody fingerprints Fossick had used to mark the map.

  Trains could be traced through the city lines in the daytime as their steam puffed out the ventilated shafts. They’d finished running hours earlier, but there had long been rumors of trains that ran unscheduled in the deep of night. Some said they were identical to the trains that operated during the days; others swore they looked like scaled wyrms. My colleagues considered the testimonies to have been made by drunkards, and I myself hadn’t put much faith in the sightings until that night. But Fossick had sworn otherwise.

  We came to the station’s service door. Magdalena twisted the handle, and it gave without resistance. I heard the dull roar of a locomotive far in the distance, felt the slightest tremor in the earth, but that was just rain drumming the makeshift roof above.

  The air stank of smoke and sweat. Rivulets of water ran down the moss-covered brick walls, an ever-shifting map. My foot brushed against something, sent it skittering down a wooden staircase that twisted into the darkness. My lantern light washed over it: a single red slipper.

  Magdalena drew a half-smoked cigar from her vest pocket, opened my lantern’s case, and drew on the cigar until the end flared. Due to the angle of the lantern, only her upper lip was visible, and its pucker reminded me of when she diverged from her forced diet into her vampiric one. Magdalena cast no reflection in the lantern’s glass, nor a shadow on the plank stairs or wall. The light seemed to flow right through her. For all intents and purposes, she was invisible to herself.

  She exhaled, staining the air with tobacco and chocolate.

  “That didn’t do much to improve the smell,” I said, and put the handkerchief over my nose and mouth.

  “I’m sorry!” she said, and made to crush out her cigar against the wall’s grout veins.

  “Oh, I’m fine, so long as I don’t smoke the thing myself.” I ignored the rasp in my throat and waved her concerns away with the smoke.

  “Even so.” She mashed the tip and dropped the twisted cigar to the wood. An odd expression crossed her face, one I wasn’t used to seeing before. Something just shy of embarrassment, I thought. Then without another word she swooped past me, twirled her cane, and descended the knotted plank stairs. They gave no sound as she treaded down them.

  On the next level, a whore contorted against the walls in the ecstasy of a ghostgasm. She was wearing the other red slipper, the toes on her bare foot curling, the nails edged with dirt.

  Magdalena passed her without a glance. I followed, the wood creaking under my weight, but couldn’t help making the briefest of observations. Through the lenses of my goggles, I saw the ghostly palms and fingertips slip past the confines of her own fle
sh, gliding up her exposed thighs, only to disappear again like ethereal waves, blurring their host around the edges as the two spirits used her to make love. The woman cried out behind us, her echoing moans retreating like the tide.

  At the bottom, my light struck the girders and beams pressed between the tunnel walls, casting sharp geometric shadows over this unfinished area of the Underground.

  Running water gurgled—the rain had created a small stream through the winding tunnel. Broken glass glistened on the muddy ground, like diamonds glittering in a dragon’s hoard.

  The water was also the source of the stink. Mosquitoes buzzed over the surface, and the patched fur of dead things bobbed.

  I consulted Fossick’s map again and nodded upstream. I slipped and staggered through the mud until the channel spread out, engulfing the whole floor. She went first, never breaking stride. I took a tenuous step into the ankle-deep filth; the dark water rushed over the tops of my shoes, flooded up to my calves. My socks swelled around my ankles as I sloshed after Magdalena, stumbled over rocks and other debris that littered the tunnel floor, flailing my hands to maintain my balance.

  Suddenly I fell to my knees. Something sharp sliced open my shin, and I cursed. A cold ooze wrapped around my waist.

  Magdalena came back to my side, gripped my arm. “Get up,” she said. “We’re here.”

  The passage opened up, revealing the water’s origin—a waterfall of runoff from an unseen maw in the tunnel’s ceiling. The tunnel we’d waded through ended against another with tracks running perpendicular to the one we stood in. I didn’t need Fossick’s map to recognize the platform still under construction.

  A raven screeched at us from just beyond the water, limping across the ground. It cowered from us, trying to move its broken wing, flicking water.

  I watched it struggle for a moment, considered crushing it under my foot, putting the thing out of its misery. But I took pity on the raven and stepped over it instead. Perhaps sparing the broken creature was a cruelty, but it didn’t particularly look like it wanted to die.