Beneath Ceaseless Skies #15

by Butler, S. C. ; Ahmed, Saladin

  The splashing continued. Hubley strained forward as she tried to hear more. What was a Glommer? Where were the rest of the sissit? How had they all gotten across the water to the tunnel leading up to the loway? The darkness still felt tangible around her ears, and she had an urge to swat at it the way she would a swarm of gnats. She took a step forward, and the oily water leaked over the tops of her boots to squish icily between her toes.

  Something hit her on the head.

  * * *

  4

  She woke with a rag in her mouth and her hands tied to a pipe set into the wall behind her. Light splashed across the assemblage of boilers and belts, pipes and pistons that filled the room, but the machinery was silent. Everything was ancient with decay.

  She coughed, shaking her head to clear her thoughts. Gagged and bound, she could invoke no spells. The sissit were either going to dine on her, or they were going to be more creative. With a sinking feeling, she realized that, once again, she’d rushed headlong through time into another unfortunate position.

  She tugged at the ropes and pipe. Flakes of rust showered her face. The ancient metal squeaked in a hopeful way, as if the strain was already too great. She pulled at the pipe as quietly as she could and was actually starting to think she might get free when a magician in stained robes surprised her by gliding out from behind one of the machines like a bank of poisonous fog.

  He was old. Too old. The skin of his face was stretched taut over bone, and his hands, which he held clasped in front of him, appeared to have no skin at all. Bent into permanent fists, each hand gripped a small crystal globe. Hubley had never seen anything like him, though she could make a good guess at what he’d been up to. Without a Living Stone, there was always a high price to pay for antiquity.

  “Ahh, my dear.” The magician’s voice was not unkind, but lacked the least trace of concern. “It seems you have regained some use of your senses.”

  Below his black skullcap his eyes loomed even blacker, with no white or iris, two great unblinking pupils like the eyes of an enormous fly, but with only a single facet each. His long, hooked nose divided their hard darkness with a thin, pointed ridge.

  “I was worried my servant had struck you too forcefully and that you were not going to waken. At least he neglected to take the odd bite or two out of you.”

  He smiled and brought his hands together. As he did, Hubley was able to get a better look at the crystal globes, which were bound to each skeletal claw with loops of thin blumet wire. The shiny coils wound up around the hands and wrists to disappear into the folds of his robe. Deep within the heart of each globe flashed small streaks of blue lightning. Hubley felt the power of his magic swell like a blister out from those strange spheres.

  “I hope you are comfortable,” he continued. “Let me unloose that nasty gag.” He raised his right hand, and a shimmer of cold blue light flashed toward the cloth around her mouth. She felt nothing until the rag untied itself with an eerie, flowing motion and slithered away from her face. Then the magician crossed his hands before him, slipping each into the opposite sleeve, and nodded. He seemed quite pleased with himself.

  With her mouth free Hubley was no longer defenseless. She spoke two quick words, intending a cloud of noxious smoke to form about the mage’s head.

  He laughed, his voice a high-pitched cackle seasoned with more than a little madness.

  “Oh, my dear!” he wheezed. “That is wonderful! Do you really think I would allow you to conjure in my own workroom? You might have struck me dead, and that would not have been to my liking. No, no. Not after all these years of time and effort.”

  He shook his head in silent laughter, and Hubley noticed he had no ears. Just holes, like the nokken back in Valing—which was where she wished she was.

  “There are incantations covering this place which prevent the working of any magic, except the magic of my own clever hands.”

  Bringing his bony claws back out into the open, he turned them this way and that, looking like nothing so much as a Malmoret baroness studying her freshly painted nails. The crystal spheres gleamed.

  “I see so few fellow humans down here to whom I can show off my talents. These miserable sissit are worse than children. Do you know, in all the centuries I have been here, I doubt I have caught even a dozen actual humans? And none of them magicians. Do you realize how much easier all this would have been if I had found even one? Do you? But, no. No magicians. Just these miserable sissit, which provide all the sustenance of a worm. Until now.”

  He leaned forward and beamed. His black eyes devoured her like a pair of mouths.

  A cold quiet settled over Hubley as she realized she’d accidentally discovered the easiest way to change the future. She’d get herself killed now, instead of later. She didn’t want to even think about what else would change when all the various older Hubleys melted away from the years ahead. Or, considering she was already as far into the future as she was ever going to get, the years behind.

  Even worse, once he cut her open, the ghoul would find her Living Stone. As devoted as he was to furthering his own life, he was sure to know what it was. And how to use it.

  So happy to have another magician to explain his brilliance to after all these years, he failed to notice her increased unease. “My techniques have worked quite nicely, all the same. I have added my own genius to the ancient art, you know. That is why I came down here. These are Dwarven crystals, naturally. They make the process easier and adapt it to all living things. I could even use the fish out of the lake, though the gain to me would be too small for any real sustenance.”

  The magician’s boasting was interrupted as a large sissit padded in through a narrow door on the other side of the room. The magician spoke sharply before the sissit could say a word. “Obahed! I told you not to disturb me until I am finished! You know my wishes.”

  The sissit bowed, trembling. “Obahed knows. But Eebul go see what Teekee doing. Maybe whole tribe coming now to kill Obahed.”

  “I will take care of Teekee and the rest when I am done. Now go away. They cannot hurt you here.”

  “Obahed hungry.”

  “Obahed eats when I am done. Now go!”

  The sissit ducked quickly back out of the room, its large, flat feet slapping hollowly on the metal floor. The magician turned back to Hubley. “I would like to continue our chat,” he said, “but time appears to be running low. And I wish to sample you before entertaining my next set of guests.”

  His back was to the door as he began to arrange several wicked looking knives and metal tubes on a table. So absorbed was he in his work that he didn’t notice when a new visitor tiptoed stealthily into the room behind him. Not even when she smashed the top of his head with an axe.

  “Hi, sis. I’m back.”

  Hubley gaped at the sight of yet another Hubley. Only this one was much closer to her own age. The new Hubley grinned, then bent down over the magician’s body.

  “I’m not sure he’s dead, yet,” she said, “if he ever was alive. But this is what I did the last time I was here. When I was you, that is. It seemed to work.”

  The axe flashed again. Still wired to the crystals, the magician’s hands bounced off and across the room. A final cut at the pipe above her head, and Hubley was free.

  “Come on, we’ve still got Obahed to get past.” The new Hubley pulled Hubley up by the arm before she had a chance to say a word. “We’ve got to close this circle we’re both running around in.” Handing her the axe, the new Hubley pulled a knife from her belt, and led the way out of the chamber.

  The narrow tunnel outside was made of the same rusted metal as the magician’s workroom. Pipes twisted across the walls and ceiling like vines in a forest. Only the floor was clear, except for occasional puddles where water dripped from the ceiling. At the entrance to another small room, the new Hubley came to a stop and held out a cautionary hand. Hubley peered around her older self’s back to find Obahed seated not five feet away at a rough wooden table
against the far wall. It sat with its back to them, one elbow resting on the table, its chin in hand. The other held a long knife with which it hacked small chips off the side of the table. Her staff lay on the floor beside it. Five or six spells to kill the creature came immediately to Hubley’s mind, until she remembered her magic wouldn’t work.

  The older Hubley took a deep breath, tiptoed up behind the sissit, and stabbed it in the neck just above its shirt.

  With a loud cry, Obahed grabbed the knife in both hands. The older Hubley stumbled away until her back was against the wall. The sissit twisted as it tried to get the dagger from its neck, knocked over the bench it had been sitting on, and collapsed to the floor. Twice it tried to sit up, splashing around in a puddle of blood. When it died, its head hit the metal floor with a clang.

  Hubley swallowed once, then threw up. The tension of the last few hours came spewing out until she slumped weakly on the floor. Her older self left her alone for a moment, but, when she’d recovered, told her to get the knife the sissit had been playing with before it died.

  “And look closely at the place where I stabbed it,” the older Hubley added. “Memorize the exact spot. That’s the only way you’ll be sure to kill it on the first try. Which, as you already know, you will.”

  Reluctantly Hubley took the bloody corpse in her hands. She had to roll it over to retrieve the knife, which had fallen beneath its body. She studied the second knife in the creature’s neck for a moment, before dumbly realizing the two were exactly the same. Then she fell back wearily onto the floor beside her elder self, wet and miserable and covered with rust and muck.

  “Have you recovered?” her older self asked sympathetically. Hubley nodded. “Okay then. It’s time to get out of here. You’re going to have to watch everything I do very closely, because the only reason I know how to do all this is because I saw myself doing it when I was you. Got it?”

  Hubley nodded. She was beginning to understand what her oldest self had told her, back at the beginning of this increasingly unpleasant adventure, about wanting to know as little of the future as possible. All this foreknowledge only seemed to be causing trouble. Here she was, following herself in what was starting to look like an endless circle, all in an effort to change the future. And, for the life of her, she couldn’t seem to get ahead of what was happening. The circles just kept drawing closer and closer, like a whirlpool spiraling down a drain.

  Wearily she took her staff from its place by the wall. Climbing up on the table, the older Hubley spun a rusty iron wheel fixed to a trap door in the ceiling. The trap door fell open, and a spatter of rusty water rained down. A second wheel showed on the inside. Behind the table was a flimsy ladder, but it reached up into the door in the ceiling and in a moment both Hubleys had climbed into the tiny room above.

  They nearly filled the small, unlit chamber. A third wheel hung from the ceiling right above their heads. Hubley reached for it at once, eager to get out of this constricting place, but a word from her elder self stopped her.

  “Don’t. You’ll bring the whole lake down on our heads. We have to close the bottom door first, then pull that lever on the left.” She pointed to a pair of switches on the wall beside them. “You pull the right one when you come back. Don’t forget.”

  Closing the bottom door, the older Hubley pulled a lever in the darkness. For a moment, nothing happened. Then gears clanked and metal groaned, and Hubley’s legs jerked as the room around her suddenly moved.

  “It’s a lift!” she said, suddenly understanding.

  Her older self nodded. They ground slowly upwards till the contraption jarred to a sudden stop. Hubley felt her older self move past her to unscrew the wheel above their heads. She heard the door creak open, and a gust of slightly fresher air swept into the room along with a splash of rusty water.

  “Where are we?” she whispered after following her older self outside. A cool breeze fingered her cheek.

  “In the middle of the lake.”

  “The lake?”

  “The one at the end of the tunnel. You were standing in it when the sissit grabbed you.”

  That lake. Hubley had almost forgotten. She was very confused. After the light of the magician’s lair, dim though it was, the plunge back into the darkness of the cavern was disorienting. She wanted to flash a light from the top of her staff that would open up the darkness to the highest point in the ceiling above. But her elder self was already tugging at her sleeve.

  “Hurry. You have to go back again. I don’t know what happens next, but there are more sissit coming. I’ll take care of them. And don’t forget that knife, or the axe!”

  Hubley removed the silver cap from her little finger once again. The wound at the last knuckle was barely a day old and still throbbed. The breeze was gusting more strongly now, and her cape flapped loudly in the wind. She spoke the word of power, and once more her soul snapped back through time...

  * * *

  5

  ...and she was lying in her Traveling Room again, her eyes focused on the rune of carved ivory set into the stone ceiling. Her rune of recovery and return.

  This time she didn’t linger, though she wasn’t about to go rushing off a second time without thinking. She needed to be more patient. She was a chronothurge, after all; she was supposed to be in control of time. The axe at her belt belied that thought, perhaps, but right now she preferred not to go too deeply into the how and why of where it had come from.

  In a chair in her study she curled up with the cat and a mug of hot tea. The problem, she decided, was that she didn’t know enough. About the sissit who’d attacked her. About what might lie on the far side of the cavern beyond the lake. She needed to go back, scout around, and find out where the sissit had come from. The magician, she already knew she would take care of. All she had to do with him was let matters run their course. But the sissit were another question. She needed to find them. Only then could she burn them out of every tunnel in Vonn Kurr, if she had to, to make sure they never found their way to the Sun Road.

  This time she would keep events under control.

  When she was ready, and after she’d gotten some much-needed rest, she summoned a memory even earlier than the last one, cast the Timespell again, and retraced her route once more through the tunnels of Vonn Kurr to the shore of Gommer’s lake. There she discovered a shallow ledge that led around the water to a rocky beach on the far side, where two small coracles were drawn up on the shingle. She considered smashing the bottoms of both, until she remembered she’d need a way to get to the middle of the lake and the entrance to the magician’s lair. So she left them alone.

  Beyond the coracles she discovered a pair of tunnels at the top of the slope. The passages were roughly hewn, not Dwarven work at all. They twisted and split among each other like a clutch of snakes, with branching tunnels going left and right and up and down. She spent hours exploring them, but without some way to mark her path she kept going round and round in circles. What she needed was to capture a sissit and make it show her the way. Otherwise she was only going to get lost.

  She retraced her steps. As she emerged back into the cavern she heard sounds from the lake. One of the coracles was being quietly paddled. If she could catch the paddler she would have her guide. But the soft splashes faded away and she was left silently cursing her lost opportunity on the wrong side of the cave.

  She waited a few minutes to see if the paddler would return. The darkness was absolute. She had risked a small light while exploring the passages, but had smothered that spell before returning to the lake. There was no sense in showing a light now; she would only scare her quarry off. She was deciding to sneak back around the side of the cavern and try to grab it there, when the sound of flat feet flopping carelessly against the stone came from the second passage. She recognized the voices immediately.

  “So. Where is boat?”

  “Boat is here.”

  “We catch fish?”

  “We catch big fish.”

/>   Two sissit, with who knew how many others on the far side of the cave, was more risk than Hubley wanted to take in capturing a guide. No doubt if she acted now she would just start up some new chain of events that would end with her having to save herself once more. No, she had promised herself she would be patient this time. Better to just keep watching. There would be other chances.

  The sissit dragged the second coracle into the water. The boat creaked as they climbed aboard.

  “Ssh!” the first sissit warned. “No noises. We on Glommer’s waters now.”

  “Glommer not worry about us. I tell you, I know when Glommer sleeping. I one smart sissit.”

  “I worry.”

  Obadeh didn’t seem to care about that. “You got hooks?” it asked.

  “I got hooks.”

  Several minutes passed with no talking. Hubley guessed they were baiting their hooks, or doing whatever it might be that sissit did to catch fish. A pair of gentle plops marked the moment when they lowered their lines into the water.

  Time passed. Hubley began to fidget impatiently, and was starting to cast about for some new course of action when a flash of light burst into the cavern from the far side, exposing the dark water, a hint of stony walls, and the two sissit crouching in their small boat. Then the light was extinguished as quickly as it had appeared.

  Hubley was taken completely by surprise. She hadn’t thought her younger self would arrive so soon. Now everything was going to get complicated again. She listened as the two sissit had their argument and fought, the first time for them, but the second for her. This time, however, she heard what happened next as the first sissit swam noisily ashore and ran across the beach to the other tunnel. More splashing erupted from the other side of the lake, signaling her own capture.

  Obahed called loudly across the water. “Ho, Eebul! What you catch?”

  A new voice echoed from the far wall. “Man, I think. You have sissit?”