Beneath Ceaseless Skies #116

by Scott Andrews

  The drake didn’t even seem to notice—but the smith did, shouting, and that caught the drake’s attention. Its tail whipped around, clipping her on the top of the head, and Netta fell.

  * * *

  She woke wrapped in warmth, and her first muddled thought was A drake, a drake swallowed me. As sense returned—and with it a lingering ache, as if she’d bumped her head on the underside of a table—that thought changed to Where’s Bron?

  A whimper at her side answered that, but it wasn’t till she turned to see him curled up next to her that her panic faded. Cold moonlight turned the fluff of his hair silver where it poked up over the edge of the blanket—a heavy blanket, enough to keep him warm and alive.

  Something crackled beside her, and she turned to see the smith drop a handful of dry grass onto a pile of wood. He spoke a syllable curiously like the ones the drakes had coughed, and the sticks blossomed into flame.

  Netta drew a shaky breath. Everyone in Alcaris had heard the stories of where the firedrakes came from; how the sorcerer known only as Vigil had built them, breathed a mockery of life into them, and given them to Duke Tasso to use as he willed. And then the sorcerer had disappeared—devoured by his own craft, so Sieg had claimed, the fate of all sorcerers—and the drakes had only gone madder since their master’s death.

  She hadn’t imagined that strange, one-sided conversation. And surely only one man would speak so to firedrakes.

  As if hearing her thoughts, the smith turned and reached for her. Netta drew back, remembering Leir, remembering that man among the refugees who’d said good girl, good boy, if you need money in Ceste, come see me.

  The smith sat back on his heels. “You’re in no danger from me,” he said. “Not of that sort, not ever. Give me your hands.”

  For a long moment Netta was still, then one by one worked her hands out from under the heavy bearskin cloak and held them out. He took them in each of his, then turned them over, his brow furrowing. “No acid burns,” he murmured. “There should have been, from such a wound. How did you manage to land a hit on them without nicking a hose?”

  Netta stared at him. “I cut the wing,” she said finally. “It was sewn together.”

  He nodded slowly. “Gut and suture,” he murmured. “Design flaw, in the early variations... of course, for those first ones I was thinking more how to get them airborne....” He reached for her again, and this time she didn’t flinch, even when he took a folded cloth from her head. “Just a concussion,” he added, and wadded up the cloth; red smoke rose up from it, and her temple throbbed in remembered pain.

  Sorcerer, she thought. Vigil. But she did not say it. Beside her, Bron snuggled closer. “Traben’s Crossing?” she asked.

  “Half a mile south,” Vigil said, turning back to the fire and tossing the cloth in. The flames flashed white, then were ordinary again. “The crossing itself is destroyed, though. Like all the rest,” he added, gazing into the fire.

  He was silent a long moment, and Netta silently named the towns she knew had fallen to the firedrakes: Alcaris, Ompete, Bilisford....

  Vigil shook himself after a moment, turning away. “You were going to Ceste, weren’t you?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Bron’s family there.” He was her cousin, but this was the side of his family that didn’t have anything to do with her. Good, kind folk, Sieg had said. She hoped he was right, even as it galled her to hope for anything that had come out of Sieg’s mouth.

  “There’s a ford another two miles upstream. It’ll mean a trek back to the road, but it’ll get you to Ceste.” He picked up a stick and poked at the fire. “I’ll see you safe there.”

  Why do you care? she nearly asked, but heard his response to the drake: for much the same reason as you’d kill them. Even sorcerers had their whims. “Thanks,” she said, and pushed the cloak back to him.

  * * *

  The ford was navigable, but only just. On the far side, Vigil said a few more words under his breath, and their clothes steamed as they made their way over the scrubland. Bron clung to her side even more than before, and though he didn’t ask about the drakes—perhaps assuming, as she did, that with Vigil with them there was less danger. He did keep asking about Aunt Salda. The locked doors at Traben’s Crossing had scared him more than the drakes, she slowly realized. The little puppet-cat sometimes helped, at night by the fire, but only if she kept from mentioning the “other two cats” in Ceste.

  Vigil watched her manipulate the puppet, offering advice on technique after Bron slept. He even began to assemble something new, but that stopped after they found the burned husk of a farmhouse. Netta dug what food she could out of what remained of the cellar, but when she climbed back up Vigil was still in the ashes, staring at the slivers of white that were all that was left. Netta gazed at him a long moment, then took his hand and led him out. The half-finished, nameless puppet remained in the rubble.

  The walls of Ceste were in sight by the time they reached the road again, and from the look of the road the first of the Alcaris refugees had been through here already. She hoped they had; some of them, anyway. There hadn’t been enough dead at Traben’s Crossing to account for all of them, just the last stragglers and outcasts.

  That night she waited for Bron to fall asleep, then got to her feet and stood between Vigil and the fire. “Teach me,” she said.

  Vigil sat with his elbows propped on his knees and would have been gazing into the fire as he had for the last two nights if she hadn’t been standing there. He raised his head, the fire painting his many scars gold. “Teach you?”

  “The fire. The hammer. The—” she wiggled her fingers as if moving a puppet, “— making of those.” He didn’t respond. “The firedrakes.”

  Vigil let out a laugh that was more like the drakes’ coughs than any human noise. “You’ve seen what they do; you think I want to teach that?”

  “Yes,” she said simply, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re a maker. You wanted to know how I’d injured it, and you told me that wing was a design flaw. You care about your work. So you must want to share it.”

  Again, he shook his head, this time smiling. “You are quick. And you’d be good at it, if your facility with puppets is any indication. But the answer’s still no.”

  “Why not?” The girl’s a bad one, Sieg said in her memory. The boy’s all right, but her....

  “Because I made them,” he said slowly. “And that means I made all this.” He gestured back the way they’d come. “And—and I cared how I made them. The best puppets I’d ever breathed a spark into, a challenge beyond what any maker had ever created.”

  Her mother would have said one should always take pride in one’s work. Netta, though, kept silent.

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to destroy what I’d made, and I thought—I thought that cutting their strings, making them free to understand what Tasso wanted them for, would amend it.”

  “You set them free.”

  “And they decided they liked this better. Liked it.” His leg twitched, as if in memory of pain. “I won’t. I’m sorry.”

  She should be glad, she thought as she lay back down beside Bron. If killing Leir made her an outcast, then sorcery would be even worse. But Bron’s aunt would take them in, and in Ceste, no one knew who Leir had been, and no one would know that she’d asked a sorcerer to teach her.

  Still, she lay awake a long time, watching the fire.

  * * *

  Refugee shacks and lean-tos clogged the gates of Ceste, some from Alcaris, some from towns further downriver. It was there that Vigil stopped. “Go on to your family, then. They’ll have missed you.”

  Not my family, Netta wanted to say, but instead she glanced at the shacks and the tradesmen who’d ventured outside to sell to the refugees. “What about you?”

  He gestured to the shacks. “I’ll find a place and rest up before I move on.”

  Bron pulled on her hand. “Come on,” he whispered.

  The people of Ceste had heard
about Duke Tasso’s progress up the river, even if it hadn’t reached them yet. Half the men who passed wore patched-together armor and carried weapons from swords to pikes to sticks with knives tied to the end. But the arches of the city were unmarred by smoke, and dozens of signs in brightly painted wood proclaimed shop after shop: weaver, tinsmith, potter. Netta lingered a moment in front of a baker’s sign, but Bron pulled her on.

  He came to a stop outside a little brown house with a spindle painted on the door. A tabby cat stretched out in the window, ostentatiously incurious. “Here?” Netta asked.

  Bron nodded, but didn’t move. Netta sighed and dragged the door open. “Hello?”

  Bobbins of brightly colored thread nestled together on warm wood shelves, filling the little room with color. Another cat, this one patched in gray and white, jumped off a shelf, gave them a look, and yawned.

  “Not a good day for business, love.” A tall, rounded woman with frizzy brown hair stepped out from the back, brushing something from her hands, then stopped. “Bron?”

  “Aunt Salda!” Bron flung himself against the woman as she knelt.

  “Oh, Bron, we thought you were lost, we thought—” She hugged him closer, tears spilling over her pink cheeks. “You look half-starved! I heard how bad it was on the road, and I thought—we never dreamed—”

  Bron said something incomprehensible and burst into tears himself. Netta smiled, but the smile froze as another person emerged from the back: Sieg, his heavy wool coat replaced by a fur-collared jacket, the expression on his face the same as when he’d seen her standing over Leir’s body.

  Salda wiped her cheeks. “I’ve been trying for weeks to get any reliable word from Alcaris. We didn’t even hear that there were survivors until the city official turned up.” Here she nodded to Sieg, who returned it with a gracious smile. “I swear, Bron, if I’d known how bad it was for you—” She stopped, looking up to see Netta standing at the door. The tears slowed, and she rose to her feet, one hand protectively holding Bron next to her. “Are you—”

  “That’s the one,” Sieg murmured. “The one I warned you about.” He gave a theatrical sigh. “I suppose you could try to reform her, with my help.”

  Netta tugged her cloak over Leir’s knife, only drawing attention by her attempt to hide it. Bron was still smiling happily at her, but Aunt Salda wore an expression somewhere between forced friendliness and horror. Murderer, Netta thought, and felt again the cold bands on the door at Traben’s Crossing, the door that was shut and locked against the likes of her.

  She opened her mouth, but any sound she could have made was drowned by the clanging of a bell in the street, loud as any forge. Salda looked up, her face paling. “It can’t be—”

  “They burned Traben’s Crossing the night after I left,” Sieg said. “They could easily have made it here.” In the street, the patch-armored men were now running.

  Netta cast a quick glance out the window, then back at Salda and Bron. She unslung her bag and fished the puppet-cat out of it. “Bron,” she said. “Stay here. Stay safe.”

  He nodded proudly, holding out his hand to clasp hers. She closed his hand over the puppet instead, then slid out of Sieg’s belated grasp and ran.

  The gates hadn’t yet been closed, though the militia were doing their best, splintering boards and knocking down shacks as they pulled the gates shut. But the fight and fire seemed to be all outside the walls, carts and unfortunates on the road cowering or already aflame. Netta scrambled past the men struggling with the gates, slashing at the arm of one who tried to hold her back. She tumbled outside and darted behind a fallen wagon for cover.

  There were only two this time—but it had only taken five to destroy Alcaris. One crouched in front of the gates, while a second landed on the walls, hissing and smoldering. What few soldiers remained outside the walls retreated back through the gate, leaving the larger drake to menace those who hadn’t made it inside in time. It wasn’t the same one Netta had wounded; its wings were held together with iron staples, and the eyes in its head were stone rather than red glass. As she watched, it coughed a gout of flame at the walls, using the same word that Vigil had spoken to spark their campfire. Soldiers screamed, but instead of pressing the advantage, the drake sat back, churning the ground with its claws.

  “I said leave them!” Vigil advanced from behind the smoldering remnants of a cart, between her and the drake. The drake snorted derision and swayed its head back and forth. “They’ve done nothing to you!”

  The drake spat a smaller flame at another shack, then peered back at Vigil. He had unslung the huge hammer from his back, but he carried it as if forgotten, its head dragging in the mud. “Why are you doing this?” he asked, his voice barely audible. “Why do you care where I go?”

  Netta rose and edged out from behind the wagon. “Because you’re their family,” she called.

  The drake’s head snapped round, and Vigil stumbled as he turned to look at her. For a moment iron and flesh shared the same expression. “Netta, no,” Vigil said.

  “You are,” she insisted, taking another step closer. “You’re the closest thing they have. And family takes you back. Family cares for you, no matter what.”

  The drake was silent. Clouds of oily vapor rose from its joints, joining the smoke that wreathed them.

  Netta shifted her grip on her knife. “But they don’t always have to. Not if you’re a murderer. And you are!” she shouted, at the drake, at Vigil, at herself.

  The drake snarled, furious as a thwarted child. It drew back, jaws open, and fire blossomed in its mouth and spiraled toward her, too fast to evade. Netta stood up straight before it, taking one last gasp of furnace-hot air before it struck her.

  The fire collapsed in mid-air, drawn back into itself like a rose withering. Vigil closed his hand around the remnants of the fire, drawn to him as easily as he’d sparked their campfire. “You are quick,” he said, raising the hammer. “Damn me for being so slow to see.”

  He charged, striking not at the narrow line of the drake’s body but at the iron joints, drawing a startled shriek that the other drake echoed. Netta followed him, slashing at the wing as it tried to claw at them both. Her actions did nothing but distract it, but that was enough for Vigil to raise the hammer for a mighty blow.

  Steam billowed around them, hot enough to scald, and Netta cried out just as Vigil struck. He spun, catching Netta against himself to shield her from the blast, and the drake gave a last squealing cry.

  Iron and stone and stranger things rained down around them, and Netta risked a glance to see Vigil’s tear-streaked face next to hers. She staggered forward, dragging him with her, out of the collapsing drake, until the heap of leather and iron lay behind them. On the wall, the second drake rose keening and circled its fallen sibling before flying off.

  She took another step, peering back, and Vigil collapsed, first to his knees, then full-length on the burned ground.

  * * *

  The surviving refugees helped her carry Vigil to one of the remaining shacks and then left the two of them with the other injured. There were more important things for them to bother with, like how a firedrake could possibly have been defeated.

  Netta took a rag from her pocket and pressed it to the angry red weal where Vigil’s sorcery hadn’t shielded him—not a sorcerer’s clout, but a cold cloth nonetheless. Her own scalds were thinner, hurting no more than a day’s blisters. After a long while, long enough that the sun began to warm the far side of the shack, his brows drew together, and he opened his eyes. “Alive?”

  Netta nodded. “You are. The drake—” She pointed to the cluster of soldiers, so many of them she could no longer make out the crumpled mass they examined. One of them raised a broken iron joint, pointing excitedly to something she couldn’t see.

  He closed his eyes for a long moment. “An end to all makings, in time.” He sat up, cast a glance at the soldiers, then shook his head and took the cloth. “I’m going south,” he said, pressing the cloth
to his head and wincing. “To Duke Tasso, I think, if I make it there. I think.... I think the drakes will try to find me. And when they do, I’ll have to do that again—” He stopped, then ran his hands over his head. Singed hair crinkled and crinkled away, leaving his scars a harsher white against the burns.

  Netta got to her feet and held out both hands to him. The little lines at the corners of his eyes reappeared, and he let her pull him to his feet. “Maybe they’ll learn not to come back to you,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said. He gazed at the cloth a moment, then folded it and tucked it into his pack. “You’re welcome to go south with me. That is, if you—if your family won’t mind.”

  Netta glanced back at Ceste, with its bakeries and shops and two pretty cats. Stay here, stay safe. “Bron’s with his family,” she said. “I don’t have any family.”

  Vigil was silent a moment. “That’s not true,” he said slowly, as if amazed by it. She met his eyes, and he nodded. “Come on. You should learn calling and closing fire first, if you’re going to work with it. That should keep you busy till we get to the next town.”

  “Maybe,” Netta said. An end to all makings, she thought, but everything that ended had to have a beginning somewhere. Even family. “Maybe I’ll learn it sooner. Mother always said I was a quick study.”

  Copyright © 2013 Margaret Ronald

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  Margaret Ronald short fiction has appeared in such venues as Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and Clarkesworld Magazine. She is the author of “Dragon’s-Eyes” in BCS #9 and BCS Audio Fiction Podcast 007, and the series of stand-alone stories all set in the same steampunk world that began with “A Serpent in the Gears” in BCS #34 and includes “The Guilt Child” (BCS #52), “Recapitulation in Steam” (BCS #61), “Letters of Fire” (BCS #69), “Salvage” (BCS #77), “The Governess and the Lobster” (BCS #95), and “A Family for Drakes.” Soul Hunt, the third novel in her urban fantasy series and the sequel to Spiral Hunt and Wild Hunt, was released by Eos Books in 2011. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston. Visit her website at http://mronald.wordpress.com/.