Beneath Ceaseless Skies #217

by Tony Pi

  Issue #217 • Jan. 19, 2017

  “Proteus Lost,” by Tony Pi

  “Requiem for the Unchained,” by Cae Hawksmoor

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  PROTEUS LOST

  by Tony Pi

  February 18, 1588

  Outside of Florence stood a Carthusian charterhouse on the crest of a forlorn hill, where a century ago I had hidden a hunted man and a stolen book.

  Now, I had need of both. Philip the Second of Spain continued to plot against our beloved majesty, Queen Elizabeth, and to cloak his schemes his assassins had crippled my web of spies abroad, murdering many by poison or the blade. To protect England, I needed reports from other sources and thus had promised the spymaster of Venice, who called himself Antlion, that I would return his Proteus Codex to him in exchange for information. And so I had ridden south with my apprentice Luca to the Certoza del Galluzzo, arriving at dusk.

  A lay brother muttered prayers to himself as he swept the front entrance. Ten years had passed since I last had seen him: Brother Giotto, my friend D’Afide’s kitchen assistant.

  Brother Giotto regarded us suspiciously as we dismounted, fear and worry clouding his face. I didn’t blame him; he wouldn’t recognize me in my current guise. Last visit I had taken the shape of a swarthy, stolid farmer, but now I appeared before him as a paler, younger man with an acrobat’s frame.

  “Brother Giotto, I’m Filippo, and this is Luca. We’ve come to see the charterhouse cook Davide, also called the basil thief.” I produced an amber with a fly trapped in its center: the price for seeing D’Afide, as we had decided long ago.

  Relief flashed across Giotto’s face. The amber, when presented alongside the code phrase basil thief, should identify me as someone D’Afide would trust implicitly. “My prayers have been answered!” He gripped my hand and lowered his voice. “Please, help him. He’s turning into a monster, and I don’t know how much longer I can hide him from the prior.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your friend’s become half-man, half-wolf!” Giotto crossed himself. “If he weren’t the kind and forthright man I know him to be, I’d have fled and left him to starve.

  “It happened two weeks ago, on the full moon. When he was struck by the change, he begged me to hide him in an empty cell. I’ve told the prior that he has been working outside the charterhouse, or that he’s only just missed him, but he’s growing more and more suspicious of my lies. When I bring Davide food on the sly, he bursts into bouts of anger and says little but words of prayer.”

  I clasped his shoulder. “We’ll do what we can. Take us to him.”

  As a thankful Giotto led us through the halls of the charterhouse, Luca whispered in my ear. “Master Flea, can D’Afide truly become half-wolf? I thought your magic only allowed human shapes?”

  “True, but the Proteus Codex hides the greatest shapeshifting tricks of the eldest and most cunning of my kind,” I said softly. “Think of the legend of Circe and how she changed men into animals. That power could be one of the secrets hidden in the book.”

  I had stolen the Proteus Codex from Antlion when he was living in Florence as Leonardo da Vinci, painting the Mona Lisa and completing the Codex, his great book on shapeshifting. It was a dangerous volume full of forbidden transformations and traps; I had learned what I dared from it. The Codex taught me the variations of the living body, tricks that could save my life. For example, by growing my heart in a different place than where an assassin might drive his blade, I might survive such a blow and live another day. Such unusual skills had served me well whilst I carried out missions as Queen Elizabeth’s shapeshifting spy.

  I had always intended to trade the Codex back to Antlion for a favor, and with a war against Spain looming, it seemed wise to repair my diplomatic relationship with him promptly. Admiral Álvaro de Bazán had passed away in Lisbon days ago, and the Seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia had been newly appointed to the command of the Spanish fleet. I would need the intelligence gathered by Antlion’s many spies on the Duke and the Spanish court to better advise Elizabeth.

  We slipped into the cloisters unnoticed. This Carthusian charterhouse was grander than those of the other, more austere orders, with a large square where archways lined the edges of the green and a small section of the cloisters where a white stone angel watched over the graves of former priors. Above the arcade peeked the rooftops of the individual cloister habitats. Along the sides were two-dozen doors, each opening into the cloisters. Giotto ushered us hurriedly towards one near the middle. “Don’t let the prior catch you.”

  “Thank you,” Luca said.

  Giotto hastened away.

  I knocked on the door. “D’Afide? It’s Flea. Open the door.”

  No answer.

  I had told D’Afide not to pry inside the Proteus Codex. Why had he, after all these years? It had taken me months to decipher half its secrets. Within the book were diagrams, secret codes that described stages of transformations and successively deeper and darker metamorphoses that went beyond the limits of what it meant to be human. But if you didn’t know which was a dangerous page and which wasn’t, you could easily misstep with the transformations and make a change to your own anatomy that could kill you.

  I had first met D’Afide, then a rotund lad, in France in 1388 during my travels across Europe, when he was apprenticing under the cook to the court, Taillevent. I discovered his potential for shapeshifting and tutored him in the art, even as he mastered his skills as a chef. He took the name D’Afide—which meant Aphid—when he joined the Elect but made the mistake of shaming Niccolò Machiavelli, who in revenge framed D’Afide for poisoning Antlion’s favorite apprentice. Given that Antlion never forgave lightly, D’Afide had turned to me for protection. I found him a safe haven in this charterhouse as a lay brother but in return had tasked him to keep the Proteus Codex safe.

  D’Afide had had to temper his love of good food in his new role as the cook for the monks. He had always been the gourmand, the snobbish chef, cook to emperors and kings, but it was basic fare at best at the monastery, and he had to stoop to cook for those who had no use for high cuisine. In the years that D’Afide had hidden here, however, he seemed more humble, saying that he now recognized taste in its most virtuous form. To hide his immortality he had let himself go fat before shedding his identity and taking a new one, faking the death of the old chef even as he crafted the guise of the new. He had taken the name Davide for this latest incarnation.

  Luca played with the ‘turn’, the little food alcove that spun on an axis behind a tiny hatch. I put a piece of amber into the opening and turned it. We Elect could permanently change our shapes but only if we could tap into the Lightning trapped inside amber. The jewel would let D’Afide know that it was me, and perhaps he would let me in.

  No response.

  “Could it be that he’s become a wolf already?” Luca said.

  Were we too late, and a hungry wolf waited inside that cloister to gorge on human flesh?

  From what I remembered, each cloister was two floors and a basement, and immediately beyond this door was a pantry and a main room with a fireplace. A small bedroom was part of the space on this floor, while there was a study upstairs. No windows opened on this side facing the central courtyard, but there were some facing the outside, so that the monks could see the landscape. Each cell had a small garden where the monks could grow their own food. We could gain entrance into the apartment there. “We’ll climb into his cell.”

  Luca gave me a boost onto the arcade roof, then I helped him up. His feet had just cleared the archway when another lay brot
her entered the courtyard. Had he seen us?

  No time to worry. Luca and I dashed across the rooftop and onto the other side. Together we dropped down into the garden, carefully approached the doorway, and entered.

  The room stank from excrement, sweat, and whatever else. And there, in the dim light we saw D’Afide—or rather, what he had become.

  Half-bear? Half-wolf? He had grown hairier than anyone I had ever seen, and his frock was torn from his great size. But he didn’t seem to see me; rather, he sniffed the air and turned towards us, but backed away like an animal sensing danger.

  My friend was losing his humanity before my very eyes.

  And there, on the table further in, was the Proteus Codex. I prayed that it was intact, or else I would lose my chance to placate Antlion and buy the intelligence I needed on the Spanish plot.

  “D’Afide. It’s Flea.”

  He either didn’t hear me or was ignoring me. I raised my voice and said his name again. He bared his teeth, his canines longer and sharper than I’d ever seen in a human being.

  “I think he’s deaf and blind,” Luca said.

  I stepped closer. Indeed, D’Afide’s opaque, milky eyes stared but saw nothing. “Oh, D’Afide, why did you look?”

  “Like Orpheus, everyone always looks,” said Luca. “But Master Flea, why doesn’t he just restore his eyes with magic?”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that, Luca,” I said. “Some changes need to be incremental, slight changes from a similar shape. Change too fast through the wrong sequence and your heart could stop, for example.”

  The wolf-man growled and advanced on us. I pushed Luca behind me and reached into my pocket for a silk handkerchief. Like amber, silk contained Lightning as well, but its power was more ephemeral, and its shapes held quite frailly and could be unraveled.

  Though D’Afide had never been a fighter and his crippled senses made it hard for him to see me clearly, his transformation had given him great feral instincts. I barely dodged his claws. I swept my leg under him and tripped him, then clasped his hand with the kerchief silk between our palms.

  “Read me, D’Afide!” I was counting on him to feel me. The shapes of those who had touched the silk last became entangled therein. With both of us touching the silk, I wanted him to sense who I was, just as I could feel his inhuman shape.

  D’Afide bit at me but I managed to hold him back. Luca drew a stiletto from his boot.

  “Don’t hurt him, Luca!” I said. “D’Afide, I will bring you back out of the maze of shapes, I promise.”

  D’Afide stopped fighting me, perhaps sensing my intent through the silk. Cautiously, I led him to the table where the Codex was. Fragments of a crushed piece of amber lay on the table. Luca lit a candle so that we could better see the book.

  There was a test at the handle of the locked door, then knocking. That lay brother must have seen us earlier and was checking on us. “Don’t answer that,” I said to Luca.

  “How will this work, Master Flea?” he asked.

  “You know how obsessed Antlion is with his mazes.” Antlion had in fact been Daedalus far back in the past, the maker of the original Labyrinth. “You must do certain changes in the right order. Get it wrong, and you might be thrust into a series of them from which you cannot escape. Take D’Afide’s blindness, for example. It has robbed him of a way to read the rest of the Codex.”

  Now that I had a better look at him, D’Afide seemed more human than I first thought. It was the coarse brown hair growing everywhere on his body, even his eyelids, that gave him the semblance of a beast.

  I thought back to my own brush with catastrophe when I experimented with the Codex all those centuries ago. I had accidentally stumbled into a transformation that made my breathing depend on thought alone. If I had lost consciousness, I’d have stopped breathing and suffocated to death. Luckily I had reversed that, but the outcome could have been deadly. “You rescue someone from a maze by following him down to where he strayed, calling to him and leading him to the safe way out, and hoping not to fall into the same trap while you are there. If I can navigate the same paths that he’s gone down, I should be able to help him back.”

  I moved the Proteus Codex into the light. It had a hidebound cover made from sealskin, protecting over a hundred pages within. Proteus of legend had been a herdsman among the sea-beasts, dwelling with a colony of seals. Burned into the cover were images of beasts and insects: pig, wolf, bear; seal, lion, leopard; antlion, cicada, bee. I flipped it open to a random page and saw the mirror-image cursive handwriting that was unmistakably Leonardo da Vinci’s, interspersed with anatomical sketches, formulae, and the Three Hares symbol on every page. “A lot of what I learned from the book comes from understanding the diagrams and his mirror-writing notes.” I showed Luca some of the anatomical drawings throughout the text.

  Luca pointed to the Three Hares. “What are these?”

  I flipped to the first page and showed him the largest of the Three Hares diagrams.

  “The Three Hares is a symbol as ancient as shapeshifters themselves. Three rabbits with only three visible ears, chasing each other in a circle.”

  “But it gives the illusion that each rabbit has two ears,” Luca noted.

  I nodded. “The illusion makes you change your perspective, every time, and is the secret key to the higher shapeshifts. For the most complicated changes to body and mind, it’s impossible to learn exactly how to do them consciously. Instead, you must yield yourself to the complex involuntary shapeshifts that Antlion cunningly planted in the Codex.” I traced the Celtic knotwork that enwreathed the hares. “See these? The tracery hides instructions for shapeshifting. By drawing in Lightning as you focus on the Three Hares, the knotwork will force you into a predetermined shape. There are more than just the circle-shaped Celtic knot like this one, on other pages. Triskeles, triple knots, nested loops, labyrinths, and other briar-like patterns that these rabbits nimble-foot through. I call them ‘protean seals’.”

  “What of the words in the spaces between the rabbits?” Luca was referring to four words in the diagram: one in the center between all of the ears, and the other three seemed like dust before the gaze of each hare.

  “Antlion’s mirror-writing. He was Leonardo da Vinci when he wrote this book, and favored writing that way because he was left-handed. It made less of a smudge and also serves as a deterrent to others who cannot easily read the words in reverse. They are needed for navigating the many paths through the Codex. The first protean seal is like the entrance to the maze. Triggering it will change my perception. For some rare people, words on a page can glow with different colors from the uncanny sight, depending on the letters, and that is the power of the first seal.”

  Luca was a quick study. “So the three words along the side have different colors, which match the word in the middle of a later seal somewhere else in the book?”

  “Right. I tried out one of the paths a century ago, and fell into a dangerous change that would have killed me.” I told him about the loss of autonomic breathing. “I had only ventured four seals deep, learned a few transformations that I had never thought of before nor been able to replicate since. You can trigger a protean seal to do or undo a change, but then a metamorphosis like the one or ones that D’Afide stumbled across might force you into a series of changes that prevent you from using the same seal to undo the cursed shape.”

  “Then I could lose you to the same danger,” Luca said.

  “Not if I’m careful. I just need to find the blind-deaf wolf sequence without straying so far that I begin to lose my sight. Once there, I can let him read my shape through the silk, and pull him back gently.”

  Luca sighed. “We don’t need two wolves, Master Flea.”

  “Nor do I wish it, Luca. But if things go wrong, I might not be able to stop myself from hurting you. Save yourself at any cost, even if you have to harm me. Understand?”

  “Clear.” But I knew Luca would hesitate to kill me. A noble sentim
ent but likely fatal if he did; a monstrous change, especially that one that made me lose control, might make me snap his neck in a berserk rage.

  I put a piece of amber in my fist and another on the table. I would need the power of the first to change my shape, and once I was ready to bring D’Afide back I’d have him tap the power of the spare. I had hoped D’Afide could guide me through the path of shapes himself, but it looked like I’d have to guess how he navigated them.

  I concentrated on the first protean seal. Looking at the Three Hares, I let my mind drift, opening to its weaves and whirls. I didn’t change perceptibly, but something inside me did shift, giving me the uncanny sight that rendered written words in color.

  The four words took on new hues. The shade of unripened green grape for the Italian word for sea, in the middle of the seal. Then, the three others in the second circle—heart was slate gray, music was the color of the harvest moon, and snake was the hue of blood from a fresh cut. One had to be very careful in judging the exact shade of the words. Close enough was not enough. The first time I had tried the seals, it had been the path of the word heart that I followed and found to be safe, as far as I was willing to go. Snake had been the false start, the dreaded breathing problem that I had discovered and undone before it became deadly. Surely D’Afide had not followed snake. But had he followed the same transformations as I had down the pathway of heart, or had he taken the path of music?

  That had been the reason I hadn’t pushed my exploration of the protean seals. Without a key that guaranteed a safe passage into the deepest mysteries of transformation known to our kind, there was only so much that I dared explore. Four-deep had been my limit, but I feared that D’Afide strayed further than that, possibly in a direction that I hadn’t tried.

  Following the path of heart, as I remembered, led me to a page where the word at the center of the Three Hares was fear, shining the same color as the word heart. Without the word-color vision, it would have been impossible to find the next safe transformation. As I recalled, the change was one that allowed a shapeshifter to completely reverse the placement of his internal organs, as in a mirror. One could achieve the same effect by slowly changing the position of each organ, but what the protean seal allowed was a simultaneous, almost instantaneous change.