Beneath Ceaseless Skies #217
Page 4
We’re sailing into a living nightmare of the dead, and she wants to bitch at me for not getting up in the middle of the night to look at a second-hand weather report for a job that I didn’t even want.
My fist clenches around the receiver. “That is at least a Category Eight.”
“Nine, actually. Waning to an Eight by ten bells.”
Her voice sounds clipped. Cold, and far away from itself. It’s difficult to tell if that’s the distortion on the radio, or if she simply doesn’t have two feelings left to rub together.
I look out of the window and watch the storm roll in until it’s all there is. Every time I see the geiststorms, it’s the same. The realization of those hundreds of millions of dead, stretching all the way back to the Harrowing. Into the war that birthed the Harrowing. Each of them dying in violence and pain. Each of them howling in the animal agony of that moment forever. I wonder if I will recognize any of them when they get close. Whether my mother and my sister are out there somewhere, screaming in the storm.
“Requiem,” says the receiver. “Wayward Star.”
It is not the first time she’s called. I squeeze my thumb onto the transmit button until my hand shakes.
Why can’t I stop staring?
“Wayward Star,” I say. “Requiem. Get me Émile.”
“Mister Laurence is not on-board,” she tells me. “He and a few of his guests were taken ill last night. The airfield physician grounded his whole party this morning.”
I spit out an angry laugh at that. “Does the devil get sick? Can a virus attack another virus?”
“Requiem. Wayward Star. Can you repeat?”
The storm is rolling in over the swirling sea. I let it wash everything inside me cold and clear and hard, until I no longer feel anything at all. Nothing but a faint weightlessness of anticipation, as though I’ve been cut adrift.
“You heard,” I say. If I turn now, we could make it back to the airfield before the storm hits. “How many do you have aboard?”
“One hundred and twelve,” she tells me. This woman with the clipped voice. This stupid fool who is about to risk everything on the say-so of Émile Laurence and can’t even be roused enough to care.
I place the receiver carefully back in its cradle and head out to check the rigging. I can hear it humming in the wind, low and soft as the strings of a plucked harp.
* * *
The geiststorms play tricks on you sometimes. For a while, it almost looks as though we’re going to miss the worst. The Wayward Star slides through the tops of the nimbostratus as though she’s skimming across an oiled sea. Silver-white in the sun and aimed towards the Gullet—a thin sliver of still air between the roiling ocean and the mountains.
In summer, the sailing is smooth and blissful in the hot still air, and thousands of people bask on the specially constructed sun decks or lean over the railings and thrill themselves with a distant glimpse of the storms—crackling with green fire in the night. Even then a good captain will always double her watch and bring a lantern ship along, just in case.
But in the autumn? In autumn the whole thing just goes to hell. The west wind blows in from the ocean and shoves the storms right up against the cliffs. If it’s a good year, the bulwark of soulfire lanterns that runs for two hundred miles along the coast is only breached two dozen times over the course of those three months. In a bad year, those two dozen times coincide with captains still stupid or desperate enough to try and make the Gullet. Those unlucky autumns stretch out into a forever of red-gold leaves, grey skies, and dead bodies falling from the heavens all along the headland.
Soon it is past ten bells. We’re within a dozen miles of the storm, and it looks as though it has started to recede. The Wayward Star tacks in close to the mountains and turns slightly into the wind—the safest course for a ship of her size—and I take Requiem out until we’re about a half a mile off of her port side. If the geiststorm looked at us with its many compound eyes, Requiem would be nothing more than the tiniest firefly, glowing green and amber against the vastness of her flank.
I tap my fingers against the wheel and turn into the wind to match her course. The air is clear enough that I can just about make out the green headache glow of each of the lanterns on the headland as we pass. All the same, every so often one of the geists will make it far enough inland to slither around the edges of the sickly light pouring off the lantern on Requiem’s prow. They turn putrid and plasmic as the light shreds their bodies into ether, and what little is left splashes like rainwater against the silver of the Wayward Star’s envelope. Blasted into nothing by the wind.
Great Inventor, I swear that I hear it when the Star deploys her new lanterns for the first time. I feel it as a low vibration in all the mineral parts of my body and look out of the starboard window just in time to see the six cold iron cages slide out of her. They ignite one at a time, turning the faceless ether of the ghostmurk into a haze of green light. It’s so bright that I have to turn my head. Raise my hand to shield my eyes. Can almost feel my own shadow burning into me. And then everything goes black. I try to open my eyes, convinced that she has blinded me. The darkness glimmers and swims. The first thing that makes any sense is the green glow of Requiem’s lantern. And the dark space where the Wayward Star should be.
Still is, I realize catching the faint reflection of our light on her hull.
But all six of her lanterns have gone out, and now the whole sky has darkened. I was right when I was standing on the airfield in front of Émile last night. We are all going to die out here for his folly.
Geists shred themselves around Requiem’s light, and their keening howls melt into the single high note that the gale makes in the ropes. I step out of the cabin door and brace against the wind. Pull down my hood down against the spume of ether that’s turning the deck to slippery silver. Like moonlight on snail’s trails. I almost lose my footing twice before I make it to the lantern and twist the key to turn the flame as high as it will go.
Through the cloud, I can still just about make out the Wayward Star alongside. Every single one of her lanterns is dark, with only the faintest ripple of green fire every now and then to show that they were ever lit.
There’s only one time when a lantern fizzles like that. The mantles have burned up on every single one of them. It should be impossible. There are laws demanding the strict testing of all the components of a soulfire lantern, especially the mantles.
That thought drops through me slowly. Like watching a stone sink down into black water. I feel the muscles of my jaw ratchet a little tighter.
How old is the Wayward Star now? Old enough that the payout from wrecking her might begin to look tempting. Especially if you are provided with the opportunity to put the whole country in a panic about the dangers of fitting passenger liners with their own lanterns. Then, not only do you have the means to scupper all of Hiron Justicae’s grand plans, but you also have the sudden influx of capital to finish building your own white elephant.
Is that truth? In all likelihood, I’ll never know. But that’s the funny thing about when the other boot finally comes down: truth doesn’t matter any more. The only truth you need is that your response now is the same. It’s the only thing left that you can do. You do what you can to survive.
For a moment, I am back at mast in the Boneyard. Émile’s fancy letter in my hand, and something as fine as fresh-spun cobwebs whispering down onto the deck. I have just enough time to realize that whatever is wrong with the Wayward Star is probably about to happen to us, then Requiem wallows hard to starboard and nearly throws me over the railing and into the black ocean of the sky. I barely manage to catch hold of the rigging, and I’m so blinded by the squall that I have to close my eyes to drag myself back aboard—trusting that primordial sense in my body to know up from down when my eyes cannot. A geist scream slices within an inch of my ear as I come back up to my feet.
They’re breaking through. The lantern... If we don’t—
The res
t of that thought is cut away. More of a feeling than a sound, like some part of me has crumpled in. I swipe the back of my hand across my forehead to clear some of the spume. Open my eyes just as the last of the Wayward Star’s envelope folds and crinkles up with flame—not the sickly green of geiststorm and soulfire but the deep umber-red of burning gas. And then debris is everywhere around. Falling embers like standing under the first full meteor shower of the year.
I can’t even really hear the storm. I can’t hear anything at all. The Wayward Star’s blackened skeleton folds in on itself as it falls, her bones already crawling with geists, swarming like grey insects. I scrabble and slither on Requiem’s leaning deck, reaching for the lantern on his prow as its light flares and then dissolves into green and crackling haze.
Then everything becomes a chaos of darkness and fire and falling debris. A geist screams somewhere overhead, loud enough that I feel as though I’ll never hear anything ever again. Something hits me from behind like a wall, like a boom coming around too fast on a sail-boat. Requiem’s scarred and slippery deck pitches sharply upwards towards me, and everything is obliterated.
* * *
In the first few seconds of waking, I’m standing numb against the gunnel as Christie finally goes overboard. I’m hanging like a frozen breath in time, watching her plummet like a stone toward the clouds with both of her arms held out to me. I think I was wrong before. She realized in that moment what I’d known all along: that salvation was impossible, or at least well beyond the likes of us. When she reached out to me then, I don’t think she was asking me to save her. I think that she was asking me to fall...
I am lying on the deck. Every joint and bone in my body are as weak as matchsticks. When I bring my hand to the back of my head, it comes back covered in blood. A spike of nausea lances outwards from my stomach and I bring myself up, retching, to sit against the gunnel. All I can see is a grey-white mist of ghostmurk, smothering everything apart from the faint creaking in the rigging. Like a comfortable old chair settling back into place.
It’s difficult to make out most of the damage through the fog. Bad enough that I don’t immediately recognize the wreck around me as my ship. The Great Inventor only knows how we are still in the air and not tumbling towards the rocks like a tangled parachute.
Old metal groans towards the prow. Something remote in the hollow space of my brain recognizes that sound. The same as the morning that Émile’s letter landed on the deck, when all the Boneyard was as quiet as the ghostmurk is right now. It is the sound a soulfire lantern makes when someone opens the casing. I stumble upwards. Feel my way along the gunnel one faltering step at a time. My footsteps sound too loud in the still fog. I almost flinch from them.
I can see the shadow on his prow. It’s just in front of the lantern, reaching hesitantly into the last splutters of green light. Even as a shadow in the mist, there is no mistaking a geist for a living human being. Some part of your brain just won’t do it—refuses to, even though all the pieces are in place.
And the lantern is almost out now. It has its hands deep in the workings...
“Hey!”
My voice is so loud that it rings. The geist pauses and for a moment nothing moves. Then she looks back at me, and something sticks hard in my lungs. My arm trembles on the gunnel, and Requiem’s rigging groans in sympathy.
When she goes back to the lantern, I don’t try to stop her. I don’t do anything at all. I just hang there in the deep stillness and watch her burn her hands on the fragments of green fire, turning up the wick as high as it will go...
“Wait!”
But the sound forces itself out of me too late. Even crippled and uncovered, the wick is long enough for the fire to flare into an agony of green light. It’s almost impossible to tell when my eyes manage to open again. Everything is swimming in a thick soup of stars and retina burn. Somewhere out in the ghostmurk, someone starts tolling a bell. The geist isn’t more than a shadow, standing in front of me and shredding into ether in the light, with both her hands held out to me.
I nod slowly, as though I understand, and reach out for her in turn. I can almost feel us both pitching over the rail. The dizziness of falling, until I realize that I’m not falling at all. That the geist has melted into nothing over me like hot wax and left me holding something as fragile as a breath in my hands. The whispery remains of a mantle.
Even in the swamp of fog I can tell that something’s wrong with it. That there was probably something wrong with it all along, just waiting for the fire to reveal it. I reach into my pocket with my free hand, fishing for something to contain the last charred fragments of proof, and laugh when I find the ball of Émile’s envelope wedged down at the bottom. I smooth it out carefully with the edge of my hand and tip the remains of the mantle carefully inside.
“Thank you very much, your lordship.”
Almost before the words are out of me, the lantern on the prow splinters and then shatters open, spraying out a long gout of green fire into the mist and stammering into nothing. I walk to the prow like I’m moving through a dream and turn the fuel tap all the way closed. The bell that’s tolling in the ghostmurk is closer now. Drawn in by the gout of green light. I see the lanterns first. Clean golden light spilling out of the gondola of a rescue ship.
“Hey!”
My throat feels as though it’s full of cotton wool, but the other ship is already tacking back around towards me, the sound of raised voices echoing in the mist.
“We’ll bring you aboard!” one of the men calls across the chasm of fog.
“No!” I shout back. Letting the cold damp air spill full into my face. Tightening my hand on Requiem’s split and ruined mast.
“Throw a tow rope across,” I tell the faceless man in the ghostmurk. I slip the envelope down carefully into my pocket before he is close enough to see. Rest my palm against the crumpled paper, as though I dare not let it go. “We’re not quite done here yet.”
Relics or not, there is still work to do.
Copyright © 2017 Cae Hawksmoor
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Cae Hawksmoor lives between genders and between worlds but also in North Wales surrounded by the mountains. They are a graduate of the Clarion West class of 2016 and are busy preparing for the collapse of industrial civilisation by wasting time on Facebook. You can find them there, as well through their website at www.cahawksmoor.com.
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COVER ART
“The Sacred Flames,” by Jinxu Du
Jinxu Du is a primarily self taught artist, now enrolled in school to pursue a career in concept art and design for entertainment media. See more work online at ishutani.deviantart.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
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