“Stymphalian!” the archivist whispered to Pheth. “With beaks of bronze and feathers of chrome. Quite rare. The queen will be pleased!”
The warlocks plucked the birds from a sky as green as wheat grass, and Pheth wondered what other marvels cavorted through those emerald skies? He longed to enter this new world, to explore its swampy mysteries. He moved toward the portal, but the archivist waved an admonishing finger.
The birds flew around the chamber, agitated, confused. They flung metal feathers at the party. One impinged a warlock, and he fell, screaming. But the warlocks eventually teleported all the birds down to the basement coop. The portal closed, the chamber fell silent, and Pheth hung his head. He knew he would never again glimpse that emerald world.
“So,” the archivist said, and the warlocks, even the wounded one, leaned in to hear. “We have a little wager. How’re you going to cook ‘em?”
* * *
Expertly, it seemed. Over the next few days, the queen was delighted with his avian delicacies. Gryphon kabobs powdered in honeybee pollen. Stymphalian hearts wrapped in penguin bacon. Raven tortellini in a tomato-base, with green peppers, eggplant, and vulture eggs. The queen wrote sonnets about his phoenix paté and read them before adoring crowds. And while she savored, Pheth slaughtered.
From Laal the warlocks portaled in a family of woodcocks, and it wasn’t until the basement’s basalt columns had been split to pieces that Pheth discovered stone-eating shamir worms infesting their feathers.
“Boil the woodcocks alive!” Akton demanded.
What could he do? The dead worms floated atop the water, smaller than mustard seeds, and he pitied the birds and worms alike.
From Gehenna they portaled in miniature sparrows that sung a song so sweetly melancholy that half the kitchen wept and hugged each other, until Akton, with dry eyes, shouted, “Get down there, Pheth, and lop off all their heads!”
What choice did he have? He silenced their song.
They portaled in a ziz, which even immature still stood twenty stories tall. He needed the help of fifty soldiers from the Legion to fell it and another ten strong demons to haul its purple liver to the oven.
They snickered at its size as he mourned its death.
From Dayan they brought in fire-winged phoenixes and giggling gryphons, both as mischievous as imps. One phoenix slipped its cage and burned several palace chambers before Kokabiel trapped it and drowned it in the lake. He threw himself a parade (it was well-attended), but Pheth didn’t see the joy in snuffling out a life like a candle.
Of all the birds on Mashit’s menu, most came from Earth. Pheth longed for the brief glimpses he caught of Earth’s skies. And to his surprise, its sky was not merely blue but apricot and crimson and jade. The warlocks portaled in penguins and peregrine falcons. Cardinals and canaries. Finches and flycatchers. Hawks and hummingbirds. And Pheth cooked them all.
He cut sinew and viscera by the hundred-fold, quenched the phoenix’s dancing flames and stilled the laughter of the gryphons. He stopped the hummingbirds’ racing hearts and forced the falcon’s last cry. On some days there were so many feathers underfoot he couldn’t see the kitchen floor.
His hands shook, he needed a cup of hemlock wine to sleep each night, and his dreams were wild with blood and feather.
But Pheth had a secret, one he dared not share with a soul. Each day, after the warlocks dropped their catch in the basement coop and he ventured down to slaughter them, the strangest thing happened. The birds would bow their necks for him to break. And always, after, a fledgling waddled into the light.
“Why?” he asked a wake of bowing vultures. “Why do you do this? Do you think I’m your god, that this is heaven?”
And their answer was always a bowed neck.
For weeks he killed and cooked, and Mashit ate. And in the evening, after the staff had left and Akton lay unconscious from too much toadstool wine, he snuck the baby birds home.
* * *
His cottage proved too small for all his new guests. Dung covered the floor, the mattress was in tatters, and the birds bickered, barked and squawked so loudly that he feared the palace would hear their cries. The mourning dove loathed the gryphon and screeched whenever it was close. The smoldering phoenix scalded the ziz whenever it snuggled up to it. The raven refused to eat grain, and the stymphalian kept trying to swallow the hummingbird.
“I am thrice dumb for this,” Pheth admitted. “But if the idiot archivist can open portals to other universes, surely I can raise a few birds!”
One morning before first light, after having been up all night because of the cawing woodcock, he slinked into the palace through the servants’ tunnels. He knew the way to the library now (the archivist had indeed been toying with him). He told the librarian, “I must research bird preparation for the queen. Lead me to your books on birds.”
The librarian, who had been Ashmedai’s foot scrubber before his new role, was eager to oblige and did not seem to suspect a thing.
That morning, and the mornings that followed, Pheth absorbed volumes under the flickering orange light of a lantern. The phoenix, he read, needed to eat hot coals six times a day. The ziz preferred leviathan meat. And the stymphalian ate human flesh. But most of the birds ate various mixtures of grain, which was plentiful enough in the kitchen, though it took some patience and skill to sneak the food home each night.
In one of the musty volumes he found a drawing of many birds living happily inside a large glass enclosure.
“This is what I need!” he said, sneezing from dust.
There were still shamir larvae in the woodcock’s plumage; they had done horrors to his stone walls. But he captured one, and using trails of powdered granite and quartz powder, he guided it along the mountainside, freeing blocks of stone. These became his bricks. He placed four lodestones in the sand and uttered seven misshapen words, calling forth a bolt of lightning. The molten sheets of cooling sand became his glass. He gathered plants that grew on the cliffs, and these became his landscape.
The bricks were unevenly cut, the glass was bent and cloudy, the plants kept sneaking out the door, and yet he smiled.
“I’ve done it,” he said. “I’ve built us an aviary.” The gosling, who had begun his first molt, seemed to nod in approval.
But then the ziz shrieked and shattered the glass. And the phoenix set fire to the sneezing ferns. And some shamirs must have escaped, because half the bricks had split to pieces.
Pheth took a deep breath and said, “I swear by the twin suns I’ll make this work.” He stepped outside and placed four lodestones in the sand and said, “This time, we will make the glass thicker.”
* * *
One dark morning, as acid rains poured down from bleak skies, he was poring over books in the library when he discovered something buried in an ancient text.
“Using these nine forbidden words,” he read, “one may transform oneself into a winged creature and take to the sky.”
Overjoyed, Pheth said, “Can I truly become a bird? Can I fly away from this accursed place?”
The book was old and full of dust, and he sneezed.
Akton emerged from behind the stacks. She reeked of wine and rotten things. “So this is where you hide.”
“Mistress!” Pheth said, standing. He slammed the book closed and sneezed again.
“You are a slau—slaughterer and a cook of birds,” she slurred. “Why research how to raise them?”
“So... so that I might prepare them better.”
“Lies,” she said. “You’re up to n—no good, and I’m going to inform the queen.”
Pheth imagined all of his baby birds plucked of their feathers, basted in butter, roasting on spits.
“You’re done, Pheth,” she said and turned to leave.
“No!” he screamed and pushed her.
He didn’t shove her hard, but Akton was drunk and she stumbled into a shelf. A thousand leather- and cloth-bound books fell onto her head, burying her under a great dus
ty pile. He heard the approaching footsteps of the librarian.
Panicked, he ran. He sped through fifty oversized halls, down a hundred twisting corridors, to the only place in the palace where he’d ever felt safe. The basement coop.
“I am ashes!” he muttered as the basement’s candles hissed and spat at him from the walls.
He ran past weeping dryads and rainbow sprites, past dybbuks rattling inside jars and golems considering their heavy chains. He sped past unicorns scratching graffiti into the walls with their horns and harpies tut-tutting and singing evil poems.
All of these creatures would be eaten or tortured or kept in these pens until the stars burned out. “What madness!” he said. “And I am complicit in these horrors!”
He reached the coop at the end of the corridor. It smelled of recent magic. Today’s catch was already here. He stopped and gasped when he saw them.
Their breasts were as blue as Earth’s tropical seas. Black and white zebra stripes painted their eyes. Their beaks were short, sharp, yellow. Crowning their heads, small blue feathers poked up like arrows from an archer’s target. Its body was golden, thick as a goose.
One approached him, and with a little jig it spread its tail of feathers into a gargantuan fan. On the tip of each plume, blue and bright, was a large unblinking eye.
A thousand eyes stared at him, angry, accusing. These were the eyes of the all-seeing Accuser at the heart of creation. The Accuser had witnessed every murderous act, and now, in this utterly magnificent form, he had come to mete judgment.
Pheth fell to his knees. “I’m sorry!” he wept. “I’m so sorry!”
A chick emerged from the huddle of birds. The adults pushed it towards him, a small brown, delicate creature lacking their parents’ brilliance. And like those before, they bowed their necks for him to break.
“Stop!” he said. “Fools! I am no god. I am no savior. This is Sheol, and I am your executioner!”
From upstairs came the sounds of shuffling and a confusion of demon voices. “Who? Pheth? He just flew into the basement!”
Leather boots plodded and demon hooves clopped at the top of the stairwell as he opened the gate and grabbed the chick. “To raise one, only to slaughter the rest? No more,” he said. “No more.”
He tucked the chick into his pocket and used his keys to free the golems from their chains. The clumsy beasts slammed against the walls, cracking stone. The floor shuddered, and dust fell from the ceiling.
Pheth shattered the dybbuks’ jars. The spirits giggled madly as they darted away. He smashed wooden trunks, freeing thousands of dryads, and they filled the air like glowflies. He set harpies free, and they cackled and walked up the walls. The demons from upstairs entered the corridor and froze at the sight of all the freed creatures.
The unicorns stampeded, skewering three demons. The rest screamed and ran. Pheth climbed over their bodies and sped upstairs, trailing four frightened demons. He raced through the kitchen, past the stunned-looking Alath, Mardero, and Buldumech, and out into the night.
Acid rains poured from dismal skies, burning his skin. An acrid fog choked the air, making him cough. The bird cheeped in his pocket as he ran all the way home.
When he entered his aviary, the birds were cawing in a cacophony, as if they knew their day of reckoning had arrived. He put the chick down on the sandy floor as the rain pounded on the glass roof.
The gosling—now a plump and gray-feathered goose—waddled up to him.
“How quickly you’ve grown,” he said. “But it’s all been for naught. Our time is short. Our judgment approaches.”
The goose pecked at the ground of the aviary, drawing an arc in the sand. The shape reminded Pheth of the sigils and zodiacs the warlocks had drawn.
“Of course!” he said. “I have watched the warlocks open a portal a thousand times. And who were they before the queen’s shuffle but idiot stablehands? There’s no reason why I can’t open one too. Even to Earth!”
The goose seemed to nod.
“I can save us!” Pheth said. “I will take us all to Earth!”
He stepped out into the burning rain. He drew obscene angles in the sand and intoned harsh syllables, sticking his fingers up and down, as he’d seen the warlocks do, and then left at just the right moment. As he worked the spell, the rain paused, as if curious, and the clouds parted to reveal crimson skies.
A vortex formed above the waters, growing. It was working!
Something soft rubbed his ankle. The goose had come to watch. He had left the aviary door open, and all the birds were pouring out. Finch and gryphon, woodcock and ziz, phoenix and dove, they all surrounded him. In the center of the vortex glimmered a sliver of blue sky.
His heart ached at the sight of Earth.
The birds squealed, squawked and chirped. And suddenly, as if they had been there for Eternity, Mashit, Kokabiel, Akton, and the Queen’s Legion stood beside his house. Akton scowled and held a bloody rag to her scalp.
Kokabiel waved his hoof, and the sliver of Earth’s sky tumbled away like a feather in the wind.
“Look!” Kokabiel said. “Birdface has birds of his own!”
Mashit stepped forward, and in the sun her gold adornments seemed to writhe and burn. “Look at these creatures, Koko!” she said. “What a wonder!” The flock of birds parted as she stepped into Pheth’s aviary. She vanished inside, and when she emerged minutes later, she said, “What a stupendous idea! Koko, you troll, why didn’t you build something like this for me?”
Kokabiel harrumphed.
“Your Highness,” Akton said, holding her bloody rag so all could see. “This aviary was not meant for you. Pheth snuck into the library. He stole the birds from the palace. And how did he feed them? By stealing from my kitchen!”
Kokabiel coughed, and she added, “I mean, Your Highness’s kitchen.”
“He must be punished!” Kokabiel added sheepishly.
Mashit turned to Pheth and sighed deeply. “I will miss your avian delights, Pheth, but sparing you would set a foul example. I will feed your mind to Barsafael, where you will suffer his madness for all Eternity. Koko, collect these birds and bring them to the palace. I have a perfect place in mind for them.”
As the soldiers came for Pheth, he remembered the nine forbidden words he had read in that book, the ones that could turn him into a bird.
He turned to the goose and said, “Forgive me, little one.” Then he spoke the nine words. Except he was nervous and said only eight, and one of the words he had certainly mispronounced. The world about him warped and shifted, and suddenly everyone was very large, and he was very small.
“Look,” Kokabiel said, and his voice shook the world. “The idiot has turned himself into a dragonfly!” He raised his forehoof. “Let me turn him back before he flits away!”
“Wait!” Mashit said. “Better yet, fix him that way. Let him live out his days as a fleeting insect. It’s a fitting punishment, I think.”
Kokabiel waved his hoof, and Pheth felt the world shift again, but this time his thoughts shrank too, so that soon all he wanted to do was find a nice rock to sun on, and maybe have a little something to eat every now and then.
* * *
The dragonfly flits from rock to lake, buzzing across the warm afternoon. How huge and bulbous that mountain is, how glorious its ledges upon which to sun.
The dragonfly soars around the mountain ten, twenty times, until he finds the familiar ledge, then lands.
Below, in an enormous valley of straight transparent cliffs that catch and hold the sun, colorful flying creatures, much larger than him, frolic on trees, wade in clear pools, and weave through the air. They eat when they are hungry, sleep when tired, and no predators haunt their skies. How graceful they fly; how vibrant their colors. They call to mind ancient memories that flicker like suns on a puddle before they vanish.
Through an opening in the clear cliffside, a huge creature emerges and flies up to the dragonfly. Its black beak, long sleek neck, and plump gra
y body make the dragonfly flutter his wings with excitement.
They soar together, diving over rock and ledge, climbing so high it becomes hard to breathe. And the dragonfly thinks, How many days have I been flitting about with my friend? The twin suns have come and gone many times, and I tire.
His wingbeats slow, stop. Above him, his friend’s silhouette flaps against the sky. She gently takes his wings in her beak and carries him far over black waters toward a distant shore.
They land on a crimson beach, where yellow clumps infest a rectangular pile of stones. She sets him on the sand and pecks away at the clumps. Creatures walk out of the water to eat them. When a creature comes for him, she frightens them all away with a honk. Her actions seem familiar, comforting. With her wing she pries open the heavy stone and carries him inside.
The interior is dark. It smells of familiar things, and he longs for something he can’t quite remember. She places him in a basin lined with soft moss, then sits across from him in the shadows. But she’s too far away. He wants to be near. So he climbs out of the basin and moves toward her. And it is here, in the warm nook of her wing, with the sound of the lake lapping at the door, that he feels safe at last to close his eyes.
Copyright © 2013 Matthew Kressel
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Matthew Kressel’s fiction has or will appear in Clarkesworld, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, Apex, as well as previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the anthologies Naked City, The People of the Book, After, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and other markets. He edits the speculative fiction and poetry magazine Sybil’s Garage, and alongside Ellen Datlow he runs the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series in New York. His website is www.matthewkressel.net.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
NOT THE WORST OF SINS
by Alan Baxter
Staring up at the stars, I hear the footsteps with plenty time to spare. Two sets, trying to sneak around behind, in the dark beyond the glow of my dying fire. Graham Masters shimmers into view and opens his mouth to warn me, but I just nod and slip my pistol from its holster. So many times, desperate people will try their luck on a hapless traveler. It ain’t the first time for me. Won’t be the last.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #133 Page 2