The warrior growls and shakes his head.
I ask him why he doesn’t want to rejoin his army. Won’t your comrades-in-arms be overjoyed at your safe return? He cuffs me, too busy rummaging through the boat to give me a proper beating. He finds bread and wolfs it down but tosses aside the purse of silver coins.
The prince examines a coin. He tells me that it bears an excellent portrait of him. In truth, it looks nothing like him.
The warrior finds a wineskin. He gulps down wine and sticks an oar upright in the ground. He says here you shall build me a new hut with the boat’s wooden planks. Start now.
I ask why live in a hut when you could live in a barracks on the other shore. Or perhaps a fine house. You may be a general.
He raises his fist, but I’m prudently out of range. We both suspect that if he ever returns, he’ll be executed for desertion.
The warrior pours wine down his throat. When it’s gone, he dances drunkenly around the oar before falling asleep.
The prince and I walk to the river. Now’s our chance, I say. We can take the boat and return to our homes.
He looks at me without comprehension.
Come, I say. Let’s leave this place and return to your realm.
He refuses. He says his subjects are not ready for his return.
I point at the pale body on the ground. Do you want to end up like him? The prince averts his gaze.
I lean my shoulder against the boat and push it towards the river. I’m no longer young. It’s difficult.
Don’t leave me, says the prince.
Again I urge him to come, but he shakes his head.
Once the boat is in the water, I return for the oar, but the prince is shaking the warrior awake. I take the oar and run back to the boat. The warrior bellows and chases me.
At the water’s edge, I turn to face him. He trips over the naked corpse and I swing the oar at him. He’s too drunk to dodge my clumsy blow, and it thumps into his head. He falls to the ground, eyes open and unseeing.
The act of murder feels strange and new. This unfamiliarity comforts me. Perhaps I’m not a criminal who fled across the river. Perhaps I’m a good man with a family on the other side.
The prince falls to his knees and sobs silently.
I tear a strip of cloth from the warrior’s blue robe and tie it over my nose and mouth. It might keep out the river’s vapors.
The prince says nothing as I climb into the boat. It feels natural to unfurl the sail. Perhaps I’m a fisherman.
The prince stands between the two dead bodies, watching. He rushes forward and for a moment I think he’ll join me. But instead he drinks from the river like an animal.
He won’t miss me.
I steer towards the opposite shore, holding my breath as long as I can. If I get up enough speed before I forget to steer, the boat may reach the other side. Whatever waits for me there, I want to see it before I die.
Halfway across the river, my lungs betray me and I gasp for air. Fortunately, the cloth on my face seems to work. I can still remember the starlings trembling in my hands. I can still remember the sound of the oar hitting the warrior’s head. The boat remains on course.
When I reach the other side, I clamber ashore and rip the cloth away from my face. I breathe deeply. Will my memories come flooding back?
Nothing happens.
I look behind me. The boat is slowly drifting downstream. On the far shore, the prince stares at me.
He does not wave.
Copyright © 2014 Oliver Buckram
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Oliver Buckram, Ph.D., writes fantasy and science fiction. He lives in the Boston area where, under an assumed name, he teaches social science to undergraduates. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, and Shimmer, among other places. He urges you to keep watching the skies.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
THE INKED MANY
by Adam Callaway
In Lacuna, there were always jobs for those desperate for a quick coin or a quick death, and no group of people were more desperate than the miners.
Chernyl dropped his rucksack and pounded on the door of the foreman’s office. The sound of snoring ceased, replaced with phlegmy curses and at least one chair being thrown over. The door opened and a pug of a man looked up at Chernyl.
“You the greenhorn?” the man asked.
“Yes sir,” Chernyl said. He stuck out his hand.
Foreman looked at it for a second before touching Chernyl’s hand and muttering, “Ah, yes, yes.” Chernyl was reminded of his last job at the sandwich stand, grabbing handfuls of corned beef to stick between two pieces of potato bread.
“So, er,” Foreman said, “when can you start I guess?”
Chernyl tried not to let the pity show up on his face. He glanced toward his rucksack and said, “Excuse me?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Foreman said, “you’re ready now. Come in. I’ll get your seal and next of kin.”
Chernyl followed Foreman into the office. It was little more than a tar-paper cube cluttered with coffee mugs, moldy bowls, and racy broadsheets. A greasy pillow sat on Foreman’s desk.
“Er, well, yes,” Foreman said, stuffing the pillow under his desk, “don’t sleep too great at home. The wife has those kicking feet....” He let the thought peter out.
Chernyl nodded, but his face must have betrayed him.
“Ever gas yourself out of a dream?” Foreman asked.
“Can’t say that I have.”
Foreman nodded. “You won’t understand then.”
Even though Foreman’s shack stood no more than a few dozen yards from the lampblack factory, silence dropped on the two of them like a coal mine cave-in. Chernyl was beginning to regret leaving the sandwich stand. Sure his only remuneration was boarding in the apartment above the deli, and sure he had to share the apartment with the shop owner’s crippled brother-in-law, but he also got all the cold beef he could eat, and sometimes the page girl from Francini’s stationarium would come over to play a few hands of Friend or Fiend.
But, no, he needed to make more coin if he ever wanted to leave the stinking mounds of Bugspit for a ghetto that wasn’t crawling with termites the size of toddlers.
“You said something about my seal?”
Foreman—or Mr. Decker according to the dented brass plaque on his desk—nodded, making both of his chins wobble. “Yes, thank you. Lost my train of thought. I need your seal on the work order.” Decker knocked over a stack of broadsheets depicting women in various states of undress. A crumpled ball of paper landed at Chernyl’s feet. He peeked inside and saw a well-muscled young man holding a bowler cap over his—
“I’ll take that back,” Decker said, displaying surprising speed, “don’t know how the wife’s reading material got mixed in with my own.”
Chernyl nodded.
“It’s not mine. I don’t like that sort of thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Perfectly healthy for a young man to explore his options.”
Chernyl nodded again.
Decker undid the top button his collar, and wisps of steam escaped into the musty shack. “In fact,” he said, “it’s probably more healthy to vary your, er, reading material. Keeps the stuff you like—the lady stuff with the clasps and the feathers and lace—more interesting.”
Chernyl wished he had a mirror. He always had trouble keeping his emotions off his face, but this was turning into a disaster. In fact, he would trade places with the lowest greenhorn working the hottest corner of the coal mine right now.... “The work order, Mr. Decker.”
Decker nodded again and seemed to pull the yellowed parchment from mid-air. “No need to read it. Just says we’ll pay you so much coin for so much coal, tonnage rate.”
Chernyl took the parchment and let his eyes travel upon the words. The pay rate was a bit more complicated than Decker had summarized. Rates changed based on the size and color of the coal
you picked. Bonuses were given for speed and purity. Dross lowered the rate significantly.
“Says here that I have to pay rental fees on an axe, a helmet, a dorm, and a cart.”
Decker looked taken aback. “Y... yes, that’s very true and very standard. I didn’t realize you could read.”
“We live in the City of Missing Letters. A few of them were bound to screw their way into my head.”
Chernyl read on, shaking his head, smirking, sighing, gasping. Decker feigned organizing his broadsheets but in reality just opened and crumpled the paper with his “wife’s reading material” on it, eyes never moving from the man on the page.
“Also says that I have to buy all my own meals at the company canteen, using company money.”
“Yes. Again, very true and very standard.”
Setting the contract down, Chernyl pinched his crooked nose. “So the company pays me in proprietary marks that I then have to exchange for real money at a piss-poor rate.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“And on top of that, nearly all of my money is taken away in penalties, rental, and boarding fees.”
“Yes.”
Chernyl made a sound deep in his throat. “Do you have a pen?”
The foreman visibly deflated, but instead of passing over a pen or a quill or a scribe or even a charcoal stick, he pushed a stump of blue wax toward Chernyl.
“A pen?” Chernyl repeated.
Decker sat up. “Oh, a pen. It’s just most guys who come in here—”
“Can’t write. Yeah, your first jab at them not being able to read made that clear as well.”
Ears turning read, Decker almost threw the inkwell at Chernyl. “There you go, smart ass. I don’t got any scribe.”
Chernyl dipped his small finger into the ink and signed his name in thick, looping letters. “S’alright. Don’t really need one.”‘
* * *
The Inked Man had watched hundreds of generations destroy and rebuild Lacuna. Fires scoured the streets, turning grout to dirty diamonds. Floods swept tons of garbage out to sea. Plagues turned the entire population into dusty paper. War criminals raided the Atheneum for those rare volumes that could reshape history with a few words.
The Inked Man had watched it all. Sometimes he got caught up in the conflagration, turning to ash or diseased wood, but he always came back. He would always come back, Fiend willing, and the Fiend was willing.
But now, as the desert pushed into bleached alleys and scoured boulevards of Lacuna, as sand snaked into abandoned homes through cracks in the sagging windows and bowed doors, as all life fled down the dry riverbeds for more habitable land, the Inked Man made up his mind.
“This won’t do,” he said, getting up from his paper throne behind the cathedral’s altar. The Inked Man’s mottled skin of paper, parchment, vellum, and flesh swished softly, staying supple even in the heat. This church had once held thousands of his disciples. Prayer masses and auto-da-fé had taken place under the tiled roof. Blood and ink traced patterns across the mosaic floor, emptying into runnels that would take it to Parchment Run. Freshwater squid gathered at the outlet pipe. Lowly was the man who stumbled drunkenly into their number.
Or so the Inked Man had once thought. Water hadn’t encircled Lacuna in half a millennium. Once the final tree within a hundred miles of Lacuna had met the enzymatic jaws of Queen Woodheart, the city was doomed.
The Inked Man was ageless. His deep black eyes held each one of his years. Even without muscle, the Inked Man was capable of turning coal into gems with just the pressure of his hand. Moving more simian than man, he brachiated up the naked sconces and leapt out of the hole in the ceiling, landing on sand. It had reached roof level already. Soon, Lacuna would be erased from the landscape, preserved in a silicate tomb beneath the dunes.
The Inked Man bit his thumb, teeth like the jagged edges of a hardcover. Red-black blood-ink welled up along the edge of the wound. He scrawled the word Fire on his forearm and ripped the ribbon of parchment off.
“Fire,” he said in the common tongue of the Five Cities before dropping the ribbon. The parchment fell toward the sand and smoldered. Smoke curled up from the incandescent letters, but the parchment didn’t catch. The Inked Man sighed, voice like pages flipping.
Walking across Lacuna—or above Lacuna’s buried rooftops—the Inked Man tried more words.
“Wings,” and origami feathers fell from his back.
“Glass,” and the sand under his feet took on a sheen.
“Breeze,” and the curling bits of parchment covering his body rustled.
The Inked Man caught a desert mouse and pressed a scrap of parchment into its mouth.
“Plague,” he said. The mouse bit his finger and jumped down. Its skin didn’t turn to parchment. Its hair didn’t fall out. Its body didn’t turn to dust.
“This will not do.” The Inked Man pointed himself in the direction of the Lampblack Mountains—now little more than a series of low dunes—and walked.
At one time Lacuna had knelt before his power. He had brought unparalleled prosperity and order to its streets. Sure, there were those that had to suffer to maintain the peace, but most of his disciples agreed that it had been necessary.
At one time Lacunans had contracted the plague on purpose, on the off chance that it would make them one with the Inked Man. They all died skinless and in agony, begging the Inked Man for forgiveness. Sometimes he crossed their foreheads with an inky thumb; sometimes not.
At one time Lacuna had orchestrated public penance ceremonies in his honor. Lexiconic saints and sinners alike would prostrate themselves on beds of broken ink wells, or paper-cut patterns into their skin, or recite prayer-spells for days on end, food and water a fond memory. Nostalgia was the only drug remaining that could get his ink-blood racing.
Coming up on the base of the dune, the Inked Man thought briefly of how long it would take him to dig through all the sand. He shook his head. Even for someone deathless, it was too much.
He unwound a long strip of parchment from his chest and laid it on the ground in a straight line. Methodically biting each finger, he began to scribble pictograms onto the skin-scroll. He had lived long enough to learn that not everything could be expressed in his native tongue. Over the centuries, he had learned dozens of languages—real and fake, futuristic and historic, ancient, extinct, imagined, fabricated—the Inked Man collected languages in the same way some used to collect rare coins.
When he was finished and had stood up, the Inked Man began uttering the guttural, discordant syllables of the language. As he completed each phrase, another pictogram incandesced. Sand began flowing away from the parchment in thin rivulets, but as he added more complexity to the tone poem streaming from his bullhorn mouth, the rivulets grew into creeks and streams and whole rivers. A depression formed in the sand, and the Inked Man watched as hundreds of invisible hands scooped more and more sand away until....
When the hot red sun was setting and the cool white sun was about to rise, the depression had become a valley leading to a bricked-up mine cart entrance. The Inked Man knew this entrance intimately. He knew how deep it led into the mountain and he knew where he needed to be.
The Inked Man wrote a word on his hand and pressed it to the bricks.
“Boom.”
* * *
Chernyl hung his rucksack on this cot and sat down. Sighing, he couldn’t help but regret his decision just a little bit. Even if he would make coin here—enough to save up and buy Trinia a wedding band—he was sacrificing his safety to get it. If only he hadn’t gotten fired from the stationary store a few months back, then he wouldn’t have had to find the sandwich stand job, and if the sandwich stand job hadn’t turned out to be a big bust, he wouldn’t be in the mine.
He shook his head. This was a useless line of thought. Anyway, if he hadn’t gotten fired when he did, he sure would have been by now. Those damn forma rolls were just too addictive. One puff, and all of Lacuna s
eemed to come to life in gaslamp glory.
“One puff and you got fired, jackass,” Chernyl said. He fell back onto the cot. It smelled of sweat and yeasty beer. A few feet above his head, the low ceiling was scrawled with graffiti both blasphemous and lewd, often at the same time. He smiled.
The billets were expansive canvas structures outside the mine entrance. There were half a dozen of them, holding hundreds of miners. The lack of trunks or belongings near the cots told Chernyl all he needed to know about the average lifespan of a miner.
However, there were touches of personality: a steamer trunk with “Jame” written in huge, calligraphic letters across the top; life-sized hand-painted pin-ups hung on the walls and ceilings near a few beds; family tintypes poked under thin blankets and flat pillows; one cot rested on a pedestal of tatty paperbacks.
“No one can read here my ass, Decker,” Chernyl said. He got up and pried one loose. It turned out to be an alchemical manual declaring the health benefits of termite enzymes.
The canvas flap opened and a dozen or so miners walked in. Regardless of what color they began the day, now they were a uniform matte black.
Chernyl stood up, but nobody noticed him. They parted around him like a stream around a stone and went to their own cots or to the line of washbasins at the far end of the billets.
A man lay down on the cot with all the books and closed his eyes, but only for a moment.
“Who in the hell took one of my books?” he said, jumping up.
Chernyl swallowed. The miner was short, thin, and very old. A soot-stained patchy beard covered most of his face that wasn’t covered by eyebrow. Cracked glasses perched at the end of his nose. He would be a comical figure if Chernyl didn’t see cords of muscle covering his bare arms.
“I—I did.”
The miner stomped over to Chernyl and, even though he only came up to Chernyl’s chin, slapped him across the face and took the book back. Chernyl saw a bright light for a moment before it was replaced by a bone-deep sting. “Who gave you the gall, son, to take another man’s property without rightly asking? Hmm?”
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