Beneath Ceaseless Skies #150

by Richard Parks

  Chernyl, embarrassed and angry, looked down at the man. “And since when is knowledge property?”

  The bookman looked like he was going to slap Chernyl again. Instead, he leaned in real close and, squinting his eyes, whispered, “I like you, son.”

  Chernyl couldn’t tell if his face was hot because of the slap, or if he was blushing. “Judgment’s still out on you.”

  The bookman laughed. “I’d call you a smart-ass if I weren’t so wise.” He grabbed Chernyl by the hand. “Name’s Pater, by way of asking, though everyone calls me ‘Spec,’ so you might as too.”

  He shook Spec’s hand. “Chernyl.”

  “Chernyl? Funny name, that. We’ll have to get you a new one.” Spec dragged Chernyl by the hand over to where another man sat on his cot sketching what looked like mutilated hands. “Hey Ganch, this kid says his name is Chernyl. What you make of that?”

  “That won’t do,” Ganch said, not looking up from his sketch. The mutilated hands were moving toward a church or something.

  “He needs a new one, eh?”

  “He needs a new one.”

  Chernyl did not like the direction this conversation was going. He tried to clear his throat, but Spec’s grip tightened.

  “Well ‘en?” Spec asked.

  Ganch looked up at Chernyl. “Inky Britches,” he said and went back to his sketch.

  “Perfect,” Spec agreed. “On account of that big ol’ mole you got growing out of your cheek, boy, and on account that your privates are prolly swaddled in cloth.”

  Chernyl jerked his hand free. “Ain’t no way I’m answering to Inky Britches.”

  Spec waved it away. “It’ll only be for a day or two until everyone gets tired and shortens your name to Inky.”

  Inky’s mouth opened and closed like a fly trap, but no sound came out. Another man walked past and slapped Inky on the back.

  “Good to meet ya Britches.” He continued on to his cot. Only later did Britches realize that the man had been naked.

  Spec put a hand on Britches’ shoulder. “Though, I suppose they could shorten it to that too.”

  * * *

  Dust rolled down the tunnels. It was good to see that some of the languages hadn’t lost their power. Whereas even to the Inked Man it sounded like he had said “Boom,” it wasn’t actually what he’d whispered. The language he had used pre-dated his birth language by almost ten thousand years.

  The Inked Man possessed senses far more powerful than sight, but he still waited until the dust cleared to venture into the mines. Closing his eyes, he bit his thumb again and scrawled Unsight on his forehead. When he opened his eyes again, darkness had become... not light, but no longer was it dark. He could see the many branching passages, the thousands of little caves, caverns, and niches, and what was within each alcove. He could see it all at once, but, again, he couldn’t see it at all. It was the perfect knowledge of the mine-labyrinth and everything contained within encoded into that single word: Unsight. The Inked Man felt it to be one of his greatest achievements, this word. He felt it to be an even greater achievement than carving the labyrinth out of the abandoned mines with hands and spells and paper-golems; an even greater achievement than what he had filled the labyrinth with.

  He took a step inside, and the sand fell behind him, although not a single grain entered his domain. For hundreds of years, Lacunans thought the church to be his seat of power, but this place of darkness and musk, cobwebs and corridors was the true heart of his empire, filled with his favorite subjects.

  The Inked Man tilted his head down. His eyes—if that term could be applied to them in the first place—felt cold, black, and dead inside his head. If the sand hadn’t fallen and even a single beam of the faint white sun touched his eyes, his body would immolate. All that would remain would be ash and two cold, black, dead stones.

  Looking down, even without light, even without eyes, the Inked Man knew himself with his Unsight. His arms—like two dead branches on a diseased tree—were inscribed with thousands of words, spells, and prayers. If he looked closely, he could pick out individual languages and trace their evolution across his body, watching how syntax changed from century to century. Words scribbled in haste on his left arm had wholly different meanings than the same words written a decade later on his right, and once-powerful prayer-chants would yield little more than a feeble light if performed today.

  “So much wasted time. So much wasted space,” he said. Whole swaths of his plague-skin were covered in dead languages, and the spells, charms, and wards written in the ancient characters had died with them. Even now as time approached its endpoint, he could feel his immortality begin to weaken. Cracks formed in the lacquer on his bones. Pulpy muscle lost strength. Flakes of skin sloughed off at the slightest urging, as if the parchment plague had resumed its course of infection; as if he wasn’t the Inked Man, the carrier of the ur-Plague, the god of this dehydrated world; as if he was succumbing to the strain of the plague that had cleansed Lacuna dozens of times throughout history; the plague he had cured before the waves of sand came and the Lacunans drowned in the riptide.

  He shook his head and took a step. His body creaked like a tree in the wind, but he still felt strong, stronger than any woman or man that had ever lived, and he still had chores to do before the end.

  The entry corridor into the labyrinth was designed to be easy, at least to appear easy. It was flat and straight for quite a ways, but it was also pitched downward. The Inked Man didn’t care how far someone got into his labyrinth, as long as they didn’t leave. Intruders—and there had been many—were surprised when they came back to this straight, flat corridor to find it had grown longer and become an impossibly steep incline.

  Bones crunched under the Inked Man’s feet at the end of the corridor.

  “Maybe I should hire a chambermaid?” He laughed to himself. “I’ve lived far too long.”

  * * *

  Inky—he had used his last few forma rolls to barter away Britches—stood in front of the mine entrance. Even though the mother-daughter suns of Lacuna had set, the darkness of the mine stained the night. His arms quivered, the pick in his hands jumping about. The company store hadn’t had boots in the right size either, so he had stuffed his spare pair of stockings into the toes. Even with their weight and a rudimentary knowledge of how gravity worked, he felt his position on this earth was tenuous at best. The overalls were second-hand and well-worn, smelling of oil and rust, sweat and spice. His helmet, too, was secondhand, but when he switched on the lamp, it produced a strong beam.

  Spec tapped him on the shoulder. “We ran outta canaries, but the alchemists rigged our lamps so your light will turn green if the air becomes foul and red before it runs out of fuel.”

  Inky fingered the spare fuel cube on his belt, the chemicals inside pressurized so as to prevent sloshing. “What color would it be if the air went foul after the lamp turns red?”

  Spec looked down, his beam bouncing around. “You ever mix paints together when you were a kid?”

  Inky shook his head.

  “You know what color blood comes out when you’re strangling someone?”

  Again, Inky shook his head.

  Spec sighed in frustration. “Doesn’t matter what color it is, ‘cause you’ll have switched your fuel already, right?”

  Inky nodded.

  “Good boy. Now stick close to me and I’ll show you how to live forever.”

  * * *

  The Inked Man walked in the deep silence of the mine. There was something comforting about being encased in millions of tons of stone. He didn’t know why. Maybe some geologic instinct passed on from the very first animalcules that lived in the rock fissures; some yearning to return to the inanimation that life evolved from.

  As he descended deeper into the labyrinth, he came upon his first cache. He knew what was inside, but he entered the small cavern anyway and felt what was around him.

  Stone shelves held the final books Lacuna ever produced, inclu
ding a few the Inked Man had a hand in creating. They were bound in cloth and printed on the papyrus that had choked the River Ars after the climate had changed. Pulp was a distant memory, trees having been cleared from the drifting continent that Lacuna inhabited. The stumps had been pulped centuries ago. There had come a brief respite when Lacunans went into the land en masse to dig up the massive roots of the once-great forests, but that couldn’t last.

  Now, the land was parched and cracked in every direction, all the way to the great oceans. At decades-long intervals tumbleweed would blow past, and the desperate papermakers of Lacuna would throws bullets at each other, trying to get a few pounds of it to pulp. Those sacrilegious enough bleached the pages of ancient tomes to write over them. Parchment and vellum hadn’t been available in decades, and the few scraps of bird skin a Lacunan got from stoning one out of the sky yielded little more than pages for a diary.

  Reeds had started floating in clumps down the evaporating river, and the Lacunans rejoiced as they ate meals of cactus fruit and baked tarantula. Having a surplus of paper for the first time in a decade, they wrote down everything that had been filling up inside them: rage at the previous generations for turning the land into a desert, rage at the Fiend for dehydrating the land with his fires, rage at the cactus for having too many needles, rage at the sky for never having a cloud, rage at the suns for getting hotter, rage at each other for hoarding papyrus reeds. Sometimes they ran out of rage and wrote confessionals, funeral dirges, recipes for scorpion tail, sense-poetry, even stories.

  In the Inked Man’s cavern, hundreds of books stared at him, spine out. Or they would have been spine out, if they had spines. It wouldn’t matter anyway, because not a single volume the Lacunans produced had a title.

  The volumes the Inked Man produced, however, did. They were bound in sumptuous green leather, clasped with a naked lock of exposed gears. He picked up one volume, felt the weight and the strange warmth. With his Unsight, he read the title: Resher Domigan. He had known Resher well. At one time, the Inked Man had been Resher’s sketchbook. Resher’s favorite subject was drawing the death poses of those who fell in Lacuna’s streets. After the sketch, he flensed them for parchment. The Inked Man hadn’t much cared for Resher, but damn if he didn’t respect the kid’s talent with a pencil and penknife.

  The Inked Man set the volume back down. It wasn’t the book he was looking for. He exited the cache and continued on. He still had a long way to go.

  * * *

  Inky wiped black sweat off his forehead and aimed his pick at the same spot he had just struck. Missing off to the left, it rang against dense stone, sending pins and needles shooting up his arms.

  He cursed loudly.

  Spec shouldered his own pick and chuckled. “You’re like a drunk trying to piss into a tin can,” he said, walking over. “Instead of watching your pick, keep your eye on where you want it to hit.”

  Inky let his pick fall. “What do you think I’m doing? I’m not an idiot. It’s dark and hot and my hands are shredded. I’m having a hard enough time standing up, much less hitting the same spot twice.”

  Spec made a clucking sound in his throat. “How much coal you get tonight?” He peaked into Inky’s cart and made the clucking sound again. It echoed around the empty cart.

  “Not enough.”

  “I’ve seen worse. You’ve got enough in there to by some hardtack from the commissary.”

  Inky slouched against the rock face. He felt the solid impacts of more practiced picks gouging coal out of the walls. One full cart a night went to his work-related expenses. He started making profit on the second cartful. The cart contained enough coal to cover the iron floor of his cart.

  “Don’t worry, Inky. We all started out this way. You won’t be knocking face-sized lumps out for a month or so.”

  “A month?”

  Spec nodded, his glasses shining in the light of Inky’s headlamp. “But you’ll carry more out of the mine every day. Most miners take their first full cart out after a week or so, if they last that long.”

  Inky nodded. That felt a bit better. “A week. I can handle a week.”

  Spec extended a hand and hauled Inky to his feet. “Of course it’s that quick because you’re billed weekly for company fees.”

  They were over a mile into the mine. Even with their headlamps and some larger alchemical lanterns, the darkness was foreboding, oppressive. Inky tried not to think what dwelled beyond the range of the light, but he was certain he had heard growling on more than one occasion.

  It may have been Tomai coughing though. The old man had been working in the mine longer than anyone else. Even his teeth were stained gray from inhaling the coal dust. Rumor had it that Decker was going to force him out because he was from the time when lampblack was worth half-gold and unions almost mined the mountain hollow.

  Inky grabbed his pick off the ground and put his weight behind the next swing, shearing off a piece of coal the size of a small apple. He almost laughed with a combination of relief and joy, tossing the lump into his cart.

  “See?” Spec said, laying a hand across his shoulders, “You’re getting it already....” The old man’s voice trailed off, and he clutched his chest. Inky grabbed him, thinking Spec’s heart had given out. Instead, Spec took a pendent of glowing crystal from inside his shirt.

  “Fifteen years of that and I’m still not used to it.”

  “What the hell, man?” Inky said, throwing his hands up.

  Spec winked. “I had an alchemist named Francini make it for me. I wanted something that would tell me when twelve hours passed. She thought it’d be funny to have this crystal singe my nipples off twice a day.”

  Inky perked up again. “I know Francini.”

  “Interesting woman, that one,” Spec said. He shook the crystal and it stopped glowing. “Interesting, and dangerous as all-get-out.”

  Chernyl shivered, but whether from the drying sweat on his skin or the truth of Spec’s words, he couldn’t say.

  * * *

  The Inked Man walked deeper into the mountain. He passed dozens of caverns, each holding hundreds of books from different times in Lacuna’s history. There were romances and utopian dreams and philosophical meanderings, but the only link between the caches were the Inked Man’s biographies of those he had known. Often he would pick up and run his fingers over the strangely warm books. He remembered being this man’s business ledger, this girl’s bedtime story, this dog’s newspaper chew-toy. They all had helped create and recreate the Inked Man; whether for better or worse was only known to him.

  As he entered the deep parts of the labyrinth, his Unsight became... odd: silhouette-feelings embossed themselves, senses-of-mass increased, lexigraphic-memory seemed to ooze from the walls like stone pus.

  He ducked into a cache. The books were printed on thick, rough-cut paper. The font was a large primitive serif, and of course, it was illuminated. The Inked Man recognized straight legs where now there were curved edges, and extinct crossbars littered half the alphabet. This was from the early history of Lacuna, some thousands of years ago. It detailed the first attempt to divert the River Ars around the city, to create what would become Parchment Run. The lamenting verse was crude, if heartfelt. It made the Inked Man smile. He remembered watching those early Lacunans with their picks and shovels, moving the heavy soil one scoop at a time.

  The Inked Man’s Unsight doubled and he had to sit down. Pain—the first pain he had felt since he became immortal—split his head in two. Something was wrong about his knowledge of early Lacuna. It felt slippery, like a slime eel out of water. He knew, but he didn’t know. Images filled his termite brain, but they were more like oil paintings than daguerreotypes.

  The Inked Man was confused, scared, and in pain for the first time in millennia. It was thrilling.

  * * *

  Inky lay on his bed, counting his coin. He hadn’t seen the sun in over a month, working the quieter night shift. Ever since his first day, Spec had been feeding him
a steady stream of tricks to charm the coal out of the wall: hit the seam here, not here; let the weight of the pick do the work; the sharper your pick, the less force you have to put behind it; don’t eat the mud clams in the commissary; don’t leave your money sack in the billets.

  This last one he had asked Spec about. “But I live in the billets. Where else would I put my coin?”

  “First Lacuna?”

  Inky shook his head. “My father lost his inheritance when First Lacuna went bust a few decades back. Why do you think I came to the mines?”

  Spec took a bite of his egg salad sandwich. “What about the commissary depository?”

  “Their fees are half my wage.”

  “Well then I dunno man!” Spec waved his sandwich around, bits of egg streaking the ceiling. “Stuff it under a loose floorboard.”

  Inky tipped the rest of his coin into his leather purse and slipped it under the loose floorboard near the head of his cot. It wasn’t a lot of money by any means, but he was making more and more every day as his strikes rang truer, his muscles grew tauter, and his carts filled faster.

  Ah Trinia, Inky thought, Only a few years and I’ll be able to afford your dowry. Then we can say good-bye to Lacuna forever.

  “I can’t believe you’re actually hiding it under a loose floorboard,” Spec said. He plunged his hands into the room-temperature water in the wash basin and splashed it over his face.

  “How’d you know what I was doing?” Inky asked, startled. He could have sworn he was all alone in the dorm. Everyone else was at the company bordello bargaining for pleasure, or eating buttered noodles in the commissary.

  Spec wiped his face with a towel and turned toward Inky. Although he wasn’t wearing a shirt, suspenders could just be seen through the thick, white hair on his chest. Inky was also reminded that Spec might be old, but he wasn’t feeble.

  “I been here the whole time. You just failed to notice.”

  Inky shook his head. “No you weren’t. I made sure the dorm was empty before counting my money.”