There was more. The story told of the tree learning to speak; of winds that would shape the words into various tones the way Sylva shaped fingers to grip a tray or broom. Sounds seemed to float up off the parchment, so that with concentration I heard the speech as well as read the forms of letters.
It mattered, because tone was often the most important thing with magic.
I learned that from the books. The wizard was correct. I did not then know his plans, but as peaceful as the skies seemed now, there would soon be no time to learn from him.
* * *
That first day spent over the scroll passed quickly. The strange script arched and coiled as I watched, marching over the words with which I was familiar until it finally left them behind and went on alone to tell of the king’s death, the blinding of his son, and the strange fruit the tree bore. The sounds continued rising from the parchment as well, forming tones I felt more than heard, passing above me like the tiny clouds over the wizard’s table.
His voice called me down to prepare dinner.
We watched the black kites after we had eaten. The sun was setting behind mountains in the west, mountains that were only peaks, cliffs, and dizzying spirals of cloud. The kites were rising on invisible threads, a line of black diamonds in formation against the horizon.
“They’re searching for you,” I said.
The wizard nodded. We were standing high in the house, though there were still scores of balconies above. There were no shelves on this level or desks of books and scrolls. Instead, wide windows opened on every side with dozens of brass and glass instruments crowded before them. The wizard was peering through one that looked like a spyglass with five or six parallel tubes.
“Can they see us?” The kites were becoming invisible as darkness grew. Through the spyglasses it was clear they had no riders, yet I felt certain they were watching.
“They will see nothing but a cloud.”
“But they know your house is disguised.”
Again the nod.
“Why doesn’t the god send the jellies?”
We sometimes drifted through schools of luminous jellies that rode high during the days before falling beneath the clouds as they cooled in the evening. I shuddered when I saw them drift past the windows, white and nearly transparent by daylight, remembering the night that had brought me to the wizard’s house, when the god turned the jellies to red, flowing, angry sheets across the sky.
“The god is yet unborn,” the wizard explained. He had explained this before. “His manifestation in organic creatures—the jellies, certain plants and animals on the surface below—are unconscious reactions. Such as you would shift or mutter in your sleep. He does not consciously search for us, though his followers do.”
“The priests?”
The wizard nodded a third time and lowered his instrument. He moved from the windows, which looked now onto an inky darkness devoid of stars, and motioned me to follow. A fire winked to life in the great hearth on the main floor far below.
“His followers, those who prepare the way for his coming—its coming—send aloft those kites. They may pray to it, and it may hear their prayers, but it hears them as one hears voices in dreams.”
I thought about the priests that had come to my father’s mill. “But the priests are like an army. They must have dozens of men in each village.”
The carved stones marking the wizard’s eyes turned on me. “Tell me about them.”
“What?”
“Tell me about the blue-cloaked priests that came to your father’s mill.”
I thought back to the day the priests had come to tell my father he could no longer harvest the glow-ink from the jellies because these aerial creatures that had provided my family’s livelihood for generations had become extensions of the god’s growing consciousness.
“There were maybe twenty of them, but it was hard to count. I’ve told you this before. They kept blending into each other. But they all looked hard, like soldiers. And they had mercenaries with them. And wagons and weapons. They beat my father.” I stopped suddenly. I had forgotten that. “They beat him and said they could kill him and no one in the village would lift a finger.”
The wizard was pulling a smoky ribbon from the air as he walked. As he spoke he twisted it around his hands. “That was not the way you told the story when you first came here. You said there were perhaps half a dozen priests. Old men. They seemed bland and ineffectual. They had no mercenaries and no weapons.”
I was confused. “That’s not how I remember it. Why would I have said that?”
The ribbon writhed in the air between us. I thought of Sylva but felt no wind.
“Because the god is growing,” he answered. “Because it is growing toward omniscience, perhaps omnipotence, and its influence is reaching backward and forward in time. When you came here the priests were bands of clerics who had succeeded in bringing the god to root in the city but were still flailing in their newfound power.”
The ribbon arched between us, and I realized it was recording the words as he spoke them. I recognized them as the language I had been training myself to read.
“Now they are an army, and they are launching a grid of watchers into the sky to snare us.” We had arrived back at the table on the main level of the house, beside the roaring fire. It seemed to take less time to move through the house when I was walking with the wizard.
“They’ve always been an army,” I said. “That’s how they were able to take the city and plant the god at its center.”
The recording spell spiraled away from us, to be lost in the dimness overhead.
“No.” The wizard stared down at the table. Now, besides the surface features and miniature billows of clouds, there were tiny flags of darkness flying in formation over its face. “There was no army. Nor did they recruit one in the time you have been here. The current of past events is being influenced. Do you recall the War of Sixteen Saints?”
“The War of Seven Saints,” I corrected. “The seven rebel generals who tried to prevent the god taking root.”
In the light from the fireplace, his eyes did look very much like the eyes of a statue. “I thought being in my house might shelter you from the influence,” he said. “Go back to your books for another hour, and then you may retire.”
But though I stared down at the books for what seemed hours, I did not see them. I recalled instead the day the priests had come to our house, their hard faces and their posture, and the sounds of the blows on my father’s back.
* * *
I do not know whether the wizard ever slept. When the timepiece woke me in the mornings to prepare his meal, he was already awake, usually standing where I had left him in the evening, staring down at the map table. And when I went to bed on my small cot beside the door, he was either there still or sitting in one of the chairs beside the fire.
He had been sleeping, though, for decades before I found his house, so perhaps he felt he needed none now.
When the kites grew thicker, the wizard finally sent Sylva to scatter them.
“You said she might not come back.” I brought the tea service and set it on a tall stool.
“She may not.”
“Is that what happened to the others?”
The wizard took his cup and stared into it as though it contained a smaller version of the map on the table before him.
“That may be the case,” he said. “At the height of my power the house was filled with winds. Each had an anima. Their spirits were tethered to my house. If they wandered from it while I was asleep they would lose cohesion and consciousness.”
I looked out the nearest window. The cloudscape today seemed a sea with a few white islands rearing out of it. I saw no black kites but knew they must be rising around us.
“Do you know this instrument?”
I looked at the tall, narrow glass column the wizard indicated. It hung on the wall between the timepiece and an open window.
“A barometer. The
port-master in the village used to carry them.”
“Indeed. Every airship captain would carry one. They gauge the weight of the air, and its falling or rising signals a change in the weather.”
I knew all this and nodded.
The wizard drained his cup. “The emperor sent me over the mountains a hundred years ago to put an end to the Sky Wars that were tearing the Shallows apart. After that there was peace, until your lifetime, when the priests tried planting their unborn god in the city.”
I knew all this as well, but I had never heard the wizard speak of it himself.
“Do you know why I slept through the War of the Sixteen Saints?”
“Three Saints,” I corrected, wondering what this had to do with the barometer. “There were three generals who rebelled.”
The wizard arched an eyebrow and handed me the cup, which I returned to the tray. When he was done, I would take it and the rest of the service to the tiny kitchen adjoining this room and wash them with rainwater cached in the stones below.
“I removed myself from the stream of history for a full century,” the wizard was saying. His attention had returned to the map table. “As the god grows, its power increases both backward and forward in time. I have explained this to you before.”
“Yes.”
“There are ways to combat this, but the surest is to isolate oneself. The god’s influence does not yet stretch as far as a century into the past; events from perhaps the previous decade alone are being altered. But I needed a way to test those changes. I needed a barometer.”
“That’s why I’m here?” I picked up the tea service. “You needed someone to gauge the god’s power?”
The wizard waved the question away. “You are here because you found the sword, and in so doing found my house.”
“The barometer is falling,” the timepiece announced.
Outside there were flashes in the distance. The wind hauled itself back in through the window, bringing with it the smell of rain. For a moment Sylva was around me, and I had the fleeting impression of a giantess with streaming hair, her form an outline of mist. She was wild and stroked my face with rainy fingers.
The wizard barked a word and the figure collapsed.
“There were many kites,” she whispered, “and there were airships as well. They are gone now.”
I had never feared Sylva before. I did now.
* * *
The timepiece woke me next morning.
“To the books,” it said.
I went into the kitchen to wash my face in cold water, then reemerged and studied the concentric rings making up the timepiece’s face. I was learning the script of the wizard’s books, but I still could not interpret any of the figures on its surface.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Now.”
I snorted.
The sky beyond the windows was a grey slate. The house felt very much like a ship today, sailing through silent and shrouded seas.
The wizard was nowhere to be seen, and the fire in the hearth beside the map table had fallen to embers. I stirred it and added some logs from the wide basket on the stone floor, wondering how the wizard replenished his supply of firewood. Did the house land to take on fresh supplies? We gathered water from the clouds and eggs from the birds that made an aviary of its upper reaches, but the flour that I used to make our bread, the tea, the wood, and the other supplies crowding the rough wooden shelves in the kitchen surely came from somewhere.
Though he was, after all, a wizard.
I climbed to my desk on the third level of the house. On the second level I had to walk nearly the entire perimeter to find the spiral staircase, which had wandered from where I had descended it the previous night.
I had finished the scroll about the tree and the dying king and his two sons. I moved on to scrolls of the second shelf, which interwove the new script with a third one, jagged and angular. This one was more difficult, but I copied out the curious shapes onto parchment with the black-and-red quill that had tasted my blood.
I encountered resistance. It was difficult to form certain letters, to join together the angle of their figures. I felt it up my arms and in my chest.
“You are weaving spells.”
The wizard had come up silently behind me. He pointed down at the short train of words I had been able to fashion.
“Is that why they’re so hard to write?”
“Spells are created of words and will. Sometimes the words are the easier part.”
I asked him what kind of spells they were.
“Warding spells. And spells of knowledge. Things that will allow you to read more of the books in the house and protect you from what you learn.”
“And from the god?”
He moved from the table and motioned me to follow.
“And from the god,” he agreed. “It cannot influence you directly, but we have already seen that it begins to shape and alter the past, including your own.”
We reached a window, and he motioned below.
“We are leaving the Shallows.”
It was like going over the edge of the world.
I had never been beyond the Shallows. I knew they were an immense mesa, but I knew it the same way I knew what the port-master used to say, that the world was an immense sphere. It was a fact never mapped directly onto my experience.
“You see now why the sky captains called it the Shallows?”
The grey clouds we sailed upon were breaking.
“Because the sky is shallow over it,” I muttered.
The wizard’s house had drifted with herds of cumulus for a hundred years over the low sky of the Shallows. When I looked down from the windows, it had always been onto a patchwork of rolling hills, farms, and small streams. Now that had ended, and the land fell away in dizzying cliffs. There was a tiny brown thread I knew to be a road, stitching back and forth down the broken cliff face until it reached sandy red-brown dunes below. The rippled dunes seemed distant as the bottom of a sea.
I had lived my entire life on a mountaintop and never known it. “That’s a desert?”
“It is. It stretches several days’ journey to where the mountains begin to rise and the city rests.” The wizard looked grim. “It does not normally hold clouds.”
There were a few other clouds in the sky with us, slipping over the edges of the cliff like steam from the lip of a cauldron.
“Except when it storms.” Sylva had come up beside us.
The wizard nodded. “I have been waiting for the winds to change, and now we have slipped the net tightening around us in the Shallows. We are going to the city.”
“I thought we were hiding.”
“We were hiding until the winds changed.” The wizard’s house was dropping slowly, and the cliffs were already rising up behind. “Now we go to do that for which I slept a hundred years. Are you afraid?”
I was not. Something grew cold and tight in my chest.
“They killed my father,” I said, angry with the memory and angry the wizard would question my resolve. “When the god moved into the jellies. The priests and their soldiers came and killed him to make an example. Then they hung his body up on one of his own kites as a warning.”
The wizard stared, and Sylva gasped.
“The gulf widens,” he said softly. “You did not have that memory when you first came to my house. You came here with your father.”
I shook my head. “I came here because....” The memories were uncertain. They changed as I watched them, like clouds in a gale. “I was fleeing.”
“He had been poisoned by the jellies, and you found my house seeking help. I healed him in return for your pledge of service. He returned to your village alone.”
“No.” My voice cracked. “I saw them kill him. I fled alone.” The memory was firm now, as clear and sharp as the outline of my father’s kite against the sky. “My father is dead.”
“He is dead then,” the wizard said.
I held bac
k my tears until the wizard had returned below, but when they came they were grey and full of fury.
* * *
The next hours passed swiftly. Clouds continued spilling from the Shallows and gathered around us as the winds carried us across the desert. Sylva began to roar in and out of the house’s windows. The wizard gave her words as she passed, phrases of power I had not heard before but half-understood. She goaded clouds down and around us until they reared on all sides like beasts.
Soon it was storming. Winds whistled beyond the windows.
The wizard called for me.
“Is it magic?” I asked.
“Magic is little more than reading the signs.” Clouds clustered over the table’s surface so densely it was difficult to see the map below. “It is magic to know when to go and when to stay.” His marble eyes glanced at the windows. “But yes, Sylva helps, aided by my power. I was afraid I would be crippled with only one of my winds remaining, but I believe she will be enough.”
She had become a monster. Soon the howl of wind was joined by the clatter of hail falling against the white stones of the house’s walls. The wizard spoke to the timepiece, and copper shutters swung into place over each window. Sylva came back in a whirl of steam through the chimney.
“Rest,” the wizard told her. Amidst the steam it was almost possible to see her shape.
“They have airships,” she said. “They are waiting over the city.”
“We will reach them presently.” He smiled. “The storm has become self-sustaining. Gather your strength for the final event.”
The mist scattered, and I lost her.
The wizard turned to me. “Can you read my books now?”
I was looking for Sylva and asked what he meant by final event.
“My books,” he repeated. “Can you read them?”
“No. Every day I find a scroll in a new language, and I’ve barely made headway in the second script. It would take a lifetime to be able to read half.”
He smiled again. He was making me nervous. It was the most I had seen him smile since coming to his house. He had been waiting and watching for so long that now to see him taking action and almost eager was disconcerting.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #150 Page 7