Beneath Ceaseless Skies #150

by Richard Parks

  “They will teach you,” he said.

  Outside, the storm continued to build.

  * * *

  I went to my desk but could not concentrate. Outside, the wind moaned, but I heard it crying inside as well. I climbed two levels and found Sylva.

  She obviously wanted to be found. She could have stayed hidden, even if she could not have remained silent. Rain had sprayed in through the crack of one of the shutters, and she shaped it into a wide and pained face.

  “Who am I?” she asked.

  I sat down beside her.

  “I don’t remember who I am.”

  “You’re Sylva.”

  Her face rippled. “Before that. Whose anima holds these winds together? The wizard is strong, but not strong enough to create life. Whose soul did he use for me?”

  I reached for her, but there was nothing. The face collapsed, and I felt only a breeze on my arms.

  “He thinks the other winds left while he was sleeping,” she said, and now her voice was at my ear. “He’s wrong. I drove them away. I was stronger than any of them, and I pushed them out of the house one by one.” Her voice grew cold and the air shaping it colder. “I wanted him—I wanted the house—to myself.”

  I had given no thought to how Sylva had come or what bound her to the wizard, but now I thought of her alone for those decades while the wizard slept, haunting the house, driving the other winds away in fury or frustration.

  “Why?” I asked.

  It was a stupid question, and she ignored it to ask her own. “Who was I, that I could have done that?”

  “Do you love him?”

  “He’s an old man.” She sighed. “I’m compelled to serve him. But I was jealous of the others.”

  I waited.

  “When we get to the city he will send me away. He will need me to drive the airships out of the sky.” Her laugh was sharp and hollow. “It won’t be difficult. But I do not want to go. The storm out there is alive now. I hear the winds I drove out. They’re not really alive, not since they left the house, but they remember me. And they’re angry.”

  The air stirred as she withdrew.

  “I don’t want to go. Goodbye, Diogenes Shell.”

  For a moment there might have been rainwater lips on my forehead, and then she was gone.

  I stared at the rows upon rows of scrolls around me. I wondered in which her story was written and how many years of reading it would take before I might find it.

  * * *

  When the copper shutters closed like a hundred eyes, lanterns along the balconies flickered to light. They stretched upward, tier upon tier, until looking at the upper levels of the house was looking into a sky of stars. We had been riding in the storm a full day perhaps. Now the lights were beginning to dim, and the wizard called me again to the main level.

  “Stay off the staircases,” he said when I reached him. He stood before the table, which was still covered in the layer of black clouds we rode within.

  “Have we reached the city?”

  “Soon.” He pointed to a spot near the table’s edge. “Sylva.”

  “I’m here.”

  “After this you will be free.”

  The lanterns along the first balcony sputtered. “After this I will be lost! You’re sending me away!” She was angry. Her voice filled the house.

  “You may go where you please,” the wizard said, still staring at the table. “Put out the fire.”

  She stomped on it and blew a thousand brilliant sparks up the chimney.

  There was a new light coming from somewhere. Thunder crashed against the walls of the house as though someone wanted inside.

  “Who were we?” Sylva yelled.

  The wizard glanced up. There was a glow against his marble eyes from the growing light in the house. The lanterns had completely gone out, but the metal of each staircase burned with a white luster that increased with each echo of thunder outside.

  The wizard turned to the timepiece beside the doorway. “Time?”

  “Soon,” it answered.

  I realized with a start that the clock was a map. Not of outside.... There were points around each of its concentric circles, one on each ring, arranged in a spiral running out from the middle. I glanced up at the rows of balconies. Each held one staircase, shining now with electric light. They moved, though I never saw it happen. At this moment they were arranged in a spiral pattern, each slightly offset from the one below. They grew brighter, and the spiral tightened, as did the spiral of arms on the clock’s face. The clock was a map of the wizard’s house.

  “Who am I?!” Sylva shouted again.

  “You are my wind,” the wizard said. “Wear this.” He pulled a silver ring off his finger and handed it to me. “The timepiece will speak to you, and obey. In time, the house will as well.”

  He moved his hands along the sides of the table, and it swung back slowly, revealing a wide hole like a well through the stone floor.

  I would have asked a hundred questions, but I did not know what was coming.

  “Now, Sylva.”

  She was all around me, filling the chamber, and her fingers were in my hair.

  Then once more she was gone.

  Below the house I could see a maelstrom of cloud and the raked hulls of airships bobbing within it. We were the center of a whirlwind, and down its throat far below loomed the walls of the city and what must have been the roof of a huge cathedral. The light running up and down the staircases mirrored the lightning in the clouds.

  “Are you going to kill it?” I thought about the god growing in rooms below, the thing the priests had planted in the heart of the city, now reaching backward and forward in time.

  “You cannot kill a god.”

  “Then what are you going to do?” I had to shout over the thunder.

  “Stop it. Change it.” His eyes flashed again. “You are not who I was expecting, Diogenes Shell, but you are the one who came. You must take my house back over the mountains, to the emperor. He summoned me home long ago, but I slept instead, waiting for this day.”

  I yelled my question again.

  “He will ask you my name. This you must tell him, so he will know I have succeeded.”

  “But I don’t know your name!”

  “You will know if I succeed. Time?” he asked again, turning to the timepiece.

  Its voice hammered like a gong. “Now!”

  Lightning flared in the sky around us, and the spiral of light in the wizard’s house answered in kind until the air sparked and my hair stood on end. The wizard stepped over the edge of the stone floor and dropped through the hole. The lightning followed him down, weaving a net around him as he fell.

  In the sudden silence I could hear Sylva calling. A new memory rose up: the massacre and the village burning beneath me as I fled in my father’s airship, and I screamed.

  * * *

  The storm cleared quickly. Clouds peeled away as the whirlwind collapsed, and below and falling behind I could see smoke wafting up from a ruined cathedral.

  No airships rose in pursuit. The wind pushed us away from the city, toward the mountains in the north. I told the timepiece to open the shutters of the windows, climbed in the house as high as I could, and used a spyglass to scan the horizon. I saw no sign of the wizard, nor did I hear Sylva’s voice on the breeze.

  “What did he do?” I asked the clock when I descended.

  “I do not know.”

  I was twisting the silver ring between my fingers as I spoke. Now I slipped it onto my right index finger, the only finger it fit, and asked the question again.

  “He fell to confront the god. The staircases, when aligned correctly, act as conduits for the lightning. He wished to face the god, and he believed this method would best neutralize its defenses.”

  “Along with Sylva’s storm.”

  “Correct.”

  “Does the house hold other tricks like that?”

  “Indeed. Very many.”

  “Turn the
house around and pass again over the city.”

  “I cannot control the house’s path.”

  “What do you mean? The wizard could.”

  The clock ticked. “Indeed. But he has sent it home, and it is returning. I can do nothing to alter its course.”

  “Where is it going?”

  “Over the mountains.”

  “And what then?”

  “The emperor’s corsairs will rise to meet us.” The voice of the timepiece rang like silver. “When they find that the wizard is gone and you do not know the word of passage, they will conclude you are an agent of the god and will have you executed.”

  “What is the word of passage?”

  “I do not know.”

  The timepiece answered no differently no matter how I phrased the question. I asked no further questions and instead waited the rest of the day hoping Sylva would return. But all the winds that found their way through the open windows were silent. After that, there seemed to be nothing but to resume searching the wizard’s books and watching the mountains’ slow approach. If he had survived, he would send a message. He would call the house back. Something. I could not imagine he would have knowingly sent me to my death over the mountains.

  But we continued to drift northward, and no word came.

  I had never seen mountains. I thought the clouds that I moved through were the true mountains, and they did indeed dwarf any contour of land I had seen in the Shallows. But these mountains rose up as though the world itself was gathering to lurch to its feet. The bank of clouds we followed broke against their knees, and their shoulders and peaks wore wreathes of snow.

  We rose until we left the cloudbank behind, and still the mountains lifted in front of us. I wondered how we looked to anyone watching on those slopes: a white, stony cumulus higher than any other dared go, solid of form while the true clouds tore themselves to ragged bits on the mountains’ lower slopes.

  Still we rose higher, passing through a narrow break between two peaks just below the snow line. Our shadow moved across a thin golden snake that disappeared over the lip of the pass. It was a road leaping over narrow crevasses on spans of ivory that seemed frail and sugar-spun from so far above: the emperor’s highway connecting his capital with lands to the south and west that he held now only in word.

  We were over the mountains for days. When I was not watching at the windows I read. The wizard had been right. Books opened themselves, and the scripts within flowed around me like rivers. I heard their words after I had closed the pages and by night as I slept beneath open windows.

  I heard my memories as well. The ribbon-spells the wizard had cast when I spoke came streaming down out of the darkness and read my own words back to me. The number of saints in the War of the Saints, the number of priests who had come to the door of our mill, my father and the words he said.

  I no longer recalled him dying.

  Yet the wizard’s house continued to hasten northward, and the wizard’s name remained unknown to me.

  There were histories among the scrolls. Soon I was able to affix the names of battles and lost fleets with the valleys that passed below us. I knew the legends of captives of war with souls enchained in water, fire, earth, or wind. I knew, when the mountains opened out to a high, grassy plain stretching out toward the horizon, that we had reached the threshold of the emperor’s capital.

  But I did not know the wizard’s name.

  The voice of the timepiece broke my reverie. “There are ships.”

  “Airships?”

  “Rising from the valley beneath us.”

  I saw them approaching in the house’s wide windows. They were unlike any I had seen before. They had no air-sacks nor sails. They rose like the wizard’s house, without apparent means of buoyancy. There were two of them, thin, with low stone walls and slanted roofs.

  “Who are they?”

  “They are the emperor’s corsairs.”

  “The house has come home,” I said slowly. I turned to the timepiece. “What is the wizard’s name? Tell it to me now or you have killed me.”

  Its voice was hollow. “I do not know.”

  When the two ships neared, someone on board the larger unfurled a blue banner. I recognized the standard from my readings: a tree with three blossoms. “The emperor is aboard that one.”

  The wizard would not have left me without a clue at all. I wracked my brain, but I could cull nothing from the words I had read or those he had spoken to me.

  The first ship pulled alongside the house, close enough I could see figures moving behind narrow portholes. There was a soft shudder, and one of the birds that had returned to the house’s upper reaches dropped heavily to my shoulder.

  “They have docked,” the timepiece said, “and three have come aboard.”

  I stood beside the large table at the center of the room. It had been dead since the wizard fell, but now it blinked to life, and I could see the landscape of mountains and wide valley that spread out below. A breeze beside me stirred.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Open it,” I told the timepiece.

  The three men who entered were tall and thin, in the white and blue uniforms of sky captains I had only seen before in very old paintings.

  The one in the middle followed a few paces behind. “Who are you?”

  I told them my name.

  “Where is your lord?”

  “The wizard fell to meet the god and sent the house back over the mountains.”

  The two in the lead held a whispered conference as the third waited. He eyed the timepiece with interest.

  “We have had no message from the city,” one of them finally said to me. “Though you would have outpaced any who came.”

  I nodded. They were suspicious. The wizard had been gone over a hundred years. I had no idea what hold the god had developed here. And the wizard had not been sent against that foe; he had been sent to put an end to the barons’ Sky Wars, which had ended in my great-grandfather’s time.

  “He would have left a sign,” the third finally said. He looked at me. “I am the Emperor Theodorus. These are my lieutenants.”

  They both gave small bows.

  “He would have given you a name.”

  * * *

  Memory blossomed unbidden:

  I had been awake since dawn. The winds began to drop as the sun rose, and I climbed the tower at the roof’s peak to slowly winch down the kites.

  “A good night?” my father yelled up from the courtyard.

  “Looks to be.”

  The clouds were piled high in the western sky, and they cast the sunlight back in brilliant white. Even in their glare I could see the glow of the jellies caught in our wicker nets.

  I cranked on the wooden winch. It took several minutes to draw the kites all the way down. When they were low enough, my father poled the wicker basket-nets from where they hung while I collapsed the kite arms and stowed them in the attic.

  “A fine harvest,” my father noted proudly when I joined him in the barn. He had already lugged in the baskets and was stained to his elbows in the jellies’ sticky-sweet juice.

  I nodded and joined him.

  He finished his load and went to stand by the vats. When I had unloaded the last of my baskets, I climbed to the upper level to unlock the windmill’s gears from the water pump and hook them to the pistons in the vats below. The beams groaned as the gears locked, and I heard my father’s approving grunt.

  The presses began to squeeze out the jelly-ink.

  Mother called then. There was a man at the door.

  A priest.

  “Greetings in the name of the New God,” he said, when my father met him. Father invited him in while Mother set out bread and cheese. The priest said he had been on the road for several weeks doing the god’s business. He blue robes were dusty and his beard untrimmed. My father offered him bread.

  “You are a trader in the glow-ink harvested from the sky?” the priest asked.

&
nbsp; My father nodded. “Trader and harvester. We process it here and take it into market.”

  “It is burned as oil?” The priest tore at his bread.

  My father nodded again.

  “A holy fire. You should be honored. Your trade is a blessed one.”

  At this my father gave a blank stare.

  The priest brushed crumbs from his fingers and spread his hands. “The Unborn God is growing. Reaching into the fabric of his world. His roots run deep, both in the earth and in ways we cannot perceive. There is a certain species of lichen that grows on the spruce of the forests to the east. It is now part of the god, and his awareness inhabits the march of shadows and seasons upon bark. There is a blindworm found in certain sands of the southern deserts. The god now hears—in its unborn sleep-—through their ears and knows the passage of caravans on the dunes above. And now in the jellies. He feels the passage of the winds across his world in the motions of their nightly migrations.” There was a glow in the priest’s eyes. His fingers were still outspread, as though he could somehow augment his god’s growth.

  My father’s face remained impassive.

  “It is a thing of great honor,” the priest continued, “to touch the god each night, even in his sleep. I was hoping—” and here the priest coughed as though embarrassed— “I was hoping to offer my services for a short time and learn of your craft, assist you in your work. It would be a great honor.”

  “You want to learn to harvest and process the jellies?”

  “This may be difficult to understand.” The priest smiled apologetically. “The nature of the god is nascent, but we perceive that he is a duality. He-who-is is one with He-who-serves. We come to know the god through communion with others as much as with the god himself, for the god is himself communion.”

  My father snorted softly, but the priest looked at me.

  “His name,” he said, “is Theodulus.”

  * * *

  “He would have given you a name,” the emperor repeated, his voice dangerously soft.

  The bird on my shoulder shifted its weight, and I recalled the twin stones of the wizard’s eyes and the story of the tree and the two sons in the first scroll.

  “He was your brother,” I said. “He was blinded and cast out.”

  “My grandfather’s brother.” The emperor’s own eyes were a deep blue. “He was consecrated and ordained.”