Beneath Ceaseless Skies #61

by Ronald, Margaret

  Peabody finally crumpled the last sheet of whatever he was working on. “Will you two stop assaulting my ears? You’re worse than street musicians!”

  Quint’s shoulders shook with another of those threatening chuckles. “They haven’t yet wiped us out, so they can tabletalk all they like.”

  “Tabletalk? More like gutter talk, with those lowbrow ditties.”

  “I take offense to that,” Izzy said, turning in his seat. “Amicaldo’s operas are hardly lowbrow. Just because they’re popular—”

  “They’re popular because they require almost no thought to follow. They’re just the same stories that the yellow novels regurgitate every dozen years, the same melodrama and inaccuracies.” Peabody adjusted his glasses and pressed two fingers to the space between his brows as if to keep in a headache. “People listen because the Capitol Opera made such a big deal out of Amicaldo’s supposed pseudonymity, and because they’re the equivalent of sugar pap in pretty wrappings. They’ve got only one advantage as far as I can tell; they are very good at culling the stupidest of the lower class.”

  Izzy dropped his cards and started to stand, but Frank shot one hand across the table and caught his wrist. “‘s always like this,” he whispered to Izzy.

  “He’s not wrong,” Quint added, scooping up the fallen cards and reassembling them into a fresh stack. “Always some poor idiot hears the songs, listens to the stories a little too hard, thinks that all’d be well if he was an alchemage. We had one picking through the dross last month, remember? Always think all’s needed is a lot of ore or a drink of distillation. Lucky for their families that they just die from it.”

  “But you can hardly say that’s Amicaldo’s fault—I mean, the histories are all there anyway, and they all say how high the death rate was among alchemages, so it doesn’t stand—”

  Frank squeezed his wrist, hard. “Let go, lad.”

  Izzy glanced back at the old man, who gazed down at the cards as if they’d tell his future. Slowly, Izzy sank back into his chair. “It does make it seem more romantic,” he admitted. “The old days, before the condensing process was invented. When all you could do with thaumic ore was hand it over to the alchemages and hope they’d decide to protect your home.”

  “Romance, eh.” Quint snorted. “Got enough romance with my Bonnie. Don’t need to yodel about it.” He dealt out a fresh hand, the cards skimming across like sparks from an ore crusher. “No. Way I see it, this is the good life. What, t’ore made alchemages strong? Nice for them, not nice for them as got in their way. This—” he gestured to the room, taking in not just the factory but the Society guards, the men coming and going for another set of tests, the cots and the emergency setup, “—this turns t’ore into light, heat, clothes, airships. Take this any day over angry madmen blowing up mountains.” He picked up his cards, then glanced at Izzy, that cruel smile surfacing again. “Go on and sing about it all yeh like, Weskit. Still won’t win the next hand.”

  He was right, about the hand at least. And Frank remained silent, at least till dinner and his next aria started up.

  * * *

  Another day passed, another day of pages and pages of diagrams that wouldn’t mean anything if he couldn’t look at the faulty vapor line, although he’d come up with a few potential ideas for a streamlined coil that could bypass the entire problem.

  And someone kept stealing his paper.

  Another night passed listening to Quint snore, followed by another day of failing to light the lamp and utterly failing to convince Zen to either let him go or put him through decontamination procedures. “It’d end your career,” she pointed out, quite accurately. “Even the Society doesn’t keep on people who waste thousands on unnecessary procedures.”

  The whole argument was carried out in darkness, Izzy still holding the useless lamp, Zen watching him through her werglass. Even without the light, he could guess at her expression. “Look,” she went on, “for some of the workers here, this might be a good thing. I mean, look at your friend with the playing cards—the little one, the one who’s always whistling. He’s getting actual medical care this way, and I don’t just mean the blood tests. It’s more than workers in these plants usually get.”

  “Then we need to change the procedures. Make it cheaper to run a mass decontamination, step up antithaum production.”

  “You were going to speak against that! Your whole paper on the Lower Kingdoms—you’re the one who’s always going on about the romance of the old days! I’d have thought you’d relish the chance to see infusion firsthand.”

  “I wasn’t in quarantine then! At least move me to the second-level tests—I’m not getting anywhere with this damned lamp.”

  “You don’t want that, Izzy. You really don’t.”

  The whole thing was made worse—well, worse in some ways—by Zen herself. Technically, he was used to her presence; they’d worked together for close to a year. But usually when the two of them were in close quarters, one or the other of them was under some apparatus, and somehow in these dark hours it was harder to think of her as the friend with whom he’d talked practical thaumics and worked on monographs for the Society.

  In the dark, with her hands on his, she was something else, something born half of her voice and half of his own mazed perception. He tried to keep his thoughts on thaumic infusion or, when that failed, Amicaldo’s oeuvre, just to keep from thinking about her, how he could have not noticed any of this before....

  Over dinner, he and Frank talked more Amicaldo—or, well, Izzy talked Amicaldo, and though Frank was a little reluctant to discuss it, he could whistle any of the arias, or even the incidental music, with only a word or two of prompting. “If this goes on too long,” Izzy told him, only half-joking, “the two of us could probably put on a show.”

  Frank grinned but shook his head. “‘s beyond me, lad. Only know tunes, not t’stories. ‘s what’s important, end of day. Only t’music.” He took a deep breath, or tried to, coughing for a full ten seconds before spitting an unpleasantly dark splotch into his empty supper bowl. “‘s like t’alchemages. Ey thought ey controlled it. Didn’t. Didn’t know what was important. Not what t’magic did, but that it was. Tha ken?”

  “I... think so,” Izzy said after a moment, watching how Frank’s face looked only a little less gray than it had when the quarantine began. “It’d explain why Amicaldo only uses plots that come straight out of the penny histories. But I’d argue there’s still a powerful quality to the libretti—”

  Frank shook his head again and opened his mouth to argue, but his eyes widened, and he scooted back. Izzy turned in his chair—just in time to see the back of the mess tent explode.

  He stood up, knocking his chair to the ground, and Frank fell forward onto the table, coughing. A crackle of lightning shuddered from one end of the hall to the other, and over the resulting concussion came Peabody’s voice, raised in petulant fury. “—told you, told you three times already that I preferred my foods separate, and still you incompetent toads—”

  A hand picked Izzy up by the scruff of the neck, and he yelped. The tent shuddered again, and he caught a glimpse of Peabody, silhouetted against the flames that now consumed the back of the tent. “Shut it, Weskit,” Quint muttered, and knocked the table over. “Wondered how long it’d take that one to break.” He dragged Izzy behind it to join Frank just as a second bolt crackled over the Society guards. “He caught a lot of t’steam.”

  They huddled together behind the table. After a moment, Izzy realized Frank was humming to himself, a frantic tune that he couldn’t quite put a name to. He knew the rest of the tune, though, and began to hum the harmony, winking at Frank. Frank started, his rheumy eyes going wide, then continued, staring at Izzy as if his head had just sprouted a viola.

  “Balls. Leave t’me to save t’songbirds,” Quint muttered, then stopped as Izzy started to lean out from behind the table. “Don’t!”

  Izzy ignored him, peering out behind the charred table. Two Society guards l
ay on the ground between him and the remains of the mess tent, one so close that Izzy could have touched his outflung hand. Dark stains spread across their uniforms, and the closer one kept trying to breathe with a noise like broken sticks cracking. At the edge of the wreckage, Peabody regarded them as if they were no more than figures on a chart. He raised his gaze to meet Izzy’s.

  Cold washed over Izzy, like the inverse of thaumic steam, prickling and biting. Not what t’magic did, but what it was, he thought, and here in Peabody’s eyes was one shard of what it was. But Peabody still thought he controlled it. And if he did, then Izzy could use that—

  Izzy jumped up and ran—not away, not the sensible direction, but to the heater and what meager cover it provided. Peabody followed, pointing as if to select him for a task, and the same crackle of lightning gathered around him, louder than before.

  Izzy ducked behind the heater just before the bolt hit, enough time for him to hit the feedback dial. The vent thrummed to life, pulling in Peabody’s attack as if it were a lightning feeder from the roof of the Society. Then with a screech of broken bearings, the mass of power churning in the heater rebounded and refocused, turning outward.

  The resulting blast, electricity and thaumic backlash combined, swarmed over Peabody like a cloud of snakes. He staggered back, his expression never changing—not even as three Society guards tackled him from behind and brought him to the ground.

  Quint rose from behind the table, staring, then laughed—a genuine laugh rather than his usual menacing rumble. “Oy, Weskit! Nice work!” he called, and slapped Izzy on the shoulder so hard he stumbled forward.

  “Nice work,” Izzy echoed, staring at Peabody and the guards. He caught a lot of the steam. A lot. But not as much as I did.

  How long until I break?

  * * *

  “It was the way he looked,” Izzy said to Zen the next day. “I’ve never seen anyone look like that, not caring what he destroyed so long as he did.”

  “I imagine it was,” Zen said.

  “See, that’s what Amicaldo understands,” he went on, turning the lamp between his hands. “That was the whole source of the Field Afire scene in Tutivillus. I can’t believe it took me so long to connect that scene with thaumic contamination outbreaks, rather than actual madness. I think there might even be an echo of the elixir leitmotif. I’ll have to hear it again to be sure.”

  Zen was silent, tracing one finger back and forth on the table. She hadn’t bothered to switch the lights off this time.

  “Do you know that no one’s yet figured out his real identity? Amicaldo, I mean. And it’s not because the Capitol Opera’s hiding anything—they don’t know it either, they just get the scores. The Lighthouse gossip column’s convinced that he’s really an automaton, producing music in secret, but I think he’s more likely one of the Society high-levels. Or possibly a member of the royal family—”

  “I don’t care,” Zen said.

  Izzy stumbled to a stop. “What?”

  Zen rubbed her forehead. “I said I don’t care, Izzy. I don’t care who Amicaldo really is, I don’t care why he chooses those stories, and I don’t care about the opera.”

  “What—but you loved them! You were so excited in coming with me to Tutivillus, you’d even scheduled the extra day—”

  “It wasn’t the opera.” She looked away, biting her lip, and at that Izzy, too, had to look away. “I couldn’t care two pins for the opera; it just mattered that I’d get to spend some more time with you.”

  If his train of thought derailed before, now it had gone right off a bridge. Izzy stared at her, the tangle of thoughts—how much he’d missed Zen, the cold nights on his cot, the opera, the way her shoulders moved under the cloth of her shirt—snarling themselves hopelessly tighter.

  “This—this is part of procedure,” he said finally. “This is a second-level stress test, isn’t it? You pull out what will affect the subject most, right, and that’s what you knew would get to me.”

  “Oh, God damn it, Izzy.” Zen pushed her chair away and got up, turning her back on him. “You would say that, wouldn’t you?” Her shoulders shook once, and she stood straighter, facing the door. “I can’t do this any more. You’re well past first-level infusion, the blood tests show it. Only I hoped—” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I’m handing you over to the Society for second-level work.”

  “Zen—” He stood unsteadily, as if the floor might crumble under him.

  “I’m sorry. I hope you get out soon.” She put one hand on the door, still not quite looking at him. “I miss you, Izzy.”

  “Zen! Zen, wait—” By the time he’d made it around the table, though, the Society guard was there, preventing him from going further.

  The hall was quieter that night, partly from the destruction of the day before, partly because there were fewer in quarantine now. The silence just let Izzy keep going over Zen’s words. It didn’t help that someone had stolen all of his papers—probably to keep track of the card game tallies.

  And Frank would not stop whistling the same damned tune from the day before, the Amicaldo chorus that Izzy couldn’t quite place. Worse, he kept whistling the wrong sequence. “You’ve got it wrong,” he finally snapped after lights out.

  Frank paused. “Have I?”

  “Yes. It’s up a tri-tone, and then the eighth-note run. Like this.” He demonstrated.

  There was another long silence from the other side of the cloth. “Well,” Frank said finally. “Well, so that’s how ‘t sounds. Wondered, I did.” There was a long pause, punctuated only by Frank’s wheezing breath and the scratch of a pen on paper. “Well. Tha’d know better than I.”

  Izzy flung one arm over his eyes. “It’s not like this in the Lower Kingdoms,” he muttered. “They don’t have the thaumic ore there, they don’t have the history of alchemages....”

  “Then what do ey have?” Frank asked, and Izzy flinched at the kindness of the question.

  “Geothaums. Naturally occurring vapor vents. They believed it was all one unity of magic, just coming to the surface in different places. That’s why they didn’t have the alchemage wars; if you wanted to work magic, you had to make a pilgrimage to the geothaums, live in the steam, then travel home... by the time you made it home, either you’d expended it all or you had only what you needed.”

  “Did ey now,” Frank said thoughtfully. “‘s some trick, to hide it away like that.”

  “It meant they didn’t have so many crazy people setting everything on fire.” He sighed. “But it meant they didn’t have as much magic, either. So they were fair game for the conquerors.”

  “Eh, not so different, for all that ey’re far off.” Frank paused. “Could tha do it? Squirrel it all away, like Borzi the Thief used to do with ‘s wooden arm? Keep it so hid tha’d forget tha had it?”

  Izzy chuckled at the reference to Borzi; he hadn’t seen that opera in ages, but the wooden-arm gag had made him laugh so hard... even Zen had laughed, her eyes alight in the dim theater... and the darkness of the testing room... “I don’t know,” he said, driving away that memory. “Apparently they think I can, since they’re still keeping me here.”

  “Maybe. But to do it that way... could be, once t’ thaum had been kept in so long, ‘d change, be not so bad when it came out.”

  “So said the old lady, eating the hot pepper,” Quint rumbled from the other side. “Why don’t you pack up and go live with those Low Kings, if they got it so right?”

  “I didn’t say—that’s not—”

  “Then don’t say owt, Weskit. A man’s gotta sleep, and not with yer two warbling.”

  * * *

  They came for him at what passed for dawn the next morning, two Society guards dragging him off his cot and down the hall before he could do more than squawk in protest. Quint yelled something after him, but Izzy could no more understand it than he could stop the guards.

  The cell where they put him hadn’t been built for that purpose. It was an old storage loc
ker, stripped bare, the stains on the floor stinking of grease and cat urine. They chucked him in the corner and were back out the door before he could even get to his feet, locking the door behind them.

  “Hey! You can’t do this—this isn’t in the quarantine protocols!” He hammered on the door. “Someone get Zenobia Wilson, she’s in charge here! This is against Society rules, and, and against the law, and against jurist practice—”

  Nothing. Not even a breath of an answer. They’d chucked him down here and left, as if he were no more than a defective part. And, frankly, he didn’t know if it was part of second-level testing. “Zen,” he called, more softly this time. “Zen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything, just let me out. I’ll wait the two weeks. I’m sorry.”

  Still no answer. And none for the next few hours. What was even worse was that the tune Frank had been humming, that stupid unplaceable Amicaldo, had gotten lodged in his head.

  At noon—or after, he had started to lose track of time—someone threw a half a loaf through the window. There wasn’t even a laugh from outside, no sadist of a jailer amused by tormenting him. Just someone doing his—or her—job.

  He revised that opinion once the banging started. It seemed like machinery, but a machine would have some regularity, while this was an arrhythmic clang, loud enough to rattle his teeth and never quite consistent enough to let him ignore it.

  And the music in his head just would not stop.

  More time passed, long enough that he had to search for a grate in the corner and hope it didn’t lead anywhere but the sewers, long enough for him to find the werglass eye set high in the same corner. He turned his back on it, uncomfortable with the idea of anyone watching him. Especially Zen.