Beneath Ceaseless Skies #129

by Austin, Alec

  Issue #129 • Sept. 5, 2013

  “On the Weaponization of Flora and Fauna,” by Alec Austin & Marissa Lingen

  “The Goblin King’s Concubine,” by Raphael Ordoñez

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF FLORA AND FAUNA

  by Alec Austin & Marissa Lingen

  It was the fifth year after our king’s exile to our verdant colonial lands that the fateful expedition returned to court. Before His Imperial Majesty’s arrival, I had spent my time in the jungles of my family estates collecting rare birds, or else in the preparation rooms and libraries cataloging them. While the terrain in this strange new country can be shifting and changeable, the light of science brings understanding to all, particularly those intrepid enough to search for the perfect specimen in lands that will alter under one’s very foot.

  However, His Imperial Majesty had brought with him both treasure and the royal favor, which he bestows upon those naturalists who can deliver the most fascinating, beautiful, and above all useful examples of the bounty of his new lands. Thus, I spent at least some of my time in the royal presence, for crumbs from the imperial table can be a feast indeed for an intrepid but not particularly wealthy noblewoman such as myself.

  As such, I was present in the imperial audience chamber when Plinio Gustavo Invicta presented the results of his expedition into the half-wild province of Corvesia; though not, alas, in any position to witness the first revelation of Plinio’s great discovery, as the Count of Nova Carthago was standing directly in front of me.

  “By the serpent!” the Count cried as I craned my neck and stood on tiptoe, trying to see past his plumed hat and the mountain of golden braid heaped upon his shoulder. “Such plumage! Such vibrant hues!”

  “Pardon, your lordship,” I said, giving up on catching more than a close-up glimpse of his hatband. “Perhaps you could be persuaded to grant a lady a glimpse of this prodigy?”

  Flushing with resentment at my invocation of the chivalric code, the Count edged to one side, allowing me a view of Plinio’s back as he brandished his specimen in a vain attempt to give the assembled courtiers a better view.

  I must confess that my first response was the conviction that Plinio had perpetrated a fraud upon the court. The jungle birds of Corvesia, as Barca’s Mapping of the Interior reports, are dark-feathered and resemble the Corvidae of our homeland, differing only in the tapering of their long bills. Corvesia, Barca explains, is far enough from the shifting lands that the wildlife is more predictable and easily classified than in the regions past the Imperial domain.

  Plinio’s specimen, in contrast, had veritable rainbows erupting from its wings and tail, with eyes and halo-patterns mingling with the stripes of color. I could easily discern why the Count’s admiration had been so effusive. No doubt he wanted such a plume to adorn his hat.

  “Silence!” the king thundered as raised voices filled the audience hall. “The bird is a pretty thing, but it is no prodigy. There are dozens of ornamental species littering the hinterlands.” He paused, just long enough to let his use of ‘ornamental’ sink in, before continuing, “Wherefore, then, have you brought this particular animal to Our attention?”

  “Your Imperial Majesty knows,” Plinio replied, “that I would not trouble you with the discovery of a purely ornamental species.” Courtiers nodded and murmured in agreement as he plunged on— the king was prone to grant naturalists who specialized in ornamental species appointments with his pet basilisk, and several were known to adorn the royal gardens. “In addition to its aesthetic properties, this remarkable creature— which I have named Phoenicis Joaoquim in your Majesty’s honor— can spit flames, and its feathers are resistant to fire. Gaspar, the lantern!”

  At this command, Plinio’s lackey, Gaspar, approached with a lantern whose wick blazed a brilliant sapphire. With more haste than grace, Plinio tore a plume from the purported phoenix’s tail and thrust it into the lantern. Beside me, the Count covered his nose with a perfumed handkerchief, but no smoke or foul scents emerged from the lantern’s depths, though the plume was visibly in contact with the wick.

  As the court’s shock gave way to scattered applause, the king raised his hand in a peremptory gesture. “This discovery has been worthy of Our attention. It is Our desire that all the naturalists here assembled should immediately depart with Plinio to discern what use may be made of this prodigy in war, and to prepare another expedition to Corvesia. It is manifestly to be hoped that the abundance of our new homeland will allow us the means of recapturing the old.”

  It was not for me, of course, to thrust myself forward. That was not the honorable course, nor would it have done me any good to be known as the kind of elbow-thrusting courtier who was at the front of every herd. On the other hand, I could not let such an opportunity escape me. It is a thing of grace and skill to ensure one’s name appears in the ears of those assembling such an expedition without putting it there oneself.

  My masterstroke, I think, was having been present at Plinio’s dissection and pointing out a duct that had decayed before the creature was embalmed, without which our understanding of the fire-breathing mechanism would have been set back considerably. After that, the expedition to Corvesia simply had to include the Lady Calixta—that is to say, myself—and her lackey.

  For I could not have prepared so hastily without the good offices of my lackey, Lygia. She is a doughty soul, one of the aborigines of this land, a broad-faced, golden-skinned girl who is as fast to prepare a dissolving potion for my specimens as she is with a comforting brew of an evening. Better still, she never mixes the two. While I was making sure of our welcome, Lygia was rolling stout stockings and packing cunning little collapsible cups and simply enormous quantities of tinned meat. We could have held a feast for the entire court and their country cousins on her supply of tinned meat—not that most courtiers would eat it, the pampered things—but Lygia insisted we would be glad of it by and by, as it is difficult to roast a fireproof bird for one’s luncheon.

  I have come to rely on Lygia. She grew up in the border territories and always thinks of such things.

  Plinio himself was the leader of our expedition, as he held the king’s favor and had brought back the bird in question. He had filled the rest of the party with a combination of explorers and nobles; the king’s favorite, the Duke of Apocrita, was obligatory, even though he peered quizzically at everything through his opera glass, which does not answer when one is scrambling along a rope in a muddy patch of jungle. The others, though, were old comrades of mine: Jovita Silveira, a jolly middle-aged lady who had helped me with my first dissection, and Roldao Cardoso, a glum fellow with long mustaches but the first man I would ask about a new bird—after myself, that is. Roldao also had the benefit of being very quiet and employing quiet servants also, which advantage cannot be understated when one is birding.

  The first few days out of court we rode long days through settled and stable country, singing songs and telling each other stories, some of them even true. The lackeys began to realize that if they told us their stories, we would listen and take them seriously.

  And that is what saved our lives on the fourth night, when we camped away from towns for the first time.

  Each of us—lackeys and nobles alike—carried pistols and shot as well as daggers. The gentlemen and I carried swords, which made Jovita scoff, for she said no jaguar or bandit respected a sword more than a well-aimed pistol, nor could you throw a sword as you could a dagger. When she said this, my own dear lackey Lygia spoke up.

  “Lady Jovita is
right,” she said. “There is a beast in these lands whose breath can rust away your steel as if it was a hundred years old. Best not to rely on those swords.”

  “Peasant stories,” scoffed the Duke. “No such creatures are mentioned in Barca, and his work is the authoritative volume on the subject.”

  “Lygia is a truthful girl and not given to misleading me,” I said sharply. “She has been with me many years. And she is from this part of the country, as you and I are not.”

  “I don’t see you throwing your sword by the wayside,” said the Duke.

  “No, but I will keep my powder dry,” I retorted, putting my arm around Lygia and leading her away. “Pay him no mind,” I told her. “He is a fool who thinks the king’s favor conveys wisdom. What does this creature look like, with its rusting breath?”

  “It comes from the shifting lands and is dark as night,” said Lygia. “It moves quickly and low to the ground, and some say it has many limbs and a lashing tail, though I have never seen it myself.”

  With the images that Lygia’s warning had conjured haunting my mind, I shared the first watch with one of Cardoso’s lads. While strange scuffling and hooting noises reached us from the jungle, the only beasts abroad were tiny mice, their eyes reflecting our campfire. When several hours had passed, I was glad to pass the watch to Lygia and retire to my bedroll.

  When Lygia woke me some time later, the jungle was silent and the mice were all gone.

  “What is it?” I asked in a hushed voice, reaching for my weapons.

  “The shadow that devours steel,” Lygia told me, and then there was a thrashing in the underbrush, and the beast charged our campfire, emitting a horrid screech.

  Lygia and I fired on the creature, but it was a blur undulating across a backdrop of darkness, and our shots went wide. Our shots roused the camp, and the Duke of Apocrita leapt from his tent, a blade of the finest Ciabolan steel clutched in one hand and a main-gauche in the other.

  The Duke’s fencing masters must have taught him better than they knew, for as the beast barreled towards him, he dodged aside like a bullfighter, lashing out with his sword, though the beast’s cries and exudations had already begun to corrode its metal. His sword pierced the cloud of darkness surrounding the creature before shattering, the blade shearing off halfway along its length.

  As the Duke gaped at what remained of his sword, the creature lashed out, knocking him off his feet before lunging for our cookware. Roldao and Plinio prudently left their swords sheathed and joined their lackeys in firing at the creature as it seized a cast-iron cookpot in its jaws. Pistol shots ricocheted from the cookware and perforated the Duke’s tent but hardly seemed to injure the beast. The barrage convinced it to retreat, however, and with a cry that left my ears ringing, the beast fled, taking our cookpot with it.

  “Is it gone?” Jovita inquired, training her pistols at the darkness surrounding our camp. As Roldao murmured that it seemed so, I approached the remaining cookware and found it dusted in iridescent black feathers. Even more shocking, however, was the state of the pans the beast had sampled and trod on before claiming the cookpot. The creature had rent them as if they were parchment.

  The Duke lay dazed in the midst of this chaos. His lackeys chafed his wrists, but he remained mostly insensible—more so, that is, than was his general wont.

  “This will not do,” said Jovita. “We will have to fashion a litter or travois so they can take him back to the nearest village.”

  I was sure this would bring the Duke to some level of consciousness—that protests would come flowing from his lips—but apparently the beast had done him more of a mischief than I had credited. His servants behaved more bravely than I would have in their place, barely waiting for dawn to set out with him, and I cannot say I was sorry to see him go.

  “We should proceed carefully, milady,” Lygia advised me as we watched them depart. “The eater of iron is a harbinger of still greater dangers, which would treat the king’s soldiers as if they were the tinned meat we carry.”

  I was about to ask Lygia what manner of creature could wreak such havoc but Plinio interrupted me, ready to instruct us to gather the beast’s feathers. He found we had already done so, even sorting them by size. “Eh, good, good,” he said. “His Imperial Majesty will thank me for my—er, our—initiative. I feel certain we are nearing the site where more of the birds we were seeking may be found—indeed, we will be adding a page to the histories. Possibly an appendix to Barca’s famous work! Perhaps they are related to the feathered shadow creature. We must maintain our vigilance.”

  “Of course,” said Roldao solemnly, saving Jovita and myself the trouble of a reply.

  “Lygia,” I asked as Plinio bustled off. “Pray tell, what did you mean by ‘still greater dangers’?”

  “Only that the tales say such creatures can grow very large, milady,” Lygia replied as she helped me stow our tent. “And very hungry as well.”

  With Lygia’s warning still echoing in my ears, our expedition set out into the wilds once more. But our progress was more difficult than anticipated, for contrary to our maps, we soon ran into a large, nearly perfectly round lake.

  “But this—this is not in Barca at all!” sputtered Plinio.

  “I thought you’d been this way before,” Jovita said.

  “No, my lady,” said Plinio’s lackey, Gaspar. “We have been to this part of the country, and to our destination. But in this exact track, no. And such a large lake, Lord Barca would have—”

  “I cannot understand it!” said Plinio. “It changes the terrain completely.”

  Indeed it did. While he was having his conniptions about Barca, Lygia and Roldao’s lackeys were gathering plants for pressing in the books in case they proved of interest. Meanwhile I was sketching a flock on the lake itself while Roldao took notes of their position and flight characteristics.

  “This is not where you found your specimen?” I said, not looking away from the flock on the lake, which, while lacking in the brilliant hues of the phoenix he had brought to court, shaded a great deal more into the blues and greens than we were used to seeing.

  “I told you, I’ve never been here before! By the serpent!” I thought for a moment that Plinio was merely adding emphasis to his avowal of pristine territory, but then I, too, noticed that the lakeshore opposite the birds was shifting. The flock organized itself quickly and took flight. Nor did I blame them: most avians prefer a stable coastline even on such a small body of water.

  I frowned. “Lygia, our instruments. Our route was to take us nowhere near the peripheries of His Imperial Majesty’s lands, and yet with last night’s commotion and the lake’s peculiar behavior, I fear we have gone off course somehow.”

  Roldao’s prodigious moustaches drooped, if anything, further. “That is a grave thought indeed, my lady Calixta, but I cannot say how it could have happened. Look.” He spread out his own maps to compare them with my own, and they were in agreement: no salient of the shifting periphery lay anywhere near our route. Nor, indeed, was there a lake anywhere to be found.

  “I expect Barca lied about the lake,” said Jovita cheerfully. “Probably it’s stocked with perch or trout or something of the kind and he wanted to keep it for himself rather than having to pay taxes on it, the pinch-penny.”

  “Probably he didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t done the thorough surveys he was supposed to be doing when he was lingering at the estates of the Marquess of Languecor and sampling her wines and her favors,” I suggested. “So he made them up. His Imperial Majesty will have to send out new parties to do them afresh.”

  “I refuse to hear a word against Barca, who is one of the most intrepid and astute explorers ever to grace these lands!” cried Plinio. “He was tricked, there is no way around it. Someone has placed this lake here since his survey in order to besmirch his reputation. But I am his loyal friend and will have none of it.”

  The rest of the party regarded him with as much courtesy as we could muster after a
night of interrupted sleep and a statement as extraordinary as that one. “And which of Barca’s rivals, pray tell,” Roldao enquired, his mustaches twitching, “would have the resources to move a lake?”

  Plinio’s reply was more sputtering than words, and his features were purpling with indignation when Lygia looked up from the surveyor’s theolodite and said, “Lady Calixta? I believe there are soldiers on the lake’s far shore.”

  “Soldiers?” Jovita said, blinking at the distant shapes that Lygia indicated. “You must be mistaken. If the king’s men had entered this area recently, Barca’s oversight would surely have been discovered.”

  “These are not the king’s men,” Lygia said in a leaden voice, and I followed her gaze past Roldao and his lackeys to the treeline, where a line of two dozen men wearing green and gray—not the azure and gold livery of the crown—trained muskets on us.

  We surrendered, of course. Even with all of Roldao’s assistants, we were outnumbered two-to-one, though it wounded me to the core to hand my sword over to the stone-faced lieutenant who commanded the rabble who had seized us. The gentlemen and I did not offer him our parole, though he seemed to imagine that such niceties were unnecessary, as we were marched through the jungle at bayonet-point. Particular care was taken with the surveying equipment Lygia had unpacked, and as the lieutenant and his men led us into a broad clearing that had been carved from the wood, it soon became apparent why.

  “Those are the Barca arms, are they not?” Roldao asked Plinio, gesturing at the elephant with its foot surmounting a globe that was carved into the façade of the massive sandstone mansion that stood before us.

  “Oh no,” Jovita said, shaking her head as our party was escorted up the steps, through the portico, and into the mansion’s entry hall, where the walls were covered in classical Carthaginian frescos and the grand staircase was flanked by crowned and rampant elephant statues. “Odilon Barca, what have you done?”