The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  “I don’t need your approval.” Kiesen storms off, following after the hooded woman. “She’s already agreed to take me if you won’t. They pay her to bring in recruits.”

  That’s who this woman is? She pretends to be a street magician to find potential recruits for the Frontiersmen, those who show some promise of understanding the elements? And she found Kiesen.

  Images roll over Jaycken’s memories like fog and solidify. He recalls his dreams when he first joined the Frontiersmen: making a discovery of the mystical elements, exploring the dead zone beyond galaxy, the last frontier … now Kiesen standing by his side.

  Despite the potential for embarrassment, Jaycken would enjoy living with his best friend again, sharing experiences, but maybe that desire is selfish. Kiesen will not be safe. If Jaycken is the only Frontiersmen in the family and something happens to him, Kiesen would inherit the family business, take it over and learn to operate it, or have someone else operate it for him and have an easy life.

  Jaycken dreams of becoming an Elemiscist, of being able to wield such power, but a smaller part of his conscious mind hopes he never controls much of the elements so that he will not be destroyed by them. So that when he’s older he can return home unaltered and unbroken.

  Now Jaycken will have to watch over Kiesen and keep him safe from the elements’ powers while Jaycken pursues his own desires and goals of rising in the Frontiersmen’s ranks.

  Kiesen disappears into the shadows between piers.

  A swarm of sailors from their carrack stare. Jasmonae shouts and motions for them to get back to work. The sailors hurry away, carrying locked crates, initiating a clanking of metal.

  Jaycken sees himself in Jasmonae’s stead, twenty years older, motioning for people to work harder, a driver or pilot of men instead of ships. The vision of himself ages before his eyes, still motioning for people to hurry as he’s fifty, then sixty. He will become his dad and experience no emotionally meaningful events other than birthdays, hopefully only a single wedding for himself, maybe Kiesen’s. Then he’s old and traveling to meet with other men of similar importance, never there for his own family, for the ones that really matter.

  Might as well be as old as Slyth already if I didn’t join the Frontiersmen. Maybe that’s what terrifies Kiesen about his own life … that and he’d rather be with me than stuck with Jasmonae.

  “Jennily and I’ll oversee the shipment from here back to the mountains,” Jasmonae says. “You’d better go and see your father before he has to leave.”

  A whoosh whoosh whoosh of flapping wings beats the night air overhead.

  Jaycken ducks and cringes. More flying things, his immediate fear as old as he can remember. But he can control this fear. Still hunched over, he glances up.

  A flock of gulls fights for landing spots atop posts and bray at each other. Beaks clack in protest. More wings whoosh and flutter.

  Jaycken stands erect. “Jennily, Jasmonae, take care of yourselves. Hopefully I’ll see you at the station in a few days.”

  “Try to take care of yourself as well,” Jasmonae says, and Jennily seems to slink behind her as if she wants to hide from something. Jasmonae holds out a package of some sort: rectangular, the size of a hand, wrapped in brown parchment paper. “It’s for Officer Ethanial. Nothing of value, but sentimental and time sensitive. For privacy’s sake, don’t look inside. He’ll know if the wrapping’s disturbed.”

  Jaycken grabs the package and runs after Kiesen.

  Cirx

  The barrel-wide torso of Cirx’s destrier, Kallstrom, rocks beneath him, the horse’s hooves splattering across the surface of the Eventide Sea. Foam and spray fling up onto Cirx’s armored feet and legs. Behind him, his son, Enix, and daughter, Erin, ride their water ponies, leaping over small swells and waves. Kitasha, his wife, follows on her courser.

  Cirx wonders if the serene nature of the ocean’s skin makes people forget the black heart that beats beneath it, that this beauty conceals a vicious struggle of life and death.

  He recently heard that equids of other planets can only walk on solid ground. Such creatures would not be of much use to him. The animals he has always considered horses have hooves composed of such buoyant keratin they can race across liquid surfaces, leap waves, and sink no deeper than they would into sand or tilled dirt.

  “Father.” Enix reins in his pony, his blond hair flopping like its own animal. “Erin is sitting in her saddle like a boy again.” His pony nickers to his sister’s.

  Erin tugs at her blue dress and swings one leg over to join her other. She brushes her hair behind her ears. “Am not.”

  Cirx lids his eyes, hunting for his elusive patience.

  Kindness was not something Cirx was raised with, not with his father, but he desires and attempts to raise his son and daughter differently, to break whatever cycle his grandfather passed on. A man’s life was not all about fighting and strength of arms and burying emotions where no one could find them.

  “Fiend Slayer!” a voice calls from across a set of surging swells. A messenger on horseback, in green leathers, waves. “The King bids you to return to the castle at once.”

  Cirx waves in reply, a sinking feeling churning in his gut. The messenger rides away in a spray of hoofbeats.

  Cirx yearned for a quiet ride with his family, a reprieve from his duties. Now his mind conjures up images of all that could await him: outsiders, treaties, parlays, subjugation.

  A wind, briny, damp, invasive, grabs at Cirx’s cloak and caresses his face and hair, lifting his locks with ghostly fingers. The swells around him murmur in a language that seeps into his bones, a language he understands.

  Cirx turns to his son and daughter. “Erin, you may ride however you please in the company of family. Only when others watch must we maintain our utmost dignity.”

  Enix’s lower lip slackens like loose reins.

  Erin giggles and sticks out her tongue.

  Cirx tightens his rein on Kallstrom as the first of a set of swells of green water roll beneath them. Wind rustles his steed’s long mane and tail, transforming the brown hair into banners.

  “Father,” Erin asks, “why’s the sea look blue sometimes, other times green, and why does rain always fall down to the Eventide instead of up into the Sky Sea?”

  Cirx isn’t sure how to answer any of her questions these days.

  “But Father,” Enix says, his tone sullen, “my friends say real control—”

  “Enix, the mightiest man grows strongest by controlling himself, not by controlling others.”

  “But, Father, you’re the Fiend Slayer, the mightiest of men.” Enix waves a wooden sword over his head, swiping at sea air as if it’s made of armored enemies. Whoosh whoosh whoosh. The oak blade speaks of great deeds.

  Cirx fights off the sinking corners of his lips. “Might isn’t found in a title.”

  Cirx has no idea what it is to be the Fiend Slayer of Staggenmoire. His renowned father cleared the world of its last great fiend, although the legend of a monster lurking somewhere in the deep persists. Rumors run around every dinner or party conversation he’s involved in, asking how he means to find the last hidden fiend. Some gossip of a house along a shore being whole one night and splintered by morning, a skin that could coat a whale washing up at some beach, a tooth as big as his horse, a whale’s corpse with bite marks like a man eating minnows, or another version that claims an entire whale skeleton washed up intact but the rest of it was supposedly digested before it was spit up and discarded by this fiend.

  The squelching clop of hoofbeats sound on the sea. “My mighty Fiend Slayer has a heart in there,” Kitasha says with a smirk. “May I ride to the castle with thee, my Knight?”

  Cirx shakes his head as Kitasha leans out and kisses his cheek. She scissors her legs, swings out of her saddle, and lands behind him. Kallstrom grunts and stiffens in response. Tender arms of warmth encircle Cirx’s neck. Lips press like wet emotion against his skin.

  “What have I done to
deserve the affections of such a lady of Staggenmoire?” Cirx turns to kiss her lips.

  “You keep trying.” Kitasha’s words are a warm breath in his ear. “No matter what.”

  “One last gallop, then.” Cirx digs his heels into Kallstrom’s stiff flanks, and the destrier lunges forward, water and foam splashing, salty on the mouth. Kitasha’s courser follows, guided by the reins still in her hand.

  The four of them ride over swells appearing like the dunes of the continent and thunder along the sea, laughing and shouting.

  Three lines of metal tracks carry from the continent in the distance and extend into the heavens, through the Sky Sea, to some kind of space station high above. Cirx only heard about this station, has never seen it, and he never intends to. Machines these new visitors call trains, made with clear glass walls, ride the tracks like he rides a destrier with his lance and bores through the Sky Sea from the space station.

  Cirx’s people have too much water; that must be what the outsiders really want. If only they would leave and never come back.

  He would love to fight them all, these newcomers, drive them away for good, but these visitors can vaporize anything with exploding bolts shot from metal weapons like crossbows, as they once demonstrated. They also have flying ships that seem more deadly than a hundred armies of knights. And these visitors told Cirx’s people that they sought peace and offered their “technology,” as they called it: lightning crossbows and even some of their ships, trading for the rights to mine in Staggenmoire’s hills.

  Too much water … Staggenmoire’s sky is a sea. It’s normal, the way it always was, always a tranquil, diffused turquoise as the binary stars that are their suns refract the hottest blue and white light through the water suspended in the atmosphere. Where the water thickens and grows leagues deep from the gravitational tidal currents of the thousand moons, night always lingers below. When the water’s depths shift around the planet and grow shallow in large regions, it allows daylight to pass through before the tide returns.

  Newer arrivals on Staggenmoire say that water suspended as a sea in the atmosphere is atypical compared to billions of miniscule droplets spread out into hovering splotches called clouds—floating white things that still could weigh millions of stones even though these clouds appear like weightless fluff sailing across the sky. On other planets, when the droplets suspended in the atmosphere as clouds begin to condense into sufficient water, they fall from the sky as rain. On Staggenmoire it always rains, a light mist or a bombarding downpour, but always rain.

  Cirx tugs against the roughened leather of his reins until Kallstrom settles to a jolting halt, his nostrils flaring as he snorts a plume of mist. Cirx dismounts, stands in shallow water near a cliff that soars a league skyward, and helps Kitasha slip down beside him.

  She seems distant now. Erin and Enix are not far behind.

  A drizzle of rain falls upon Cirx’s hair with a soft patter. Thick, gray fog swarms the rocky outcroppings above, hiding the home of his people: the castle on the peak, surrounded on all sides by cliffs that plunge a league to the booming surf of green and white. The Eventide Sea.

  Waves curl and crash against the cliffs with a roar, carrying pebbles and shells of pink and white as cold water rolls up around the soles of Cirx’s leather boots.

  Before this last year or so, no one knew any different. Too many things change far too quickly now. Although Cirx is only two-and-thirty years old, he feels like he should be forty decades older so that he can sit with the elders up on the castle walls, peering out from the crenellations with acid rising in his gut, discussing how the world is changing for the worse.

  Cirx should be wrinkled and old and be unable to ascend the tunnels inside the cliffs to reach the castle by himself. He should be sitting and watching the fog hover around the castle walls by a hearth fire, discussing the days of old with his Mir—what the males of his people called their closest male comrade—and their last days should fade away before too much else alters their world.

  His father drove the fear of the unknown into him, the fear of outsiders who would one day come and take everything from them. Cirx just expected them to be from across the Eventide, from his own planet, never from beyond the Sky Sea.

  His father was right. Cirx’s fingers settle around the steel longsword hilt at his waist and squeeze; his other hand falls from his shaggy brown locks to the breastplate and sigil of the three blue raindrops on his chest.

  What a world this has become.

  Water laps at Cirx’s ankles like the tongues of a hundred dogs.

  Cirx pats Kallstrom, his chestnut destrier, as he ponders his summons by the king. The stallion paws at the shore in search of fatty clams, his lips razing the water in sweeping strokes, tearing at clumps of green algae that slurp as they are pulled from the surface. His teeth crack open a bivalve mollusk and chew the mushy organism inside.

  Waves crash against pillars of rock hovering around the bay, the pillars appearing to support the low Sky Sea, a blanket of blue.

  Cirx eyes a dark opening within the cliff face ahead. The leagues of ascending tunnels inside the mountain are the only way for most people to arrive at the castle, a vigorous price to pay. Spear-toting guards lurk inside, his people’s defense against anything their world ever brought. The only other route for goods to reach the castle is through several pulleys and baskets up on the cliffs.

  “Try to listen and aid the king,” Kitasha says and hugs him, the warmth of her arms and body lost in his breastplate.

  Cirx caws like a bird to a crescendo and pitch so high it seems it could not have come from a human mouth. The symphony climbs the cliff as if a rock ladder.

  He waits.

  Enix’s and Erin’s ponies stop in shallow water seethed in green foam.

  A clatter carries back down, but nothing appears from the mist engulfing the mountain. A stone bounces, ricochets, plops into the sea, the only sign of something coming. Cirx scrutinizes the cliff overhead: gray and brown rock, jutting outcroppings, deep gullies. Green moss. A subtle movement.

  Cirx caws again.

  A spike of gray rock descends. Eyes open. A creature perfectly camouflaged slinks down from a terrace, rock becoming eight distinct limbs of fur. It approaches, the head and body like a jaguar, single piercing claws at the extremities of its eight legs, most buried into the cliffside. A saddle of gray leather extends from its back and faces upright. Cirx’s means of travel.

  The shoop shoop shoop of a morning gull comes from the sky as it skims the sea in search of flotsam crustaceans or mollusks, then wheels about. A single piercing claw of the cragcat lances out and spears the gull before bringing the white clump of feathers to its mouth with a crunch.

  The cragcat shrieks with a tone that rings Cirx’s head and forces his hands over his ears.

  Three speared limbs settle on the pebbly beach with a crunching of rock, sand, and shell: an invitation.

  As a knight, Cirx can ride a cragcat up to the castle rather than taking the inner tunnels.

  Cirx steps around the thick fur of gray, brown, and green, hoists himself onto the cragcat’s slippery saddle, and jams his feet into the stirrups.

  Erin, Enix, and Kitasha watch.

  Cirx wants to say “I love you,” but those words are too much, something he never heard his father whisper in his sweetest dreams. He raises his hand to his forehead and motions as if he were wearing his helm and raising his visor in respect. Enix does the same. Erin and Kitasha blow kisses.

  The cragcat leaps up the cliff, its claws impaling stone like silent pickaxes. Cirx’s legs tighten against the length of its back as he sits upright, the beast positioned vertically for walking the mountain. Mist pearls the air with gray tendrils; the jagged rocks and sea disappear into the shroud. The dark opening of caves pass by: cragcat dens.

  No matter how many times Cirx traveled this way, riding on the back of a predator moving parallel to plunging cliffs makes him nervous. Images of outsiders awaiting at the ca
stle barely distract him. He wobbles and sways with the animal’s ascension, an instinctive route, rising higher and higher.

  After several long minutes, the mist thins into ribbons. A flat of land emerges.

  ***

  A voice carries down the dim hallways, mixing with the flicker of flamelight, the clatter of steel armor, the damp and salty air: “Mir.”

  Torch sconces guide Cirx onward, his heavy boots an echoing march. A steel-armored body eclipses his path. Sir Garrabrandt: outstretched arms crossed and hands clenched in fists, raven-black hair and beard trimmed short around his head and jaws with the likeness of his absent helm. Eyes of glinting bronze. A single platinum pearl necklace tight against his throat.

  “My Mir,” Cirx says, crosses his arms, and bumps his fists against Garrabrandt’s.

  “They’re already with the king.” Sir Garrabrandt adjusts himself under his hauberk with a shift of the hips and a tug. “Three visitors. Different this time.”

  “Lead on.”

  Garrabrandt marches away, slower than typical. After winding through halls and up circling stairways, Cirx and his Mir await their summons outside the throne room.

  “How was the family ride?” Garrabrandt asks, more of a grunt. “Before it was interrupted.”

  Cirx shakes his head. “The usual. Enix trying to boss Erin around, or attack everything. Erin arguing with him or asking me questions even the old sages couldn’t answer.”

  Garrabrandt chuckles. He has four daughters and no sons. “At least they’re not crying all the time. I never know what to do or say to console them. Even those sages you speak of don’t understand the emotions of females ranging from two to three-and-ten years.”

  Cirx nods. A silent minute passes.

  Garrabrandt shifts uncomfortably. “I’ve been having strange dreams.”