Issue #77 • Sept. 8, 2011

“Salvage,” by Margaret Ronald

“Gone Sleeping,” by Heather Clitheroe

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

SALVAGE

by Margaret Ronald

        Colonel Dieterich closed the maintenance panel below the airship’s secondary propeller, sending a puff of gray dust cascading over the mesa. “Well, it looks fine, despite the rough landing,” he said. “I should be able to fly us out of here.”

        I brushed dust from my trousers. “Not that I’m accusing you of hubris, sir, but I’m sure others have said the same thing, and, well—” I gestured to the shambles just beyond our little airship: the shattered undercarriage of a wrecked dirigible much larger than our own. The high, sagging dome scaled with thousands of bronze plates verdigrised by half a century’s disuse gave the derelict Chiaro the look of some great fish dragged from its home. Beside it, our little propeller-driven airship was no more than a sneeze.

        Dieterich’s heavy brows lowered in an irritated glare. “Yes, well, they weren’t flying a ship of my design, now were they? Nor were the other idiots who tried to land on the far side of the wreck, with their ridiculous ‘salvage blimp’—” He stopped as a ramp unfolded from the side of our ship. “Don’t tell the Professora I said so,” he added in an undertone.

        I nodded assent as Professora Lundqvist descended from our airship onto the mesa. Her tank sloshed gently as her wheels reached the uneven ground, and the sensor ring on top of her tank rotated one way, then the other. “Professora,” I ventured, “are you sure you ought to be out?”

        “Quite sure,” she responded, her phonograph translating not only her words but her air of dismissal. “Would you rather I stayed put, like some kind of potted plant?”

        “I’d rather you stayed back in town,” Dieterich grumbled, getting to his feet. “You have no business being along on this mission, Lundqvist; you’re too easily damaged.”

        “Phidias was my student. That makes it my business.” She pivoted back and rolled some distance away. “If one of your students decided to go off on some harebrained salvage mission that then crashed in hostile territory, I’m quite certain you’d do the same.”

        The Colonel sighed. “In that case, we’d best make our way around and examine where his blimp crashed. At the very least we can learn how they—damn it all, Lundqvist!”

        The Professora had already moved on, trundling across the mesa. Grumbling about damnably stubborn brains in damnably stubborn jars, Dieterich followed after her, tugging his greatcoat over his shoulders, then paused as he realized I wasn’t following. “Coming, Charles?”

        “In a moment, sir.”

        I’ve traveled with the Colonel too long to keep certain moods secret. He turned back to face me, arms folded. “You’ve been out of sorts since... well, since we got word about Phidias, at least. Mind telling me what’s wrong?”

        Since longer than that, to be truthful, but I didn’t blame the Colonel for looking to the proximate cause. “I don’t much like derelicts, sir.” Truth, if not the whole truth.

        Dieterich chuckled. “Me either, honestly. They’re too strong a reminder of mortality. But,” he added, stumping after the Professora, “as I said, our little ship should be just fine. Don’t worry so.”

        “If you say so, sir,” I murmured, gazing up at the plates that had once armored the Chiaro’s dirigible sac, now unhinged by time and age.

        It was not that I held the misunderstanding against the Colonel. He might see it as a theoretical memento mori, but the shattered metal and gears of the Chiaro were a little too similar to the mechanical augmentations that ran through my own flesh. It was understandable that he would forget, given that for a number of reasons I had to keep my nature a secret from all but him and the Professora, but I was never unaware of it. I had been designed and altered with as much care as the Chiaro had been, and though I might no longer use my Merged elements in their original cause, I could not so much as draw breath or even blink without remembering them.

        We left the sagging dome of the dirigible sac unexamined, since despite its awe-inspiring bulk it was no more than a shell. Instead we crept into what little of the undercarriage remained. According to the old broadsheets, when the pilot’s control over the mighty airship broke at last, giving way to the many wounds inflicted by the automata of Parch, the undercarriage had dragged along the top of the mesa and left nothing behind.

        This proved only partly accurate; while the lower levels had been demolished entirely, a few of the higher ones remained. We wrangled the Professora over the shattered beams, ignoring her grumbling at having to be manhandled so, and I wrenched open a gap in what had once been the floor of the second-class compartments. “The gilding’s still in place,” I said as we clambered through. “It looks untouched.”

        “Of course it’s untouched,” the Professora muttered. “Only idiots come up here. And yes, I am including Phidias in that assessment.”

        She had a point. The Chiaro had remained undisturbed for two very good reasons: the bitter winds that wreathed the mesa and had given us such a rough landing, and the automaton town of Parch to the east. Automata, thinking machines, were not particularly bellicose, but they were fiercely protective of anything they considered their territory. The Chiaro itself had proved that by straying into Parch’s airspace, and that had been its downfall: the vaunted plating of the sac proved ineffective as armor but very effective as ballast. The wounded dirigible had limped away and crashed in disputed territory, so any official recovery attempts were scrapped.

        Which left the unofficial, the underfunded, and, inevitably, the disastrous attempts. And, sure as gravity, people like the Professora to clean up after those attempts, bringing along people like me in her wake, who were just as adrift as the damaged Chiaro had been.

        Behind me, Dieterich turned in a slow circle. “They still tell stories about the crash, you know.”

        Lundqvist made a sharp, chattering noise, something her phonograph could not quite interpret into speech. “I’m sure they do. Charles, could you move this beam? Dieterich, do give him a hand; your valet can’t do all the work.”

        “He already makes all the tea,” the Colonel said mildly, but winked at me. We heaved a large beam—glittering with fine strands of werglass—out of an arched doorway, now at a 30-degree angle. “Last time I was back home,” he went on, “they even made it part of the pantomime. Something about self-sacrifice, the men and women who’d signed on as thaumaturges giving their lives to keep the Chiaro aloft while the passengers evacuated. They’d even brought an actress from the Capitol to play Raisa the pilot, dying in her throne....”

        I caught his eye, and he shrugged. “Melodrama, of course,” he added sheepishly.

        “Good lord,” the Professora said, and when we looked up from the beam, we understood why. Even the most luxurious airship I’d traveled in was still at heart a transport, and so every space had been used. Here, the makers of the Chiaro had flaunted their wealth through empty space. Even though the walls had been twisted by the crash, this was unmistakably a ballroom. Parquet floors sloped from a low angle at one end to the opposite angle at the far end, like an ocean wave, and each inlay gleamed with gold leaf.

        It was not the only mark of excess. “Look,” Dieterich said, pointing to the walls. High panels of molded werglass glowed weakly. “I haven’t seen this much waste since my brother’s wedding,” he added, but in a tone of wonder rather than condemnation as his reflection pointed back at him.

        “There’s werglass spun through the whole thing,” the Professora said, rolling with some difficulty toward a broken gap in the wall. Dust from the mesa had sifted inside, limning the long, broken strands of glass that ran through the wall like horsehair through plaster. A faint, greasy glow sparked as she drew back, a sign of thaumic distillation worked into the glass.

        “But that would make every wall worth a king’s ransom,” I said.

        “Several kings,” she acknowledged, using one of her two styli to pry aside a fragment of werglass. “The thaumaturges who managed it must have been able to perceive the entire structure.”

        I shivered, and not just because of the wind leaking through the broken walls. Airship thaumaturgy was based on the link between man and machine, a machine controlled directly by human concentration, by carefully trained experts whose mental discipline simultaneously kept them separate from the machine and cognizant of its flight. I was the opposite: my machinery was completely integrated, to the point where I no longer perceived it as something outside my self. My eyes itched from the pressure of multiple lenses behind them, and for a moment I was very aware of the thrum of the engines that passed for my heart.

        My reflection watched me from a cracked werglass panel, streaked down the middle with blackish-green where the ore had seeped out from the crack and solidified. From outside I looked human, but only the same way that from a distance the Chiaro looked intact. But the thaumaturges of the Chiaro had not considered their airship any more alive than their pocketwatches. I smiled nervously, and after a second, the reflection smiled too. Werglass reflections, and their delay, will never cease to unnerve me.

        “Halloo!” Dieterich yelled from the next room over, and I hurried over the warped parquet to reach him. Here, a small tea-salon had been turned on the opposite side from the second-class compartments, as if the whole undercarriage had been corkscrewed. A broad staircase had once been meant to sweep down into what I assumed had been passenger cabins; a smaller, less ornate one led to a more utilitarian door that still sported an embossed gold seal. “Halloo, anyone there?”

        No answer. The Professora’s springs sagged. “I can’t make it over those stairs,” she murmured. “Charles, Dieterich, let’s go back outside and around to the salvage mission wreck—”

        A tiny quad-bolt, no longer than the last joint on my little finger, dropped from the staircase above, coming to rest against the Colonel’s boot. Slowly, like a broken wind-up toy, a man’s face peered down from behind the little door with the gold seal. “Who,” he said, then blinked and donned a pair of cracked eyeglasses. “Professora? Is that you?”

        “Phidias.” Lundqvist rolled to the foot of the stairs. “You are a royal idiot, first-class, do you know that? Come down here this instant.”

        Her former student obeyed, still moving as if he was unsure how arms and legs worked. “Professora,” he said again, and smiled. Even with three weeks’ beard and a dry, unwashed aroma to him, his smile remained as brilliant as if we were at a Society function. “I’m so glad you came,” he added, resting his forehead against the top of her tank, sand-colored hair flopping lank over her sensor ring.

        “So am I, Fiddy. So am I.” She was silent a moment, then rolled back. “Where are the rest of your team? What happened?”

        “Windstorm?” the Colonel offered.

        “Not quite,” he said, walking past us to a breach in what had once been the floor but now made one of the walls of the tea-salon. “We’re near Parch, remember? One moment we were about to land, and then—” He shook his head. “I thought I’d seen something on the ground, but it was too late—the first shot knocked us out of the sky, and the second finished the job. I’m surprised you made it past them.” He drew a shaky breath. “As for your other question—” He opened the window, then turned away. “There.”

        I risked a glance over the Colonel’s shoulder. Six mounds of earth marked a line tucked against the side of the Chiaro. “Fiddy,” the Professora whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

        He managed a shrug, but his eyes were red. “We knew it was a risk to come up here, but we thought those damned Parch clankers wouldn’t be guarding it. Most of my team died in the crash, and the ones that didn’t... I’m no doctor, Professora. I was never good at field medicine.”

        The Colonel bowed his head. “You’ve been here alone, then?” I said.

        Phidias started. I regretted speaking up; my status with the Colonel and Professora might be more informal, but to the Society at large I was still only the Colonel’s valet, no more than a fixture in the background. “It wasn’t so bad,” he said, turning to the Professora. “And we’d brought enough rations and water for seven... I haven’t even really put a dent in that.”

        “Yes, well, we’ve come to take you home, Fiddy. I can cover your debts, and then you and I are going to have a long talk—”

        “Home?” He looked up, alert for the first time. “No, no, I can’t go home yet. You don’t realize what they did when they made this ship.”

        “What, burned heaps of money in a furnace?” Dieterich muttered.

        Phidias shot him a glare. “No, you—no, nothing like that.” He held up a thin sliver of werglass so dark it practically stank of thaumic contamination, then fumbled in his coat and produced a folded blueprint. “Raisa, the pilot—you remember the stories? She wasn’t just the pilot; she designed the whole thaumaturgical linkup, and she was so ahead of her time I can barely decipher her work. But the linkup is entirely different—it’s based on parallel, rather than serial mode.”

        I glanced at the Colonel, since most of that had gone over my head. To my dismay, he looked thoughtful, and the Professora’s tank had begun to bubble. “You mean a multiply enhanced link,” he said, tugging at his mustache. “Compartmentalization.”

        “Exactly!” Phidias beamed at him. Myself, I was still lost. “Exactly. They haven’t tried to make anything on the scale of the Chiaro since the crash, but if a parallel link process could be developed, it would revolutionize airship design. I’m almost on the verge of deciphering it—please, just a little longer, and I’ll have it. You can even take the credit before the Society if you want, I don’t mind, it’s not as though they’ll have me back—”

        “Don’t talk like that, Fiddy,” the Professora said. “If you make a discovery, you claim credit. Simple as that.” She rotated to face Dieterich. “We’ve got the provisions. And don’t worry about me; I had my tank changed before we left.”

        “Then it’s settled!” Phidias clapped his hands. “I’ll bring down the unit log—”

        A thump and rattle sounded from the depths of the Chiaro, and Phidias froze. “Not another one!”

        “Another—”

        Phidias paid no attention to the Colonel. “They’ve been coming here, coming to steal her—” He clenched the banister so tight his fingers turned white, then clambered up the skewed staircase and returned with several loops of heavy cable. “Help me. If we trip it, we can tie it—”

        The Colonel glanced at me and nodded to the Professora. She made an irritated noise, but I put my back to her tank, ready to defend her.

        Since Phidias wasn’t looking, I leaned over and exerted some of my Merged strength to wrench a bent pipe from what was left of the wall. But as I straightened up, a glimmer flickered in the corner of my eye—not from below, but behind, in the ballroom.

        “There!” Phidias whispered. “Do you see it?”

        “Yes,” I said, but in truth I wasn’t sure what I saw—something like the reverse of a shadow, a glimmer of reflected light passing from one pane of werglass to another. Sunlight, I told myself despite the heavy cloud cover outside, or some Merged reaction to the werglass. Shivers running down through my bones, I raised the pipe, backing up against the Professora—

        A shriek and clatter echoed behind me, and I spun to see Phidias clinging to the back of what looked like a four-legged metal spider. Dieterich swung his end of the cable and lassoed the thing’s legs, and the whole mess toppled over, chattering in a blur of unintelligible static. “That’s it!” Phidias yelled, scrambling away. “That’s one of them!”

        “An automaton?” the Professora said. “From Parch?”

        The machine looked up at her—a strange gesture from something that had neither head nor eyes. Instead, something like a scarab had been welded onto the front of it, and this rotated as it got a better look at us. “Parch,” it repeated in a surprisingly dulcet voice.

        “Oh, this isn’t good,” Dieterich muttered.

        I was not accustomed to the sentient automata that populated the Hundred Cities, and had always assumed they would be larger. This one, however, stood only about a foot taller than me, its legs folding out from a central core as wide as the Professora’s tank. The speaker at the base of the machine’s “head” thrummed, and a stream of atonal syllables issued forth.

        Dieterich shook his head. “None of us speak Lower Kingdom.”

        The automaton clacked, a sound that somehow echoed one of Lundqvist’s irritated sniffs. “I speak Imperial. Not well.”

        “I thought this was off-limits to both sides of the border,” said the Professora.

        “Rule of Parch, yes. Rule of earth, no. I follow rule of earth.”

        Dieterich drummed his fingers against the crumpled samovars, scarred brown digits tapping out an irregular rhythm. “So you’re here in violation of Hundred Cities law?”

        Its central column swiveled in place. “Rule of Cities, rule of earth. I am here for, hhhnn,” the speaker twitched as it thought, “pilgrimage.”

        “What?” I took a step closer, forgetting that I still held the pipe, and the automaton twitched, focusing on me.

        “That’s ridiculous.” Phidias got up from his place at the foot of the tilted staircase, his fists clenching and unclenching.. “Ridiculous. And the ones who shot us down, were they on ‘pilgrimage’ too?”

        It swiveled again. “Might be.”

        Phidias’ lips curled. “Then they’re in violation too,” the Professora said smoothly. “In the meantime, I intend to stay put.”

        “And for better reasons than that—thing,” Phidias snapped. “It’s a machine. Machines don’t have a religion. If you believe that ‘pilgrimage’ rot, then you’re—”

        “Belief isn’t the matter here,” Dieterich paused, glancing at the automaton. “Do machines have a religion?”

        Phidias snorted, and for the first time I found myself in agreement with him. Obviously, machines didn’t bother with such matters; the idea was as foolish as... as life remaining in a derelict airship. I cast a glance over my shoulder at the empty ballroom, shivering.

        The automaton’s insides churned a moment, an unpleasantly grinding noise. “No,” it said finally. “But this one will make her circuit regardless.” It rose up, snapping the cable as if it were no more than frost-killed straw. “This one is Transit-born, chosen female, designated Chaff.”

        Though he’d flinched back at the sight of the cable breaking, Phidias snorted at the “chosen female” bit. “Some automata do choose a gender,” Dieterich pointed out.

        Chaff nodded. “Stayed female fifty years. Before that, neuter. Considered gender a fad for younger mata. Changed mind before beginning Path.”

        “You don’t look much like a thresher,” I said.

        Chaff’s eyes swung toward me. “Do you look as you did when natal?”

        “Charles,” the Professora said softly, and I quieted. Behind her, a faint glimmer passed over the shattered werglass in the wall, gone before I could be sure that anything had provided that reflection.

        I shivered and glanced again at the empty ballroom, trying to convince myself that I’d seen nothing, a task that might have been easier had I not known I’d been designed to notice unusual things.

* * *

        The next few days passed far too slowly for my tastes. Phidias scrambled all over the remnant of the Chiaro, ranging from his little nest in the pilot’s cabin with cutting torches and saws in hand, claiming that the residue of Raisa’s work remained in the werglass logs in the “unnecessary portions” of the ship. I couldn’t argue with the fact that much of the Chiaro seemed unnecessary, but as wall after wall gave way to his incessant banging, the resulting headache seeped into my skull and would not leave. It didn’t help that he liked to sing as he worked, and though I couldn’t make out the tune, the echoes of it were deeply unnerving.

        Dieterich, for his part, proved much the same as his role at the Society: place a puzzle in front of him, and he was happily enthralled. Occasionally, he tried to find a way into the thaumaturgy chamber, since airtight emergency doors had shut that section off, presumably so that any fires that started in the airship would not affect the thaumaturges. Since the Professora was limited to those parts of the wreck that her wheels could traverse, she spent much of her time in the tea-salon, brooding.

        Myself, I tried to find reasons to stay out of the wreck. But there were few other places to go—our cramped propeller ship, the smeared wreckage of Phidias’ salvage expedition, or the barren mesa itself. Cold, dry wind drove grit into my eyes when I ventured outside, and though the heavy gray sky above threatened rain, I knew anything that fell would evaporate long before it reached us.

        The Chiaro wreck itself was little more hospitable: at one end was the uncanny ballroom, at the other a nest of airtight doors blocking off the thaumaturgy chamber. The pilot’s cabin itself was Phidias’ domain, though I hardly grudged him the space, since that must have been where Raisa herself had died. To reach the Professora, I had to cross that warped parquet floor, and every time I entered the ballroom I had the sensation of being watched. My mechanical reflexes remained alert, but with nothing to lash out at. And though I had passed for human for decades, here I was far too aware of what ran in my bones as surely as thaumic distillation ran through werglass. I slept poorly, dreaming of the metal inside me, of the airship coming alive around me as my own body betrayed and devoured itself, and woke to a ship that should have been empty and dead. But the occasional glimmer, trick of the light or my eyes or something more, made that “should have” more of a hope than a statement.

        If Phidias had been through three weeks of this on his own, no wonder he was such a wreck.

        My nerves went from unsteady to outright paranoid when, late one afternoon, I heard a tenor voice, clearer than it had ever been, echoing from the Chiaro. I picked my way through the second-class cabin, gooseflesh prickling my skin. It was a sentimental love song, the kind to which swains add their beloved’s name: even the wind follows your steps/but not as close as I/Raisa, Raisa....

        The name sent a fresh shiver down my back, and I stumbled, knocking over a broken bench. The singing stopped, and quick footsteps receded. I hurried through the door in time to see the glimmer shivering across the panes on the far side of the ballroom. To either side Phidias’ reflection, slower than he was, turned and ran. But deeper in the glass, held in the reflections of reflections, he was still dancing, arms extended to nothing.

        I started after him, then stopped as I realized the light in the room was dimmer than it should have been. I turned to the gap in the wall, only to see a blank scarab-face staring back. “Chaff,” I breathed, but the automaton turned away, its shadow following.

        I squeezed out through the wall, werglass bristles dragging at my trousers, and landed on the uneven mesa with a thump that sent dust spiraling out. Chaff made no move to elude me, forelegs folding to bring it closer to the earth. “Chaff,” I said as I reached it. “What did you do to him?”

        It leaned further, tapping its body against the ground, then rose. “Specifics?”

        “The glimmer—Phidias. What he was dancing with. You’ve been projecting that, haven’t you?” A coil tightened, somewhere in my gut. “You did, didn’t you? You did something to the werglass, made that glimmer. He was dancing with it.”

        Chaff was silent a moment. “I am not so strong,” it said finally. “Nor so active.”

        I caught my breath, startled no less by the machine’s serenity than by its tacit agreement that the glimmer was not my imagination.

        It continued walking, stopping every five paces in what I assumed was an approximation of prayer. “Pilgrimage of the Path is not worship, but consideration. Meditation on the liminal states. Here, on sin as well.” It bent again, this time murmuring a chatter of machine-talk. “I contemplate the echo of flesh in machine and the great sin behind it. Contemplation is not what that one wants.”

        The echo of flesh in machine. I put one hand to my chest, very aware of what passed for a heart there, of the thaumically infused flesh that kept me alive and running. Chaff’s life, if it could be called that, sprang from the residual thaumic infusion of her body; I was not so different, for all that I counted myself mostly human. “But if you truly mean what you say,” I went on, not quite able to believe I was entertaining the possibility, “then why did you tell the Colonel that the machines had no religion?”

        Chaff’s central column pivoted, the result very like a person cocking her head to one side. “Because he used the singular.”

        It took a moment for that to settle in. “You mean there’s more than one?”

        Chaff made a winding-up noise, and abruptly I recognized it as a chuckle. “One? That is like saying, hhhhn,” she paused to consider, “all flesh has one favorite music. Many kinds. And some prefer no music, or pictures instead.”

        “Many kinds,” I echoed.

        “Many and many.” Her scarab tilted. “Path of the Earth, best. Noughts, fine but talk too much, do little. Monastic Column, broke off from Path some time ago, idiots. Way of the Steel Emperor, all stripped gears, bent ratchets... also smug. Yes. Smug is right.” Chaff chuckled again. “In Parch, ninety-two sects, three hundred mata. Interesting conversations. Of those ninety-two....”

        She went on, speaking more quickly, interspersing automata chatter and Lower Kingdom words. I could already feel my eyes glazing over at the thought of an hour-long discussion of sectarian beliefs among the automata.

        Chaff turned to face me. “You would hear Path of the Earth?”

        “I—” Although proselytizing automata might be worse.

        “Charles! A word with you!” Dieterich emerged from underneath our little airship, then paused as he saw Chaff. “Now, please, Charles.”

        I followed Dieterich behind our airship. “Yes, sir?”

        “Get Lundqvist and young Phidias. Make him pack up every last splinter of glass if that’s what it takes, but we’re leaving as soon as I get this repaired.”

        “Gladly, sir,” I began, then stopped. “Repaired?”

        “Yes.” He opened a panel under the propeller mount and gestured at the cables within—and the very noticeable gap where the cables ended. “Repaired. The motivating element’s gone. As well as half our fuel—enough that descending will probably be interesting.”

        “Stolen? You’re sure?” Dieterich gave me a look. “Sorry, sir. But who—”

        He chomped on his pipe thoughtfully. “Phidias is too scatterbrained, I think, to manage any real sabotage. Chaff, though... I rather like automata, Charles, but they don’t think the same way we do.”

        I thought of Chaff’s meditation on sin. I’d been so baffled by her that I hadn’t asked why she had been watching Phidias, or what the glimmer really was. I pushed away my lingering unease over the glimmer to concentrate on the more real, present problem. “It’s possible.”

        “More than possible. And certainly it would be convenient for the Parch automata if we did not return.” He ran one hand over the fringe of tight gray curls that was all that remained of his hair. “I can rig the ship to fire without it, but I don’t want to risk another sabotage. We’re leaving now.”

        I hurried back inside the wreck, scrambling over splintered benches, casting glances over my shoulder for Chaff. “Professora! Phidias!”

        “Here, Charles.”

        I paused at the door to the ballroom. The Professora stood before one of the mirrors, her brain reflected as no more than a pale smear against the glass. “Professora,” I said, not liking either how my voice echoed or how my reflections bent one after the other to follow her. “How soon can you pack up?”

        “Hm? Oh, a few minutes, I suppose.” She didn’t move, though. “Charles, could you do me a favor?”

        If it would get her moving, I’d do anything. “Certainly, Professora.”

        “I know you can see properly. Would you do so now?”

        I hesitated. The Professora and Dieterich both knew my nature, knew that my eyes were only one of the many parts of me that no longer had a claim to being human.

        “Your secret will be safe. Phidias is off cutting through walls to get to his lost Raisa, so he won’t see you.”

        At that I started. “You knew?”

        She let out a long, slow noise, not unlike a sigh. “Fiddy and were close once. I can tell when he’s in love. Please, Charles.”

        I blinked, then focused, lenses sliding in front of my eyes as they adjusted, the pressure in what in humans was the sinus cavity building into a slow headache. “What exactly am I looking at?” I said, flicking from lens to lens.

        “The glass, Charles. And I think you’ve seen it too.”

        My mouth was dry, and I forced away the memory of Phidias dancing with nothing. “A ghost?” I managed, failing to imply that the idea was foolish.

        “That’s what Fiddy thinks,” the Professora said simply.

        I shifted the last lens into place and caught my breath. Through the altered lenses of my Merged physiognomy, the werglass to every side flared and flickered, energy chasing through it like a flock of birds in the air, like fire across a grass plain. “There’s a trace of power still moving through the glass.” Not a ghost, after all, but residual energy, something left over from its former use. No more a ghost than the lenses I used were an intruder in my body. “It’s not coherent, though. The glass isn’t in use, it’s just still powered. Somehow.”

        “I thought so. My senses aren’t exactly the same as yours, Charles, but I could still tell something about the glass....” She sighed, her springs relaxing. “Do you know what they warn us about in theoretical thaumics?”

        “It’s not my department,” I said, still staring.

        “Embodiment. Loss of self. It’s worst for the thaumaturges; there’s a reason most airships only keep them on short shifts. When you’re using your mind to control an entire airship, it’s easy to lose oneself in the body of the machine.” She flexed her each of her styli in turn, like an artist examining her hands. “It’s almost the opposite of what they tell anyone going through the acorporeal treatment.”

        Echo of flesh in machine, Chaff had said.

        “They’ve tried to transfer the human mind to automata, you know. Failed, repeatedly. You and I are as close as they’ll ever come to that, and my position is hardly enviable.” She chuckled, sadly. “But dying while linked isn’t yet fully understood. And now Fiddy... Fiddy believes he’s fallen in love with a ghost.”

        “An echo,” I said. And a sin? What was sin to machines?

        “Charles, I need you to do one more favor for me.”

        I adjusted my eyes back to normal, wincing at the pressure. “Professora, the Colonel has said we need to leave immediately.”

        “So we shall. This will only take a moment. And it will make the leaving easier.”

        The favor in question was simple enough: put down a ramp so that the Professora could finally reach the little pilot’s cabin where Phidias had been working. She waited in the salon, listening to the muffled cacophony as Phidias cut yet another section of undercarriage away, while I wrestled several fragments of benches into place and helped her wheel onto them.

        The cabin was the one part of the Chiaro that resembled any other airship: crammed with equipment, werglass consoles on swinging frames so that a quick pilot could shuffle between them when needed without bothering to consult the thaumaturges—the ones who must have been on the far side of the sealing door at the end of the chamber, I realized. Instinctively, I turned to the heavy chair built into the wall: the main throne, from which the pilot could run the whole dirigible in case of thaumaturgy failure. It was empty. “Raisa—she should be—”

        “Fiddy probably buried what was left,” Lundqvist said absently, turning over lenses. “If there was anything—it looks like the fire came through here, even if Fiddy’s been polishing it up.” She motioned to blackened, ashy marks on the werglass, the crazed and leaking lenses.

        Phidias’ blankets and foul-smelling clothes lay in a heap, swaddling shards and irregular blocks of werglass. “This can’t be his research,” I murmured. “I don’t think even the Colonel could draw anything from this.”

        “Which is why he kept Dieterich working on the larger pieces,” Lundqvist said over the growing din of Phidias’ work. “Poor Dieterich. He might play the hardened military man, but he’s too trusting.” Her lower stylus lifted disintegrating leather straps and dropped them again. “The werglass is useless, Charles. There is no hidden breakthrough.”

        “Then why stay?”

        The Professora hissed. “Charles, look.” She glided back half a pace. “This throne is not meant for proper thaumaturgy. No one in a meditative mudra could sit here. Nor would they need to be strapped in.”

        I got to my feet. “You think—”

        “There are scratches on the armpieces. Small, but present. And the neural tap—” Her stylus drew back, as if fearing contagion.

        I looked where she gestured. Near the top of the throne, where Raisa’s head would have rested, there should have been a werglass knob. Instead, a dull metal spike gleamed with tracings of glass. I shuddered at the sight of it.

        “That is anything but temporary, Charles. I always wondered how the Chiaro even got airborne—it was too big, you’d need dozens of thaumaturges on repeated shifts, not the six plus Raisa that the broadsheets lauded. And with the werglass—that would just make things worse, the thaumaturges would have been aware of the entire damned ship, not just the propulsion. Unless they weren’t kept on shifts. Unless they were irrevocably wired into the machine.”

        I adjusted my eyes to see the scratches better. Heroic sacrifice, Dieterich had said of the pantomime back home. But what worth was a forced sacrifice?

        The scratches on the throne became clearer, as did something else. The tarnish of fifty years’ disuse had been scraped away. “Professora, these scratches—”

        The constant clang of Phidias’ investigations suddenly turned deafening. I spun to see the airtight door opening, a cloud of dust—no, not dust, but smoke—

        I may have lost much that made me human, but my lungs are as weak as any man’s. I fell back, coughing, and only briefly caught a glimpse of Phidias, masked, raising a bent pipe and bringing it down across my temple.

* * *

        I woke to pressure across my chest and waist and outright pain at my extremities. My head ached, more from the smoke than the blow, and now my eyes refused to focus on even such a nearby thing as the straps holding my wrists in place. I started to struggle, then froze as a voice made it through the fog in my brain. “. . . simple enough,” Phidias said. “Cut away the dead weight, and the structure is still good.”

        A dull pain throbbed at the back of my neck, like a bruise but pressing, though I clearly remembered Phidias striking me on the temple. And besides, my hand looked wrong. I tried twitching my fingers. Nothing. And it looked... wizened, somehow. There was a smell in the air, like dried meat, like lizards in the sun....

        Phidias stalked past me, and I froze again, but he paid no attention to me. “Residual energy and pattern transfer did only so much, though. So as I said, I’m very glad you came.”

        The fog in my brain was clearing, enough that I could see that the hand I’d been concentrating on was a left hand, even though it was on my right. The pressure on my neck worsened, as if something were trying to push through my skull. I was hanging—no, not quite suspended, locked into a sitting position, as if I were a harvest effigy in a wicker chair, ready for the bonfire.

        At the far end of the room, the Professora’s tank had been nestled among dozens of werglass lenses on swinging frames—the pilot’s cabin, I thought, then rejected it, since these were in much better condition, unmarked by fire. Phidias moved between us, pacing, checking the panels as if he were beginning an experiment. Not Raisa’s cabin, then, and that was a relief of sorts....

        “There’s no saving her, Fiddy,” the Professora said at last.

        “You don’t know that.” He moved past me again, this time carrying a piece of machinery, too new to be the Chiaro’s. The motivational element from our little airship.

        “I meant the ship,” Lundqvist said tartly. “Raisa’s been dead for decades.”

        “She’s in the glass, Olga. She’s in the glass and I can bring her out.”

        He probably buried what was left, I heard the Professora say in memory, and reflexively jerked away. Leather stretched and tore, and I finally realized whose hand I’d been staring at, why the scratches on the throne in the pilot’s cabin had seemed fresh, what that dry-lizard smell was, and worse, worse—

        I was in another thaumaturge’s throne, the link jammed against the base of my neck. And to either side of me were the other members of Phidias’ salvage team, dead and desiccated, hanging in thrones of their own. The hand beside mine was twisted into a claw, still grasping futilely at the strap that held it in place.

        He hadn’t buried his team. He’d buried the original thaumaturges, and replaced them with his team. Residual energy and pattern transfer.

        I screamed, my voice giving way to the Merged cry I’d first used as a child, grating forth in a howl. At the other end of the chamber—the main thaumaturgy chamber, I realized, the place that had been sealed off—Phidias leapt up from beside the Professora. “What? He should be linked—”

        “Charles is a little different when it comes to these things,” the Professora said, her phonograph barely flattening the relief in her voice.

        That was one way to put it. Phidias must have tried to link me in, as he had with all the members of his team—maybe those who survived the crash, or maybe none had survived, maybe he had linked them dead—but my Merged physiognomy did not mesh with Society thaumaturgy, the metal woven through my skull did not permit a full link, and I remained unlinked, if mildly concussed.

        I yanked at the straps on my wrists, and decades-old leather began to fray. Where was Dieterich? Struck down the same way? Linked already? The room seemed to lurch as I tore one hand free.

        “It doesn’t matter,” Phidias said. “All I need is you.”

        The Professora’s styli drew back. “Fiddy—”

        “You’re used to it,” he said. “You’ll be fine. And once I carry the glass out of here, I can find a way to bring her out too.” He took hold of the Professora’s upper stylus as if to shake hands, then jammed it into a socket on the console.

        A strangled noise—not a scream, nothing with as much thought behind it, but a horrible chattering cacophony of garbled phonemes—emerged first from her phonograph and then from the walls themselves.

        The strap on my left wrist snapped. A bang echoed my cry, loud as Phidias’ work in the struts. But the Professora’s scream went on, and the pounding continued, till I no longer knew what was in my head and what was real. I tore open the last strap and dropped to the floor, then rolled as the floor changed direction entirely.

        The entire room seemed to pulse in time with the clamor—from the closest wall, I realized, and saw the weathered steel dent inward. I stumbled forward, but Phidias stood between me and the Professora, one hand gently patting her tank as if to encourage a pack animal. “Professora!” I yelled.

        She didn’t answer, or couldn’t. But a rack of lenses swung forward, against the pull of gravity, and struck Phidias first across the jaw, then in the gut as he staggered back. A second lens flailed against him, shattering over his head, and the keening from every wall took on a harsher, furious note.

        The lenses continued to strike as I leapt over Phidias. I wrenched Lundqvist’s stylus from the socket, heedless of the damage I did to both. “Professora Lundqvist!” I shouted, peering at her sensor ring and the brain beyond. But the walls continued to keen, and Lundqvist’s phonograph remained silent.

        The closest wall dented and caved, tearing apart, and the noise cut off abruptly. Fresh air poured in, driving werglass splinters over me and revealing the rest of the Chiaro falling away around us. Chaff and Dieterich peered through the gap, clinging to what was left of the Chiaro’s structure. “Dammit, Charles, I told you we’d be taking off, but I meant in my ship!” Dieterich roared as Chaff tore the rest of the wall free as easily as I might tear paper.

        I was in no mood for wit. “The Professora,” I gasped, dragging her tank along—then stopped dead as I saw the mesa sinking below us. We were already six feet up and rising. “We can’t leave her—”

        Instead of answering me, Chaff leapt onto the Professora, knocking me aside. She pinned the Professora’s tank between her forelegs, as if she were a vessel to be borne, then tumbled back, out of the diminished compartment. Still clinging to the wall, Dieterich reached in and caught my sleeve. “Mind the fall, Charles, and don’t waste time!” he shouted, and leapt into the cloud of dust and splinters that hid Chaff and the Professora from view.

        Phidias moaned behind me, and I glanced back. The werglass still glimmered, but in every panel now, glowing unmistakably. I adjusted my eyes, heedless of Phidias’ presence, only to see a pattern blooming in the glass, fragmented and uncertain but present. But compared to the Professora, even to the machine in my own flesh, it was only a trace, an echo, swallowed up by the horror of the dead in that room.

        Phidias got to his feet, sobbing, reaching out first for the glimmer in the glass and then to the empty throne. “Phidias!” I called.

        He ignored me, clutching the arms of the throne, clinging to the frayed leather as he tried to fit himself where I had been, then throwing his head back—

        I turned and leapt. An unMerged man might have died in such a fall. But I was wholly Merged, wholly myself, with machinery as much a part of me as my brain, and I could trust those reflexes to minimize any damage. That didn’t keep it from hurting, though; I hit the ground, bearings shifting and tendons parting even as I rolled. I came to a halt at last, one ankle badly twisted and my nose and mouth full of gray earth.

        “Charles.” The Professora’s voice, weak but present. I turned to see her, still held by Chaff, her wheels askew and styli dangling useless, but her tank uncracked and marvelous brain unhurt. “Look.”

        I rolled over to see. The great arch of the Chiaro, those green-blue panes gleaming like cabochon gems, rose in a slow curve above the mesa. Below hung truncated fragments of the undercarriage: the pilot’s cabin alone. No, not alone—the ballroom as well, those endless werglass mirrors no doubt reflecting us in miniature. Raisa, Raisa, even the wind follows your steps....

        A gust of wind rattled across the ground, sending debris whirling past us—but above, the toll was greater. One by one at first, then more as the corroded bolts gave way, the bronze plates reduced to paper-thinness by time and corrosion trembled. Like petals from some strange tree, they scattered to reveal only rusted mesh below.

        For a fraction of a second, even the air stilled, as if to preserve the Chiaro in place. A breeze reeking of hot tin and broken stone and the horrible mummified scent of the dead salvage team wrapped round us. Then, so slowly it was almost gentle, the Chiaro fell, this time shattering itself against the side of the mesa, crumbling against it till there was nothing left.

* * *

        We offered Chaff a lift off of the mesa, but she rejected it. “The Path of the Earth should remain on the earth,” she said. “I have already sinned once by leaving it.”

        Though we were all glad she had done so, none of us were up to debating the philosophy of transgression with her. Instead, Dieterich shepherded us back to our little ship and took off, guiding us through what was left of the wind.

        “I followed Chaff at first,” he said finally. “Found the wreck of Phidias’ airship... it hadn’t been shot down at all. No, it looked like they’d tried to take off, only to crash again.” He let out a long breath. “That told me I needed to find you, and I’m just sorry it took so long.”

        “You could tell that just from the crash, sir?” It had looked like any other wreck to me.

        “I’m insulted you even need to ask, Charles.” He was silent a moment, then began patting his pockets, searching for his pipe. The airship lurched, and he stopped. “Lundqvist—”     

        “I should be flattered,” she said quietly. “He thought enough of my intellect to let me be the linchpin of his plan to bring Raisa back.” She let out a long sigh—imitated it, I thought, clinging to human mannerisms as if to remind herself what she was. “I should be, but I’m not.”

        “It was an insane plan,” Dieterich grumbled.

        “Perhaps not, depending on which branch of theory you follow,” the Professora said, a little of her didactic nature reasserting itself. “If he was the man I taught, if he remembered anything of my lessons, then he would have linked himself in as a last effort. But that would have lasted just long enough to be part of the ship, to feel it come apart around him. If I wanted revenge, that would be it.”

        I thought of Phidias flinging his head back against the throne, felt the still-raw wound pulse at the back of my neck, and kept silent.

        “And if you didn’t?” Dieterich asked.

        “If I didn’t.” Her phonograph thrummed with another imitation of a sigh. “If I didn’t, I’d remember how it felt to be—be part of all that. Integrated, even imperfectly. I’m still not sure whether I struck him, or whether....” She caught herself, then began again. “I think if he linked, he found more than he expected.”

        “He did,” I said quietly. As had all of us. I put one hand to my forehead, feeling the pressure of lenses behind bone, the glimmer of life in both, the echo of machine in flesh.

        Below us, Chaff continued her trek across the mesa, cutting a new path. I watched her go as we descended, down into the lands far from Parch.

Copyright © 2011  Margaret Ronald

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Margaret Ronald’s fiction has appeared in such venues as Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and Clarkesworld Magazine. She is the author of “Dragon’s-Eyes” in BCS #9 and four other BCS stories set in the same steampunk world as “Salvage,” including “A Serpent in the Gears” in both BCS #34 and the new anthology The Best of BCS Year Two, featuring the same characters as “Salvage.” Soul Hunt, the third novel in her urban fantasy series and the sequel to Spiral Hunt, and Wild Hunt, was released by Eos Books in 2011. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston. Visit her website at http://mronald.wordpress.com/.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

GONE SLEEPING

by Heather Clitheroe

        People liked to say that Messir Wong was not quite as wide as he was tall, but when he rode his donkey down to market in his red coat, it sometimes looked as though a great apple was perched atop it, and it made me laugh.

        From a distance, at least. He came to the market regular-like, but he always stopped at my house where my mama sold him the meat pies baked in yellow pastry just the way he liked them. She always gave him a discount, of course, because Messir Wong was an alchemist and she said it paid to be on friendly terms—in case somebody got ague or my uncle had another attack of gout. I heard it said he was a witch, too, but I’d had a good look at his hands when my mama handed him a packet of twelve meat pies—he had a good appetite, he said—and I didn’t see any backwards thumbs. Everybody knows witches have those. Even my mama said so.

        The last witch we had on the island was a hundred years ago—maybe more, because nobody ever talked about it if they could help it—and that witch was burned in the town square, outside the mayor’s house. No grass grows on that spot now, only red moss, and nobody walks on it, because magics can do bad things if they touch you. So it’s good not to do witch things, Messir Wong says, because even just wanting to do ‘em is bad enough, even if nothing ever happens from the wanting.

        Today the sky was dark and thick and the air hung heavy with the fog that rolled in off the sea, and I didn’t see him until he was just at the edge of the porch, his donkey peering up at me with its brown eyes.

        “Messir Wong!” I yelped. He gave me such a start. I hadn’t been wanting to do nothing, but he always looked at me like maybe he thought I was thinking in my head about witching things.

        “Ai,” he said. “All the fog and the rain. It’s soaking into my bones. Amina, is your mother ready for me?”

        “No,” I said. My mama was inside, fanning the coals so the meat pies would finish cooking. “The wood was too damp today.”

        “You’re a naughty girl,” he said, and he groaned and puffed as he slid off the donkey. “You should do a better job of bringing it in.” But he was teasing me, I saw, because he reached into his jacket and pulled out a hard candy wrapped in a bit of bright paper. “Take your medicine,” he said, and he flipped it to me. I caught it. “To make you sweet.”

        He always said that. For as long as I could remember, he had been coming every week, and every week he had a bit of candy for me and he liked to joke it was my medicine. I never been sick that I knew, except when I was a baby, but he always said the same joke. “To make you sweet, because you’re a very sour girl.”

        That part was true. My mama told me that when I was very small, there was a terrible fire and I had been still a tiny baby and I almost burned up to death. But Messir Wong’s tinctures and salves saved me, and all I had now were the tight shiny scars that pulled one eye down and the corner of my mouth up, so that I puckered my face when I talked like I was eating a sour ju-ju fruit. I almost died. That’s what everybody said, and they said I must have used up all the luck in my family because that same day my father was out on the water in his fish boat, and he got caught up in a lobster trap and dragged to the bottom of the sea, where he slept for all time. Everybody said it was a bad accident, but they happen in fish boats all the time, and it was just his time.

        Today I scratched the donkey’s nose and Messir Wong gave me the reins to hold while he went in to see my mama. In my mama’s stories, the witches always had donkeys that were cloud-white with blue eyes, and they were smart and gentle. But Messir Wong’s donkey was regular grey and black, just like all the donkeys on the island, and it wasn’t very nice. Sometimes it would bite people, and once I saw it kick a man so hard he walked funny for a week.

        Messir Wong said it had a name, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. “That’s the donkey’s business,” he said. Not my own business. So I just scratched his donkey nose and told him not to bite me, please, and sometimes he let me scratch behind his ears where the bridle pushed his hair flat.

        This morning the donkey rested his hairy chin on my shoulder and whuffled in my ear because he was feeling friendly, and I liked that. I waited for Messir Wong, holding onto the reins and wishing we had a donkey to ride instead of having to walk everywhere on my own two feet. We couldn’t afford a donkey. I listened to my mama talking to him as she poured him a cup of cocoa tea and told him she still had to wrap up his meat pies.

        They talked like grown-ups do, all quiet and then with little bursts of laughter, and I started to unwrap my candy and sang a little song I made up just that morning. My cousin Nomi came from around the edge of the porch through the fog, and the donkey threw his head up with a surprised snort and swung his tail all around.

        “You wanna come play?” she asked.

        “No,” I said, and I put the candy in my pocket so Nomi wouldn’t see, because it was just for me. “I gotta wait here, like I’m told.” And I jerked my head towards the door of the house.

        “Oh,” said Nomi, and she sat down beside me. She was littler than me, born after the fire, but we were best friends in all the world, and she never made fun of my sour scar face. Both of us looked out at the fog, swinging our legs and petting the donkey.

        “Look at this,” Nomi said, and she put her hand in her pocket. “Gris-Gris caught it.” It was a little pecker-bird, the kind with the flame red feathers and a yellow tuft on its head, and we looked at it lying in the palm of Nomi’s hand.

        It was dead, of course. Gris-Gris was a champion mouser, and he could catch the big blue-bottle bugs and the dusty brown sparrows, and he liked to bring them to Nomi because he loved her best. I was sorry to see he got a pecker-bird, though. They were special. They had to be, to get those kinds of colors on them. “Can I see?”

        “No,” said Nomi, and she pulled her hand back. “I’m gonna bury him on the beach.”

        “You dumb girl,” I said. “Gris-Gris is gonna dig him up.”

        “I’ll let you see, if I can hold the reins,” she said.

        I hesitated. The donkey was supposed to be my job. But I wanted to touch that pecker-bird, because I’d never done that—you couldn’t even get close to one, they’re so fast—and the feathers were so pretty. “Just hold the reins,” I said. “Don’t do nothing.” And she took them from me and tipped the pecker-bird into my cupped hands.

        Its feathers were silky soft. It looked just like it was asleep, except for the spot where Gris-Gris sunk his fangs in and the little clot of dried blood on its chest, dark brown against the pretty red. He had bitten it through, and now it was gone. I felt sad. I started to hum my little song because I felt so sad, and I wished it wasn’t dead. I touched the cold, dead beak with one finger. I only touched it that one time. I swear it. I touched it with my one finger and sang the little song while Nomi kissed the donkey on his nose, and I thought I wish you would come back awake, little pecker-bird. And all of a sudden, something so strange happened I thought I was gone crazy.

        The little pecker-bird twitched in my hand.

        I stopped singing and I held my breath. Wishing for a thing isn’t the same as thinking about witching things. It can’t be, ‘cause people wish for things all the time and they never come true.

        But the pecker-bird twitched again, and then, ever so slowly, its beak fell open and its tongue stuck out, and one eyelid flickered closed and then opened up again. I looked at Nomi but she was still talking to the donkey. And then I did something. I didn’t know why. But I held my hands up to my sour face and I pursed my lips and blew onto the bird’s head. Just blew on it like when you have an ember and you want to make it spark up and glow red hot, and I wished it over and over in my head.

        That was probably a witching thing I did.

        The pecker-bird quivered as I blew, and then it went still.

        So I blew again, just like I do when I start mama’s fire for her when we get up, and now the pecker-bird gasped and flipped open both its eyes and turned its head up to me, so I blew some more, and then it fluttered its wings and I opened up my hands and it flew away! It flew up and clung to the porch post and hung there for a moment, still panting and Nomi shouted as it flew up and away into the fog.

        “It’s flying!” she shouted. “All that time it wasn’t dead! All the time it was in my pocket!”

        “It was probably sleeping,” I just said, because I felt shaky and sick in my head, and my heart was bumping in my chest like it could shake itself apart. I thought the fog had got thicker and swirled all around me, but I rubbed my eyes hard and shook my head and it went away. And then I heard the boards behind us creak. And I turned around to see Messir Wong looking at me, and I didn’t know if he saw it. I was so afraid he’d say something.

        But he didn’t say nothing to me. He took the meat pies from my mama and asked her if she might come up to his place in the afternoon to see him. She said she would, but she didn’t sound surprised or nothing, because sometimes he paid her to clean his house on account of not having a wife. Then he turned to me and said, “You be good today, doux-doux, and don’t be making trouble, you hear?”

        I was too scared to say nothing, in case he might think I had thought witching thoughts in my head, so I waved goodbye and I went down to the beach with Nomi, who was still talking about the pecker-bird. I didn’t say a lot, but by then I wasn’t feeling so sick in my head, and I thought maybe it all hadn’t quite happened. My thumbs weren’t on backwards. I’d checked. They hadn’t even turned in a little. I wasn’t a witch. But I felt funny, like Messir Wong’s taffy candy stretched thin and about to break in the middle, and I walked slow until I started to feel a little better. It wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t wrong to wish for a pecker-bird to be alive again. I didn’t mean it no trouble, and Gris-Gris was the one who killed it dead. Not me. I didn’t do nothing but wish a little.

        We went down along the beach, past Nomi’s house where my auntie waved and blew us a kiss from the garden, and we walked out as the tide pulled the water back. We filled a bucket between us with the little clams that stick in the mud, the ones my auntie likes to steam open in her big iron kettle. I didn’t feel so sick anymore, and I forgot all about feeling scared. We went back to Nomi’s house, and we had lunch under the big ju-ju tree in her yard. My favorite, salt cod and cornbread.

        Then we were sitting in the shade, because the sun had come out and burned off the fog. Nomi was throwing a little ball for Gris-Gris and patting him, and I was licking the salt from my fingers and singing my song, and all of a sudden, Nomi said “Oh, Gris-Gris! Are you sick?”

        Gris-Gris had been sitting up in the grass, flicking his tail from side and side and waiting for Nomi to throw the little ball, when all of a sudden he growled funny in his throat and hissed, and then he fell over stiff like a board and shivered, and then he didn’t move at all. She was bending over him and crying his name.

        I thought a bad thing. I thought he was getting what he had coming to him because of the pecker-bird. I thought that, and then I felt bad, because Gris-Gris was Nomi’s best friend in the world, except for me, and he was just doing what cats do best. Messir Wong says sometimes a creature can’t fight its nature, because that’s the way it’s supposed to live. I wanted to wish Gris-Gris would be all right, and I guess I did.

        My head felt sick again and my eyes felt filmed over with some kind of fog, but I didn’t say nothing because Nomi had gone yelling for her mama and left me alone with Gris-Gris at my feet.

        He wasn’t breathing. And I thought about that pecker-bird, but I thought about how much Nomi loved Gris-Gris, too, because he was as nice and gentle a tomcat as ever we knew, and smart enough to come when you called him, and how he purred and could dance on his legs for a little bit of meat or a feather on a string, and I did it again. I wished he’d be back alive. I pursed my lips and blew.

        His grey fur moved where I blew on it, but nothing happened, and I felt desperate sad but also, in the back of my mind, I felt so happy to know I wasn’t a witch. It wasn’t working and he wasn’t coming back alive, so I wasn’t a witch. But when I thought that to myself, something in Gris-Gris seemed to tremble, and I touched his chest with my finger and felt it move.

        Well, what was I supposed to do? I wished harder. I couldn’t just stop.

        My auntie saw it. She saw me lean over Gris-Gris and blow on him, and she saw that cat get up and she looked at me and I looked at her, and Nomi said, “She woke him up, mama, just like the pecker-bird!”

        “What about a pecker-bird?” my auntie said.

        I wanted to tell Nomi to keep quiet. “The pecker-bird she kissed this morning. She woke it up! The one Gris-Gris got. It was just sleeping!”
        I didn’t say nothing. I wasn’t wishing for it on purpose, it just happened. But I felt so sick again, like in the morning, and my auntie looked at me and I tucked my thumb under my fingers and shoved my hands into my pockets, and she said real quiet that I better go straight home and not stop to talk to nobody. So I did.

        When I got home, my mama wasn’t there, and I remembered she was going to go visit Messir Wong. So I went to bed in my corner and laid down, pulling my blanket over my head. And I thought, I ain’t no witch. I’m just a girl with a sour scar face and no papa, and that’s all I am.

        I heard my mama come back some time later, and I heard her talking to somebody in the yard, and when I peeked out the window, I saw it was my auntie. They were arguing about something. But I watched and I saw my mama wasn’t arguing back, just standing with her arms hugged around her and her shoulders bent down, and then she shook her head and came into the house. I thought she would say something, she would ask to see my thumbs, but she only said I should stay inside the house until she told me I could go out. I asked if I could go out to play with Nomi. But she said no, I couldn’t play with Nomi. Not for now or for a while. “I got to think,” she said. “Messir Wong is coming to see you tonight. So you stay inside now, and you mind me. You hear me, Amina?”

        And I said I did, and I sat in the old rocking chair and knitted until it was time for supper, and my mama took down a pot of beans from the stove and gave it to me to eat, but she still didn’t say much. “Show me your knitting,” she said finally. I went to get it and she looked it all over. “That’s real nice,” she said. “Now look, you dropped a stitch there. Let me show you how to fix it.”

        “But mama, “ I said. “I ain’t finished my supper.”

        “It’ll keep,” she said, and she told me to crawl in her lap so she could put her arms around me. I could watch her fix the knitting like it was my own hands doing the work, her strong brown hands showing me just what to do to fix it. She sounded sad, but she told me she was fine. Just fine. Then she told me to finish up the beans I was eating, and she sat and watched me.

        Very late that night I went to bed, but my mama stayed up, sitting in the rocking chair and looking at the fire. “You be a good girl,” she said, when I kissed her cheek to say good night, “and you remember what I showed you with that knitting.” It was a strange thing to say, but I promised her I would, because her voice was still sounding sad, and then I went to bed, and when I said my prayers, I added one in. Please don’t let me wish for nothing no more. Not one more thing. I’ll be a good girl from now on. I felt something hard in my pocket, digging into me, and I put my hand in there and pulled out the wrapped candy Messir Wong gave me that morning. I put it under my pillow for later, because I was trying to be a good girl. Good girls don’t eat candies at night time. They sure don’t.

        Well, some time late, when the birds outside were silent and the frogs too, that time of long night before the dawn, there was a pounding on the door that scared me awake.

        I heard my mama get up and then I heard my auntie’s voice, shrill and scared, and mad, too. Then there was light in the room from a lantern that made me almost blind, and I rubbed my eyes and saw my mama trying to pull my auntie away from me. And in my auntie’s arms was Nomi. And she wasn’t moving.

        She was limp like a stuffed doll, and her arms were swinging loose, hanging down and her fingers were slack. Her eyes were open, and when I looked I saw they were flat and staring, just staring, and her skin was ashy the color of old soot.

        My auntie stood there with my cousin, my best friend in the world, in her arms, and I knew it was bad. I knew it. My heart was thudding and my head felt sick again, and I thought about the pecker-bird in the palms of my hands and Gris-Gris, and I knew it was all because of me. I had wished and then things had happened, and wishing was a witching thing, and witching was a bad, bad thing.

        “You can change her,” my auntie said. “You can do it again. She told me about the bird. And the cat. You touched that cat. You touched her, and now it’s happened again. You change her back.”

        “Mairee, no!” gasped my mama. “No, you know what Messir Wong said... it’s got to stop, or it’ll just keep going....”

        “I don’t care,” my auntie said, and her voice was savage and cold. “You had yourself a witch baby and you knew what would happen. Now we’re all paying for it. There’s always a price. Always! You lost your man and now I lose my girl. Well, I’m not gonna give her up, you hear me? You hear me?!”

        And she screamed, and my mama shrank back from her, tears running down her face, and started to sob. “No, Mairee, no... no, no, no....”

        But my auntie was coming up close to me and she looked at me and held out my cousin. “You bring her back,” she hissed. “You bring her back.”

        And I reached out and took my cousin’s cold hand in my own, feeling how the skin was dry like dust, and I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, like I was some other person completely. I was some other sour scar face girl in another body, who wasn’t me but was me, and that awful sick feeling in my head got worse and I thought I would die. My chest was cracking open from my heart, cracking wide open because it was fairly beating against my ribs like a wild caged animal.

        But I wished. I wished harder than I ever wished for anything before, wishing ‘til all of it filled me up, and I felt like I was full of fire and it burned me so hot I couldn’t see nothing, couldn’t hear nothing. I wished and I wished, because Nomi was my best friend in the world, and it wasn’t wrong to want her alive again. Not ever going to be wrong to wish for that, even if it meant my thumbs turned right around backwards on my hands right there and then.

        My auntie was still holding Nomi in her arms, and I was still holding on to her hand, wishing. Then Nomi made a choking noise, and something green came dribbling out her mouth, and there was a gurgle sound as she drew a breath, and then another, and then she started to cry, weak and thin like a kitten, but she wasn’t cold no more and she wasn’t dead sleeping neither. I fell down on the floor with a thump, and I was so sick I threw up all my dinner on the floor. That fire had burned me up in the middle, and I felt so awful sick I didn’t have time to look at my thumbs.

        My auntie just started at me, her face gone pale and her lips blue, and all of a sudden she was on her knees and Nomi went rolling out of her arms to the floor. My auntie looked at my mama with wide open eyes. And then she was clawing at herself, pulling at her throat and thumping her chest when her fist like it was on fire, on the inside. Then my auntie made a keening noise and she bent double, her body shaking in a wild fit, falling to one side. She jerked and thrashed until she was on her back, her heels drumming against the floor in a wild dance, her head thrown back and the veins in her neck standing out like knotted ropes. There was frothing spit all around her mouth, and it seemed to flow out her nose and then her eyes, and my mama snatched up Nomi and held her close.

        My auntie gave another heaving jerk and then she stopped moving. Just stopped. Nothing. Not moving, not breathing, just lying there with her eyes open and staring. I was crying. I’m not ashamed to say. I was sobbing and Nomi was still crying and my mama was yelling. I crawled out towards my auntie. I knew I could wake her up. I knew I could do it. Just like the pecker-bird and Gris-Gris. Just like Nomi. I could wake her up. I could wish it and it would be true.

        As I reached for her hand, my mama threw herself in front of me. “No!” she yelled. “No, you don’t touch her. Amina, you just let her lie there and you do nothing. Don’t you touch her, Amina, or I’ll be next!”

        But it was too late; before she said that, I had touched my auntie’s leg and wished just a little, but that burning up fire was still in me, I guess, because it burned me up even more and I felt all over sick. I lost my balance and fell into her, and my mama screamed as my auntie started to shake again, and then the fog rolled into my eyes again and I felt hands pulling me away and I was outside the house. Messir Wong was holding something smelly under my nose and slapping my face, and I was in the cool night air, riding the donkey and going somewhere up the hill, to Messir Wong’s house, and he made me drink a medicine.

        That was the last time I ever saw my mama.

        Nowadays Nomi and my auntie live in their house by the sea and I live up the hill with Messir Wong, and he teaches me about medicines and how to make salves and about the herbs that grow in the tall grasses and in the woods. Sometimes Nomi comes to visit me, but not very much. She doesn’t remember what happened that night, and my auntie said never to tell her.

        Messir Wong gives me a medicine that makes me tired, and so I sit in a rocking chair on his porch and knit and I talk to his old donkey. Sometimes Messir Wong takes me with him when he goes down to market but I have to stay at my auntie’s house, and she doesn’t talk much to me. She talks to Messir Wong sometimes, and the both of them tell me I can’t never wish to wake anybody up again, because of what will happen. I asked them if my thumbs would be on backward and Messir Wong said no, but my auntie said never tell anybody, never even once, because nobody would want to know me if they knew I was a witch. They might even want to kill me dead.

        I know she’s right. I still get the sick feeling in my head, still I do, but my thumbs aren’t backwards yet. I wait for it to go away and I knit pretty shawls and scarves. But sometimes I think about the pecker-bird, and I think about how it came to life in my hands, and I wonder about where my mama is. I wonder where they buried her, but Messir Wong won’t tell me and Nomi doesn’t know, and I’m too afraid to ask my auntie. I wonder if I could still wake her up, if I ever could find where she’s sleeping.

        I think maybe I could.

Copyright © 2011  Heather Clitheroe

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Heather Clitheroe lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her work has appeared in Kaleidotrope, Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, and Awkward Two. Visit her online at www.lectio.ca.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Mushroom Forest,” by Geoff Trebs

Geoff Trebs is a twenty-seven year old artist based out of Orange County, Southern California, who specializes in concept art and character design. His free time is spent working on an unpublished original action comic. Contact him for studio or freelance work at getrebs@earthlink.net, and view more of his artwork at dinmoney.deviantart.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2011 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.