Issue #150 • Jun. 26, 2014

A Double-Issue in Celebration of Our 150th Issue

“The Manor of Lost Time,” by Richard Parks

“The Black Waters of Lethe,” by Oliver Buckram

“The Inked Many,” by Adam Callaway

“The Unborn God,” by Stephen Case

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, and a special 150th-Issue giveaway for a signed Brandon Sanderson hardback novella, visit

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

THE MANOR OF LOST TIME

by Richard Parks

        Let’s get something straight right now—her name at the time, her proper name, was Driana. Not “The Enchantress Sorrowsbane” or “She Who Speaks in Fire” or any of the other garblings this story has apparently accumulated over the last thousand-odd years.

        Yes, no doubt she was known by those names too. Most humans can’t seem to avoid becoming something other than what they are, unlike the more sensible demon-kin. Yet it was the beginning you asked about, and at the start of it all she was a twiggy little redheaded bundle of trouble named Driana. I know. I was there.

        My name is Sahel.

        Yes, you got that wrong as well. Don’t worry. Your conjuration was flawed, but at least you got the Barrier right. It will hold for a while. Lucky you. Hmmm? Oh, I just realized that someone wanted my attention, and I was curious. I’m not used to being summoned like a common variety demon. Frankly, I’m surprised that even a garbled version of my name is known in the world—I’ve tried to be more discreet than that. Oh, well.

        So you want to know about Driana? The truth? On your head be it, then. I don’t owe you anything, understand, but I do owe Driana at least that much. What I will tell you now is the truth.

        You can trust me that far.

* * *

        I first met Driana the year after the war between the Twelve Kingdoms and the western barbarians had ended. In the town of Kelan’s Pass in Morushe, a hedge wizard named Ledanthos with delusions of talent was about to charm a loveamulet for one of his more romantic—and wealthier—customers when he finally noticed the witchworm. There was barely an inch of it showing through a crack in the wattling near the floor, and if the one who’d placed it there had used a piece of wood other than freshly-peeled willow, he might not have noticed it at all. Yet he did notice, and that was that.

        “Well well,” he said. “It seems there is a thief about.”

        I’m not sure what memory has survived of Ledanthos. If justice were served, very little. He was a small man of small vision, yet I will give the miserly old coot his due—he knew opportunity when it arrived. A more selfimportant magician might have taken grave offense at the thought of someone tapping into his magic without permission and sent a fatal curse down the witch-worm to end the matter there and then. Not Ledanthos. He spoke charms of binding and summoning and sent those instead.

        I’m not sure what he expected, but not half an hour later Driana appeared at his door. She was then as I have said: small, skinny, hair like a burning stack of hay and just about as neat. She wasn’t frightened, as one might expect. She was furious. Her eyes were as wild as a trapped animal’s. She clearly wanted to flee, but the charm that had brought her to Ledanthos’s door held her fast. Even so, she would not enter the shop when bidden, and Ledanthos practically had to drag her in. This raised Ledanthos’s annoyance and my curiosity.

        Where was I, you ask?

        Where I always was in those days: in the middle of Ledanthos’s workbench, trapped, immobile. There was very little of interest in the old man’s life that didn’t take place in that room, so I missed nothing important.

        “You must either pay me for the magic you have stolen, or I may collect in goods and services,” Ledanthos said. “That is the law. This thing—” here he held up the nowbroken pieces of the witch-worm “—is no more, but by my estimate has been in place nearly a week. You owe me seventy-four imperials.”

        Seventyfour gold coins. What complete rubbish. Ledanthos had never learned the true art of tapping power from the world around him. Much of Ledanthos’s magic came from me; his own magic wasn’t worth seventyfour imperials if stolen his entire life, never mind the minuscule fraction the girl had filched. Yet the law was on Ledanthos’s side, and by the look of both the girl’s clothes and the expression on her face, it might as well have been all the money in Creation.

        “I see,” said the old man. “Then you must work for me until the debt is paid. What is your name, girl? Who are your parents?”

        “Driana,” she said. “My parents were killed in the war.”

        That explained the ragged clothes and the obvious fact that she hadn’t bathed recently. Driana’s mother had been a witch of sorts on the western frontier and had taught the girl a little, but not how to gather her own magic. After the war Driana had moved eastward and survived on odd jobs and theft, including such crude tricks as the witch-worm to siphon off magical energy. Perhaps she would have been reduced to selling her body in another year or two but, judging from what I came to know of her later, I doubt that. More likely she’d have been hanged first. All this, of course, I learned after the fact. At our first encounter, other matters caught my attention.

        She saw me.

        By that I do not mean she saw what Ledanthos saw: a crudely hewn stone statue sitting in the middle of his workbench. And, by the way, when I say “crude,” I mean it. The carving could have been anything from a demon to an underfed bear.

        Ledanthos did not know about me, you see. He thought I was simply an object of magical power, which, you must admit, was more or less true. He siphoned that power in a similar fashion as Driana’s witch-worm to use in his work, yet he only saw the statue form into which I was sealed. Driana saw me. I was certain of it, as she looked warily around Ledanthos’s workshop. Her anger was gone and now she looked resigned, and nervous, but also very curious.

        I could see her peering intently at the odd assortment of books, vessels, and bric-a-brac littering the shop as if she were trying to remember everything and sort out what it was for, what it did. When her gaze came to me she stopped, and she stared for so long that Ledanthos finally frowned.

        “What are you looking at, girl?” he asked.

        “That statue. It’s very strange.”

        He grunted. “There is much strangeness in the world, girl; no sense getting caught up in it. So. Your first job is to clean up in here while I run some errands. Touch nothing that you do not understand, which should be almost everything except the charcoal bin and the rat droppings in the corner. Mainly sweep the floor and tidy up. If you do a good job I’ll feed you when I get back. You needn’t bother running away; my binding spell will only bring you back and you’ll find a whip waiting. Do we understand one another?”

        The mention of food finally got her attention off of me. “Yes... um, what should I call you?”

        “Master, of course.”

        “Yes, Master,” she said, as if the words had a poor taste to them. Her disgust wasn’t lost on Ledanthos, who merely grinned.

        “You want the merchandise, you pay the price. One way or another. The folly of thieves is that they believe this does not apply to them. I’ll be back soon, so get busy.”

        Driana did so, though the only broom available had a cracked handle and moldy straw that, at least at first, left more debris than it removed. It was only when the room was somewhat more presentable that she put the broom aside and looked closely at me again.

        “What are you?” she asked aloud.

        Now, please bear in mind that this was a new thing. I had been trapped in what looked like a pitiful little statue for the better part of five hundred years, and in all that time no one, even those like Ledanthos who recognized the magic surrounding me, saw my prison for what it was. Driana did. She knew someone alive was trapped there, and she was curious. Frankly I was curious about her as well.

        Driana glanced out the window by the door, but there was no sign of Ledanthos. She reached into a pouch on the ragged strip of leather she was using for a belt and pulled out another witchworm. I could plainly see the faint glow of magic about it. Now, as you should suspect from your botching of my Summoning, in magic it’s as much how you say a thing as what you say, and when Driana spoke the simple word ‘Reveal,’ it was better than an hour of Ledanthos’s arcane incantations in three forgotten languages. Even the ones he actually got right.

        In that instant the crude little statue which was both my home and prison stood unmasked as the portal that it really was; the one that, for five hundred years, I had been unable to cross. Driana’s green eyes went wide in astonishment and wonder.

        “By Sethis....”

        Don’t say that name.

        I didn’t really expect her to hear me, but that simple revealing spell had done far more than simply drop the veil from the statue. My tongue was unbound, and the true appearance of my prison—to the degree it had a true appearance—was uncovered. And all with no more than a bit of borrowed magic and simple intent. Even I was impressed—the urchin clearly had talent.

        “Who are you?” she asked.

        My name is Sahel. How did you recognize me?

        “My mother’s specialty was illusion. She was killed before she could teach me much, but the ability to recognize illusion was among her very first lessons. So what are you? Why are you serving this rag and trick wizard?”

        I am demon-kin, and I serve Ledanthos for the same reason you do—I was caught. Though I will say in my defense that it was not Ledanthos who caught me.

        She sniffed. “That bloody fool? I’ve been stealing his magic for months; he only caught me because I was beginning to think he was blind as well as stupid. I won’t be so careless next time.”

        Why were you stealing magic in the first place?

        She shrugged. “To live. I have no source of power of my own, nor yet the skills to make any. I used the stolen magic to charm small trinkets to sell, or to make a baker look one way while his fresh loaves were going another direction; that sort of thing. Simple tricks, though I always wondered how one like Ledanthos could command such a high level of power. Now I know. Does he?”

        He knows only what he sees. His curiosity extends no further than that. Frankly, how he became a magician at all baffles me.

        “Me, too, yet he is my master now,” she said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I should tell him what he has in you.”

        I laughed then, for the first time in several centuries. Perhaps we should just speak plainly to one another. You want something from me. I think perhaps I want something from you. Shall we discuss it?

        “I want many things,” Driana said. “My freedom, for a start. What do you want, Sahel?”

        Many things as well, but for now I simply want the same thing you do, as I believe you have already guessed. Ledanthos will be back shortly. I suggest you give the floor another pass with that miserable excuse for a broom if you want to eat tonight. We’ll talk later.

* * *

        ‘Later’ proved to be several days away. Ledanthos was very busy at the time, and he kept Driana even busier. I will say in his favor that he fed her little worse than he fed himself—which was to say, miserly—and never actually beat her, though he threatened constantly.

        Hmmm?

        Ah, of course. I thought you might be wondering about that. The answer is ‘no.’ If the old miser had ever lusted for anything other than gold, such urges were long dried up by the time I knew him. Driana, like my own hidden self, was a servant to him and that was all.

        Which was probably fortunate on his part—he might not have noticed the wickedlooking knife she kept concealed, but I certainly did. As for his binding spell, it was powerful enough thanks to me, but like all his work, it was somewhat shoddy. I have no doubt Driana could have broken free in time, with or without my help. Unlike Ledanthos, she had great natural skill and a desire to learn and understand more. I remember wondering at the time what she would be capable of if she lived long enough to master her art. I guess time and history have answered that, yes?

        Let’s see... oh, yes. Ledanthos got a summons from a surprisingly wealthy client. It seemed that the potency of his amulets and spells was becoming better known, and he would now get the chance to improve his standing with those who used the services of conjurors such as himself. I almost expected to sense visions of grander quarters and fine clothes about him, but then I remembered that this was Ledanthos, and the only ‘visions’ he had were of more gold that he did not spend, simply piled up higher, faster, and easier, but to no better effect. After all, a pig in a crown is still not a king.

        Yes, I know. The expression was old even a thousand years ago. Pardon the digression. So Ledanthos got this summons and of course he had to answer it straight away. I think he considered taking Driana with him since he had gotten used to her help, but she was still wearing the same filthy rags she’d been captured in—I wager it had never occurred to Ledanthos that this was a problem—and there simply wasn’t time to make her more presentable. As it was, Ledanthos’ best robes looked more than a little threadbare as he left us alone once more and locked the door behind him.

        Driana didn’t even bother picking up the broom. “How long have you been trapped there, Sahel?” she asked without preamble.

        Five hundred years, give or take a bit.

        She nodded. “Very well, this is what I propose: I will help free you. In return you will not harm me, and you will serve me gladly for a term of forty years.”

        I almost laughed again. Forty years. To little Driana then it must have seemed like all the time in the world. She may have learned better, but never say she always knew better.

        No, I said.

        She blinked. “No...? Do you want to stay in there forever?”

        Hardly. But once I’m out of here I’m going to have my own business to attend to. I can’t very well do so if I’m bound to you for another forty years. Why would I trade one prison for another?

        She looked grim. “Forty years is nothing compared to five hundred,” she pointed out. “And I don’t have to help you. You could sit in there for another five hundred years!”

        That is true. Now I want you to picture yourself in bondage to that miserable old coot for the same forty years you demanded of me. You know magic will extend his life more than that, even. I’ll weight my time against yours and we’ll see whose is the easier burden.

        As I said, I was pretty certain that she could break his magical chains in much less time. She was less certain of that, and of herself. I used that, as I would any tool that suited my purpose.

        Driana looked unhappy, but she wasn’t going to give up so easily. “Twenty years,” she said.

        One year, I countered.

        “Fifteen.”

        Five.

        “Ten!”

        Five.

        She sighed deeply. “Seven?”

        Must I repeat myself?

        “Oh, very well. You will serve me for five years, and swear to bring me to no harm now or later. If you agree, then tell me how to free you.”

        Done. And freeing me is simple, if not easy—you have to find me.

        She frowned. “I’ve already found you!”

        Finding the river is not the same as finding the fish, as any decent fisherman could tell you. You’ll have to cross the portal to where I am.

        “Then won’t I be as trapped as you are?”

        Trapped? No. However, there is a danger that you can become lost. Yet this is the only way. I cannot come to you, so you must come to me.

        “You’re aware of my presence. Can’t you simply guide me to you once I cross over?”

        Yes... and no. You’ll understand once you’ve crossed the portal.

        If it sounds as if I’m being a little vague, that’s no more than the truth. I was afraid Driana wouldn’t make the attempt if she knew what was waiting for her on the other side. I’m not sure I would have in her place. I can only say in my defense that I did not know Driana quite so well then.

        Her reveal spell was still working fine. In the place where my statue sat on Ledanthos’s work table, there was a patch of darkness about five feet high and half again as wide. That was another illusion of sorts, but then normal dimensions of height and width don’t really apply to this particular portal. In symbolic and practical terms, it was a doorway, and that was enough. Driana took one step off Ledanthos’s work stool and passed through the opening.

        I can tell you what she saw because it’s what I saw, my first time here. The difference was that there was no portal behind me to return through. There’s a trick to it, of course. As things were, Driana stood in what looked like a short hallway. Beyond that was another door.

        “Where am I?” she asked.

        There’s a door in front of you, correct?

        “Yes.”

        Open that door and you’ll find out.

        She did as I said. “By Sethis....” Her voice trailed off.

        I did tell you about saying that name... oh, never mind. What do you see?

        “My mother... my father. They’re alive!”

        I knew this was going to be a critical point. If Driana could not get past the first door, there was no chance she’d be able to find me. After coming this far, coming so close to freedom, I confess I was a little nervous, and I made a very serious mistake.

        I lied.

        It’s just an illusion to distract you. Walk on to the next doorway.

        “It’s wrong,” she said. I could tell that she hadn’t moved a single step closer. “They’re not the way I remember them.”

        I said it’s an illusion. Keep moving.

        “If it’s an illusion, then why aren’t they as I remember? Why do I see them this way?”

        What way?

        “Older. I’m older too. My father is smiling, my mother is crying. Do you know what my mother and I are doing, Sahel?”

        No.

        That at least was the truth. I could not see what she saw now; this was her lost time, not mine. I could not see her at all, now that she had crossed the doorway. The immediate surroundings of my prison I could see as clear as a cloudless morning. But the place itself? No more than the little in front of me, and for me there were no doors.

        “We’re in our home, the one that was burned to the ground the day they died. My mother and I are sewing my wedding dress.”

        It’s a trap to snare you, to prevent you from moving forward. Nothing more. Ignore—

        “Stop lying to me, Sahel! I told you I know illusion, and this is not an illusion! I’m not merely seeing this, I’m there! I’m myself and yet I am with them. I know what that girl sewing the dress is thinking, I know what she’s feeling. I’m watching it all, yet the thread is in my hand and I feel the sting from the needle’s point! If you don’t tell me what this means right now, our bargain is ended. And I do know the way out.”

        She wasn’t bluffing. I’d thought the lie might make things easier, but this was Driana I was dealing with, and let me confess frankly that I was only just then beginning to understand what that meant. I abandoned the lie.

        I don’t know the true name of this place, Driana, if it has one. I call it ‘The Manor of Lost Time.’ Humans and demon-kin alike generate a nearly infinite cache of lost possibility for every path not taken. This is the place where all the ‘might have beens’ reside. That is what you’re experiencing now. The potential was there, but it was thwarted, for better or worse. What you’re seeing and feeling now, and knowing now, did not happen. You’re right—it’s not an illusion, but it’s also not real, and never can be real.

        “I lost this the day my parents died,” she said simply.

        I nodded, forgetting for the moment that she could not see me. Yes, I said.

        “What will I see next?”

        I truly do not know, Driana. Perhaps something horrible, or something painful and sad, but also perhaps something wonderful, joyous. Whatever it may be, it is something you’ve lost forever. That’s what is waiting behind every door. Fortunately, only a limited number of doors block your path to me, but I do not know exactly how many, or why the ones that appear are the ones that do appear. I’m trapped in a room of my own lost time, and I cannot see my door, or you. You’ll have to cross your own lost time to reach me, and find the door I cannot see.

        I’m not sure what I expected then. I halfway expected her to flee from both myself and Ledanthos, binding spell or no. But after a very long silence, I heard her voice again.

        “Makan. I was going to marry Makan. I rather suspected that.” Maybe it was my imagination, but I think there was a touch of relief echoed in her words.

        He wasn’t your choice?

        “He was... Makan. A year older than I was. He was tall and strong and pig-headed, and he cheated at ring-toss. I liked him well enough when I didn’t actually hate him. Yet when I’m sitting with my mother sewing my wedding dress, I love him more than anything. I’ve never been in love or lost a love, but I do know what both feel like, to love and lose in the exact same moment. Thanks to you, Sahel.”

        I’m sorry.

        “No you’re not, and you may go to blazes. But not until after you honor our bargain. I see the next door. I’ll open it now,” she said, and that’s what she did.

        I’m not going to tell you everything she saw behind every door. Partly because there are some she never spoke of, even to me, but mostly because it’s beside the point. I told you the first because you need to understand what this was costing her. What it would cost anyone. How would you like to see your lost chances and potentials paraded in front of you, forced to live through every single one, the good and the bad, but all never to be? There are few humans who wouldn’t be reduced to a blubbering mess within an hour’s time.

        Not Driana, though I’m honestly not certain how many more she could have taken before she finally walked into a bit of lost time that was not her own: an image of a celestial city and a street located just this side of what you might refer to as the Abode of the Gods.

        Yes, it was mine.

        For creatures with the lifespan of mayflies, relatively speaking, humans have quite a gift for focusing attention on the matter at hand, whatever it may be. It was only when she found my lost time that Driana stopped concentrating on the next door and paused to wonder just what the hell she’d gotten herself into. Fortunately for me.

        “What are you, Sahel?”

        Demon-kin. I told you that.

        “This place belongs to no version of a hell I’ve ever heard of.”

        An expert on hells, are you?

        “The truth, Sahel. For our bargain to work I need to know I can trust you. Tell me the truth. Who are you? How did you get here in the first place?”

        Yes, she did finally ask me that. I do think it would have been wiser on her part if that question had been asked earlier, but I guess it was better the way things were. That’s always a comfort to cling to, when dealing with lost time. I imagine there’s a new room in the Manor now, of what would have happened had she asked those questions earlier. I will avoid it.

        Again, yes, I’m going to tell you what I said, else nothing else that follows will make sense to you. And do remember—you asked.

        Just over a year ago there was a war on the western border of this country, I said.

        “I know, Sahel,” Driana said grimly. “I was there.”

        Just over five hundred years ago, there was a war in the Abode of the Gods, and I was there.

        “By Sethis—”

        Stop saying the wretch’s name. How many times must I repeat that?

        “But... the demon-kin are far older than that,” she said in protest. “And long-since banished to infernal planes of existence. Assuming there was such a thing, what business would it be of yours?”

        I said I was demon-kin, and so I am. What are demons but gods who have lost their place in the heavens? What makes you think that one war ended all of them?

        I knew she was thinking about it, though I still could not see her, nor even the lost time that she moved through now. My lost time. I think it would have been a nice touch if I’d been allowed to see and experience it rather than just knowing it was there. A bit of torture, perhaps. Only that the point had never been to torture me. Or any of us. Maybe Sethis thought that made everything all right.

        “You’re saying you were a god?!”

        Not ‘were,’ Driana. ‘Am.’

        Excuse me, but if your mouth has fallen open in surprise, I do wish you’d close it. I find the thought very distracting. Ummm? Well, I advise you to get over your astonishment. There’s more.

        “But once you lost...” Driana began.

        I know the rules, Driana. A new born demon, to seed to the Infernal Plane? There’s just one problem with that assessment—I wasn’t on the losing side.

        “But... then why are you here?”

        Because it was my charge to drive the last four rebels from the Abode of the Gods. Because as I was so doing, Sethis, Lord of the Heavens and Commander of Lightning, lost his divine nerve. He sealed the portal with all five of us inside. The loyal and the traitorous alike.. Neither Heaven nor Hell; simply sealed away. Each of us in our separate houses of lost possibilities, until the end of time... which may come sooner than he thought..

        You want to know what she said? She said what you’re obviously thinking. That I was lying.

        The thing is, as you may have noticed, I’m not a very good liar. It’s not my nature, but Driana is very good at knowing a lie from the truth. So Driana said that she didn’t believe me, but of course she did. Just as you do. I had to make sure she continued to believe me, so I continued to tell her the truth, just as I’m doing to you now.

        You’re standing within my sphere of lost time. I do not know what it shows you, but you know it is none of yours. Isn’t that true?

        The answer came softly. If it had been spoken with any less force even I would not have heard it.

        “Yes.”

        You see the doorway that is hidden to me. Is that not also true?

        Again the answer came, “Yes.”

        Know this, Driana—I will do as I have sworn. I will serve you in all things for a term of five years. You can train your magical skills with a god for a tutor. At the end of that time, I will take my leave of you and use my freedom to track down the four who were imprisoned at the same time I was. When I find them, I will set them free. Together we will storm the Abode of the Gods.

        “But if you lose....”

        I did not lose before, and I will not lose this time. Lord Sethis, if he is very lucky, will soon reside in a prison of his own lost time, and in his case I will not conceal the door but I will bar it against him, and he will contemplate what will never come to pass for the rest of eternity. I swear that this is so. Do you believe me?

        “Yes, Sahel. I believe you.”

        You’ve heard my choice, Driana. Now make yours—open the door and free me, or return the way you came, to your master, Ledanthos. You’ll likely be rid of him on your own, sooner or later.

        Now then. You must admit that was a very silly question on your part. You know what Driana did, or this conversation would not be happening. You can well imagine Ledanthos’s surprise when she emerged from nothing leading a being of light and fire like a little lost child. The shock killed him, which is a pity—I wanted to do it.

        As for me, I’m not quite done with my plans. These things take time. Three of my brothers and sisters are free now. Soon we all will be.

        Umm, no, I do not think you will be offering any prayers to Sethis. See, he still doesn’t know. We wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, would we? No, no sense in squirming. You did ask. And no, I said your barrier would hold for a while. I think it lasted up until just before the part where Ledanthos left Driana and me alone for the second time. If you’ve got any more questions, I suggest you ask them now.

        Am I responsible for Driana’s final disappearance? I did not harm her, if that’s what you mean. I swore not to, and I’m a being of my word. Besides, why should I? She’s been a great help to me over the years. She found two of the other rebels on her own.

        Loyalty to her god? What do you know of that? While it’s true Driana swore by Sethis out of habit, in her heart she was furious with him, not the least for letting her parents die. Finding them again in the Manor of Lost Time only made that worse, I’m afraid. Gods often forgive humans, in the stories. There’s no rule that says a human must forgive a god. Just between the two of us, I think she hates him more than I do.

        Yes, that’s right. Hates. There are many legends about Driana’s death, and I assume that’s why you asked that silly question. They’re all nonsense, because she hasn’t died. When time came to weigh on her too heavily, she merely returned to the Manor of Lost Time. She lives there now, and acts out her lost potentials. She’s young when she chooses, old when she takes the whim. She marries that lout Makan or doesn’t. She has borne children, fought demons, and even inherited Ledanthos’s amulet business in one well-lost bit of possibility. But mostly I think she spends the lost time with her parents.

        I think she regrets losing their potential most of all.

        No, I said I will have no prayers, and I meant it. You won’t need them since I’m not going to hurt you. I am, however, going to put you somewhere safe until all this is over. You may thank me later. You’re going in the way I did, my first time, so you won’t be able to find the door. If you have any more questions, you can put them to Driana directly. I’m sure you’ll run into each other sooner or later.

        By the way, she won’t show you the way out, and if I were you I wouldn’t try and force her. Even if she’s not in the mood to call down lightning on your head, she still carries that knife of hers and the legends don’t begin to do justice to her famous temper. But ask her politely and she might just show you where to find your own lost time.

        Which starts now.

Copyright © 2014 Richard Parks

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Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in numerous anthologies including Year’s Best Fantasy and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. His fourth story collection, Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter, was released in February of 2013 by Prime Books.

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THE BLACK WATERS OF LETHE

by Oliver Buckram

        At dawn, starlings fall from the sky like fat feathered raindrops. After flying low over the river, they forget to flap their wings and they plummet downward. Some splash into the black water. Others hit the ground near me, making little furrows in the bare earth. Those that survive are stunned and twitching. Before they can recover and fly away, I twist their necks with practiced ease.

        The prince trembles in his sleep but does not wake, despite a broken-winged starling scrabbling in the dust near him. He must be dreaming of a full belly and a warm bed, of life on the other side of the dark river.

        I only call him prince for lack of a better name. He claims a disloyal vizier must have seized his realm and exiled him. More likely, he’s a slave who came here to flee a cruel master. That would explain the scars on his back.

        Who can say for sure? Like all three of us, he’s forgotten his name and everything else about the other side of the river. He calls me ‘greybeard,’ which at least is accurate. I’ve been here the longest.

        The warrior emerges from his hut—a pitiful structure of sticks and grass—and roars for his breakfast. His strength and brutality make him the unquestioned tyrant of our little group. We know he’s a warrior because he was wearing a bronze helmet when he washed up on the riverbank years ago. Thus he’s not a runaway slave or fugitive criminal. A deserter, I think, though I never say it aloud.

        The warrior kicks the prince awake and orders him to fetch water. Our camp lies by a stream that flows into the river. Water from the stream is unclouded and does not bring oblivion.

        The prince stumbles to his feet in time to avoid another kick. While I gather up starlings into dark feathery piles, he dips the battered helmet into the stream. We’ll use it as a pot to cook starling stew. Once the warrior has eaten his fill, there may be some left over for the prince and me.

        I pluck the birds as the prince gathers brush for the fire. The brush burns poorly, but it’s all we have. Wood is scarce here, as if the trees themselves don’t remember how to grow straight and tall.

        The prince cries out. He’s found a large wooden object at the water’s edge. The thing is at least ten feet long, with a pole sticking up from the middle.

        It’s a sailboat, I say. Sailboat. The word emerges from my mind like a bloated corpse rising from murky depths.

        The warrior stares at the boat, which is tangled in the reeds. We’ve never seen a vessel on the river before. The black water has no fish, and who’d want to travel here?

        There’s no reason for anyone to visit our empty scrubland. Civilization, comfort, memory: these must all be on the opposite bank. On this side lies only madness. Nature itself here is unnatural. Ants sometimes fly in the air. The prince says that of course ants fly. On the other side of the river, he claims, his golden carriage was pulled by swarms of winged ants. I remember none of this.

        The warrior approaches the boat warily. Lying inside is a dead man wearing a blue robe. Perhaps his heart forgot to beat. The river sometimes kills men this way. For others, drinking the black water, or breathing its vapors, leaves body unscathed but mind empty. When the prince first arrived, he drooled and babbled for days before regaining the power of speech.

        I scan the opposite shore of the wide river for any sign of human activity, for the people who sent the boat. As always, I see only a forest of pine trees. The prince sometimes sees gleaming battlements and distant towers, but I’ve never caught a glimpse of them.

        The warrior drags the corpse ashore. He strips the clothes from it. It’s been two years since the last body washed up, and we’re all dressed in tatters.

        When I look at the boat, words flood into my head. Square rigged sail. Flat bottom. Steering oar. Perhaps I’m a shipwright. The large black eyes painted on the bow look familiar. Am I a painter?

        The warrior, now dressed in the blue robe, tosses aside the filthy rags he used to wear. The prince looks at me, and when I remain still, scrambles to retrieve them.

        The warrior hauls the boat onto land. Summoning my courage, I protest. I tell him we should sail across the river. We must have survived the crossing once before. We can again. The boat is big enough for three.

        He laughs and says a crossing is too dangerous. He starts searching inside the boat.

        I point at the nude stranger lying in the dirt. Look, I say. The wind is shifting. See how it ruffles his hair. If we raise the sail, the wind will blow us to the opposite shore.

        The warrior growls and shakes his head.

        I ask him why he doesn’t want to rejoin his army. Won’t your comrades-in-arms be overjoyed at your safe return? He cuffs me, too busy rummaging through the boat to give me a proper beating. He finds bread and wolfs it down but tosses aside the purse of silver coins.

        The prince examines a coin. He tells me that it bears an excellent portrait of him. In truth, it looks nothing like him.

        The warrior finds a wineskin. He gulps down wine and sticks an oar upright in the ground. He says here you shall build me a new hut with the boat’s wooden planks. Start now.

        I ask why live in a hut when you could live in a barracks on the other shore. Or perhaps a fine house. You may be a general.

        He raises his fist, but I’m prudently out of range. We both suspect that if he ever returns, he’ll be executed for desertion.

        The warrior pours wine down his throat. When it’s gone, he dances drunkenly around the oar before falling asleep.

        The prince and I walk to the river. Now’s our chance, I say. We can take the boat and return to our homes.

        He looks at me without comprehension.

        Come, I say. Let’s leave this place and return to your realm.

        He refuses. He says his subjects are not ready for his return.

        I point at the pale body on the ground. Do you want to end up like him? The prince averts his gaze.

        I lean my shoulder against the boat and push it towards the river. I’m no longer young. It’s difficult.

        Don’t leave me, says the prince.

        Again I urge him to come, but he shakes his head.

        Once the boat is in the water, I return for the oar, but the prince is shaking the warrior awake. I take the oar and run back to the boat. The warrior bellows and chases me.

        At the water’s edge, I turn to face him. He trips over the naked corpse and I swing the oar at him. He’s too drunk to dodge my clumsy blow, and it thumps into his head. He falls to the ground, eyes open and unseeing.

        The act of murder feels strange and new. This unfamiliarity comforts me. Perhaps I’m not a criminal who fled across the river. Perhaps I’m a good man with a family on the other side.

        The prince falls to his knees and sobs silently.

        I tear a strip of cloth from the warrior’s blue robe and tie it over my nose and mouth. It might keep out the river’s vapors.

        The prince says nothing as I climb into the boat. It feels natural to unfurl the sail. Perhaps I’m a fisherman.

        The prince stands between the two dead bodies, watching. He rushes forward and for a moment I think he’ll join me. But instead he drinks from the river like an animal.

        He won’t miss me.

        I steer towards the opposite shore, holding my breath as long as I can. If I get up enough speed before I forget to steer, the boat may reach the other side. Whatever waits for me there, I want to see it before I die.

        Halfway across the river, my lungs betray me and I gasp for air. Fortunately, the cloth on my face seems to work. I can still remember the starlings trembling in my hands. I can still remember the sound of the oar hitting the warrior’s head. The boat remains on course.

        When I reach the other side, I clamber ashore and rip the cloth away from my face. I breathe deeply. Will my memories come flooding back?

        Nothing happens.

        I look behind me. The boat is slowly drifting downstream. On the far shore, the prince stares at me.

        He does not wave.

Copyright © 2014 Oliver Buckram

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Oliver Buckram, Ph.D., writes fantasy and science fiction. He lives in the Boston area where, under an assumed name, he teaches social science to undergraduates. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, and Shimmer, among other places. He urges you to keep watching the skies.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE INKED MANY

by Adam Callaway

        In Lacuna, there were always jobs for those desperate for a quick coin or a quick death, and no group of people were more desperate than the miners.

        Chernyl dropped his rucksack and pounded on the door of the foreman’s office. The sound of snoring ceased, replaced with phlegmy curses and at least one chair being thrown over. The door opened and a pug of a man looked up at Chernyl.

        “You the greenhorn?” the man asked.

        “Yes sir,” Chernyl said. He stuck out his hand.

        Foreman looked at it for a second before touching Chernyl’s hand and muttering, “Ah, yes, yes.” Chernyl was reminded of his last job at the sandwich stand, grabbing handfuls of corned beef to stick between two pieces of potato bread.

        “So, er,” Foreman said, “when can you start I guess?”

        Chernyl tried not to let the pity show up on his face. He glanced toward his rucksack and said, “Excuse me?”

        “Yes, yes, yes,” Foreman said, “you’re ready now. Come in. I’ll get your seal and next of kin.”

        Chernyl followed Foreman into the office. It was little more than a tar-paper cube cluttered with coffee mugs, moldy bowls, and racy broadsheets. A greasy pillow sat on Foreman’s desk.

        “Er, well, yes,” Foreman said, stuffing the pillow under his desk, “don’t sleep too great at home. The wife has those kicking feet....” He let the thought peter out.

        Chernyl nodded, but his face must have betrayed him.

        “Ever gas yourself out of a dream?” Foreman asked.

        “Can’t say that I have.”

        Foreman nodded. “You won’t understand then.”

        Even though Foreman’s shack stood no more than a few dozen yards from the lampblack factory, silence dropped on the two of them like a coal mine cave-in. Chernyl was beginning to regret leaving the sandwich stand. Sure his only remuneration was boarding in the apartment above the deli, and sure he had to share the apartment with the shop owner’s crippled brother-in-law, but he also got all the cold beef he could eat, and sometimes the page girl from Francini’s stationarium would come over to play a few hands of Friend or Fiend.

        But, no, he needed to make more coin if he ever wanted to leave the stinking mounds of Bugspit for a ghetto that wasn’t crawling with termites the size of toddlers.

        “You said something about my seal?”

        Foreman—or Mr. Decker according to the dented brass plaque on his desk—nodded, making both of his chins wobble. “Yes, thank you. Lost my train of thought. I need your seal on the work order.” Decker knocked over a stack of broadsheets depicting women in various states of undress. A crumpled ball of paper landed at Chernyl’s feet. He peeked inside and saw a well-muscled young man holding a bowler cap over his—

        “I’ll take that back,” Decker said, displaying surprising speed, “don’t know how the wife’s reading material got mixed in with my own.”

        Chernyl nodded.

        “It’s not mine. I don’t like that sort of thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Perfectly healthy for a young man to explore his options.”

        Chernyl nodded again.

        Decker undid the top button his collar, and wisps of steam escaped into the musty shack. “In fact,” he said, “it’s probably more healthy to vary your, er, reading material. Keeps the stuff you like—the lady stuff with the clasps and the feathers and lace—more interesting.”

        Chernyl wished he had a mirror. He always had trouble keeping his emotions off his face, but this was turning into a disaster. In fact, he would trade places with the lowest greenhorn working the hottest corner of the coal mine right now.... “The work order, Mr. Decker.”

        Decker nodded again and seemed to pull the yellowed parchment from mid-air. “No need to read it. Just says we’ll pay you so much coin for so much coal, tonnage rate.”

        Chernyl took the parchment and let his eyes travel upon the words. The pay rate was a bit more complicated than Decker had summarized. Rates changed based on the size and color of the coal you picked. Bonuses were given for speed and purity. Dross lowered the rate significantly.

        “Says here that I have to pay rental fees on an axe, a helmet, a dorm, and a cart.”

        Decker looked taken aback. “Y... yes, that’s very true and very standard. I didn’t realize you could read.”

        “We live in the City of Missing Letters. A few of them were bound to screw their way into my head.”

        Chernyl read on, shaking his head, smirking, sighing, gasping. Decker feigned organizing his broadsheets but in reality just opened and crumpled the paper with his “wife’s reading material” on it, eyes never moving from the man on the page.

        “Also says that I have to buy all my own meals at the company canteen, using company money.”

        “Yes. Again, very true and very standard.”

        Setting the contract down, Chernyl pinched his crooked nose. “So the company pays me in proprietary marks that I then have to exchange for real money at a piss-poor rate.”

        “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

        “And on top of that, nearly all of my money is taken away in penalties, rental, and boarding fees.”

        “Yes.”

        Chernyl made a sound deep in his throat. “Do you have a pen?”

        The foreman visibly deflated, but instead of passing over a pen or a quill or a scribe or even a charcoal stick, he pushed a stump of blue wax toward Chernyl.

        “A pen?” Chernyl repeated.

        Decker sat up. “Oh, a pen. It’s just most guys who come in here—”

        “Can’t write. Yeah, your first jab at them not being able to read made that clear as well.”

        Ears turning read, Decker almost threw the inkwell at Chernyl. “There you go, smart ass. I don’t got any scribe.”

        Chernyl dipped his small finger into the ink and signed his name in thick, looping letters. “S’alright. Don’t really need one.”‘

* * *

        The Inked Man had watched hundreds of generations destroy and rebuild Lacuna. Fires scoured the streets, turning grout to dirty diamonds. Floods swept tons of garbage out to sea. Plagues turned the entire population into dusty paper. War criminals raided the Atheneum for those rare volumes that could reshape history with a few words.

        The Inked Man had watched it all. Sometimes he got caught up in the conflagration, turning to ash or diseased wood, but he always came back. He would always come back, Fiend willing, and the Fiend was willing.

        But now, as the desert pushed into bleached alleys and scoured boulevards of Lacuna, as sand snaked into abandoned homes through cracks in the sagging windows and bowed doors, as all life fled down the dry riverbeds for more habitable land, the Inked Man made up his mind.

        “This won’t do,” he said, getting up from his paper throne behind the cathedral’s altar. The Inked Man’s mottled skin of paper, parchment, vellum, and flesh swished softly, staying supple even in the heat. This church had once held thousands of his disciples. Prayer masses and auto-da-fé had taken place under the tiled roof. Blood and ink traced patterns across the mosaic floor, emptying into runnels that would take it to Parchment Run. Freshwater squid gathered at the outlet pipe. Lowly was the man who stumbled drunkenly into their number.

        Or so the Inked Man had once thought. Water hadn’t encircled Lacuna in half a millennium. Once the final tree within a hundred miles of Lacuna had met the enzymatic jaws of Queen Woodheart, the city was doomed.

        The Inked Man was ageless. His deep black eyes held each one of his years. Even without muscle, the Inked Man was capable of turning coal into gems with just the pressure of his hand. Moving more simian than man, he brachiated up the naked sconces and leapt out of the hole in the ceiling, landing on sand. It had reached roof level already. Soon, Lacuna would be erased from the landscape, preserved in a silicate tomb beneath the dunes.

        The Inked Man bit his thumb, teeth like the jagged edges of a hardcover. Red-black blood-ink welled up along the edge of the wound. He scrawled the word Fire on his forearm and ripped the ribbon of parchment off.

        “Fire,” he said in the common tongue of the Five Cities before dropping the ribbon. The parchment fell toward the sand and smoldered. Smoke curled up from the incandescent letters, but the parchment didn’t catch. The Inked Man sighed, voice like pages flipping.

        Walking across Lacuna—or above Lacuna’s buried rooftops—the Inked Man tried more words.

        “Wings,” and origami feathers fell from his back.

        “Glass,” and the sand under his feet took on a sheen.

        “Breeze,” and the curling bits of parchment covering his body rustled.

        The Inked Man caught a desert mouse and pressed a scrap of parchment into its mouth.

        “Plague,” he said. The mouse bit his finger and jumped down. Its skin didn’t turn to parchment. Its hair didn’t fall out. Its body didn’t turn to dust.

        “This will not do.” The Inked Man pointed himself in the direction of the Lampblack Mountains—now little more than a series of low dunes—and walked.

        At one time Lacuna had knelt before his power. He had brought unparalleled prosperity and order to its streets. Sure, there were those that had to suffer to maintain the peace, but most of his disciples agreed that it had been necessary.

        At one time Lacunans had contracted the plague on purpose, on the off chance that it would make them one with the Inked Man. They all died skinless and in agony, begging the Inked Man for forgiveness. Sometimes he crossed their foreheads with an inky thumb; sometimes not.

        At one time Lacuna had orchestrated public penance ceremonies in his honor. Lexiconic saints and sinners alike would prostrate themselves on beds of broken ink wells, or paper-cut patterns into their skin, or recite prayer-spells for days on end, food and water a fond memory. Nostalgia was the only drug remaining that could get his ink-blood racing.

        Coming up on the base of the dune, the Inked Man thought briefly of how long it would take him to dig through all the sand. He shook his head. Even for someone deathless, it was too much.

        He unwound a long strip of parchment from his chest and laid it on the ground in a straight line. Methodically biting each finger, he began to scribble pictograms onto the skin-scroll. He had lived long enough to learn that not everything could be expressed in his native tongue. Over the centuries, he had learned dozens of languages—real and fake, futuristic and historic, ancient, extinct, imagined, fabricated—the Inked Man collected languages in the same way some used to collect rare coins.

        When he was finished and had stood up, the Inked Man began uttering the guttural, discordant syllables of the language. As he completed each phrase, another pictogram incandesced. Sand began flowing away from the parchment in thin rivulets, but as he added more complexity to the tone poem streaming from his bullhorn mouth, the rivulets grew into creeks and streams and whole rivers. A depression formed in the sand, and the Inked Man watched as hundreds of invisible hands scooped more and more sand away until....

        When the hot red sun was setting and the cool white sun was about to rise, the depression had become a valley leading to a bricked-up mine cart entrance. The Inked Man knew this entrance intimately. He knew how deep it led into the mountain and he knew where he needed to be.

        The Inked Man wrote a word on his hand and pressed it to the bricks.

        “Boom.”

* * *

        Chernyl hung his rucksack on this cot and sat down. Sighing, he couldn’t help but regret his decision just a little bit. Even if he would make coin here—enough to save up and buy Trinia a wedding band—he was sacrificing his safety to get it. If only he hadn’t gotten fired from the stationary store a few months back, then he wouldn’t have had to find the sandwich stand job, and if the sandwich stand job hadn’t turned out to be a big bust, he wouldn’t be in the mine.

        He shook his head. This was a useless line of thought. Anyway, if he hadn’t gotten fired when he did, he sure would have been by now. Those damn forma rolls were just too addictive. One puff, and all of Lacuna seemed to come to life in gaslamp glory.

        “One puff and you got fired, jackass,” Chernyl said. He fell back onto the cot. It smelled of sweat and yeasty beer. A few feet above his head, the low ceiling was scrawled with graffiti both blasphemous and lewd, often at the same time. He smiled.

        The billets were expansive canvas structures outside the mine entrance. There were half a dozen of them, holding hundreds of miners. The lack of trunks or belongings near the cots told Chernyl all he needed to know about the average lifespan of a miner.

        However, there were touches of personality: a steamer trunk with “Jame” written in huge, calligraphic letters across the top; life-sized hand-painted pin-ups hung on the walls and ceilings near a few beds; family tintypes poked under thin blankets and flat pillows; one cot rested on a pedestal of tatty paperbacks.

        “No one can read here my ass, Decker,” Chernyl said. He got up and pried one loose. It turned out to be an alchemical manual declaring the health benefits of termite enzymes.

        The canvas flap opened and a dozen or so miners walked in. Regardless of what color they began the day, now they were a uniform matte black.

        Chernyl stood up, but nobody noticed him. They parted around him like a stream around a stone and went to their own cots or to the line of washbasins at the far end of the billets.

        A man lay down on the cot with all the books and closed his eyes, but only for a moment.

        “Who in the hell took one of my books?” he said, jumping up.

        Chernyl swallowed. The miner was short, thin, and very old. A soot-stained patchy beard covered most of his face that wasn’t covered by eyebrow. Cracked glasses perched at the end of his nose. He would be a comical figure if Chernyl didn’t see cords of muscle covering his bare arms.

        “I—I did.”

        The miner stomped over to Chernyl and, even though he only came up to Chernyl’s chin, slapped him across the face and took the book back. Chernyl saw a bright light for a moment before it was replaced by a bone-deep sting. “Who gave you the gall, son, to take another man’s property without rightly asking? Hmm?”

        Chernyl, embarrassed and angry, looked down at the man. “And since when is knowledge property?”

        The bookman looked like he was going to slap Chernyl again. Instead, he leaned in real close and, squinting his eyes, whispered, “I like you, son.”

        Chernyl couldn’t tell if his face was hot because of the slap, or if he was blushing. “Judgment’s still out on you.”

        The bookman laughed. “I’d call you a smart-ass if I weren’t so wise.” He grabbed Chernyl by the hand. “Name’s Pater, by way of asking, though everyone calls me ‘Spec,’ so you might as too.”

        He shook Spec’s hand. “Chernyl.”

        “Chernyl? Funny name, that. We’ll have to get you a new one.” Spec dragged Chernyl by the hand over to where another man sat on his cot sketching what looked like mutilated hands. “Hey Ganch, this kid says his name is Chernyl. What you make of that?”

        “That won’t do,” Ganch said, not looking up from his sketch. The mutilated hands were moving toward a church or something.

        “He needs a new one, eh?”

        “He needs a new one.”

        Chernyl did not like the direction this conversation was going. He tried to clear his throat, but Spec’s grip tightened.

        “Well ‘en?” Spec asked.

        Ganch looked up at Chernyl. “Inky Britches,” he said and went back to his sketch.

        “Perfect,” Spec agreed. “On account of that big ol’ mole you got growing out of your cheek, boy, and on account that your privates are prolly swaddled in cloth.”

        Chernyl jerked his hand free. “Ain’t no way I’m answering to Inky Britches.”

        Spec waved it away. “It’ll only be for a day or two until everyone gets tired and shortens your name to Inky.”

        Inky’s mouth opened and closed like a fly trap, but no sound came out. Another man walked past and slapped Inky on the back.

        “Good to meet ya Britches.” He continued on to his cot. Only later did Britches realize that the man had been naked.

        Spec put a hand on Britches’ shoulder. “Though, I suppose they could shorten it to that too.”

* * *

        Dust rolled down the tunnels. It was good to see that some of the languages hadn’t lost their power. Whereas even to the Inked Man it sounded like he had said “Boom,” it wasn’t actually what he’d whispered. The language he had used pre-dated his birth language by almost ten thousand years.

        The Inked Man possessed senses far more powerful than sight, but he still waited until the dust cleared to venture into the mines. Closing his eyes, he bit his thumb again and scrawled Unsight on his forehead. When he opened his eyes again, darkness had become... not light, but no longer was it dark. He could see the many branching passages, the thousands of little caves, caverns, and niches, and what was within each alcove. He could see it all at once, but, again, he couldn’t see it at all. It was the perfect knowledge of the mine-labyrinth and everything contained within encoded into that single word: Unsight. The Inked Man felt it to be one of his greatest achievements, this word. He felt it to be an even greater achievement than carving the labyrinth out of the abandoned mines with hands and spells and paper-golems; an even greater achievement than what he had filled the labyrinth with.

        He took a step inside, and the sand fell behind him, although not a single grain entered his domain. For hundreds of years, Lacunans thought the church to be his seat of power, but this place of darkness and musk, cobwebs and corridors was the true heart of his empire, filled with his favorite subjects.

        The Inked Man tilted his head down. His eyes—if that term could be applied to them in the first place—felt cold, black, and dead inside his head. If the sand hadn’t fallen and even a single beam of the faint white sun touched his eyes, his body would immolate. All that would remain would be ash and two cold, black, dead stones.

        Looking down, even without light, even without eyes, the Inked Man knew himself with his Unsight. His arms—like two dead branches on a diseased tree—were inscribed with thousands of words, spells, and prayers. If he looked closely, he could pick out individual languages and trace their evolution across his body, watching how syntax changed from century to century. Words scribbled in haste on his left arm had wholly different meanings than the same words written a decade later on his right, and once-powerful prayer-chants would yield little more than a feeble light if performed today.

        “So much wasted time. So much wasted space,” he said. Whole swaths of his plague-skin were covered in dead languages, and the spells, charms, and wards written in the ancient characters had died with them. Even now as time approached its endpoint, he could feel his immortality begin to weaken. Cracks formed in the lacquer on his bones. Pulpy muscle lost strength. Flakes of skin sloughed off at the slightest urging, as if the parchment plague had resumed its course of infection; as if he wasn’t the Inked Man, the carrier of the ur-Plague, the god of this dehydrated world; as if he was succumbing to the strain of the plague that had cleansed Lacuna dozens of times throughout history; the plague he had cured before the waves of sand came and the Lacunans drowned in the riptide.

        He shook his head and took a step. His body creaked like a tree in the wind, but he still felt strong, stronger than any woman or man that had ever lived, and he still had chores to do before the end.

        The entry corridor into the labyrinth was designed to be easy, at least to appear easy. It was flat and straight for quite a ways, but it was also pitched downward. The Inked Man didn’t care how far someone got into his labyrinth, as long as they didn’t leave. Intruders—and there had been many—were surprised when they came back to this straight, flat corridor to find it had grown longer and become an impossibly steep incline.

        Bones crunched under the Inked Man’s feet at the end of the corridor.

        “Maybe I should hire a chambermaid?” He laughed to himself. “I’ve lived far too long.”

* * *

        Inky—he had used his last few forma rolls to barter away Britches—stood in front of the mine entrance. Even though the mother-daughter suns of Lacuna had set, the darkness of the mine stained the night. His arms quivered, the pick in his hands jumping about. The company store hadn’t had boots in the right size either, so he had stuffed his spare pair of stockings into the toes. Even with their weight and a rudimentary knowledge of how gravity worked, he felt his position on this earth was tenuous at best. The overalls were second-hand and well-worn, smelling of oil and rust, sweat and spice. His helmet, too, was secondhand, but when he switched on the lamp, it produced a strong beam.

        Spec tapped him on the shoulder. “We ran outta canaries, but the alchemists rigged our lamps so your light will turn green if the air becomes foul and red before it runs out of fuel.”

        Inky fingered the spare fuel cube on his belt, the chemicals inside pressurized so as to prevent sloshing. “What color would it be if the air went foul after the lamp turns red?”

        Spec looked down, his beam bouncing around. “You ever mix paints together when you were a kid?”

        Inky shook his head.

        “You know what color blood comes out when you’re strangling someone?”

        Again, Inky shook his head.

        Spec sighed in frustration. “Doesn’t matter what color it is, ‘cause you’ll have switched your fuel already, right?”

        Inky nodded.

        “Good boy. Now stick close to me and I’ll show you how to live forever.”

* * *

        The Inked Man walked in the deep silence of the mine. There was something comforting about being encased in millions of tons of stone. He didn’t know why. Maybe some geologic instinct passed on from the very first animalcules that lived in the rock fissures; some yearning to return to the inanimation that life evolved from.

        As he descended deeper into the labyrinth, he came upon his first cache. He knew what was inside, but he entered the small cavern anyway and felt what was around him.

        Stone shelves held the final books Lacuna ever produced, including a few the Inked Man had a hand in creating. They were bound in cloth and printed on the papyrus that had choked the River Ars after the climate had changed. Pulp was a distant memory, trees having been cleared from the drifting continent that Lacuna inhabited. The stumps had been pulped centuries ago. There had come a brief respite when Lacunans went into the land en masse to dig up the massive roots of the once-great forests, but that couldn’t last.

        Now, the land was parched and cracked in every direction, all the way to the great oceans. At decades-long intervals tumbleweed would blow past, and the desperate papermakers of Lacuna would throws bullets at each other, trying to get a few pounds of it to pulp. Those sacrilegious enough bleached the pages of ancient tomes to write over them. Parchment and vellum hadn’t been available in decades, and the few scraps of bird skin a Lacunan got from stoning one out of the sky yielded little more than pages for a diary.

        Reeds had started floating in clumps down the evaporating river, and the Lacunans rejoiced as they ate meals of cactus fruit and baked tarantula. Having a surplus of paper for the first time in a decade, they wrote down everything that had been filling up inside them: rage at the previous generations for turning the land into a desert, rage at the Fiend for dehydrating the land with his fires, rage at the cactus for having too many needles, rage at the sky for never having a cloud, rage at the suns for getting hotter, rage at each other for hoarding papyrus reeds. Sometimes they ran out of rage and wrote confessionals, funeral dirges, recipes for scorpion tail, sense-poetry, even stories.

        In the Inked Man’s cavern, hundreds of books stared at him, spine out. Or they would have been spine out, if they had spines. It wouldn’t matter anyway, because not a single volume the Lacunans produced had a title.

        The volumes the Inked Man produced, however, did. They were bound in sumptuous green leather, clasped with a naked lock of exposed gears. He picked up one volume, felt the weight and the strange warmth. With his Unsight, he read the title: Resher Domigan. He had known Resher well. At one time, the Inked Man had been Resher’s sketchbook. Resher’s favorite subject was drawing the death poses of those who fell in Lacuna’s streets. After the sketch, he flensed them for parchment. The Inked Man hadn’t much cared for Resher, but damn if he didn’t respect the kid’s talent with a pencil and penknife.

        The Inked Man set the volume back down. It wasn’t the book he was looking for. He exited the cache and continued on. He still had a long way to go.

* * *

        Inky wiped black sweat off his forehead and aimed his pick at the same spot he had just struck. Missing off to the left, it rang against dense stone, sending pins and needles shooting up his arms.

        He cursed loudly.

        Spec shouldered his own pick and chuckled. “You’re like a drunk trying to piss into a tin can,” he said, walking over. “Instead of watching your pick, keep your eye on where you want it to hit.”

        Inky let his pick fall. “What do you think I’m doing? I’m not an idiot. It’s dark and hot and my hands are shredded. I’m having a hard enough time standing up, much less hitting the same spot twice.”

        Spec made a clucking sound in his throat. “How much coal you get tonight?” He peaked into Inky’s cart and made the clucking sound again. It echoed around the empty cart.

        “Not enough.”

        “I’ve seen worse. You’ve got enough in there to by some hardtack from the commissary.”

        Inky slouched against the rock face. He felt the solid impacts of more practiced picks gouging coal out of the walls. One full cart a night went to his work-related expenses. He started making profit on the second cartful. The cart contained enough coal to cover the iron floor of his cart.

        “Don’t worry, Inky. We all started out this way. You won’t be knocking face-sized lumps out for a month or so.”

        “A month?”

        Spec nodded, his glasses shining in the light of Inky’s headlamp. “But you’ll carry more out of the mine every day. Most miners take their first full cart out after a week or so, if they last that long.”

        Inky nodded. That felt a bit better. “A week. I can handle a week.”

        Spec extended a hand and hauled Inky to his feet. “Of course it’s that quick because you’re billed weekly for company fees.”

        They were over a mile into the mine. Even with their headlamps and some larger alchemical lanterns, the darkness was foreboding, oppressive. Inky tried not to think what dwelled beyond the range of the light, but he was certain he had heard growling on more than one occasion.

        It may have been Tomai coughing though. The old man had been working in the mine longer than anyone else. Even his teeth were stained gray from inhaling the coal dust. Rumor had it that Decker was going to force him out because he was from the time when lampblack was worth half-gold and unions almost mined the mountain hollow.

        Inky grabbed his pick off the ground and put his weight behind the next swing, shearing off a piece of coal the size of a small apple. He almost laughed with a combination of relief and joy, tossing the lump into his cart.

        “See?” Spec said, laying a hand across his shoulders, “You’re getting it already....” The old man’s voice trailed off, and he clutched his chest. Inky grabbed him, thinking Spec’s heart had given out. Instead, Spec took a pendent of glowing crystal from inside his shirt.

        “Fifteen years of that and I’m still not used to it.”

        “What the hell, man?” Inky said, throwing his hands up.

        Spec winked. “I had an alchemist named Francini make it for me. I wanted something that would tell me when twelve hours passed. She thought it’d be funny to have this crystal singe my nipples off twice a day.”

        Inky perked up again. “I know Francini.”

        “Interesting woman, that one,” Spec said. He shook the crystal and it stopped glowing. “Interesting, and dangerous as all-get-out.”

        Chernyl shivered, but whether from the drying sweat on his skin or the truth of Spec’s words, he couldn’t say.

* * *

        The Inked Man walked deeper into the mountain. He passed dozens of caverns, each holding hundreds of books from different times in Lacuna’s history. There were romances and utopian dreams and philosophical meanderings, but the only link between the caches were the Inked Man’s biographies of those he had known. Often he would pick up and run his fingers over the strangely warm books. He remembered being this man’s business ledger, this girl’s bedtime story, this dog’s newspaper chew-toy. They all had helped create and recreate the Inked Man; whether for better or worse was only known to him.

        As he entered the deep parts of the labyrinth, his Unsight became... odd: silhouette-feelings embossed themselves, senses-of-mass increased, lexigraphic-memory seemed to ooze from the walls like stone pus.

        He ducked into a cache. The books were printed on thick, rough-cut paper. The font was a large primitive serif, and of course, it was illuminated. The Inked Man recognized straight legs where now there were curved edges, and extinct crossbars littered half the alphabet. This was from the early history of Lacuna, some thousands of years ago. It detailed the first attempt to divert the River Ars around the city, to create what would become Parchment Run. The lamenting verse was crude, if heartfelt. It made the Inked Man smile. He remembered watching those early Lacunans with their picks and shovels, moving the heavy soil one scoop at a time.

        The Inked Man’s Unsight doubled and he had to sit down. Pain—the first pain he had felt since he became immortal—split his head in two. Something was wrong about his knowledge of early Lacuna. It felt slippery, like a slime eel out of water. He knew, but he didn’t know. Images filled his termite brain, but they were more like oil paintings than daguerreotypes.

        The Inked Man was confused, scared, and in pain for the first time in millennia. It was thrilling.

* * *

        Inky lay on his bed, counting his coin. He hadn’t seen the sun in over a month, working the quieter night shift. Ever since his first day, Spec had been feeding him a steady stream of tricks to charm the coal out of the wall: hit the seam here, not here; let the weight of the pick do the work; the sharper your pick, the less force you have to put behind it; don’t eat the mud clams in the commissary; don’t leave your money sack in the billets.

        This last one he had asked Spec about. “But I live in the billets. Where else would I put my coin?”

        “First Lacuna?”

        Inky shook his head. “My father lost his inheritance when First Lacuna went bust a few decades back. Why do you think I came to the mines?”

        Spec took a bite of his egg salad sandwich. “What about the commissary depository?”

        “Their fees are half my wage.”

        “Well then I dunno man!” Spec waved his sandwich around, bits of egg streaking the ceiling. “Stuff it under a loose floorboard.”

        Inky tipped the rest of his coin into his leather purse and slipped it under the loose floorboard near the head of his cot. It wasn’t a lot of money by any means, but he was making more and more every day as his strikes rang truer, his muscles grew tauter, and his carts filled faster.

        Ah Trinia, Inky thought, Only a few years and I’ll be able to afford your dowry. Then we can say good-bye to Lacuna forever.

        “I can’t believe you’re actually hiding it under a loose floorboard,” Spec said. He plunged his hands into the room-temperature water in the wash basin and splashed it over his face.

        “How’d you know what I was doing?” Inky asked, startled. He could have sworn he was all alone in the dorm. Everyone else was at the company bordello bargaining for pleasure, or eating buttered noodles in the commissary.

        Spec wiped his face with a towel and turned toward Inky. Although he wasn’t wearing a shirt, suspenders could just be seen through the thick, white hair on his chest. Inky was also reminded that Spec might be old, but he wasn’t feeble.

        “I been here the whole time. You just failed to notice.”

        Inky shook his head. “No you weren’t. I made sure the dorm was empty before counting my money.”

        Spec smiled. “Don’t worry, Inky. Your money ain’t worth the time or effort.”

        Inky felt his ears burn. Granted, most of his money had been taken in fees and penalties, but what remained was hard-earned. “If you were wealthy enough not to need my money, you wouldn’t be working here.”

        “Oh I don’t need to work,” Spec said, sitting on his own cot. “I don’t need to work.”

        “You going to blab where I’m keeping my stash?”

        “Nah,” Spec said, “Your secret’s safe with me. Just make sure you remember Spec next time you get a couple forma rolls.”

        Smiling, Inky nodded. He opened his mouth to thank Spec when someone burst through the flap, panting. “Fire. Fire in the mines,” he said. Inky didn’t recognize the boy, but that didn’t matter. You didn’t call ‘fire’ unless your boots were smoking.

        Inky and Spec ran into the coming dawn, and at once started coughing. The air was thick with smoke. Flames twisted out of the mine’s entrance.

        “How bad is it?” Spec asked, but the boy was gone.

        He cursed and ran toward the fire. Inky followed. A bucket brigade was passing pail after pail of sand from one to another, and cartloads more were dumped into a growing pile at the beginning of the line.

        Spec grabbed one of the miners and spun her around. “Where did it start? Anyone left in the mine?”

        She set a full bucket down and grabbed another. “Idiot from the boom crew dropped his vial of reagent a hundred yards in,” she said. Her hands moved almost too quickly for Inky to follow as they filled a bucket every breath. “Still a couple overnighters behind the flames.”

        Spec cursed again and took off for the mine. Inky had a hard time keeping up with the old man. The bucket brigade didn’t even give them a second glance.

        At the mine entrance, a large stone cabin held fire-fighting gear: buckets for the sand that trapped fire in glass, hoses for the pump carriages that never came, axes to break down the doors that weren’t there, and thick leathers for the fools who would try to rescue the well-done.

        Spec half-jumped into a pair of leather trousers hanging from the wall. Cracked, more black than brown, and covered in ash, these leathers had seen many fires. By the mottled scars on Spec’s back, Inky knew the old man had seen more than one fire as well.

        “You gonna shrug into some leathers or stare at my handsome ass?” Spec asked, tossing the heavy garments to Inky.

        Up until this point, he hadn’t thought of going into the fire. In fact, he hadn’t thought of much, following Spec by instinct. Now the possibility of going into a fire—a fire fed by crushed coal and the chill breeze as it wove its way underground towards the Fiend’s throne—was overwhelming.

        Sitting down, Inky began tugging on the leathers. When he was overwhelmed, he ran on instincts alone, and his instincts told him to follow Spec even if that meant diving into that flaming maw himself.

        “Here,” Spec said, handing Inky a glass mask. “It’s alchemical and won’t melt to your face.” He threw a satchel over Inky’s shoulder. A ragged, insulated hose snaked from the bottom of the mask to the satchel.

        “The satchel does burn,” Spec said, “so tuck it into your overcoat. The alchemists tell me we have three hundred breaths of oxygen in the sack. I’ve never tested it, and don’t let me catch you either.” Spec put on his own rounded glass mask. “Stay close.”

        They exited the stone shack and plunged into the smoking heart of the blaze.

* * *

        The Inked Man burned. Even though he saw no flame nor smelled no smoke, he burned. He had to be burning. What else could cause him to fall to his knees? Throughout his own history only one element could weaken him, could destroy him if only he wasn’t eternal: fire.

        Inching along the corridors on his stomach, he looked through the stone floor with his Unsight, seeing the countless miles of snaking pathways underneath him. They were there in case Lacuna ever rose again and he needed more space for his caches, his library of ages.

        At first, the pain had been a welcome respite to the decades of numbness and non-feeling. It wasn’t that he was incapable of being hurt—every time he tore his thumb open to cast spells in blood, it stung just as much as if his skin was flesh and not paper—but this was a novelty of pain. Having been a tome in the book fires of the Modernist Revolution, fuel for the funeral pyre of Komi Lanedon, and ash in the ruins of his own church, the Inked Man was used to the cleansing pain of flame. This, though, was a pain of a different sort. It was the burning of extreme cold and the heat of the pit of fear in his stomach. Something was wrong, and he didn’t know what, and his body was reacting to it; reacting to a profound sense of wrongness. The Inked Man had lived so long and so fully that he was as near omniscient as a being could be, but he was frightened for no other reason than his Unsight told him to be.

        Maybe he had cast the spell wrong? Maybe this was some sort of Unsight double-vision that was eating as his mind?

        The spell wasn’t wrong. He had created the spell himself, and it was flawless. The feeling—the cold, unburning, burning feeling—was the knowledge that he shouldn’t be here; that the books around him—many that he had written himself—were from a time before himself.

        “But I did exist. I remember orchestrating the Bugspit Rebellions and digging the Run and mating with Queen Woodheart and working in the deli.” His voice gave out but his mind still raged. I helped lay the first bricks in the wall ringing Lacuna. I remember putting up the first animal-hide tents on this land. I remember teaching the proto-Lacunans how to chisel memories into stone.

        The pain increased and it focused his thoughts to a sharp point.

        But that doesn’t explain how I remember them.

* * *

        Inky tried counting his breaths at first, but after five, he decided focusing on the flames was a better use of his time.

        Chunks of coal threatened to trip him. Support timbers, flaming and fallen, should have caused him to pause, but Spec vaulted over them like a show horse, so Inky did as well. Hot embers floated up the legs of his trousers when he leapt flame; singed the hair on his leg. He was thankful for the clean air in his satchel.

        Even though he was in a mine, Inky’s tunnel-vision extended only to the edges of Spec’s leathers. The deeper they went into the mine, the hotter it became. Inky felt like a side of haggis: just a bunch of organ meat boiling in a sack.

        Spec turned and motioned for Inky to crouch down. He tore off his mask and leaned in real close.

        “I’m going to be doing some stupid things. You will not do them. Nod now.”

        Inky nodded.

        “Good.” Spec put his mask back on and stood up, dragging Inky with him. They stayed low and crouch-walked through the smoke.

        Even the flames didn’t shed enough light to penetrate the smoke and natural darkness of being entombed in stone. They tripped and stumbled. Inky was sure he had used at least half of his breaths. Like a black drop of ink, panic spread across his heart.

        Spec tore off his mask. “Day!” he yelled into the mine. The flames roared, but Spec roared louder, and Inky listened as the echo faded into smoke.

        “Day!” he yelled again. They walked deeper into the inferno. “Day.” His voice continued to echo, until, as if from a great distance, a thin reply came.

        “Night.”

        They stopped. Spec put his mask to his face and took a deep breath. Once more, he called, “Day!”

        And once more the reply came, “Night.”

        Spec ran forward, the weight of his leathers forgotten. Inky was spurned on by a blood-cocktail of fear and thrill and the knowledge that if he lost sight of Spec, he would be lost as well.

        “Day!”

        “Night.”

        “Day!”

        “Night.”

        Every time Spec would scream into the smoke, the reply would come louder and louder. How he knew where he was going, how he avoided every fallen support, dropped mine tool, every flaming hunk of coal, bordered on preternatural. Inky stumbled more than once but never left his feet. Falling would mean death as sure as a bullet in this environment.

        Spec fell to his knees and Inky nearly tripped over him. Instead, he used his momentum to slide to a stop on his own knees.

        In Spec’s arms, Tomai—the quiet old man who collected scraps of paper—wheezed, stained black by soot.

        “Help me lift him,” Spec said, putting Tomai’s arm over his shoulder. Inky took the other side, and they hoisted him up. Spec put his mask over Tomai’s face. “If we go steady, we’ll all get out.”

        A tunnel support gave way behind them. The massive beam wedged itself into the tunnel between them and the mine entrance, throwing flames from floor to ceiling.

        “Of course this’d happen,” Spec said. Shaking his head, he slipped out of his coat and draped it over Tomai.

        Inky must have been staring, because Spec grabbed him by the ears. “Remember what I said about me being able to do stupid things and you not.” It was a statement not a question. Inky nodded anyway. He wasn’t going to do anything stupid, but he also wasn’t about to let Spec die in the mine.

        Finding a pick on the floor near the fire, Inky shrugged out from under Tomai. In one motion, he grabbed it and swung it as hard as he could into the beam. It shattered into charcoal and ash.

        Spec shuffled past him with Tomai limping along. “May not’ve been stupid, but it wasn’t smart.”

* * *

        The Inked Man had been crawling since the moment the universe came into being; since the moment the Fiend blew his nose into a tissue and tossed it onto a lifeless rock. He couldn’t remember a time before crawling, before pain. He was crawling toward something, but he didn’t know what. He was beginning to suspect that the snake that bound the world had swallowed him and he was crawling forever through its circular digestive system.

        But no. With his Unsight, he would have seen the ribs and vessels and lymph of the snake. All he saw were endless corners, countless books, and a hopeless path.

        He crawled on. The books were becoming ever more primitive; his handwritten volumes almost non-existent after a certain point. He was getting close, but the pain was growing worse; the sense of unreality, the sense of loss, of having never been.

        Something in his Unsight kept him going. It shined like a beacon of white fire. He had followed it through the eons, and now he was finally at the doorstep. He dragged himself through the doorway and screamed as the pain tore his body apart. Down every ink-filled vein, jagged ice sliced him to ribbons. Worse yet, his mind cramped, pulling in on itself, making itself into as small a target as possible for the Unreality to hit.

        But the light was so bright! The beacon so pure! This must be the place of Unpain, of Uncrawl. All he needed to do was reach the books within and learn their secrets. His Unsight told him all he needed to do was lay his hand on a book and he would be saved.

        The Inked Man grabbed the nearest stone shelf and hauled himself to his feet. The pain pounded through him like a thousand thousand termites mating in his body. All he had to do—

        But there were no books. Instead, tablets of clay—of dark, red, Lacunan clay—lined the walls. With black tears forming in his eyes, he let his head tilt forward. It struck a clay tablet.

        In a blinding flash of Unlight and Pain, the End of Time came to shutter the world, but the Inked Man was nowhere to greet it.

* * *

        “Just a little further,” Inky whispered under his breath. His mouth was dry and sick with ash. Air from the satchel came weak and stale. His lungs were scorched and drew weak breath. Every bone was about to snap, every muscle about to dissolve, but he kept moving.

        On his left arm, the old man Tomai struggled with each step but never stumbled once. On his right, Spec stumbled with each step but never fell. Inky half-carried them toward the small aperture of dawn light.

        “Inky,” Spec wheezed, “Let me fall and you take Tomai. Get out. Don’t be stupid.”

        Inky pretended not to hear him. This was stupid and that’s why he was doing it. His whole life to that point had been in the pursuit of avoiding stupidity; avoiding risks and doing something great. His entire life, he had never made an impact on anyone. Even Trinia—Trinia who he loved so much and would marry someday—seemed to tolerate him only for discounts on sliced beef.

        Now, though, now he had a chance to do something really stupid. He had a chance to save the lives of two men. If he could just make it another dozen yards or so, he could feel stupid for the first time.

        Inky grunted and increased his speed. Now he was carrying both men and he was sure his shoulders were going to tear but there was the light, the sweet beautiful dawn light, and dozens of miners and bucket brigaders and families and reporters stood in that dawn light, and if he could just make it a few... more... steps....

        Inky, Spec, and Tomai collapsed in the ash, in the dawn light.

* * *

        Out of the mine, the Inked Man lay on his stomach in the center of a circle of stones. The River Ars—if it could be called that—was nothing more than a thin artery wearing at the parched earth in the distance. Dozens of bowstrings drew back with the creak of supple bone. The arrows carried tips of flint and flame.

        “No more flame,” he whispered. A tall woman holding a massive femur walked toward him. She bent down and looked right into his eyes. He stared back but was distracted by the filigree tattoos tracing around her eyes.

        “You have the Unsight,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

* * *

        Chernyl—no one called him Inky anymore—sat on his cot with his head in his hands. Tomai’s shallow breaths spoke like a metronome. Chernyl wanted to stuff Tomai’s mouth with burlap to stop the noise.

        Spec’s cot was empty save for an old tintype of the miner. It had been decided that the cot would serve as his memorial; no one would ever sleep on that pile of books again. Even Decker agreed to keep the vacancy after Chernyl sunk a fist into the foreman’s gut.

        The physiker said Spec died from smoke suffocation. She had no idea how he had made it so far. Spec’s tongue was a cigar stump. His esophagus had became a hardened chimney. The lining of his lungs had turned to ash.

        “Save a little on cremation costs, eh?” she said. Spec didn’t have any family so she gave the death certificate to Chernyl. It was stuffed into Spec’s favorite romance novel under the cot.

        Chernyl clenched the leather purse in his hands, empty as his growling stomach. It had been like that when he returned from the fire. He suspected the greenhorn who had come into the dorm yelling “Fire,” but he couldn’t be sure. When he went to Decker about it, the wheezing foreman held up his hands. “That’s why we offer the services of our company bank at a reasonable rate.”

        “Don’t you think I should get a bonus or reward for saving the lives of two miners?” Chernyl asked. He was trying to keep the boiling frustration inside of him. Decker had made it clear that another outburst would land him in the mines permanently: as an indentured servant. That’s how justice worked in Lacuna.

        “What about Spec’s will? Did he leave me anything?” It was a shot in the dark, but Chernyl had felt a connection with Spec, and he hoped it was a two-way street.

        “Oh, I’m sorry Chernyl,” Decker said, “but because Spec never filed his will with the company office, his savings became property of the bank.”

        Chernyl was out of the office before the fat man could finish his sentence. Like hell Spec didn’t file a will, but who could find it in that bird’s nest of old newspapers and pin-ups.

        By the time he got back to the billets, the sun was setting. Tomai sat on the edge of his cot, pulling on his boots.

        “You’re going to kill yourself if you go back to the mines this quick,” Chernyl said, falling back onto his cot.

        Tomai answered with a dry cough as he pulled the boot lace through each eyelet.

        “Piss poor thanks if you die so soon.”

        “Did I ask for ya to save me?” Tomai asked. He didn’t even glance at Chernyl as he got up and walked out of the billets.

* * *

        For the first time in his afterlife, the Inked Man felt uncomfortable on a throne. The people here had built him a massive seat of smooth stone, hewn from the low mountains to the east.

        In the years since he had arrived, the Inked Man had taught the proto-Lacunans how to turn their spoken language into characters, how to press those characters into slabs of river clay, and how to preserve those slabs in the mountain caves.

        Before the Inked Man, the people were nomads, following herds of camels around the dry, cracked land. Now, the few dozen nomads were comfortable in stone cabins at the base of the mountains. They farmed the fertile mountainside and were even beginning to domesticate livestock.

        Morinae ruled the village as a sort of governor or chief. She had aged well since that first night in the middle of the stone circle. Long gray braids were piled on top of her head. The filigree tattoos had faded but were still visible, shining in the firelight. From her first husband, she had borne five children. After he made the foolish decision to raise a hand against her and found that though her back may have bent she was still fast as a scorpion and twice as poisonous, she had taken a new husband and borne five more children. They, in turn, had given her dozens of grandchildren. And, only a few days prior, her first great-grandchild: a girl named Tes-Morinae.

        But, there had been others. The little figures, looking so much like swaddled paper dolls, were concealed within the Inked Man’s throne.

        “Why are they so soft?” Morinae asked. She cradled one in her arms. It had her high forehead and upturned nose; his paper skin and blood of ink.

        “They’re paper people. Most don’t survive.”

        Morinae ran a hand over the Inked Man’s forearm. “And you are also paper?”

        “More and less.”

        She sat on the arm of his throne. “I like this paper,” she said. “What animal do you kill to get it?”

        The Inked Man laughed, walking his fingers up her arm. “No, no animal. Parchment and vellum come from animals. Paper comes from trees.”

        “And where would we travel to find and kill these trees?”

        “I lived through a time where trees grew for a thousand miles in every direction.”

        “This is a great distance?” she asked.

        The Inked Man nodded. “But I also watched the last tree ever to grow in Lacuna fall.”

        Morinae traced the tattoo on her forearm. “Lacuna. The Missing Letters,” she said, the letters cut and rubbed with lampblack, wrapping her arm from elbow to wrist.

        “The City of Missing Letters.”

        She jumped off of the throne. “We will find these missing letters and make them do our bidding.”

        The Inked Man laughed again. “You may find the letters, but making them bend to you will be difficult. Some say impossible.”

        Even though Morinae was considered an elder by her people, she still had the fire-glint of adventure in her eyes. “Difficult, yes. Doubly so without paper.” She toed a rock across the soil until it fell into a little hole. “And now I will grow a stone weed.”

        The Inked Man fell forward with the weight of her words. For the first time in decades, he felt the Unsight return and propel him toward the End of Time again.

        Morinae shook him awake. He was lying at the foot of his throne. “Are you all right?” she asked.

        “Morinae, I can give you paper. I can give you trees.”

        She smiled. “I would give anything for paper.”

        He nodded. “You will have to give everything for paper.”

* * *

        Chernyl’s pick fell against the rock with the weight of his sorrow. He had sent Trinia another batch of letters and hoped she would understand his delay. If she even wrote him back he would feel better.

        Hunks of coal the size of his fist jumped off the wall. He tossed them over his shoulder. If he got them into his cart, good, but it was difficult to care today. The cart clanged and he knew at least some had hit their mark.

        “Thanks for the boost, Britches.”

        Chernyl turned around and nearly dropped his pick. It was him: the greenhorn who had stolen his money. Or at least, who Chernyl thought stole his money.

        “You,” he said.

        The greenhorn smiled. “Most call me Lorch, but I’ll let it slide.”

        “You stole my money,” Chernyl said.

        Lorch’s eyes bulged and his mouth opened, but all that came out was a hiss.

        “Where’s my coin?” Chernyl asked. He didn’t like how this kid’s face was turning blue. Why wouldn’t he stop hissing?

        Looking down at his hands, Chernyl saw the handle of his pick against Lorch’s throat. He let his arms drop.

        Lorch dropped to his feet, coughing. He tried to say something, but his voice hadn’t recovered.

        “I want my money back.”

        Lorch motioned for Chernyl to come closer. As he leaned in to hear Lorch, steel flashed into Chernyl’s vision and everything went white and then black. A second-type of blackness overcame him, darker than the first. This one was accompanied by throbbing pain and an eye crusted over with dried blood.

        Had he heard laughter, or had that been a dream?

        Chernyl stood up and wobbled a bit. His cart seemed emptier than a moment ago. Had Lorch stolen some of his coal?

        No, Chernyl thought, He stole all of my coal. The greenhorn took my cart.

        Chernyl grabbed his pick off the floor and wound up over his head. He put every frustration of the past few weeks—the company’s shoddy policies, the harassment from the older miners, Spec’s death, Lorch’s theft, Trinia’s silence—and struck the rock face with all of it. The strike echoed up and down the mine, but Chernyl couldn’t hear it as he fell through his shattered life and felt the stone pile on top of him.

* * *

        It had taken Morinae and the Inked Man a full year to collect the supplies to seed the land. He had written plague notes on scraps of his skin. Morinae slapped them onto every seventh person. Within days, those people fell ill. The plague was back in Lacuna. The plague was in Lacuna for the first time.

        The victims suffered little. The Inked Man had constructed this plague to leave the body intact. Instead of large flakes of parchment sloughing off, the victims turned quickly to something like rot-wood.

        Morinae—playing the part of concerned elder—asked for volunteers among the healthy to take the sick far across the dead plains; to put their hide-wrapped corpses on the backs of camels and to bury the body only after the animal fell. Volunteers always came forth, even though they knew it was a one-way journey. The Inked Man gave each volunteer a prayer card written in his own blood, to be read at journey’s end.

        In this way did they seed the land. The two leaders of Lacuna made sure never to touch too many, and the population of the village grew and grew, until the Trickle Ars became the River Ars, and even Morinae’s great-great-grandchildren were bent with age.

        The Inked Man looked from his throne atop the Lampblack Mountains and saw the first saplings in the distance, with the shadow of larger trees darkening the horizon. Sighing, he got down off of his throne and made his way to Morinae’s palace.

        By this time, she had lived longer than anyone had ever lived on this earth. The Inked Man had made sure of it, with recipes for tinctures and salves he had brought back from the other Lacuna. Even with his medicine, though, Morinae could no longer walk, no longer feed herself. She could hardly speak but for whispers.

        He crawled in through her bedroom window. One of her great-grandchildren—the greatest healer in the village—stood near her bed. When she saw his giant form, her lip wavered but she didn’t flee.

        “She’s dying,” Tes-Morinae said.

        The Inked Man nodded.

        “You can’t do anything for her.”

        The Inked Man nodded again.

        This seemed to satisfy Tes-Morinae. She started for the door, but before she exited, she whispered once over her shoulder. “I know where trees come from.”

        The Inked Man didn’t nod this time. He didn’t think he had time to nod. With his Unsight, he saw Morinae’s heart beginning to slow.

        “Morinae,” he said, brushing a wisp of white hair from her dark forehead. “I need one last thing from you.”

        She didn’t whisper. She didn’t even open her eyes. All Morinae did was smile, and he knew that she was ready.

        The Inked Man bit his lip with jagged teeth and pressed them to her forehead. There were no words, no incantations, no prayers to utter. From the moment he pressed his bloody lips to her forehead, from the moment his pulse traveled from his wood-pulp heart to her skin, the mark glowed white and she breathed no more.

        The Inked Woman’s eyes opened as her skin mottled brown and yellow. Where once skin sallow and wrinkled by age had hung off of eroding bones, now flesh of vellum and paper, muscle of pulp and parchment, filled her frame. Even her hair returned to the black of a bottomless inkwell, hanging in sheets to the bottom of her pointed chin.

        The Inked Woman sat up. Her eyes traveled down her calligraphied arm to where her fingers intertwined with those of a man-sized paper doll.

        Lifting him in her arms, she made her way to the library in the mountain, to where her people had stored their first clay stories.

        It only seemed fitting.

* * *

        Chernyl knew he was awake because it was so dark; darker than the inside of his eyelids. He knew he was alive because of the pain. His body was mostly intact, cushioned by something like wood pulp, but his ankles were shattered and his body itched. When he raked his fingers down his arm, papery skin came with.

        Trying not to panic, Chernyl got to a sitting position and searched in his pocket for matches. He could see where he had fallen through the wall of the mine by the patch of lighter blackness above him. It was too far to reach, even if he was able to stand up.

        “Why ain’t I dead?” Chernyl asked. Slabs of stone surrounded him but for the rot-wood below him. Chernyl probed the rot and felt something solid.

        “If I can get a couple sticks, maybe I can make a fire.”

        He pulled at the rot, but it wouldn’t budge. It didn’t feel like a stick though; more like paper rolled tightly into tube.

        “Paper?” He itched his arm again. An entire sheet of skin came off in his hand.

        Bracing himself, he pulled harder. The paper gave way and he jerked backwards, slamming his hand into one of the stone slabs. He felt warm blood drip down his wrist and pool into the bundle of rot and paper.

        He couldn’t keep the panic at bay anymore. Sobbing, he put his head in his hands.

        Chernyl, balling rot, paper, skin, and blood in his head whispered into the darkness.

        “All I want is some Light.”

        The ball of blood and paper glowed.

        And there was Light.

Copyright © 2014 Adam Callaway

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Adam Callaway’s Lacuna stories, which include “Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin“ in BCS #73 and “The Magic of Dark and Hollow Places” in BCS #96, have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, nominated for the Million Writers Award, and named to the Locus Recommended Reading List. He lives in Superior, Wisconsin, with his wife and two dogs.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE UNBORN GOD

by Stephen Case

        There were black kites of the god’s priests aloft in the evenings, fabric dark against the sky. I could tell that it troubled the wizard, though he said nothing. Sylva had volunteered to leave the flying house, to scout them where they hung and carry them away, but the wizard had refused.

        “He thinks I would not come back,” she explained to me, spilling around me like mist. “If we fly too far from his house, we lose our way. We forget.”

        “Is that what happened to the others?”

        Papers shuffled on the desk before me. Her hands were the wind. “Perhaps.”

        I was writing with a quill the wizard had fashioned me. It was a tail-feather from one of the large black birds that roosted in the upper levels of the house. I had been his servant for less than a week (though time quickly became stretched in odd directions inside the house’s walls, and the only way to mark it was the inscrutable concentric rings of the timepiece by the entrance) on the day he sent me to find a bird and pluck its feather.

        “Here are the words you must say,” the wizard told me then, leaning over the map table in the center of the house. He made me repeat them.

        It was my first taste of magic, and it felt metallic on my tongue. The words hummed as I shaped them, setting my teeth on edge and numbing my throat as they passed.

        “He must see you when you speak. You must look him in the eye.” The wizard’s own were on mine now; or rather, the polished bits of marble in the place of his eyes by which he somehow saw.

        The interior of the wizard’s house was shaped like a domed rotunda, though viewed from without it drifted through clear skies as a lone cumulus, its windows and doorway invisible to anyone observing from below. The first floor was dominated by the map table at its center and its walls broken at regular intervals by tall, narrow windows. Each level above formed a balcony running the circumference of the house and was usually lined with books. It was impossible to tell how many levels there were, and each overhung the next as the dome arched toward its peak. Mists hid the highest reaches, and enormous skeletons and preserved creatures were suspended from the unseen ceiling.

        There was a single spiraling staircase connecting each level, but these rose at different points along the circumference of each floor so that moving upward between balconies was never direct. In addition, no staircase—and the staircases were the most ornate aspect of the wizard’s house; silver and carved of bone or ivory—seemed fixed in location. They moved, in fact, according to a specific pattern, though I did not realize this until the wizard fell from the house.

        On the day I fetched the quill, I found one of the large black birds after climbing through at least eight levels of the house. It was perched on a railing opposite a wall of shelves filled with glass jars each containing a human hand suspended in colored oil.

        I cleared my throat, hoping the bird would look toward me. In response, it took wing and circled the suspended bones of a rock-whale to perch again on a railing three balconies higher. It might have been a raven or a rook but for its a bright azure beak.

        I sighed heavily and started upward once more.

        When I reached it the second time, now opposite a wide desk of scattered scrolls and spots of ink, the bird cocked its head to study my approach. I spoke the words the wizard had given me. I could not tell that they had any immediate effect, save once again feeling heavy and deadening in my mouth, but the bird remained impassive as I approached and tugged from its tail a long, black feather.

        It was only when I broke eye contact that the bird screeched and speared the back of my hand with its blue beak. I was still nursing the gash when I returned to the wizard.

        “Good,” he said. He took the ebony feather and notched it with a tiny silver knife. “It must taste blood before it takes ink.”

        I showed him my hand.

        “Hold it out.”

        I did, and then shouted and tried to pull away when he pushed the shaft of the feather into my wound. When he withdrew it, the barbs of the feather were streaked with red as though it had drawn up blood as a tree takes water.

        “Sylva will bring you something for the wound,” he said, releasing my arm. I held the wound with my other hand, pressing down until it throbbed.

        “You must learn to write.” The wizard moved back to the table in the house’s center.

        When I had first come to his house (by night in the airship with my poisoned father, fleeing the god’s ministers), the wizard, if what Sylva and the timepiece told me was correct, had been sleeping in one of the upper levels for years. Now he seldom left the circular map table. Sylva whispered it was where he had taken council with his captains in the old days, when the emperor had sent him here into the Shallows from over the mountains. But none came to take council with him now that I could see, save perhaps the winds and the birds that passed in and out of his windows.

        The table was enormous. It seemed as wide as the room I had slept in as a child in the mill beside the stream. It was a map of the Shallows, detailed so that every river and field appeared. Sylva called it by a certain name when I had first come to the house, but now I could not recall what it had been. (I may not have been listening, distracted by trying to catch a glimpse of her whose voice I heard and hands I felt but could not see.)

        Besides the map, the features of which shifted so it always remained centered on the location of the wizard’s drifting house, the most noticeable aspect of the table was the clouds. They floated above its surface like smoke, in perfect miniature of the clouds above the Shallows, portraying the shifting aerial topography through which the wizard’s house passed.

        When I stood beside him clutching my hand, the table showed tiny flecks to the far south, building into hillocks and furrows moving northward, until the center of the map was a cluster of white columns with scything blue canyons between. I could see those columns outside the windows as we passed among them, blinding white and flattening at the tops.

        “There are scrolls in the third cabinet of the third level,” he was telling me. “Begin your lessons with those of the third shelf. I do not have time to teach you myself, but you must learn nonetheless.”

        “I know how to read and write.” My parents had sent me to the school in the village until I was old enough to help my father at the mill.

        “Not the languages my books are written in. Not enough to be useful.”

        “Why?” I pressed. I was bitter about my hand.

        The carved stones that were his eyes turned toward me for an instant before shifting back to the table.

        “Because I wish it.” He paused as though waiting for me to argue. When I was silent, he continued. “The books themselves and the quill will assist you. Begin copying the third scroll, and continue to the next when you are ready.”

        I sighed heavily and started for the nearest staircase. I assumed in my ignorance that studying would be less labor than scrubbing the flagstone floor with rainwater. In this, as in much, I was incorrect.

* * *

        I found a desk on the third level, not far from the shelf the wizard indicated. I wanted to be alone but not too far away. I still understood little about the upper levels of the house, but I knew that one did not climb into them without having been sent on a specific errand.

        The house had a tendency to resist casual wandering.

        Sylva found me where I sat on a weathered oaken stool. “I brought you something for your hand,” she whispered, “and some parchment and ink.” A bandage coiled through the air like a serpent.

        One could not see Sylva. I wished I could, because her voice was kind. Perhaps because we were both servants of the wizard, she treated me at times like a younger brother. Not like the birds, who ignored me, and the timepiece, who only answered my direct questions, and then only as though I were a particularly uninteresting piece of furniture.

        Sylva, according to the wizard, was a wind to which he had provided an anima. She was a living breeze. She could carry things and take messages, and she could clean the wizard’s house, but like the wind, one only saw the effects of her passage. Depending on how hard she concentrated, she could manipulate objects with surprising dexterity. She must have been rather focused now to carry the parchment and ink to the table so steadily in her twisting fingers of air. I thanked her and when she said nothing assumed she had gone.

        The parchment of the third scroll smelled of age, but the ink inside was dark. I realized why the wizard had selected this particular volume, for it was written in the language I could read, interspersed with lines of an unfamiliar text. It told a story of two brothers and a tree and a dying king. I soon learned that the unknown script told the same story; that the scroll was a tool by which I was expected to learn the language.

        There was more. The story told of the tree learning to speak; of winds that would shape the words into various tones the way Sylva shaped fingers to grip a tray or broom. Sounds seemed to float up off the parchment, so that with concentration I heard the speech as well as read the forms of letters.

        It mattered, because tone was often the most important thing with magic.

        I learned that from the books. The wizard was correct. I did not then know his plans, but as peaceful as the skies seemed now, there would soon be no time to learn from him.

* * *

        That first day spent over the scroll passed quickly. The strange script arched and coiled as I watched, marching over the words with which I was familiar until it finally left them behind and went on alone to tell of the king’s death, the blinding of his son, and the strange fruit the tree bore. The sounds continued rising from the parchment as well, forming tones I felt more than heard, passing above me like the tiny clouds over the wizard’s table.

        His voice called me down to prepare dinner.

        We watched the black kites after we had eaten. The sun was setting behind mountains in the west, mountains that were only peaks, cliffs, and dizzying spirals of cloud. The kites were rising on invisible threads, a line of black diamonds in formation against the horizon.

        “They’re searching for you,” I said.

        The wizard nodded. We were standing high in the house, though there were still scores of balconies above. There were no shelves on this level or desks of books and scrolls. Instead, wide windows opened on every side with dozens of brass and glass instruments crowded before them. The wizard was peering through one that looked like a spyglass with five or six parallel tubes.

        “Can they see us?” The kites were becoming invisible as darkness grew. Through the spyglasses it was clear they had no riders, yet I felt certain they were watching.

        “They will see nothing but a cloud.”

        “But they know your house is disguised.”

        Again the nod.

        “Why doesn’t the god send the jellies?”

        We sometimes drifted through schools of luminous jellies that rode high during the days before falling beneath the clouds as they cooled in the evening. I shuddered when I saw them drift past the windows, white and nearly transparent by daylight, remembering the night that had brought me to the wizard’s house, when the god turned the jellies to red, flowing, angry sheets across the sky.

        “The god is yet unborn,” the wizard explained. He had explained this before. “His manifestation in organic creatures—the jellies, certain plants and animals on the surface below—are unconscious reactions. Such as you would shift or mutter in your sleep. He does not consciously search for us, though his followers do.”

        “The priests?”

        The wizard nodded a third time and lowered his instrument. He moved from the windows, which looked now onto an inky darkness devoid of stars, and motioned me to follow. A fire winked to life in the great hearth on the main floor far below.

        “His followers, those who prepare the way for his coming—its coming—send aloft those kites. They may pray to it, and it may hear their prayers, but it hears them as one hears voices in dreams.”

        I thought about the priests that had come to my father’s mill. “But the priests are like an army. They must have dozens of men in each village.”

        The carved stones marking the wizard’s eyes turned on me. “Tell me about them.”

        “What?”

        “Tell me about the blue-cloaked priests that came to your father’s mill.”

        I thought back to the day the priests had come to tell my father he could no longer harvest the glow-ink from the jellies because these aerial creatures that had provided my family’s livelihood for generations had become extensions of the god’s growing consciousness.

        “There were maybe twenty of them, but it was hard to count. I’ve told you this before. They kept blending into each other. But they all looked hard, like soldiers. And they had mercenaries with them. And wagons and weapons. They beat my father.” I stopped suddenly. I had forgotten that. “They beat him and said they could kill him and no one in the village would lift a finger.”

        The wizard was pulling a smoky ribbon from the air as he walked. As he spoke he twisted it around his hands. “That was not the way you told the story when you first came here. You said there were perhaps half a dozen priests. Old men. They seemed bland and ineffectual. They had no mercenaries and no weapons.”

        I was confused. “That’s not how I remember it. Why would I have said that?”

        The ribbon writhed in the air between us. I thought of Sylva but felt no wind.

        “Because the god is growing,” he answered. “Because it is growing toward omniscience, perhaps omnipotence, and its influence is reaching backward and forward in time. When you came here the priests were bands of clerics who had succeeded in bringing the god to root in the city but were still flailing in their newfound power.”

        The ribbon arched between us, and I realized it was recording the words as he spoke them. I recognized them as the language I had been training myself to read.

        “Now they are an army, and they are launching a grid of watchers into the sky to snare us.” We had arrived back at the table on the main level of the house, beside the roaring fire. It seemed to take less time to move through the house when I was walking with the wizard.

        “They’ve always been an army,” I said. “That’s how they were able to take the city and plant the god at its center.”

        The recording spell spiraled away from us, to be lost in the dimness overhead.

        “No.” The wizard stared down at the table. Now, besides the surface features and miniature billows of clouds, there were tiny flags of darkness flying in formation over its face. “There was no army. Nor did they recruit one in the time you have been here. The current of past events is being influenced. Do you recall the War of Sixteen Saints?”

        “The War of Seven Saints,” I corrected. “The seven rebel generals who tried to prevent the god taking root.”

        In the light from the fireplace, his eyes did look very much like the eyes of a statue. “I thought being in my house might shelter you from the influence,” he said. “Go back to your books for another hour, and then you may retire.”

        But though I stared down at the books for what seemed hours, I did not see them. I recalled instead the day the priests had come to our house, their hard faces and their posture, and the sounds of the blows on my father’s back.

* * *

        I do not know whether the wizard ever slept. When the timepiece woke me in the mornings to prepare his meal, he was already awake, usually standing where I had left him in the evening, staring down at the map table. And when I went to bed on my small cot beside the door, he was either there still or sitting in one of the chairs beside the fire.

        He had been sleeping, though, for decades before I found his house, so perhaps he felt he needed none now.

        When the kites grew thicker, the wizard finally sent Sylva to scatter them.

        “You said she might not come back.” I brought the tea service and set it on a tall stool.

        “She may not.”

        “Is that what happened to the others?”

        The wizard took his cup and stared into it as though it contained a smaller version of the map on the table before him.

        “That may be the case,” he said. “At the height of my power the house was filled with winds. Each had an anima. Their spirits were tethered to my house. If they wandered from it while I was asleep they would lose cohesion and consciousness.”

        I looked out the nearest window. The cloudscape today seemed a sea with a few white islands rearing out of it. I saw no black kites but knew they must be rising around us.

        “Do you know this instrument?”

        I looked at the tall, narrow glass column the wizard indicated. It hung on the wall between the timepiece and an open window.

        “A barometer. The port-master in the village used to carry them.”

        “Indeed. Every airship captain would carry one. They gauge the weight of the air, and its falling or rising signals a change in the weather.”

        I knew all this and nodded.

        The wizard drained his cup. “The emperor sent me over the mountains a hundred years ago to put an end to the Sky Wars that were tearing the Shallows apart. After that there was peace, until your lifetime, when the priests tried planting their unborn god in the city.”

        I knew all this as well, but I had never heard the wizard speak of it himself.

        “Do you know why I slept through the War of the Sixteen Saints?”

        “Three Saints,” I corrected, wondering what this had to do with the barometer. “There were three generals who rebelled.”

        The wizard arched an eyebrow and handed me the cup, which I returned to the tray. When he was done, I would take it and the rest of the service to the tiny kitchen adjoining this room and wash them with rainwater cached in the stones below.

        “I removed myself from the stream of history for a full century,” the wizard was saying. His attention had returned to the map table. “As the god grows, its power increases both backward and forward in time. I have explained this to you before.”

        “Yes.”

        “There are ways to combat this, but the surest is to isolate oneself. The god’s influence does not yet stretch as far as a century into the past; events from perhaps the previous decade alone are being altered. But I needed a way to test those changes. I needed a barometer.”

        “That’s why I’m here?” I picked up the tea service. “You needed someone to gauge the god’s power?”

        The wizard waved the question away. “You are here because you found the sword, and in so doing found my house.”

        “The barometer is falling,” the timepiece announced.

        Outside there were flashes in the distance. The wind hauled itself back in through the window, bringing with it the smell of rain. For a moment Sylva was around me, and I had the fleeting impression of a giantess with streaming hair, her form an outline of mist. She was wild and stroked my face with rainy fingers.

        The wizard barked a word and the figure collapsed.

        “There were many kites,” she whispered, “and there were airships as well. They are gone now.”

        I had never feared Sylva before. I did now.

* * *

        The timepiece woke me next morning.

        “To the books,” it said.

        I went into the kitchen to wash my face in cold water, then reemerged and studied the concentric rings making up the timepiece’s face. I was learning the script of the wizard’s books, but I still could not interpret any of the figures on its surface.

        “What time is it?” I asked.

        “Now.”

        I snorted.

        The sky beyond the windows was a grey slate. The house felt very much like a ship today, sailing through silent and shrouded seas.

        The wizard was nowhere to be seen, and the fire in the hearth beside the map table had fallen to embers. I stirred it and added some logs from the wide basket on the stone floor, wondering how the wizard replenished his supply of firewood. Did the house land to take on fresh supplies? We gathered water from the clouds and eggs from the birds that made an aviary of its upper reaches, but the flour that I used to make our bread, the tea, the wood, and the other supplies crowding the rough wooden shelves in the kitchen surely came from somewhere.

        Though he was, after all, a wizard.

        I climbed to my desk on the third level of the house. On the second level I had to walk nearly the entire perimeter to find the spiral staircase, which had wandered from where I had descended it the previous night.

        I had finished the scroll about the tree and the dying king and his two sons. I moved on to scrolls of the second shelf, which interwove the new script with a third one, jagged and angular. This one was more difficult, but I copied out the curious shapes onto parchment with the black-and-red quill that had tasted my blood.

        I encountered resistance. It was difficult to form certain letters, to join together the angle of their figures. I felt it up my arms and in my chest.

        “You are weaving spells.”

        The wizard had come up silently behind me. He pointed down at the short train of words I had been able to fashion.

        “Is that why they’re so hard to write?”

        “Spells are created of words and will. Sometimes the words are the easier part.”

        I asked him what kind of spells they were.

        “Warding spells. And spells of knowledge. Things that will allow you to read more of the books in the house and protect you from what you learn.”

        “And from the god?”

        He moved from the table and motioned me to follow.

        “And from the god,” he agreed. “It cannot influence you directly, but we have already seen that it begins to shape and alter the past, including your own.”

        We reached a window, and he motioned below.

        “We are leaving the Shallows.”

        It was like going over the edge of the world.

        I had never been beyond the Shallows. I knew they were an immense mesa, but I knew it the same way I knew what the port-master used to say, that the world was an immense sphere. It was a fact never mapped directly onto my experience.

        “You see now why the sky captains called it the Shallows?”

        The grey clouds we sailed upon were breaking.

        “Because the sky is shallow over it,” I muttered.

        The wizard’s house had drifted with herds of cumulus for a hundred years over the low sky of the Shallows. When I looked down from the windows, it had always been onto a patchwork of rolling hills, farms, and small streams. Now that had ended, and the land fell away in dizzying cliffs. There was a tiny brown thread I knew to be a road, stitching back and forth down the broken cliff face until it reached sandy red-brown dunes below. The rippled dunes seemed distant as the bottom of a sea.

        I had lived my entire life on a mountaintop and never known it. “That’s a desert?”

        “It is. It stretches several days’ journey to where the mountains begin to rise and the city rests.” The wizard looked grim. “It does not normally hold clouds.”

        There were a few other clouds in the sky with us, slipping over the edges of the cliff like steam from the lip of a cauldron.

        “Except when it storms.” Sylva had come up beside us.

        The wizard nodded. “I have been waiting for the winds to change, and now we have slipped the net tightening around us in the Shallows. We are going to the city.”

        “I thought we were hiding.”

        “We were hiding until the winds changed.” The wizard’s house was dropping slowly, and the cliffs were already rising up behind. “Now we go to do that for which I slept a hundred years. Are you afraid?”

        I was not. Something grew cold and tight in my chest.

        “They killed my father,” I said, angry with the memory and angry the wizard would question my resolve. “When the god moved into the jellies. The priests and their soldiers came and killed him to make an example. Then they hung his body up on one of his own kites as a warning.”

        The wizard stared, and Sylva gasped.

        “The gulf widens,” he said softly. “You did not have that memory when you first came to my house. You came here with your father.”

        I shook my head. “I came here because....” The memories were uncertain. They changed as I watched them, like clouds in a gale. “I was fleeing.”

        “He had been poisoned by the jellies, and you found my house seeking help. I healed him in return for your pledge of service. He returned to your village alone.”

        “No.” My voice cracked. “I saw them kill him. I fled alone.” The memory was firm now, as clear and sharp as the outline of my father’s kite against the sky. “My father is dead.”

        “He is dead then,” the wizard said.

        I held back my tears until the wizard had returned below, but when they came they were grey and full of fury.

* * *

        The next hours passed swiftly. Clouds continued spilling from the Shallows and gathered around us as the winds carried us across the desert. Sylva began to roar in and out of the house’s windows. The wizard gave her words as she passed, phrases of power I had not heard before but half-understood. She goaded clouds down and around us until they reared on all sides like beasts.

        Soon it was storming. Winds whistled beyond the windows.

        The wizard called for me.

        “Is it magic?” I asked.

        “Magic is little more than reading the signs.” Clouds clustered over the table’s surface so densely it was difficult to see the map below. “It is magic to know when to go and when to stay.” His marble eyes glanced at the windows. “But yes, Sylva helps, aided by my power. I was afraid I would be crippled with only one of my winds remaining, but I believe she will be enough.”

        She had become a monster. Soon the howl of wind was joined by the clatter of hail falling against the white stones of the house’s walls. The wizard spoke to the timepiece, and copper shutters swung into place over each window. Sylva came back in a whirl of steam through the chimney.

        “Rest,” the wizard told her. Amidst the steam it was almost possible to see her shape.

        “They have airships,” she said. “They are waiting over the city.”

        “We will reach them presently.” He smiled. “The storm has become self-sustaining. Gather your strength for the final event.”

        The mist scattered, and I lost her.

        The wizard turned to me. “Can you read my books now?”

        I was looking for Sylva and asked what he meant by final event.

        “My books,” he repeated. “Can you read them?”

        “No. Every day I find a scroll in a new language, and I’ve barely made headway in the second script. It would take a lifetime to be able to read half.”

        He smiled again. He was making me nervous. It was the most I had seen him smile since coming to his house. He had been waiting and watching for so long that now to see him taking action and almost eager was disconcerting.

        “They will teach you,” he said.

        Outside, the storm continued to build.

* * *

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

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

        “Who am I?” she asked.

        I sat down beside her.

        “I don’t remember who I am.”

        “You’re Sylva.”

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

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

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

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

        “Why?” I asked.

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

        “Do you love him?”

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

        I waited.

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

        The air stirred as she withdrew.

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

        “Have we reached the city?”

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

        “I’m here.”

        “After this you will be free.”

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

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

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

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

        “Who were we?” Sylva yelled.

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

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

        “Soon,” it answered.

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

        “Who am I?!” Sylva shouted again.

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

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

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

        “Now, Sylva.”

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

        Then once more she was gone.

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

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

        “You cannot kill a god.”

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

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

        I yelled my question again.

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

        “But I don’t know your name!”

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

        Its voice hammered like a gong. “Now!”

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

        “I do not know.”

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

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

        “Along with Sylva’s storm.”

        “Correct.”

        “Does the house hold other tricks like that?”

        “Indeed. Very many.”

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

        “I cannot control the house’s path.”

        “What do you mean? The wizard could.”

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

        “Where is it going?”

        “Over the mountains.”

        “And what then?”

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

        “What is the word of passage?”

        “I do not know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        I no longer recalled him dying.

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

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

        But I did not know the wizard’s name.

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

        “Airships?”

        “Rising from the valley beneath us.”

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

        “Who are they?”

        “They are the emperor’s corsairs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Someone knocked at the door.

        “Open it,” I told the timepiece.

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

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

        I told them my name.

        “Where is your lord?”

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

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

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

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

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

        They both gave small bows.

        “He would have given you a name.”

* * *

        Memory blossomed unbidden:

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

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

        “Looks to be.”

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

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

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

        I nodded and joined him.

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

        The presses began to squeeze out the jelly-ink.

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

        A priest.

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

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

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

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

        My father nodded again.

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

        At this my father gave a blank stare.

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

        My father’s face remained impassive.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

        “I know his name, and I know now what has become of him.”

        They waited. The house suddenly felt like my own. The rest of them—even the emperor—were only guests here.

        So many books yet to be read.

        “He was called home after the Sky Wars, “ I told them, “but he had foreseen the god’s coming. He slept, so as to remain out of reach.”

        The emperor paled slightly at mention of the god. I remembered the stories they told of the emperor summoned over the mountains to play the role of justice when they executed Septimus, the only of the Sixteen they had been able to take alive.

        “One cannot kill a god. But the wizard fell to face it. Not to defeat it. Not to destroy it. To let it absorb him, as it was absorbing the stream of time, the sentience of its priests, the flow of jellies across the sky. To conquer through submission, and by so doing shape its motions and its nature from within.”

        The wizard’s ring felt warm on my finger. A breeze played at the back of my neck.

        “I know the wizard’s name. You are Theodorus, as was your father before you and his before him. The wizard was Theodulus,” I said. “As am I.”

        The emperor’s stunned silence was vast, and in it I heard submission.

        The clock chimed, the wind laughed at my ear, and the wizard’s house—home now—hung high and stately over the emperor’s plains.

Copyright © 2014 Stephen Case

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Stephen Case is currently completing a dissertation on nineteenth-century stellar astronomy at the University of Notre Dame. His fiction has appeared previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and most recently in Lore and the Sword and Laser anthology and is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction. He lives with his wife, four kids, and three chickens in Kankakee, Illinois. Find him on the internet at www.stephenrcase.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Kaybor Gate,” by Alex Ries

Alex Ries is a Melbourne- based illustrator and concept artist. His artworks have been featured by publishers including Clarkesworld Magazine, Pearson Education Canada, and the Discovery Channel. He worked with THQ’s Bluetongue Entertainment studio and contributed to four published titles. His studies in diverse visual media such as painting, 3D visualization, and film, coupled with an interest in biology and real-world technology, have fostered an artistic style that can not only accurately illustrate life from the real world but fictional life as well. View his work at www.alexries.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press

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