Beneath Ceaseless Skies #74 Read online

  He quietly gets up on aching legs and walks upstairs, to the apartment above the store where he lives with Papa. There are blankets in the linen closet by the bathroom, and he takes out a few and walks back down the dark staircase. He does not dare to start a gas lamp for fear it might draw attention, so he leaves the place in darkness as he makes his way back to the office.

  He folds up one blanket to serve as a pillow and puts it on the floor behind the girl. He gently nudges her awake and shows her the blanket and the makeshift pillow, and she takes both without protest.

  Wilhelm feels pleasingly chivalrous as he watches her go back to sleep wrapped in the blankets he gave her. Lying down next to her would be an intrusion, and improper besides, but he also doesn’t want to go to his bedroom, which is as far away from the office as a room in this house can be. So he fetches two more blankets from upstairs and makes himself a makeshift bed behind the pen counter in the store.

  * * *

  In the morning, the girl is gone.

  When Wilhelm wakes up, still dressed in the clothes he wore the day before, he walks over to Papa’s office to find it empty, save for the two blankets. They are in the middle of the floor, neatly folded.

  He checks the front door of the store to find it locked. All the windows are latched, the shutters still fastened from the outside. However the girl got out of the shop, she did so without breaking a lock or window.

  He realizes that he never asked her name.

  Wilhelm gathers the blankets she left and carries them upstairs. Before he places them in the linen closet again, he sticks his nose into the soft wool. The scent of her hair is faint, but he recognizes it instantly.

  It is close to seven o’clock, and he should be hungry for breakfast right now, but Wilhelm finds that he has no appetite. He trudges downstairs to get Papa’s store ready for the day’s business.

  * * *

  She left him something on the pen counter: a folded sheet of paper and a small leather pouch. He picks up the pouch with trembling fingers to find that it is quite heavy. When he opens the drawstring and peers inside, he almost drops the pouch in surprise. There are gold coins inside, just like the one he took in payment from her yesterday. He takes them out and stacks them on the counter. Twenty-one of the peculiar coins come out of the pouch, a small fortune.

  Wilhelm slowly unfolds the paper. She has done a little drawing with the purple ink he gave her—a large wooden bridge, covered with a roof decked with shingles shaped like fish scales.

  He knows this bridge, even though he has never seen it with his own eyes. There are lithographs of it in the books about the Weald he has been reading in the bookshop down the street. It is the bridge that spans the river in the Borderlands south of here—the bridge beyond which civilization ends and the Weald begins.

  Underneath the drawing, she has written in narrow, loopy script: Je m’appelle Venadis.

  Wilhelm sits down on the floor behind the counter for a long time and looks at the drawing and the single word beneath it. When the chime of the clock reminds him that it is time to open the shop, he ignores it. Instead, he runs his fingers over the lines she drew, the neat loops and hooks of her name underneath. He says it in a low voice, letting the unfamiliar combination of sounds roll off his tongue: Venadis.

  Then he sits and thinks, with the drawing in his hands.

  They will find the paper, he realizes, and the renewed fear makes his stomach roil. And if he carried one of the pens I sold, they will find that as well.

  There are lots of paper stores in the city but only one that carries the new fountain pens. Papa ordered them from the overseas trader, and when they arrived at the shop two weeks past, he had boasted that no other shop in the province carried them yet.

  Wilhelm knows that he could probably talk his way out of it. He should hide the gold, burn the note, and tell the police someone stole the pens and paper yesterday. But probably is not a good word when the other possibility is a five-year sentence in one of the Crown’s prisons.

  * * *

  When Wilhelm gets to his feet, he does not walk over to the door to unlock the store. Instead, he goes to fetch his leather book-bag. Then he goes back downstairs, where the regiments of ink bottles stand guard between stacks of notebooks and sheet paper. He fills the bag with inks—the expensive water-proof ones that will stay on paper even in a downpour. Finally, he walks over to the pen counter and takes all the new fountain pens as well.

  He leaves ten of the gold coins in the secret compartment his father keeps behind a lithograph on the wall of his office. Papa will not be pleased, but Papa has good business sense, and he will have the gold melted down or hold on to it until it is safe to exchange. That much gold is enough to pay for the missing merchandise and make up for the fifty Prussian marks Wilhelm takes out of the register’s drawer. He will need safe money for the journey south. If he hurries and takes the late-morning train, he can be in the Borderlands this afternoon. From there, it is only twenty kilometers to the bridge Venadis has drawn, and even a pudgy fellow can walk that distance in four hours. He can be at the Weald Bridge by nightfall.

  Wilhelm walks out of the store, locks the door, and drops the key into the mail-slot.

  Outside, there’s a new scent in the air. The wind carries the smell of charcoal and ashes from the market square, flakes of burnt paper floating on the wind like premature snowflakes.

  Wilhelm takes a deep breath and sets out for the train station with a smile.

  Copyright © 2011 Marko Kloos

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  Marko Kloos is a freelance writer and stay-at-home parent. He is a graduate of the Viable Paradise SF/F Writers’ Workshop. A former native of Germany, Marko lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two children. Their compound, Castle Frostbite, is patrolled by a roving pack of dachshunds. He is currently working on a novel set in the world of “Ink and Blood.” His blog is at munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com.

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  COVER ART

  “Mushroom Forest,” by Geoff Trebs

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

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2011 Firkin Press

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