Beneath Ceaseless Skies #103 Read online

  Faversham was lost in thought despite the bumps and jostles while the Sun climbed ever higher along the arc of its rails, a gunmetal disc in the sullied clouds above. In time he cast his attention my way.

  “It’s important that you understand the rest of Averly’s tale,” he said gravely; “what happened after he vanished.”

  “I can barely contain my indifference,” I muttered. The old sod continued as if I hadn’t said a word.

  “Averly dropped below telescopic view, as I have already mentioned and came down in Baggeridge Wood. Yes, he survived the fall. He made his way home on foot. Honoria found him at our country house, bless her poor soul. Something unimaginable covered the top half of Averly’s body, viscous and pulsing like a sickly mass of jelly. She could see the shadows of his bones and organs inside. One of his arms was gone and a monstrous tentacle writhed about in its place. He called to Honoria in a voice no longer his own, reached to her with that inhuman appendage, begging for her help, but she ran. She ran, her mind driven to madness before she reached my door.”

  I was dumbfounded. “And I’m expected to believe this because—?”

  “It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not, lad, as long as you do believe your eyes.” He turned to face the road ahead.

  At last we came to rest at the cottage of what had once been a small orchard overlooking the hellish factories below, its trees barren and leeched of all color. The cottage itself was in shambles, the orchard devoid of native fauna or birds of any kind; even the crows that stalked us from Priory Hull kept their distance, roosting in the dead trees, watching through cold industrial lenses instead of eyes but coming no closer.

  A notch cut into the hillside accommodated the springhouse. It was a simple structure of timbers and stacked stone, heavy with moss and vines.

  At Faversham’s direction the automaton placed me on the sooty path in front of the building. Inside the dank space I could make out a low circular wall that enclosed the source of the spring. I was surprised to see that the well was still functional. Virtually all of the natural water sources in the Black Country had dried up long before in the heat of the underground fires.

  Faversham carried the sack of dead animals slung over his shoulder—reinforcing the image of a goggled and masked Father Christmas—and set it down before me. He leaned back against the stacked stone, looking older and more haggard in the dirty gray light.

  “Barnaby Drum left no one behind in the steelworks and colleries,” he said, “and Marcel Saint-Jean was a recluse known intimately to very few. Neither of you had an honest purpose in this World beyond your overwhelming desire to flee it. The sad truth is, Barnaby, for all your fanciful dreams, you could vanish today and no one would be the wiser.”

  “That’s been my plan from the first!” I said. “Surely if you can hear my thoughts you know the fact of it. Barnaby Drum cannot book passage without selling his future to indentured servitude, but Marcel Saint-Jean has the coin and papers to go where he pleases. He can cross the Channel to the Great Mirror in Armorica, far from Albion’s reach, and leave this wretched orb forever.” The old man turned away. “But now to my great amazement and inconvenience, I find myself bound and naked and at the mercy of a bloody madman who likes to behead things and poke about in people’s bloody brains!”

  If Faversham was listening to my frenzied bombast he offered no evidence of it. One by one, he removed the animals from his canvas sack and piled them inside the springhouse. I heard a splash of water and then another, much louder; a wet echoing clatter against heavy stone.

  Something was in the well.

  It surfaced in a spray of warm droplets and muck, uncoiling before us like a nightmarish serpent. Faversham had referred to the appendage as a “tentacle”, but this atrocity was nothing like the tactile extremities possessed by squid or cuttlefish. It was translucent and wormed throughout with the color of bile, with pus oozing from scabs and barbed thorns too sickening to contemplate. It wrapped itself round the carcasses and pierced them with its thorns. The barbs were hollow. They siphoned away the nutrients and fluids still present, leaving pale white masses of meat drained of all color, like something that had been chewed too long and spat out. Then, with the agility of a metal-mesh whip, the tentacle gathered the depleted remains into its coils and slid back down the well.

  The clockwork crows in the trees above us cawed and roared and rattled their metal wings as if in demented applause. The automaton stood motionless as a statue.

  I could not move, could not look away, nor could I whimper even the faintest of sounds, my terror was so great. At last Faversham turned to face me. His eyes behind the goggles’ glass lenses were brimming with tears.

  “I’m dying, lad,” he said, his head oddly twitching to one side. “The coal lung has claimed me at last and I can no longer care for my boy. But neither he nor his dear bride must be left unattended. Nothing is more important than family.”

  And Barnaby Drum must atone for his sins, the presence in my mind said.

  Faversham’s head wrenched again, more pronounced now. He was in pain, clearly, his breathing suddenly labored. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t banish the sight of that grievous appendage from my eyes.

  “We’re called into this World to attend others, lad. ‘Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.’”

  His head reared and jerked to the side once again, so violently that I heard the bones in his neck snap. He looked at me one last time as his ear erupted in a gush of blood and viscera, a ghastly abomination crawling from the cavity on tiny segmented legs. It paused as if testing the foul air, then scuttled away as Faversham blacked out from the pain.

  “Faversham!” I cried. “God in Heaven. Faversham!”

  With a great splash the tentacle whipped upward again and coiled around Faversham before he could fall, lancing his body with its hollow barbed thorns. The thing that had once been Thomas Averly Faversham fed on its father. It drained my captor of life and essence, then pulled the spent form with it into the well and the watery end that awaited.

  Pin-pricks stabbed me in the ankle, then the shin....

  The creature that had burst from Faversham’s ear was crawling up my leg. I tried to kick it off, furiously, but the chains that bound my ankles and wrists restrained my movement, and the creature’s razor claws dug in with each step. The thing was scabbed over and of the same sickly cast as the tentacle—Averly’s tentacle—as if condensed from the same vile elements. The tip of its spiked tail dripped a clear liquid.

  Through the dark tangle affixed to my pubis it climbed, over my stomach and heaving chest, my wretched breath thunderous in the confines of the gas mask. Up my neck, over the mask’s buckle and straps, into my ear. Burrowing into my ear....

  * * *

  I awoke with no memory of pain, no memory of discomfort at all. I lay naked as a newborn on the sooty path before the springhouse, the great automaton Ramses standing watch, backlit by the gray disc of the Sun. Dried blood caked the side of my face.

  Gingerly, I unsnarled my knot of chains and sat upright. Without a thought I knew the combination to their locks and opened them easily, free at last. A disconcerting impulse to flee suddenly came over me, to run away from the masks and false lives to which I’d somehow been connected, but just as quickly the feeling disappeared. How strange it seemed now.

  A calm clarity enveloped me. All should have been quiet, but nothing would ever be quiet again. I heard the plaintive susurrus of minds in the village below, too numerous to count. I heard dear Honoria and the innocence that remained among the shards of her broken intellect. And Averly, poor Averly, bless his tortured soul. No intellect at all, not anymore, just the elemental need to survive. He’d be hungry again before long. Best I saw to it. Boiler No. 3 in the workshop still needed its slip valve replaced as well, and a new batch of sedative was waiting to be brewed. Motherwort, certainly, perhaps with a touch of lavender or skullcap.
Honoria liked that. The distilling of potions—an odd thing for a coalminer’s son to know. (A miner’s son.... Where had that come from?) No matter.

  I looked down over the ironworks that clung to the side of their burning hill, chimneys belching fire and corruption into the melancholy air while rivers flowed red with molten slag.

  The nursery rhyme that had haunted my every dream since childhood suddenly came to mind, as if I’d known the words all along; the poem and the World it described:

  When Satan stood on Priory Hull

  And far around him gazed,

  I never more shall feel, he said,

  At Hell’s fierce flames amazed.

  Silly things to fret about when there was so much work to be done. There was nothing more important than family. I looked up at my towering clockwork companion.

  “Ramses, attend,” I said.

  Copyright © 2012 Dean Wells

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Dean Wells’s short fiction has appeared in Ideomancer, Eldritch Tales, ShadowKeep Magazine, 10Flash Quarterly, and The Nocturnal Lyric, as well as multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “To the Gods of Time and Engines, a Gift” in BCS #80, set in the same world as “When Averly Fell.” He is a member of SFWA. Visit him online at www.darkapostle.net.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  BANDIT AND THE SEVENTY RACCOON WAR

  by Don Allmon

  I

  This far south the grass was nearly gone. There had never been any trees. The ground was orange, crumbled and old, and went on flat until the evening heat lapped it up.

  “How long do you think our shadows are?” the boy asked.

  “As long as the world is wide,” Jacsen said.

  “Have you been that far?”

  “Farther.”

  They kept on, Jacsen and the boy, shod hooves of their horses crushing baked shale, evening shadows long like a meridian on an empty map. A pale moon rose long before sunset.

  “We’re not going to make it to the edge tonight, are we?” the boy said.

  “Nope,” Jacsen agreed. “Not tonight.”

  The southern horizon was getting nearer. It looked like the edge of the world.

  * * *

  Next morning, they’d hardly gone a mile when the boy found something dead. He crouched over it. He called Jacsen over.

  “It’s a raccoon, ain’t it?” the boy said.

  Jacsen stared at the carcass from his saddle.

  “It looks just like you,” the boy said, awestruck.

  His words rang ill and Jacsen felt suddenly sick. Heat sick maybe and he needed some water.

  “What’s it mean?” the boy asked. He scanned the endless horizon as if there he’d find the answer, some place from where it might have come, but there was no place like that.

  Jacsen looked south. He started off again and the boy called after him, “Don’t you want to bury it?”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Jacsen said, not turning.

  * * *

  They lay on their stomachs, side by side, looking down over what had seemed like the edge of the world. It dropped only a hundred feet. Still, a long way. It was a canyon, or maybe once a seabed, bone-dry for thousands of years. Its far side, if it had a far side, was beyond the horizon. Broad mesas and narrow buttes rose within it like naked islands.

  Cesler Grange was a fortress, not a farm. It clung to the ridge of the nearest mesa, a mile south. Its walls were towered, crenellated, and scarred by war. The iron mouths of cannons showed through its teeth. A switchback road to the canyon floor was, far as Jacsen could tell, the only way up. On the canyon floor between them and the Grange a company of soldiers was encamped.

  Cesler Grange was under siege.

  “Was your pa in the military?” Jacsen asked. The boy said no. “These are mercenaries, not Imperial soldiers. You can tell because all the regiment insignias are different. That equipment there, the tents, that’s all surplus. And they’ve been here awhile. See how many times they’ve moved the latrines?” He pointed to rows of darker earth where cesspits had been backfilled. “And see those pits in the ground there on the far side of the camp? That’s probably as far as the Grange cannons can reach, which is why the camp is where it is, just out of range. Those twelve-pounders they have—see them? the four of them?—those are useless. Where they’re placed, they can’t possibly reach the Grange.”

  “Look there,” the boy said pointing to a mass grave. Lye dusted the bodies. “Is that where they buried my brothers?”

  Jacsen didn’t know.

  * * *

  “Something’s coming,” the boy said. There was a plume of dust in the east. It was a column of cavalry, supply carts, and siege howitzers, snaking along the canyon floor. They flew Imperial pennons. From the top of the canyon wall, Jacsen and the boy spied down on it. It took the entire day to arrive.

  A bleached, gray, wooden wagon rattled alongside the howitzers. It had no advertisements painted on its sides. It had no windows. It had a peaked roof. Bones were strung from its eaves like a fringe of icicles. They clacked as they swung. It was pulled by a team of four black horses. The horses knew the way themselves and the driver’s perch was empty.

  “What is that?” the boy asked.

  “Can you feel it?” Jacsen asked.

  “What is it?”

  “A witch,” Jacsen said watching the bones swing. “A bad one.”

  As they watched, the boy tugged at Jacsen’s sleeve, begging for reassurance. In all the last four days, it was the closest the boy had ever come to him.

  * * *

  II

  The boy’s father had pulled a rifle on Jacsen the moment he’d seen him. That hadn’t surprised Jacsen at all. He knew how he looked. He looked up to no good, armed as he was and with his hat pulled down so low.

  The man’s had been the first house he’d seen in three days. Still, Jacsen hadn’t thought to stop at all except that he’d seen an iron water pump out front. The very sight of it made him thirsty, and probably the horse wanted water too.

  And what he got was a gun on him.

  On the porch stood the boy and his sister, side by side. She was maybe eight, dressed in gingham and a traveling bonnet. The boy was maybe ten, he in wool and homespun. They were both towheaded as dandelions. He clutched her left hand tightly in his right. In his other hand was a homemade wooden crutch. Standing still, he didn’t seem to need it. Just held it the way he did her hand.

  The man stood beside a cart in the drive.

  Over the barrel of his rifle, he looked Jacsen over, eyes lingering on each piece of iron and steel, the revolver on his thigh, carbine in the saddle scabbard, cavalry saber on his hip, and knife strapped to his leg.

  Jacsen let the reins fall and raised his hands slowly. The horse stopped.

  “I don’t know you,” the man said. “You a soldier?”

  “No,” Jacsen said. “Heading down to Cesler Grange. Don’t mean anyone no trouble.”

  “Only folk headed out that way are soldiers. No call for common folk.” He considered Jacsen some more, maybe looking for some sign that Jacsen was lying, some insignia or color. “If you ain’t a soldier, what are you then?”

  Jacsen said, “I saw you had a pump.”

  When the man didn’t move or say a word, Jacsen tipped his head toward the pump and said, “You mind?”

  The man gave him a nod.

  Jacsen lowered his hands and dropped from the horse. He nodded his thanks and led his horse to the trough. He worked the pump, everything slow and easy so as not to give the man any cause. “There ain’t no need for that gun,” he said.

  The man said nothing. He kept the rifle on Jacsen.

  The water was cool and he removed his hat, thinking to run some water over his head. When he leaned forward beneath the spout his sidelock fell from behind his ear, braids swinging, agates clicking, and the little girl said, “Papa, he’s a clansman!”

&nbs
p; The man told her to be still.

  Jacsen washed, then put back on his hat, pulling the brim low again. He filled his waterskin. Then he stood awhile as his horse drank his fill.

  The cart was half loaded, everything tossed in and all jumbled up, no order to it, nothing rightly packed. “Looks like you’re moving out,” Jacsen said.

  “Just get your water and go,” the man said.

  So Jacsen looked away. The horse was still drinking and Jacsen thought to pull it away and go, but he let it drink.

  The man’s house was stone. Its roof was thatch. The hex sign painted over the door had weathered nearly gone. The house stood on the edge of a field of pale yellow rye. There wasn’t a hill or tree or other home to be seen anywhere. Along the porch, there was a patch of garden. It was the only bit of color Jacsen had seen in too long and he couldn’t pull his eyes from the small flowers. Looking at them made the heat seem less, the plains less burnt out.

  Those flowers took heart to tend. Not the man. The girl, then.

  She was hiding behind her brother, bashful, and she leaned forward and whispered something into his ear and he shushed her.

  Poor girl, spending her days tending her flowers and shushed by her men, so Jacsen smiled at her and said, “You’re a pretty little lady.”

  Soft and cold, the man asked, “Is that what you like?”

  Jacsen’s gut went all to ice.

  “That why they sent you back here?” the man said.

  Keeping cool, keeping level, Jacsen said, “I only meant you have a couple of fine children.”

  “How—,” the man shifted his hands on the rifle stock leaving sweaty smears, “How much you give me for the girl?”

  Water trickled down Jacsen’s forehead and into his eyes.

  “Twenty shillings?” the man asked. “She’s worth twenty shillings. Ain’t been touched.”