Beneath Ceaseless Skies #29 Read online

  I will think of my friend the artist, whom I helped along the path to madness.

  * * *

  “There are no windows here.”

  The artist stood outside the bars of my cell. When I said this he glanced nervously around at the block walls as though to verify my statement.

  “We are in the bottom of the palace, the portion that is below the ground when it sets,” he said. He carried a leather folio under his arm. “You....” He paused, and then laughed softly. “You questioned the Khan regarding the statues.”

  I shrugged. There were no guards in the corridor outside my cell. I had seen no one since they had brought me here after my questioning in the garden. I wasn’t even sure how long I had been here. Again, I wondered how much the Khan knew. Was I being held as a spy? Did he know about his daughter? Or was he simply angry that I had spoken of the statues?

  “Why does he hate them?” I asked the artist. And then: “Does the Khan know you’re here? Did he send you for information?”

  The artist seemed puzzled and echoed my shrug. “He may know I am here. He has many eyes. If I was not to be here, he would have stopped me.”

  I repeated the first question.

  The artist was quiet for a time, fingering the edges of his leather folio. “My father told me once something that his father told him. It is said that in my great-grandfather’s time the first Khan built the palace, but that is not true. At least, not according to my family. My grandfather’s father was with the first Khan, the Glorious Khan, when his armies came to this valley, and in that time the palace was already here.”

  I leaned forward. In the east we knew that the Khan’s ancestors had come from over the sea and that they had settled these lands we had thought to be empty. “What about the statues?”

  The artist nodded. “They were here as well. They stood at attention then, row upon row.” He paused. “They guarded the palace.”

  “Who were they?”

  I could tell the artist was getting more nervous, and I wasn’t sure why he told me these things. He waved aside my question. “They weren’t guarding only the palace. They were guarding someone inside the palace.” His voice lowered. “My grandfather said there was a queen who lived in the palace, a woman more beautiful by far than any of the Glorious Khan’s hundred wives. The Khan wanted this land and the palace for his own, but he wanted her as well.” He stopped and looked at me. “I think you have seen this woman.”

  “What happened?”

  He bit his lip, waiting perhaps for me to address his assertion, then finally continued. “At first the Khan’s men were welcomed as guests, but when he made his intentions clear, the soldiers drove his men from the palace. A mage, a technician of the Khan, said he knew a magic sleeping beneath the valley that could make the palace and the kingdom the Khan’s own. Under cover of darkness this man led the Khan’s men into caverns beneath the palace. When the morning came, he told the Khan to withdraw to the hills surrounding the valley.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “That night when they returned to the valley, the guards had been turned to the forms in which you see them now. The Khan was elated, but when he went to the palace he found that the queen was stone as well. He would have killed the mage in his fury then, but the man insisted that the Khan and his own men would die as well unless he showed the Khan how to make the palace fly. They did, working for weeks by night, each day withdrawing to the hills. When the sails were finally in place and the palace floated over the gardens by day, the Khan cast the mage from the Tower of Birds.”

  I couldn’t contain myself. “Does the Khan know how it works? Does anyone?”

  “He has many wise men. Perhaps someone has rediscovered whatever it was the mage knew. Perhaps it is simple. I myself do not know the reason.”

  “It is,” I said, nodding. “It is simple. I know how it works.”

  The artist arched an eyebrow. “So it would seem. You are the first to have survived the gardens by day since the time of the Glorious Khan.”

  “What happens to those who stay out during the day? Do they turn to stone?”

  The artist shook his head. “They are simply found dead the next morning. Their eyes bulge and something has clawed at their throats.”

  “They do it themselves, trying to breathe.” I was musing to myself. “But why would the queen’s guards have been turned to stone when the caverns were vented?”

  “They are not men,” he said, as if that explained all. “You have seen them. They were more than simply men when my grandfather’s father came to the valley.” He leaned toward the bars a second time, his eyes sharp. “But again, I believe you have seen her.”

  It was in that moment—with his eyes on me—I decided what I must do. I knew I truly had no other choice than to wait upon the Khan’s pleasure or anger, so I told the artist of the woman I had seen, of the slender bars that formed her prison, and of how the palace rose. And, by speaking of this last, I told how it might be made to fall.

  “She is there?” he said. His eyes were shining. “I will find her there, in the courtyard of which you spoke?”

  I nodded.

  “We are trained,” he said, almost in a whisper, “our entire lives. To serve beauty. This is for what I have labored years.”

  “Do you understand me clearly?” I asked him. “The palace will sink like a stone. The Khan, his court, all who are onboard will perish.”

  He was silent for a time, and when I see him in my memory I am certain that I see madness dancing in his eyes, like a lantern moving among trees. He closed them for a moment, and when he opened them again they were clear.

  “Imagine that I am the lowliest servant on the flagship of the Khan’s armada,” he said slowly, as if to himself. “I find that the Khan has taken prisoner a maiden of the sea, that he has pulled her from her people and locked her away in a cabin of his ship. I can do nothing to free her, for she is bound too tightly and the Khan’s guards are legion. What I can do, all I need do, is find a single weathered plank, some piece of rotted wood, some way to let the waters reclaim her. Then she will again be with her people. For any price I would do that, so long as first I could look upon her face.”

  * * *

  Time passed, and presently words were spoken in the corridor. The door to the chamber opened, and a guard walked in with a eunuch in a long silver robe.

  “The gods must smile on you, foreigner,” the guard said, inclining his head toward the eunuch. “You’ve won the favor of the Khan.”

  It was not the Khan’s favor though, and my heart sank as I realized I was not being led, as I had hoped, to the Tower of Birds. Instead I was taken down narrow side corridors into an area of silk hangings and incense that I realized were the chambers of the Khan’s daughters. At a narrow door the eunuch paused. He bowed low, opened the door, and stepped aside to let me enter.

  No sooner had I stepped into the chamber than she was in my arms.

  “You will be dead in the morning,” she told me.

  “We may all be dead in the morning.” I pushed past her gently and looked around the room. We seemed to be in her private chambers. “Where is your wardrobe?” She pointed to where it stood half-hidden behind silk hangings. “Your gowns, are they all made of wolfsilk?”

  She nodded.

  I hurried to the wardrobe and pulled it open. “We must gather as many as we can and get to the highest storey of your tower. Tell your sisters to come too if they want to live, and to bring their robes.”

  She looked at me as though I had gone mad.

  It was daylight, and the palace rode high above the silent gardens, but I knew that by now the artist might have already found the woman in the courtyard. After that he would find a way to tear the palace apart if he thought it would be of service to her. I had told him nothing but where to find her and the method of the palace’s flight. Yet I was sure that would be enough. All it would take would be a tear in the fabric of the sails or a crack in the masonry of the l
owest level. It might take the palace days to fall, sinking like a punctured aeronaut’s balloon, but it would fall.

  I could almost feel the stone soldiers below stirring in anticipation.

  The Khan’s daughter returned after a moment, her arms full of diaphanous gowns and half a dozen confused sisters in tow.

  We worked all that day, and I explained as much to them as I could. I wasn’t sure they understood and I was almost sure that none of them believed me, but they smiled shyly and laughed at seeing their gowns torn and fitted together as though it was a game. I didn’t know how the silk of the sails was joined together, so I folded the edges of the gowns, had the women stitch them as tightly as they could, and sealed them with wax.

  When it grew late and the eunuch came to escort me back to my cell, a long sheet of the fabric covered most of the floor of the chamber. The castle was beginning to settle for the night, and I wondered if it would rise again in the morning.

  * * *

  That night in my cell in the oubliette, I dreamed of the statues. They were beneath the waves of a true sea, like figureheads fallen from some passing fleet. They were draped in seaweed, calling to each other. Their queen was lost, they said, and they pointed to show me where. I watched their arms stretching, slowly, for what seemed like years, until the moon rose and positioned itself at the ends of their outstretched fingers.

  * * *

  The palace did rise once more, with the heat radiating from the stones, soon after I heard the silver gates slide shut above. I spent the day in expectation, either for a slow listing of stones or the tread of feet outside. The footsteps came first, late in the morning.

  His guards took me from my cell into the central corridors of the palace. Here the stones gave way to marble, and I was led up wide, spiraling staircases. After a time I realized that we were heading to the Khan’s Tower of Birds.

  I had been there once before. The tower is large, and the Khan’s chamber at the top encompasses the entire upper storey. The final staircase ends in narrow bronze doors that open to the floor of the room, and the room is wide with windows on every side. Along the walls beneath the windows, there are cages upon cages of birds of every type. Birds perch along the windowsills, and there are others constantly arriving or leaving with bits of paper in their beaks or wrapped with ribbon and clutched in talons.

  As I passed through the narrow doors and saw the windows open on every side, I was struck by the feeling of floating atop a sea. The palace was my ship, the thermal sails visible faintly below were my sails (though they truly held no such function), and I stood now far at the top of a rigging of stone and iron.

  The Khan rose from where he had been consulting with his ministers in one corner of the room and walked across the carpets to where I stood. When I had been in this room once before I had noticed how much like the faces of the hawks around him the face of the Khan had appeared. It looked even harder today, its dark features set.

  I bowed slightly, very aware of the guards flanking me, of their huge curved swords hanging at their sides.

  “I welcome you to my palace,” the Khan said slowly, “to my kingdom. I welcome you in good faith as an envoy from my brother to the east. Now I ask: why were you sent here?”

  I spoke as slowly as the Khan. “I was to gather information of you and your realm, of the habits and customs of your people.”

  “And when you return, what will you tell?”

  “I will say that the Khan is a very great khan, and that he rules in a land more fantastic than they would believe possible.”

  He studied me. “Your people, will they believe this?”

  “I do not know, majesty.”

  The Khan had taken a half step past me and was looking at the window at my back. Turning, I could see that sun was nearly overhead.

  “I pass the noon hours here, to feel the heat off the stones as the palace sleeps beneath me. In the evening, when the palace has landed, I will gather my wives and daughters and release my people into the gardens.” He paused. “Your people, they will want to know how my palace flies.” He did not voice it as a question.

  “I’m sure they will, majesty. I will tell it, for I believe I know.”

  He seemed to not have heard. Instead he said, “We find a man in my courtyard today, one of our artists. He is gone mad, screaming that it would be him to bring the palace down forever. He speaks of sins of my father and his father before him.” His face had become hard. “He laughs when my guards kill him. You know this man I think.” I nodded. “He was a good artist. I have him sketch portraits of many of my daughters.”

  At this last word the guards on either side fastened vice-like grips on my arms. The sun beat down at the sills of the windows, and I heard very faintly the clink-clink of the huge chain stretching down to the ground far below us.

  “Beauty drives some men mad,” the Khan was saying. He stepped closer, and suddenly I was sure that the shape beneath his folded robes was indeed a jeweled dagger.

  I would have asked him again then about the statues, whether the stories the artist had told about them and the Glorious Khan were true. It seemed I had nothing more to lose, but it was at that moment that the palace began to fall. I heard a noise like a huge sucking, like something large coming unstuck from mud. From very far below there came the sound of huge gates crashing, then the echoed sounds of hundreds of doors throughout the palace slamming and giving way to an unseen fluid forcing its way up, through corridors and chambers. Everything in the palace began to tilt to one side.

  The guards had already released me and were hurrying to the windows to stare below. The Khan yelled orders to his men.

  “It’s air, your majesty,” I said quickly. “It’s air being forced upward through the palace. I suppose it’s getting trapped in pockets along the way and pushing through cracks in the rocks. Doors are being blown out too.” It seemed so simple that the explanation brought no fear, though later, when I would think of what it truly meant, I would try to forget.

  The palace tilted farther, and now the Khan and his guards were scrabbling for handholds on the stones. Around a gable of a tower roof came his daughters’ spinning coracle, a wooden skiff suspended in the center of a bowl of silk, and I threw myself from the Tower of Birds as it passed beneath.

  We rose, or the palace fell, until the peak of the Bird Tower was a tiny spoke beneath us, and it truly felt as though we floated upon a sea now, for there was no vastness of stone about us nor was there a chain tethering us to the valley floor.

  The wind over this invisible sea pushed us west, toward the ridge of mountains that separated the valley from the true sea, and we rode before it.

  * * *

  Now in the dying light of this fire at the edge of what had been the Khan’s orchards I bring this account to a close. When or if I return to my people in the east, they may or may not hold me accountable for the deaths of the Khan and his court. All evening as the sun dropped we watched birds come and hover over the valley, searching for a tower no longer there. I thought I could see marble shapes moving through the gardens below us, but it may have only been the play of light.

  The daughters of the Khan have worn themselves out with weeping, and now they speak of the lands beyond the sea and finding husbands for themselves among the boyars of the Khan’s islands. They wear no silk, but they are lovely, and their sister has come to lie beside me.

  My thoughts turn for a moment to the artist, and I wonder what forgotten portal or rusted hatch he must have forced open before the Khan’s guards found and killed him. I wondered if he was happy to know his blood had been spilled in the service of a woman of stone. Perhaps the Khan was right and this was all madness.

  I end now. I find I have written this only so that one day, if you sail over a strange and silent sea, you will know something of what lies beneath your silky ship.

  Copyright © 2009 Stephen Case

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  Stephen Case teach
es astronomy at a small liberal arts college in Illinois. His fiction has appeared in Ray Gun Revival and his poetry in Mindflights and Isotope (forthcoming). His research on scientific instrument collections in the ante-bellum South has recently been published in the journal Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences.

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  COVER ART

  “Sabicu,” by Myke Amend

  Myke Amend likes to mix the dark with the lighthearted, the serene with the chaotic, making pieces that can invoke different and opposing thoughts and feelings. He has been featured and/or interviewed in Kilter Magazine, Dark Roasted Blend, IO9, Fantasy Art, Brass Goggles, Elfwood, Superpunch, and many other web magazines and blogs. More of his work can be seen at http://www.mykeamend.com/.

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  Table of Contents

  “The Woman and the Mountain,”

  “The Silver Khan,” by Stephen Case