Beneath Ceaseless Skies #17 Read online

  Just a stupid rat, and he was jumping like he’d never seen one before—him, a sewer runt. He took another breath and started walking.

  It was a few moments’ careful skirting of the benches, twisting of doorknobs almost above his reach, creeping down silent hallways before he found the laboratory they’d first come to, where Sloan had laid Caroline’s glasses. Jabey hoped—it was all he had, a hope, a suspicion—that Sloan would not leave a token there unless there were other tokens about.

  Caroline’s glasses still lay on a bench; whether that was good sign or bad, Jabey couldn’t guess. He walked down the row of cabinets, opening them one by one and searching for any collection of oddments that might be tokens. He found squat beakers and glass bulbs with long slender necks, matches and vials of fluid. Tiny white crystals like salt—maybe they were salt—sat beside stones the size of his fist.

  At the end of the row stood a block of steel taller than Jabey with a wheel in its front and the slit outline of a door. If he were a clubber with gimmicked pretties to keep, he’d keep them here where would-be thieves like him couldn’t snatch them. He ran a finger down the groove, felt the solid inflexibility of the thing. He rummaged a blunt knife from one of the cabinets and poked at the groove, wedging the blade in until it began to bend. The wheel, now, that was how it opened properly, wasn’t it? He tried it and it rotated smooth and silent under his hand, but the door did not suddenly swing open nor a lock click free.

  He shoved at the immobile, immovable mass. No good; the thing was solid as a sewer wall under twenty feet of rock.

  Sloan. If he could get a jump on Sloan, make him open it -

  “I meant that you should report to me personally.”

  Jabey twisted, already backing against the safe.

  It was Sloan, of course, in the same cheap suit, though a rat was now draped over one shoulder. In the half-light Jabey caught a glimpse of its eyes and shrunk from their glittering brightness.

  “Perhaps you will explain why you are attempting to deface my safe?” Sloan’s voice was cool, mild.

  Jabey straightened as tall as his body allowed and kept his mouth closed. He wasn’t going to snivel even if he was going to get gimmicked one last time.

  Sloan dropped to a crouch and looked Jabey in the eye—as did the rat. Jabey pressed just a little harder against the edge of the safe. Sloan noticed. “Go,” he said, and the rat hopped down and scurried into the shadows.

  “Now, if you will kindly explain....” The voice hardened.

  The words burst from him. “You got no right!”

  “Undoubtedly,” Sloan said, “but to which wrong do you refer?”

  “That girl back there,” said Jabey, “the one growing up for some crack-kettled rich—it’s her father, isn’t it? Caroline’s.”

  “Ah.” Sloan nodded, stood. As he lit a lamp on the workbench he said, “I may not violate the privacy of my clients, of course, but allow me to compliment you on your astuteness.”

  “Caroline ain’t been left on your doorstep like some cellar queen’s kid. What do you think, you can do your gimmickry on any muck you like, like they’re just air, free to take?”

  “Better that she be abandoned before we use her? Better that she slip into the sewers afterwards, like so many sources do, to become couriers and pickpockets for the city’s underlife?” Sloan smiled faintly. “You of all men know our business here in the quarter. You sought employment nonetheless, did you not?”

  Jabey stared for a moment, his teeth clamped so hard his jaw ached. And then, “You go on talking like that, like maybe you’re sorry about her and the others, when you made us this way. Look at me. I can’t even reach to punch you in the apples. I can’t go abroad for fear the right-living folk’ll catch me. And it’s not just me, either, nor the other bastards folks leave in your alleys. You do this to rich muck’s girls, just for coin.

  “I’m some dumb runt, is what I’m thinking, because I’d take those kid glasses and lay your head with ‘em—I know the place, you learn that kind of thing running for gangers, which is all you left me to. All that, and -”

  But the words were getting caught and his eyes burned with tears. He could only stare blurrily all the way up to that pale face, those eyebrows sardonically raised.

  “All that,” Sloan finished, “and you still find whatever I might offer you preferable to running for Yol Stulbrend, avoiding that cur of his and the stings from his slave collar.”

  “Sure don’t. Sure don’t.”

  Sloan turned away. “Very well, then. Kindly step aside.” Jabey shuffled away as Sloan walked to the safe. He spun the spokes once, twice, back again in some pattern Jabey couldn’t see, and then pulled the door open. Inside were shelves of jars, each with some oddment or two, although not what Jabey had expected: curls of hair, pilings of dull white clippings like maybe istocrats’ fingernails. Sloan plucked a jar from the array, swung the door shut, and twirled the wheel. He held the jar out for Jabey to see. “This, I believe, is what you came for?”

  A ringlet of brown hair curled at the bottom. It looked like Caroline’s.

  Sloan set the jar on the bench and crouched again. Jabey did not shrink away this time.

  “How badly do you want that the contents of that jar?”

  Jabey waited.

  Sloan sighed. “I planned to offer you our usual compensation: food, clothing, security from all but accident and your own stupidity. But I see by your face that this isn’t enough. Suppose I offered you that jar and its contents as well?”

  “Don’t make sense,” Jabey said. “I’m just another no-account runt. What do you want me for?”

  “You shall run my errands and my messages. You shall travel among your old circles of petty criminals and would-be gangster kings and report on all you hear. You shall be a spy, an envoy. In all these things I will require absolute obedience.”

  “That’s dumb. You can have any muck you want for a coin or two.”

  “But I cannot hold their loyalty as I hold yours. It would be a simple matter to obtain a few more strands of hair from the girl if I wished. If you acted against my interests.”

  “You give me that jar, and I gotta trust you won’t gimmick Caroline anymore?”

  “As I must trust that you will not betray me.”

  “Why won’t I run out right now and shout to all the coppers and the gangs about you?”

  “First, because they won’t listen. Second, because you don’t yet have anything to tell them. But most importantly because you would not be standing in my laboratory if you didn’t care more for that young lady—whom you’d never met until last night—than for your own convenience.”

  “She’s just some rich’s girl,” Jabey muttered.

  “Yes.” Sloan folded his arms and looked down at Jabey, his expression blank. “She is but one of many projects. There is the wife Caroline’s father requested, for example. I make you no promises about her fate, nor about that of any other creature in my laboratories. Think carefully, Jabey Tinyman. Do you trade your liberty for one little girl’s height?”

  That was it: a job and Caroline being all right. Everything he’d wanted—more than he’d wanted—when he’d crawled out of the west hill sewer, looking for a pretty.

  “The glasses, too,” Jabey said.

  Sloan raised an eyebrow, nodded in what maybe was approval. “The glasses, too.”

  Jabey pushed away the picture of the little gimmicked girl sleeping in her little room. He couldn’t help her. He couldn’t help all those others either, people and beasts and some in between. This was all he could do.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “You got me.”

  * * *

  Sloan left him to attendants with instructions to feed him and find him a place to sleep, and when he woke again Sloan sent him with a message to a dive across town. “You needn’t hurry on the way back—just see you don’t get caught. You’ve no security yet from rabble like Yol.”

  Jabey heard the hint—though he w
ondered why Sloan would give it—and after he’d delivered his message to the gape-mouthed serving girl, he ducked beneath the streets and walked the sewer line up, up, following his feet along the turns.

  A few candles still lit the windows of Caroline’s house. He knew the window he wanted this time, and he climbed up and out to it, remembering how the catch hadn’t been quite closed. It wasn’t now. He jogged it until it scraped loose. Frozen, he waited, but there wasn’t a sound. Silently he swung the window open and crawled in.

  There was no sleek head on Caroline’s pillow, just a lump of quilt.

  “Caroline?”

  Nothing, for a moment. Then fingers slipped out of the quilt and slowly it slid down from Caroline’s eyes, just glints in the dark.

  “Wh-ho are you?” she whispered.

  The potion. He should have remembered. “A tinyman,” he said. “Like an elf, kind of.”

  The head disappeared. “I don’t want to see an elf.” The quilt muffled the words. “Go away.”

  “I’m Jabey. Don’t you remember me?”

  But of course she didn’t.

  She peeked out again, the cover still pulled up over her nose. “I dreamed about you.”

  “Yeah?” He took a step forward.

  Again the head ducked out of sight. “It was a bad dream,” she said, her voice wavering. “Please, go away.”

  Stillness. No sound but quick, sniffling breaths beneath the quilt.

  Finally Jabey said, “I won’t bother you again. But I’ll be seeing nobody else does, you hear?” He whispered the last words. “I’ll see you’re all right, Caroline.” He unwrapped the cloth from the opera glasses and laid them on the table by her window, and then he slipped out again, and down, and into the seeping streets known only to the rats and the tinymen.

  Copyright © 2009 Sarah L. Edwards

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  People keep asking Sarah L. Edwards what she’s going to do with her life. While she figures it out, she continues to write science fiction and fantasy, read a lot, knit (anybody need a scarf?), and wonder what to do with her math degree. Her fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future XXIV, Aeon Speculative Fiction, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Her story “The Last Devil” appeared in BCS #4 and as BCS Audio Fiction Podcast #4., and her story “The Woman and the Mountain” appeared in BCS #29. and as BCS Audio Fiction Podcast #28.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  SYSTEM, MAGIC, SPIRIT

  by T.D. Edge

  When I saw Prince Jestin rushing to join my carriage, nose carving the air like a tiny, snotty shark’s fin, I actually wanted to die in the Spirit Ring tomorrow.

  Half a dozen guards protected him, which was six too many by my reckoning. Fifth in line for the throne and about as smart as an earthworm with piles, no one would want to assassinate him anyway, except for maybe the King if he ever got round to anything as public-spirited as a cost-cutting initiative.

  Jestin dismounted clumsily, mainly on account of not wishing to lower his gaze to anything so common as the ground, then stood outside the carriage waiting for one of his men to open the door for him. Once inside, he took the seat in the corner diagonally opposite me then waved his men away to flank us.

  A long silence followed. Being well past the age of caring what royalty thought, and doomed besides, I could easily have taken a little nap right then. But duty called, or rather tugged at the remains of my conscience, so I said, “Would you like me to instruct the party to move off, sire?”

  He waited a moment then turned to face me. “Wizard,” he said, only it came out bearing the latest high society affectation, a lisp—withard, God help me. “You may indeed issue such an instruction.”

  There’s nothing better than low-ranking, fad-following royalty for extinguishing any last desire to even bother fighting for one’s life against other wizards in the Ring. But I leaned out the window anyway, whistled to the lead man, and we lurched forward, the carriage springs groaning into action. For a minute or two, our little cabin resonated with the sounds of horses neighing, leather straps creaking, men shouting. Dust from the hot road swirled in too, but Jestin acted as if it would never dare clog his royal nostrils. He looked out his window, casually waving a royal hand to the peasants at the side of the road, few of whom, it has to be said, reciprocated.

  We didn’t speak as the carriage left the city and headed south along the east bank of the River Dalfang. The quiet suited me, since I wanted to absorb images of the land I loved and would almost certainly never return to. Like most countries in the northern world, however, the beauty of the mountains, wooded valleys and emerald meadows belied the harsh life experienced by the majority of its occupants.

  “Withard,” said Jestin without looking at me. “We are most pleased with the smooth movement of this carriage. Pray tell, is this the result of your magic?”

  Ah-hah, what was this? A touch of curiosity poking its beak above the mental fog of privilege?

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s nothing more than the result of a well-proportioned mixture of lubricants applied to the crucial bearings just before we left. Sire.”

  Another silence followed, in which I assumed he’d lost interest and returned to contemplating his gold-plated navel. But then he said, “We would hear more about magic, if you please.”

  Now, when I was younger and still full of missionary vim about changing the world for the better, such a request would have engorged my wand faster than a working woman could raise a farm boy’s interest. But experience had taught me that dissertations on magical systems are incredibly dull for all save the oblivious nincompoop who actually believes anyone wants to listen. No, when people ask you what you ‘do’, all they really want is a snappy line or two they can repeat over dinner later.

  Well, to hell with that. I said, “Do you believe all good must be paid for?”

  He blushed. “Are you implying the necessary comforts of royalty are not earned?”

  “Actually, I just gave you the essence of the Legwin system of magic.”

  “It seems rather blunt.”

  “Everyone would like to be rich, sire, but the truth is there’s only so much wealth a nation can produce; so if one man takes more of it, another man has to live with less.”

  I watched him struggle with righteous anger over this and admired his royal training in decorum when, instead of calling the guards to throw me in the nearest sewage ditch with my wand rammed where it hurt, he simply said, “Are there not two magical systems in Arcanadia?”

  “Yes; you may prefer the other, sire: the Roeling system.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Roeling wizards believe magic lies outside the laws of cause and effect, therefore there is no price to pay for using it. Other than the wizard’s fee, of course.”

  “I see,” he said. “Clearly, you follow the Legwin system, Wizard Ambrose.”

  Well, what do you know? He’d actually bothered to find out my name before boarding. Interesting.

  “I’m old-fashioned,” I said, deciding to dispense from now on with ‘sire’ and ‘your grace’ or any other hollow gloss his kind demanded in order to fan the illusion that they didn’t skid-mark their pants from time to time like everyone else. “Correction: I’m old. I know that every pleasure has to be paid for with pain, sooner or later. Yet a life without pleasure isn’t worth living.”

  So it was that my mind wandered across my life, remembering the pleasures; I didn’t need reminding of the pains. But he spoke again then, bringing me back. “And why do you go to Nerwan?”

  I didn’t need to ask why he was visiting our neighboring country, it being an open secret amongst the few who cared that his old man had decided to marry him off to King Rusper’s youngest daughter, hoping, no doubt, she’d want to set up home next door to her own folks.

  “I’m going to die there,” I said.

  “We do not understand.”

  “Fifteen old wizard
farts are getting together in an underground cavern, and the one who wants to live the most takes all the remaining spirit left in the others. He or she is filled with youth again and the rest die.”

  “How frightfully harsh.”

  “We figure it’s better to have one wizard full of virile fizz to give the world than fifteen burnt out wrecks whose wands soon won’t be good for anything except scratching their backs.”

  “We think we see....”

  I didn’t think he did. How could he possibly understand the fair finality of the Spirit Ring—that only the one who still yearned for life was given it, while those too tired had it taken away?

  I turned back to the window, but after only a minute or so he said, “I worry that I won’t love her.”

  I should have felt honored—royalty normally confined use of the personal pronoun to their nearest and dearest. But his mention of ‘love’ just wearied me further.

  “So what if you don’t?” I said, ignoring his shocked expression at my less than respectful tone. “It won’t stop you doing your duty, will it? I doubt there’s ever been a royal couple who married for love, anyway. It’d be damned inconvenient, what with all that ‘living in separate wings’ business and having to remain two paces apart in public at all times.”

  “I don’t mean love like that,” he said. “I just want to marry someone who will speak to me as honestly as you have done.” He blushed and looked away, which was as well since my jaw had fallen open at this most un-royal-like declaration.

  “Mother and father don’t communicate,” he said. “They barely even look at each other, unless it’s required by the occasion. I want a woman I can share my life with, so we can both learn and be better.”

  Now, to a non-wizard, all this would no doubt sound like the ravings of a spoilt brat looking for a ‘real’ life because he had no chance of getting his hands on his family’s power. But I followed Legwin and therefore knew about cause and effect. So I reckoned that maybe this prince acted like such a royal ponce in public simply because he was too scared to face his strongest need.