Beneath Ceaseless Skies #80 Read online

  haunting her because she’d done it all before.

  The light continued to brighten; its radiance harnessed the fire of Heaven’s Engines and stripped Cecily clean, soiled wings immaculate, without soot or stain. She saw everything that the Machines had conspired to keep hidden in darkness.

  They demand the spilling of blood, Granduncle said. They envy us, you see, the iron in our veins....

  But that made no sense, Cecily realized with a start. Even as a child it hadn’t made sense, but she’d never once dared to question it.

  “What need, you wonder, does a Machine have for blood?” Oliver asked. “Knowledge and control are the fires that drive the Engines of Heaven, but even Gods cannot see beyond the limits of their own Perfection. The random, the haphazard, the irrational, the human, are well outside their understanding. So a test was devised. A study in bedlam, if you will. An inquiry into the ever-shifting balance between Order and Chaos.”

  A test subject was chosen (Cecily already knew, as dread gave way to lifetimes of memory): a little girl who railed against the World as if lost in a hedge maze, a sparrow trapped in a sooty length of pipe.

  Granduncle was wrong. Or he’d lied. It hardly mattered now; all of her gifts had been offered in vain. The effects of her blind single-mindedness, the lives she’d made to suffer, the phantoms round about her whose dreams would never be realized.

  Christ Jesus weeping.

  It was all so achingly clear.

  “You were the arbiters,” she said to Oliver. “The voices in the garden.”

  “We’ve been alongside you all the while, whispering in your ear, steering you to action. Sometimes you’ve even heard us, but never for the right reasons.”

  “It’s not too late!” she cried. Her heart swelled with the assurance of apotheosis—the transfiguration into Mechanical Immortality. “I understand now. I understand it all.”

  Oliver shook his ruined head. “Only because we’ve shown you, child. You were meant to learn it yourself.” He turned and shuffled away, the raven on his shoulder peering at her through black industrial lenses. It echoed the revenants’ laughter with cold and ominous intent.

  And the light of Heaven’s Engines receded again into the shadows, into the soot-laden places Cecily knew so well. The ghosts crowded around her and rejoiced, burning her flesh with icy fingertips, the absolute cold of wrought-iron graves.

  “I just wanted them to notice me!” Cecily wept as she gazed into the Perfection exposed beneath Oliver’s earthly flesh, but her voice was silenced as the metal whip wrung her by the neck.

  Oliver looked back and flashed a steely grimace, the ghastly travesty of a clockwork man’s smile.

  “Sad little fleshling. They’ve noticed you all along,” she heard the thing say. Just as it had always said, a thousand times before. “The Gods of Time and Engines are ever anxious for their gifts.”

  And as they hoisted her into the belfry, and her body snapped down at the end of the wire mesh line, the icy fires of Time rose to take her, to consume her, and carried her back through the balance wheels to the never-ending Now, the place where the circle began and forever begins again.

  At least until she gets it right.

  * * *

  Cecily liked to hurt things.

  She didn’t know why....

  Copyright © 2011 Dean Wells

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  Dean Wells’s short fiction has appeared in Ideomancer, Eldritch Tales, ShadowKeep Magazine, and The Nocturnal Lyric, among other magazines, and he is a member of SFWA.

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  COVER ART

  “New Lands,” by Rado Javor

  Rado Javor is a Slovak artist who splits his time between Bratislava and the UK. His favorite subjects include gothic Colonial America, WWI aircraft, dark science-fiction, and Napoleonic naval engagements, many of which were featured in the game Empire: Total War. See more of his work at http://radojavor.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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