Beneath Ceaseless Skies #205 Read online

  Issue #205 • Aug. 4, 2016

  “Salt and Sorcery,” by Raphael Ordoñez

  “A Deeper Green,” by Samantha Murray

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  SALT AND SORCERY

  by Raphael Ordoñez

  The two glassy knobs that protruded from her pale pink hair flashed with inner fire, resonating with the storm that was tossing the airship like a drifting spore.

  There were sounds in the passageway outside. She busied herself over the hinged wooden compact, which was open like a clamshell on a cushion before her. Her eyes were weary and wise, belying her youthful, almost nymphean looks.

  She heard voices conversing lowly, then a final goodnight. A sallow, hawk-faced man stepped through the hatch into the cabin. His skull’s joints were bold lines on his shaven crown. He had never looked old because he had never looked young.

  “I thought I told you not to take your hair down,” he said.

  “I didn’t plan to go back out.”

  “I don’t care what you were planning. Look at those things. It’s as though you want people to know what you are.”

  She put her hands up to rearrange her coiffure. Her hair, the color of dawn-tinted clouds, was long and luxuriously heavy. She met his eyes in the mirror and saw that they sparkled. She shuddered inwardly. “Are we far off course?”

  As if to emphasize the question, the ship dropped suddenly and then soared upward.

  “We’re off every map they’ve got,” the man said. “There’s no way to set down in this gale, so we’ll just have to coast along with it until it decides to give out. We may never get back to Enoch. How about that?”

  She returned to the compact, using tweezers to adjust the black, beanlike ova in their rotating ring of cavities. Only four remained to her. “Do the others know?”

  “Those fools?” He ran a finger down the edge of a design on the bulkhead. “You were very free with them tonight.”

  She snapped the compact shut. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Not at all! I prefer it when you speak your mind. I don’t like all this skulking about. And if what you say reflects rather badly on me, well, that’s not your fault is it?”

  She turned to face him. “Darden, you know I—”

  “Please,” he said, putting up one hand. “How long has it been since I found you? There’s nothing you have to apologize for. Not to me. We’ve been through high times and low together, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, Darden.” She thought of the story he’d told her again and again, of his finding her, a puling babe, exposed in the pumice desert of Lund.

  He laughed. “Oh, I remember one low time. What would the others think if they ever knew what you’d done with those seeds of yours? Eh? Do you remember the look on old—”

  “I never use them except when you ask me to!” she cried.

  “So it’s my fault! You think the chimeras come out of nowhere!” He laughed again. “Why, if I didn’t keep those little beans of yours under lock and key...! Speaking of which...” He put his hand out. “Finished?”

  Orana gave him the case. He placed it in a metal-bound wooden chest and locked the lid. She winced at the sound.

  “Don’t delude yourself,” he said. “We’re both rotten.” He slid his arm around her waist and crushed his lips against hers. He moved to her neck. His hot breath filled her ear: “You’re just a little more rotten.”

  There was a loud pop, and Darden flew back against the bulkhead. His eyes glittered with malice. The scar on his cheek turned white.

  Lightning stabbed at the embrasures, seeking the source of power. An explosion rocked the craft. Night swept black-winged into the cabin. Gravity loosed its hold, turning the contents into swirling flotsam. Orana drifted up out of Darden’s reach as though in an ecstasy of divine rapture.

  Then a giant’s hand came down, and the bulkhead crashed against them. Stunned, Orana found herself whirled back into space. She had a glimpse of Darden’s face streaked with blood. A rent opened in the hull like a black mouth, and icy fingers yanked her into darkness.

  A mote in a howling maelstrom, she tumbled for what seemed an eternity through elemental anarchy. Orientation and polarity lost all meaning. Mad choirs of daemons shrieked in her ears, driving her in a harsh zigzag across the face of chaos.

  Something struck her a resounding blow, bounded away, and struck her again. And then, suddenly, miraculously, she found herself pressed against a flat surface. Her senses righted themselves, and she knew that she was on the ground.

  The wind blasted her with tiny pellets that stung her eyes and filled her mouth with the taste of salt. She rolled over to put her face in the lee. Lights whirled like meteors across her vision. The airship was turning somersaults into darkness. Then the gale picked it up like a toy, and it was gone.

  * * *

  A vision of pink and pale blue greeted her open eyes, a perfectly smooth plane of sparkling rose receding to the line at infinity, vertical in her vision, to meet the cosmic sapphire dome.

  She got up on one elbow. The sun was a pink ball peering over the world’s rim. Her shadow was a blue finger stretched out behind her.

  For a confused moment she thought she lay in a snow field. But the surface was hard and gritty. Also, it was not cold. By bits and pieces she recalled her advent upon the plain, the taste of salt on her lips.

  Her heart leaped. The salt flats were so remote that some doubted their very existence. The last nameless range west of Enoch, far past the great karst plateau, was known as the Edge of Beyond. And its twisted pinnacles merely overlooked the beginning of the flats.

  She was alone in the heart of Beyond.

  The breeze was cool and dry. There was no other sound and no sign of any living thing. The sky was cloudless. The sun waxed incandescent as it rose.

  To the south she descried a trail of wreckage across the glittering expanse. She got to her feet, stretched her sore muscles, and began walking. The scattered objects were the only things upon which her eyes could fix. The flats were utterly featureless. No hills or mountains were visible at the circle of the horizon.

  Halfway to the nearest piece she passed a place where the ship had struck the salt. The crust had cracked, revealing a pool of muddy blue-green brine, placid under a sheet of floating crystals. The ship itself was nowhere in sight. Perhaps it had righted itself and flown on. If that were the case, it might soon return, and find her there on the plain.

  Many of the things were from her cabin. She found some clothes, now woefully inadequate. She was wearing a tight pink blouse and loose, flowing black pants. There was a pair of sandals among the wreckage, which she slipped on, but Darden had liked to keep her looking her best, and the gowns strewn over the salt were no better than what she had on.

  Taking up the trail again, she came across more mementos: jewelry, artifacts, rare cylinders. Darden specialized in organizing acts of larceny and tomb-plundering—they’d been on such a mission when the storm struck—but lately he’d come to rely almost exclusively on her talents in evading both the guards of the modern world-city and the cunning traps of the ancients.

  The trail petered out. There was one last object in the distance. Squinting—the sun was a glaring white ball in the east now and the flats shimmered brilliantly—she descried a shattered rectangle. She bounded forward with a cry of joy.

  It was the chest.

  She reached it and fell to her knees. The lock had been broken but the contents remained. Trembling, she drew out the compact. The seeds were intact. She sat cross-legged on the salt and positioned them more carefully, as a mot
her might shift her sleeping infants.

  The world was a shining white disk beneath a clear blue dome. Sunlight pounded inexorably on her back and skull. She had no water, no food, and no shelter. She wouldn’t last more than a few hours if she didn’t find a way of protecting herself from the onslaught.

  She rose to her knees went through the chest more carefully. Most of the contents were oddments that Darden had considered important. Among them was his chain-sword, his most prized possession.

  She drew it out carefully. She’d never been allowed to touch it but had watched Darden handle it many times. With one flick of her wrist, the links locked into place, forming a razor-sharp rapier. She drove the pommel against her hip, and the blade collapsed into a chain again.

  The chest held nothing else of value. She got to her feet with her finds and returned to her clothes. Among them were two white bed sheets. Using the chain-sword, she cut a hole in the middle of one and slipped it over her head. A silken cord served to cincture it around her waist. The other she used as a hood.

  The glare of the salt was blinding now. Her vision was already blurred. She recalled that a silken sleeping mask lay among her scattered clothing. She took it up, cut two slits in it, and slipped it on after completing her toilet, unconsciously arranging her hair as Darden had liked it, with the knobs of her antennae hidden.

  There was little more to be done. She filled a satchel with anything that seemed likely to be useful, including a paring knife, a cup, a bottle of liquor, and extra pins for her hair. Into the bag also went the compact and chain-sword. With that she set out.

  East lay Enoch the world-city. South lay the wreck of the airship. North and west lay lands empty and unknown. She headed northwest. She knew she would probably die, but still her heart was light.

  * * *

  As the trail of jetsam receded Orana began to feel strangely exposed. The plain went on, and on, and on, without the slightest variation in any direction. It proved difficult to keep up a good pace. With no goal to make toward, her steps wove back and forth. The earth was a treadmill, the sun a lidless eye transfixing her with its stare.

  The white expanse rebuked her soul. It whispered that the world of color and form existed in the eye alone, a broken impression of a vast blank cosmos whirling toward tepid surcease. And in that final unalterable uniformity, time and existence would cease to have meaning, and all would be one, and nothing.

  The sun climbed overhead. Her feet lagged and her head lolled on her shoulders. Clouds of sparks assailed her vision. She sank to the glittering plane, rolled on the salt for a moment, and lay still.

  Her half-open eyes seized upon the tiny crystalline cubes whose complex configurations stretched away in nightmare boundlessness.

  Deliriously, she got up on her hands and knees. It seemed all one whether she walked or crawled. The latter proved more irksome, though, so she rose unsteadily to her feet and kept walking.

  Soon she began passing patches of pale blue-green. A measure of sanity returned to her mind. She felt the gnawing of thirst, and her lips were dry and cracked, but she remembered who she was.

  Clouds started to coalesce in the north. She prayed silently to all the gods she knew. There were still no landmarks, but the plain was broken into big polygons like tiles mortared with crystalline ridges.

  Bastions of clouds bore down on her, hung with curtains of pearl. The storm-wall reached from horizon to horizon, a soaring range with slanting lines pushing ahead of its broad foundations.

  Advance towers surged around her. Delicious shadow enveloped her. Cool wind tugged at her raiment. Thunder rolled. And then the blessed rain came down.

  She stopped and opened her mouth to the heavens. That did nothing to slake her thirst, but it washed the salt from her lips. She set her cup out on the crust. Once her raiment was soaked she sucked at the sheets and let them grow sodden again.

  The rain slackened after all too brief a downpour. Ragged rents exposed the blue sky. Water lay in a thin sheet on the ground. She tasted it, but, as she’d expected, it was already too salty to drink.

  She swallowed what had gathered in her cup, took off her sheets, and wrung them out in it. This, too, she drank, then repeated the process. She downed three cupfuls that way. The fourth and last she kept in the cup.

  Puffy white cumuli scudded over the flats now beneath high cirrus banners. Rainwater lay in a perfect sheet across the plain, an inch deep in every direction, reflecting the sky like a mirror. It was as though she floated between two heavens, one above and one below.

  She went her way exultantly, walking on water, sole to sole with an upside-down second self, dancing between twin layers of clouds.

  * * *

  The shallow ocean lifted into haze and vanished as the sun declined. Her legs grew weary. She felt the need of rest. But every spot was the same as every other.

  As the ruddy disk touched the horizon, her feet started breaking through into sun-warmed quagmires. She backtracked, halted, and peered forward. In the uncertain light it was hard to tell where solid ground lay. This, then, was the place to sleep. She lay down, wrapped in her two sheets.

  The sun sank out of sight. Twilight swept over the earth. Stars appeared in the desolate gulf, waxing in darkness, gathering into glittering swarms. They bore down on her like a volley of flaming arrows.

  She felt as though pressed against a spinning ball from which she might drop into the abyss at any moment. In the west, Saant hung low like a flickering red candle. Staring into it, she fell asleep, and dreamed of temples with empty tabernacles.

  * * *

  In the morning she skirted the thin crust by veering to the north. The plain continued as before. Her water was gone. She hoped for another afternoon shower, but no shower came. The featureless flats rolled on and on. She was achingly thirsty again and light-headed with hunger.

  Dark spots came and went in her sun-touched vision. One spot refused to vanish. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. A long, low eminence lay in the dancing distance.

  It was an outcrop like an island in the sea of salt, an upturned keel of brown stone clothed in varicolored vegetation. She started forward convulsively, half stumbling, half running, thinking of the rainwater that must have pooled in its hollows.

  As a girl, she’d once been aboard a steamer with Darden when an earthquake struck. Their craft had settled to the exposed reef. She’d been entranced with the loveliness of the coral landscape that rose up before her. Then the waves had returned, and they’d barely escaped with their lives.

  The salt-island reminded her of that reef. The great mosses and lichens that crowned it looked as though carved by elfin jewelers. There were golden heliodor stalks with exploding cinnabar heads, and beds of blue-green beryl, and creeping carpets of amethyst orbs, and forests of ruby-tipped olivine spears, and towering onyx pagodas and toadstools, and rolling lichen-mats like landscapes carved of jade in arches and hollows and orange-velvet cups. Dragonflies darted hither and thither like winged brooches, crimson, bronzy green, and black-banded yellow.

  She had almost reached the shoreline, where soft breakers of blue-green salt rolled against the black rocks, when a shrill whistle brought her up short. She froze. A figure stood silhouetted against the sky at the island’s brow, then vanished.

  “Hello?” she called.

  For a moment there was no answer. Then, suddenly, a score or more of tiny brown warriors materialized out of nowhere, brandishing spears and bows. She thought at first that they were pygmies, then realized that they were merely children. They wore scaly animal skins and bits of tattered cloth and scrap metal. Some were almost naked.

  Orana stepped forward and lowered her hood and mask. A dart whizzed past her ear. It had been shot by an older youth, lanky and large-eared, who stood head and shoulders over the others. He strode to the fore and held his hand out menacingly.

  “I missed you on purpose,” he said. “I could’ve killed you if I’d wanted to. That was just a warning. Th
is is our place!”

  “Where are your parents?” asked Orana.

  “Dead!” a little girl yelled. The other children took up the chorus: “Dead! They’re all dead! Our parents loved us but they’re dead!”

  The boy held his hand up for silence. “We’re all orphans here. I am the phylarch. We don’t allow big people. Go away!”

  “I won’t harm you,” said Orana. “I’m just thirsty.”

  “It’s against our rules.”

  “Oh, Arrow,” said the girl who had spoken, “can’t we break the rules just this once? She seems nice, and she’s so pretty.”

  Arrow shook his head. “You’re too young, and don’t understand. You don’t remember the time before.”

  “I do too. But that’s not the reason you’re keeping her off!”

  The other children shouted her down.

  “And anyway,” said a warrior boy, “it’s stupid to talk about breaking a rule, when we’ve never even gotten the chance to follow it.”

  “If we don’t follow our rules,” another boy said, “Tiamat will think we don’t love her. Then we’ll never go to Pureland.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to go to Pureland,” said the girl. “We’ll be big people someday. You’ll be first, Arrow.”

  “That’s different.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Please,” said Orana, “I just need water and something to eat.”

  The boy phylarch hesitated. The other children looked expectantly at him. But stone set in his eyes. “Newt! Cubit! Ray!” Three warrior boys gathered around him. “You stay here, and make sure she stays off the island. The rest of you, come with me.”

  The children melted into the mossy crevices, leaving the guards behind, two with spears and one with a nocked arrow. They watched Orana placidly, like crafty animals.

  She began walking north, parallel to the shoreline. The boys kept up with her, leaping from stone to stone. They didn’t call to her or talk to one another.

  The island was a mile long. At its northern extremity it rose into precipices crowned with big lichened boulders and pillars and what appeared to be a ruined temple. An isolated outcrop stood in the salt to the north. She set out toward it, crossing the glittering expanse. The boys remained in the shadow of the cliffs.