Beneath Ceaseless Skies #30 Read online

  She was naked, her body wasted by starvation and, I supposed, a loss of vitae. A thin sheet was wrapped around her thighs like a child’s nappy, stained and soiled. Her wrists and ankles were held down by large padded leather straps, and I saw a leather pad on the cover of the case, right over her forehead. As I watched, she jerked, one arm slapping against the strap that held it down.

  The mirrored panels inside the silver case oscillated with captive energy. Gleaming wires coiled around her limbs like a tangled net, running from circular openings in the bottom of the case to small ceramic funnels resting on the woman’s body: on the top of her head, on her forehead, over her throat, over her heart, over her diaphragm, over her womb, and under the fabric covering her thighs. The limp feeding tube dangled obscenely from her mouth against her flattened breasts.

  I wondered if Number 21 felt any pain, afloat on opium dreams while her vitae was siphoned away on copper wires.

  “I found the drugs!” someone shouted. A moment later metal struck metal. Cries to be careful rose up among the onlookers.

  I pressed my hand against my chest again, my fingers clutching my ragged coat collar. My bladder felt full and my back teeth ached. The vibrations from the case were stealing my breath away and seemed eager to take more.

  I dragged my hand away from my chest and lifted one of the ceramic funnels. It resisted. I tugged and saw that it covered the ends of wires that had been inserted into the woman’s flesh, surrounded by suppurating lesions. I touched the naked copper and gasped as a galvanic shock ran through me, making my heart stutter and my muscles convulse. Horrified, I wrenched myself away with the primal desperation of a rat whose leg has been caught in a steel gin trap.

  Behind me, voices rose in a cheer as the lock on the medicine cabinet broke off. A deep-voiced man began to read labels and pass around bottles. I heard ‘tincture of laudanum’ called out multiple times, to shouts of acclaim. Compound oxygen, iron bitters, and a variety of other elixirs and patent medicines were also received with general approbation. The factorymen took care of their charges at least as well as any hospital.

  Still shaking, I lowered the lid and re-engaged the latch. Then I lifted the feeding tube and hooked it back up to its wire support and slid the panel shut over Number 21’s face.

  The metal lid vibrated under my hands, and a peculiar emptiness ached inside my chest.

  The world had changed; I realised that, now. Inside this dark, buzzing, technological shrine to science, where one person’s death meant another’s immortality, there was no room left for an old-fashioned resurrection man with old-fashioned values.

  The Reverend Brant stood a few rows away from me, his expression bleak, and I wondered if he, too, was considering the obsolescence of his profession. For what did God have to offer a world in which immortality was bought and sold at a manufactory’s cold iron gate?

  * * *

  We took the medicines and the copper wire and the lanterns and anything else that might fetch a few shillings on the second-hand market, and then we cut some of the more pathetic living skeletons out of their metal cases and carried them into the neighbourhood bars and taverns. The Reverend Brant pointed toward their unconscious, bleeding bodies and harangued the crowd about the unforgivable evil being perpetrated on the poor to benefit the rich. Outrage spread, as outrage does, and eventually it turned into violence.

  The body I’d carried out of the Millside manufactory had felt light, almost insubstantial, in my arms. I abandoned it when the rioting started and ducked through the tavern’s kitchen, nicking a carving knife on my way out. Several hours later, I had new bodies to carry, bodies that felt much heavier as I loaded them into a barrow from the manufactory courtyard.

  “Victims of the riots?” the night porter asked, holding up a lantern and peering at them from the back door of the hospital where I’d once worked and still plied my trade.

  “Seemed a waste to let the constables haul ‘em off to a pauper’s grave,” I said piously, “when their misfortune might do some good for science, instead.”

  The night porter gave a cynical snort and waved me in, asking no more, and after I’d laid the bodies out in the hospital morgue, he counted their worth into my waiting palm. Each coin glinted like an electrical spark, and I felt a surge of satisfaction at having stolen a little life of my own out from under the noses of the rich.

  Wasn’t but two days later, the morning after I paid the Reverend Brant a corpse’s price to bury my Bet in one of those private, guarded cemeteries, that Lizzie and I stood on the crowded train platform, holding crisp paper tickets out of the city to a place where the air was fresh and the dead lie motionless in their graves. Choking clouds of ash and steam billowed around us, and shrill train whistles pierced the air. With my sack of digging tools bundled up next to me and the carving knife jammed into my boot, I pulled my daughter close and squeezed her shoulder. She looked up at me with a tentative, uncertain smile.

  I still don’t know what, exactly, those manufactories are collecting inside their damnable ceramic jars. The Reverend Brant believes vitae is the human soul, but if that’s the case, then a soul is a heavy thing, indeed. As for me, I’ve been feeling agreeably light of heart ever since I set foot within that dark Millside manufactory.

  Copyright © 2009 Dru Pagliassotti

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  Dru Pagliassotti is a horror and fantasy writer and the owner of The Harrow Press. She's written a steampunk fantasy novel, Clockwork Heart (Juno Books, 2008), and her horror novel An Agreement with Hell will be published by Apex Book Company in 2010. In real life, she’s a professor of communication at California Lutheran University, where she researches boys’ love manga and fiction. She blogs intermittently about all of these things at drupagliassotti.com.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE BOOK THIEF

  by Jennifer Greylyn

  The last thing I remember is opening the book.

  You would think I’d remember more than that. The first line. The first word even. But it isn’t that kind of book. You don’t notice what it says. Only that it pulls you in and takes you away from yourself. Like a dream you can’t resist. A dream you can’t quite wake up from.

  Not long ago, I thought it was a sign from God. It didn’t turn out like I expected, though, which just goes to show I don’t understand stories.

  But this is no way to begin, if you are hearing me. Considering where I am, I should be able to do better. Let me try again.

  * * *

  I thought I saw my sign in the hands of a dead man.

  His name was Vuric and, even though he wasn’t recently dead, not by the stink wafting off him, he was recently discovered to be dead. His landlady, Malthea, found him a few hours before I poked my head into the little taproom she kept on the ground floor of the moldering house she owned in Elsabar Street, just south of the Tengral River.

  She, a rotund woman with rusty-iron curls barely contained by the bleached kerchief she wore, was wiping down the polished plank on barrels that served as the bar with much more vigor than the task demanded, regularly pausing to glare at a trio of older men sitting at the only occupied table. They, in turn, were determinedly ignoring her, even though it was obvious from the way each of them would pick up his mug, go to drink from it, and then set it down with a hard thud, that they were out of ale and not pleased about it.

  I knew right then I’d stepped into the middle of something, and I was just about to step back out when the landlady spotted me. “You there, young sir, you’ll help a poor widow, won’t you?”

  I wasn’t so young that I didn’t see the shrewdness in her eyes beyond the pleading tone, but I also saw that those eyes were faintly red from weeping, as if she was in genuine distress. I was curious enough to listen to her because I knew I could use the goodwill of someone who rented rooms.

  “If I can, good lady,” I answered with polite evasion but a charming smile. She invited me in to sit dow
n on a stool at the bar and drew a drink for both of us. Now, I’m sure she saw through my smile but was in so worrisome a situation that she hoped she could use me. Since I meant to use her too, I had no hard feelings.

  She told me one of her lodgers had died, an old man called Vuric, and he had no family or friends to see to his burial. “I’d be very grateful to anyone who’d make the arrangements for me,” she explained in a throaty whisper, and I expected her bosom to begin heaving with dramatic sobs at any moment, but I misjudged her. That wasn’t how she meant to lure me in. “I’d be willing to let you have his rooms and their contents, minus the cost of the funeral, of course.”

  “Of course,” I murmured back noncommittally. I wanted to see the rooms first, to decide if there was anything in them worth selling, before I agreed to anything.

  Malthea nodded, as if she expected that, and led me up two flights of wobbly stairs to the top floor, but not, however, before she shouted a warning at her sullen customers. “Don’t you three even think about refilling your mugs while I’m gone!” The whole trio, I swear, flinched as if she’d read their minds, and I knew right then not to underestimate her.

  “So who was this Vuric?” I asked conversationally as we ascended the steps.

  She was in front of me, which kept me from seeing her face, but she did hesitate, which made me suspect she wasn’t going to tell me the whole truth. “He was a scholar. Once worked at the University, I think. But I don’t know for sure. He was very private.”

  I took that to mean she didn’t pry into the lives of her lodgers. I was grateful for that. Had she asked me, I’d have said I was a peddler and it would even have been true, as I always had a few things in my pack to sell. But, like her explanation of Vuric, it wouldn’t be the whole truth.

  She didn’t ask me anything, though, and that gave me a good feeling about her, which likely made me more trusting than I should have been. I was running through possibilities of what she might have left out of Vuric’s story—that he was her secret lover, that he was interested in banned books—when we came to the landing. She turned to the only door and took out a key.

  Despite the stench of decay that rolled over us, I’m certain that my eyes gleamed when I saw the first room. I shouldn’t have been so obvious, but I couldn’t help it. It was laid out like a study with worktable and chair, inkwells and pen box, but what drew my eyes were the books. Three shelves of them and a wooden chest that might have held more.

  I know how valuable books are. When I was young, my father apprenticed me to a papermaker. He was a butcher by trade, but he said he wanted something better for me. “Something cleaner” were his very words. I don’t think he realized how messy a paper mill could be, but I was often out of there, making deliveries to the shops in Stationers’ Row. That was where I was introduced to books, new and old, bound and unbound, and where I learned to read when I paid an apprentice scrivener all my meager allowance for months to teach me.

  Outside those shops, I’d never seen so many books as in Vuric’s study. They were too expensive for most people to own more than a few. Paper made them less expensive than they’d been a century ago when they were still routinely copied on parchment, but they still cost a lot because they had to be copied by hand. I was looking at years of work.

  I went inside without thinking, to take a closer look at the shelves and the chest, but then I noticed the second room beyond the first, a bedroom separated from the study by a wooden partition. There was a bed against the wall and, on the bed, a body clutching a book. And, through the thin clenched fingers, I could just make out the title on the cover. It said Hope.

  It was such an unexpected title, so apt in its simplicity, that it struck me hard. I was used to long, convoluted titles that told me exactly what was in the books. I carried a few of the most popular in my pack. A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Inns along the Route to Saint Eleos’ Shrine. Meditations on the Death and Miracles of Saint Calynn. The Marvelous Tales of a Traveler among the Chain Islands. But none excited me the way the one in Vuric’s hands did. I think I would have pried it out of his fingers if Malthea hadn’t been with me.

  Reminded of the landlady, I looked for her and saw she was still hovering in the doorway, as if reluctant to enter. She wasn’t pinching her nose so the odor couldn’t have been bothering her. In fact, she looked like she was sniffing the air. That puzzled me until I remembered she might have been Vuric’s lover, so maybe she was checking to see if there was any lingering scent of her perfume. I hadn’t noticed her wearing any, but it was hard to smell anything over the smell of Vuric.

  He was certainly nothing to look at now. Wispy white hair did little to cover a narrow skull that was already becoming more pronounced as the rotting sallow skin sank into it. His teeth, yellow and crooked, at least the ones that remained, formed a parody of a smile as the shriveled lips pulled back. I was glad his eyes were closed so I couldn’t see what death was doing to them. He seemed too old and decrepit for Malthea, but there was no accounting for some women’s tastes.

  “What killed him, do you think?” I called back to her. It sounded unfeeling, especially if he had been her lover, but I wanted to see my prospective landlady’s reaction. There were no signs of violence, so I was pretty sure it had been old age that got him. Still, I needed to reassure myself I wasn’t getting into a situation the Watch might take an interest in. I had good reason not to want to get mixed up with them.

  Again there was a slight hesitation before she answered, but what she said sounded plausible enough. “He had a bad heart. He had medicine from the apothecary for it. It could have killed him in his sleep.”

  Then, as she went on to explain how she usually left his meals for him on a tray outside his door, how she got worried after a couple of days when he didn’t appear to have eaten anything, and how she failed to rouse him no matter how hard she knocked, all to justify to me why she’d finally opened his door, I let my eyes roam and noticed, on a little stand by the bed, a small, earthenware pot with a picture of a spiky, purple flower painted on it. I recognized the foxglove, which I knew was a treatment for a weak heart. My former master had taken it. I also knew too much foxglove was poisonous. But the pot was more than three-quarters full, which made it unlikely Vuric had swallowed too large a dose.

  I was happy to be able to confirm that much of Malthea’s story about the dead man, but, even if I hadn’t, I knew I wanted these rooms. These books. Especially the book in Vuric’s hands. It felt like a sign to me. I’d returned to Senest, the city of my birth, because I had nowhere else to go. I’d been hoping for a new start and it seemed I’d found one. Maybe the book could even tell me what I should do next.

  I walked back out to the landlady, and she broke off her long-winded explanation when she saw my face. She smiled like she knew what I was going to say, but I, feeling expansive, said it anyway. “I think, good lady, I’ll be able to help you after all.”

  * * *

  That was how I inherited the dead man’s rooms.

  Malthea and I haggled all the way down the stairs over the details and, when she finally agreed to let me have the rooms, keep the contents, and not have to pay rent for the first two months in exchange for disposing of Vuric’s body, I was sure I’d got the better part of the bargain.

  Arranging the funeral was easy. A big city like Senest has a lot of jaedanals and it was simple to find a jaedan—a jaedana, actually, by the name of Sister Alassa, who, thankfully, I’d never met before—who wouldn’t ask too many questions. I told her I wanted the death rites said for poor departed Vuric, making sure she knew I wasn’t kin and didn’t want to attend the service. I could see from her expression she thought that a little odd, but she didn’t comment. Probably just relieved someone was paying for Vuric’s funeral and the parish didn’t have to.

  What took a lot more time, a few days in fact, was going through Vuric’s book collection. For reasons I didn’t understand at the time, I put off looking at the book he’d been holding when
he died. I told myself inventorying the rest for what could be sold was more important. I took a few at a time to Stationers’ Row and walked into the shops I’d delivered paper to as a boy, but, for all the nervous pounding of my heart, I wasn’t recognized. More than ten years had passed and I’d grown from boy to man. Besides, I wore a heavy beard to further obscure my features and the blackness of it and my hair made my hazel eyes look brown.

  Overall, I did very well for myself, earning a hefty pouch of coin and, aside from the funeral, I had only a few other expenses. One was replacing Vuric’s bed. I might be happy to take over the dead man’s rooms, but I wasn’t going to sleep on the straw mattress and sheets where he’d died and, more importantly, rotted before Malthea discovered him. Another was buying lye soap, a bucket and linen rags to give the rooms a thorough scrubbing and get the stink out. I could have hired some charwoman to do it, I suppose, but it was a way to make the rooms mine and, anyway, I entertained the idea Vuric might have had a hiding place or two and I wanted to be the one to find them.

  Mainly what I found was Vuric had recently cleaned the place himself. There was barely any dust anywhere except in some of the cracks between the floorboards. I did pry loose a floorboard he might have secreted things under, but the space below held only mouse droppings now. I suspected he’d burned whatever he’d been hiding because there was a huge heap of cold ash in the mantled hearth. I stabbed at it with the poker and uncovered the remains of singed papers, two broken bowls, countless candles, and what I’d swear had been a white robe.

  It made me wonder if the old man had had some inkling he was about to die and wanted to make sure no one else got their hands on his treasures, such as they were. Old people did get odd fancies sometimes. I gathered everything up and dumped it in Malthea’s midden out back. I only regretted the loss of the papers. I was curious what Vuric the scholar had written about.