Beneath Ceaseless Skies #36 Read online

  Panic seized me. I shouted her name and banged open doors, surprising workers asleep in hard bunks and startling merchants blinking through spectacles at contracts. I bounded upstairs, stopping only when my thighs burned and my lungs wheezed. I stood on the landing, panting, until I heard voices growing louder above me. I hid in a privy—a zinc-lined booth that smelled like its function—as bootsteps echoed over the platform.

  As they crossed the landing to file out through a narrow door, I considered my appearance: nothing identified me as a man of the Mirror lands. Except for my cloak I was dressed like a peasant. Assuming I wasn’t arrested for vagrancy, I could range throughout the Motor Kingdom at will. If I was lucky enough to find them, I could even seek help from the Inhibition: the secretive network of saboteurs and subversives active throughout the world. It was said they concentrated their work in the Motor Kingdom.

  I stepped out of the privy to nod at the passing soldiers. They ignored me.

  Two options were clear. Either Nadia had gone up, into the Motor heartland to spend her life on revenge—or down, to round up survivors and begin afresh. In neither case would she get her money’s worth. The Motor King was the best-guarded man in the world, and she was hardly a skilled assassin. She’d never killed except in the usual way of royalty, by ordering faithful men to their deaths. Just the same, any survivors she found below would be deserters. They’d never put a crown on her head, but they might at least keep her safe.

  So I went upstairs, hoping she hadn’t gone this way and knowing angrily that she probably had. I was tired of her ambitions. But duty, years of promises made and kept, compelled me to find her and persuade her against revenge. As I climbed the stairs from landing to landing, I examined every mirror for a glimpse of red hair, a sallow cheekbone, a blue eye. But I saw only myself.

  In a foul, low-ceilinged room where pungent chemicals ate the silver off old mirror shards—the metal flakes were caught in sieves and sold by the gram—I paid the old man in residence a brass penny to let me harvest food from his balcony. Between the cliffs fell sheets of warm rain, hazing the yellow light. The water drooled off a distant overhang, splashing onto the fragrant leaves.

  Squatting to watch the rain fall, I peeled and ate a fist-sized melon. The rind sailed down, to be scraped off a tract, brushed off a shoulder, washed through a gutter down to the basal lands. There, the books said, copper-skinned farmers grew food of all kinds under sunlamps powered by falling water. It was there, one day, that my own body would fall after being heaved over the tract. I shook the water out of my hair As I stood in the doorway searching my pouch for another coin that might loosen the old man’s tongue if he knew of the Inhibition, an officer of the Motor King stepped into the room.

  He was young with blushing cheeks and a thatch of black hair squirming to be free of his lieutenant’s cap. The old man sat in a rusting chair, a cloth breathing mask over his mouth, and the officer knelt to speak with him. I clipped the pouch shut and strode quickly by him, heart pounding against the dagger nestled under my arm. I nodded good day. He raised his cap, grinning a stupid, good-natured smile, and moved out of my way. My mouth was too dry to thank him.

  In the mirrors outside, my face was white. Haggard pouches huddled under my eyes. Looking like a war refugee was likely to get me arrested, so I composed my face until I resembled a happy, footloose vagrant—the kind of man who was just passing through because passing through was how he preferred to live.

  As I climbed, I noticed the mirrors giving way to the telltales of the Motor Kingdom. Bundles of cable hugged the walls. Dark lenses watched from the ceiling; metal ears listened. I was so absorbed in these sights that I didn’t notice the footsteps behind me.

  “Good day,” the young officer said, falling into step with me as I rounded a spiral staircase. He introduced himself as Terrence, a lieutenant in the Motor King’s occupational force. I called myself Walter, origin unspecified, occupation flexible. I told him I was just passing through his fine country; I hoped I had not trespassed.

  “Oh no,” he assured me, “you’re quite welcome here.”

  “Well that’s a happy surprise.”

  In his plump youthful face, his brown eyes were thoughtful. He looked about to say something grave, but it seemed at the last moment he changed his mind. He looked around us at the spiralling staircase, remarking that it swept up in a counter-clockwise fashion, giving the advantage to the attacking force rather than the defenders. “A strange design, don’t you think?”

  “Only if you live upstairs.”

  He chuckled as we mounted the last step. There a doorway opened onto a small barren room. An automaton, receiving motive power from the cables bracketed to the ceiling, polished ball bearings. The pudgy young woman overseeing it was so desperately bored that her face crumpled with disappointment when we declined to stay and talk. Terrence examined the cases of polished bearings, writing the figures into a chart he carried. Then we continued upstairs.

  I accompanied Terrence along his entire work route. I made up stories about my travels and my origins in a fictional province of the Optic lands, while he recounted the dry details of his life as a lieutenant-inspector in the low-level components industry. Cogs, gears, ball bearings and springs: he seemed to know everything about them. He spoke warmly about his ambition to move into the high-level sector, where whole machines were assembled for shipping and sale. I asked him about the war, hoping to find out whether Nadia had been captured. Unfortunately he knew little except as it pertained to manufacturing.

  And so together we hiked up through the gyrus, visiting workshops and factories. Some were little rooms housing only a single machine. Others were larger workshops like those in the Mirror Palace, with dozens of workers moving in unison. In all of them, Terrence wrote down production totals. A few times, with a mischievous smirk, he falsified lower figures.

  In every workshop, great or small, the bundles of wire sprouted from holes in the ceiling, feeding power to the automata and collecting information via mesh ears and bead-like glass eyes.

  “Is this a primary region?” I whispered to Terrence. We were climbing a cramped stairwell with neither human nor metal ears in sight.

  “It is now.” He fingered an insulated cable bracketed to the wall. “The king had the lower parts of the country wired to prepare for the war. Now that the Mirror Kingdom has fallen, he’ll have that wired into the primary region, too.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it,” I said hopefully.

  “I make it my business.” Smiling, he put a finger to his lips.

  We stood aside as a team of technicians in brown uniforms approached. They passed us on the narrow landing, saluting Terrence as they squeezed by. A pair of young soldiers followed, lugging a giant spool of white cable. When their footsteps echoed below us, I returned Terrence’s smile. I’d found a friend in the Inhibition.

  But as we continued upward, my thoughts turned to Nadia and her madness for vengeance. It was hopeless now. For decades, since the reign of King Stefan’s grandfather if not before, the very anatomy of the Motor lands had been a tool of the state hierarchy. Engineers strung miles of cable, connecting the centers of manufacturing to the great dynamos at the Motor Palace on top of the gyrus. Not only did this put the machinery under state control, but the wires carried extra channels for optic and audio data. They allowed the Motor King and his corps of cerebromancers to monitor any of the so-called primary regions. If the Motor Kingdom was already incorporating the Mirror lands into its network, Nadia had no hope of retaking them. A surprise attack on the Mirror Palace, a slim hope already, simply could not succeed.

  And so, as I followed Terrence through echoing factories and tiny workshops, I inwardly gave up on helping Nadia with her ambitions. It was a burden I was glad to be rid of. Not since the attack, I realized with some surprise, had I cared whether she ever wore a crown again. If she’d been captured, then Terrence and his co-conspirators might help me free her. If not, I would leave the
gyrus and leave Nadia to pursue her own happiness.

  She would probably never find it, but I think happiness was never her intention, anyway.

  * * *

  At the end of the day, Terrence led me onto a tract miles above the Mirror Palace, in what appeared to be a farm of sorts just outside the Motor heartland. The sky was darkening: through the narrow slots around the uncountable layers of tract, faint indigo light fell to glimmer darkly on the valvework cliffs. Instead of serving as a highway, like the one fronting the Mirror Palace, this road was the site of a sleepy, free-standing village. Structures clapped together from metal scrap stood ramshackle on the wide road. Rickety bridges rattled as factory workers returned home from their shifts. All around the dark houses and up to the edges grew lush grass, vegetable plots, white mushrooms and melons. The place was speckled with grazing goats, serenely unaware of their future.

  Soon we sat in a taproom where electric lights traced the rims of our mugs. My thighs ached like they hadn’t for years, and even this warm beer—too yeasty by far—felt wonderful as it flowed down my throat. From the patrons’ covert looks at me, and from the way those looks melted when they landed on Terrence, I understood this place was friendly to the Inhibition. Men hunched over their drinks at the other tables, gossiping in low voices.

  “I’ve never seen a place like this,” I said. Like everyone, I thought, I’d always lived in the rooms hollowed out of the gyri, the chambers inhabited since time immemorial.

  Terrence smiled at me. “It helps control what kind of people come in.” I looked around. Apart from the fact that they were all men, the clientele seemed undistinguished. However, I saw none of the Motor King’s lenses here, nor the steel mesh balls that picked up audio signals.

  Food arrived—a platter heaped with goat meat and pickled melon, cheese, mushrooms, leafy vegetables. I ate with gusto. Once my hunger subsided, I tried again to draw Terrence out on the battle—how it had gone, and whether anyone of note had been captured.

  “Of course, you would have come through there,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I’m not the type that armies concern themselves with.”

  He looked at me kindly. An exile, or homeless. An object of pity. “You must have concerned somebody once.”

  “Let’s say that somebody concerned me.”

  “Hmmm.” He drank with his eyes closed, as if kissing the glass. The scanty remains of the foam bobbed lower. I imagined he was thinking of the women who’d concerned him—or of the men. With that intuition, a mirror came to life in my head. Our day together must have looked very different from his side of it. I was an unattached man, lonely, and obviously in search of a bed for the night. I wondered if he knew of the Inhibition at all.

  Terrence smiled at me. “We did win, of course.” On the copper table veined with verdigris, his fingers unconsciously traced a network. “The King was planning on victory, which means the factories were, too. So if we lost, the factories would be the first to know about it— we’d have to change up production schedules, free up workers to restock the army...” He shook his head. “Complications I don’t need.”

  “There are always complications,” I said. “Believe me.”

  “Now more than ever,” he replied.

  I questioned him with a look.

  “It’s all anyone’s talking about. The war’s been won, and how is the King celebrating? He’s getting married tomorrow! It’s a nightmare. Everyone’s going to want a day off—

  “Terrence, listen to me. Is it the Mirror Queen?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve been through this way before,” I explained. “There was a queen or a duchess in that little country who fed me once. She was young. I’d like to know what’s happened to her, if she survived.”

  “I’m sure I could find out for you.”

  I rewarded him with a smile.

  Beaming, he ordered more drinks, and more, until the night ended on the narrow mattress of his little officer’s cabin. I didn’t resist as he undressed me, nor did I comfort him when he then fell back, aghast. I lit the lamp calmly, found my trousers, and put them on again. “It was in the Mirror Queen’s service,” I said, “that I was rendered a eunuch.”

  He turned his face from the lamplight. “I’m so sorry.”

  I shook my head. Sorry. That day was the proudest of my life. I knelt before Nadia—she was a princess then—and swore that I would always serve her, always protect her. And even though she herself had betrayed that trust by abandoning me on the stairwell landing, I had enough honor to protect her still, if not to serve.

  But what did Terrence know of honor? Instead of telling him of that day, I found myself cradling his head as he sobbed and sobbed on my chest. “While we were together in the taproom,” he said, sniffling, “all I could think of was how lucky you were. Not to be a cog in the Motor. Clicking through the same motions day after day.”

  “I think you’ve done pretty well, actually.”

  He sneered. “I thought Lafferty was doing well, until he jumped.”

  “Was Lafferty... close to you?”

  “Ha! No. He was my boss. He had this job before me.”

  “Goodness.”

  In the gentle course of our lives we think of war as an aberration. A battle is talked about for generations after: the dents in the walls are shown to children. How short, then, must be the lives of the men and nations who comprise our minds. Every decision we make is the outcome of a civil war. And just as in a rebellion there’s no way to know which side will win, nor even what values they truly stand for, until the fighting ends and the new monarch is crowned. A war must have raged at a level below my attention, because the winning idea sprang up as if from nothing.

  I tilted Terrence’s head by the chin. “Listen to me. I’m the Mirror Queen’s cerebromancer. I’m the only servant she has left in the world. If she’s been captured, I must know. You said you could find out the bride’s identity. Can you do that for me?”

  I wanted to tell him I didn’t care about his comfortable boredom, not when I’d lost my home and my queen only two days before. But of course to him his own crisis was greater. I’d lost the world I loved, but he’d never had one.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “If the Motor King has her, then I’ll kill him.”

  He wiped sweat from his suddenly much paler brow.

  “It won’t be safe, of course. But if you want to, you could come with me.”

  “I—” he said, “I don’t know about this.”

  I reached into my pack and brought out my dagger, which caused him to jump backwards. Then I took out an apple and peeled it. “I can save you from the life you hate,” I said. “That does not make us lovers; it makes us friends. Would you like a snack?”

  I let him kiss me. Just once. We stayed up planning for hours; then we slept side-by-side, foot to head and head to foot, like travelers at a crowded inn. The whispery grinding of factory work kept me awake for hours. But Terrence slept soundly, and in the morning we set out.

  * * *

  When we rose, Terrence could not stop smiling at me. We stepped out onto his comically small balcony—there was barely room for the two of us—and he pointed high above at some crenellations poking out of the cliff face. “Those balconies overlook the tract closest to the Motor Palace. They’re open to officers and lower nobility.” In our late-night planning session I’d described my vision in as much as detail as I remembered: the wide tract cleared for the parade, the richly-dressed raining blue flowers on the royal couple, the clear view of the Motor King.

  Terrence explained to me that being an officer in the occupational zone—even an industrial officer—entitled him to military privileges. We planned to meet at the balcony I’d seen in my vision. Terrence would spend the day making inquiries, and if the bride was indeed Nadia then he would use his rank to obtain a precision rifle, ostensibly for a day of marksmanship practice. He would give the rifle to me, a
nd I would assassinate the Motor King once he’d taken his vows. By the laws of this country, Nadia would inherit the monarchy. If she wasn’t strangled by an ambitious courtier then she would have her throne. She would no longer be my problem, and I could depart with a clean conscience.

  If Terrence showed up without the rifle, it would mean Nadia was not the bride. We would strike out for other lands. We’d settle far away, ideally in another gyrus, and do our best to live peacefully. Terrence loaned me a spare uniform. He watched me with disconcerting quiet as I changed into it, and pecked my cheek before leaving.

  I hiked alone up narrow stairs, chewing a hard crust of bread and a few prunes as I went. In the factories, pistons throbbed like hearts, and gears ground their teeth slick with oil. The scent of motor grease was ubiquitous, the gnashing of machinery a muted roar. Where the doorways down below had opened into little nooks of odd size—humble workshops holding a single automaton—here every room was a vast hall stretching farther than I could see. Rank upon rank of men and women worked in synchronous motion, welding components, lowering presses, riveting, oiling, cutting, drilling. Everywhere I saw the palsied hand of King Stefan at work. In the walls I could all but hear his whispered words, multiplying out to the ends of his dominion.

  Such thoughts reminded me of my vision, the effects of which were fast reshaping my life and Nadia’s. If I survived this day, and King Stefan didn’t, then my vision would affect the whole world. And the Great Being only knew what it meant for Nadia, and what she in turn would do to the world. I found myself wishing I’d never entered her service. Would this kingdom be any happier with her on its throne than King Stefan?

  When I arrived at the top of the gyrus, soldiers had already blocked off the tract. Here I stared up and marveled at a sight I’d only read of in books: the cliffs went up—and ended. Far above them the stripes of light I’d learned to call sky swelled into a blue infinity. The sun was a jewel of painful brilliance. Pillows of white gas boiled in slowed motion; birds wheeled in flocks of thousands.