Beneath Ceaseless Skies #89 Read online

  “I can’t—” Yengec started, but found it impossible to finish. The whispering was too strong. The words flowed past, dragging him along, and after a time he no longer resisted but allowed them to take hold and carry him away.

  * * *

  Like alchemists, cities collect things. Only, the mind of a city is not like the mind of men. Paramentals hover there, caught between manifestation and suggestion, eager to be made incarnate.

  * * *

  Yengec sat in a shed rubbing his temples. His clothes were stained with undercity dirt. Grundlag had left him here in one of the empty lots on Hexmouth Street. Even now, above ground, the whispers persisted.

  “Longmere,” Yengec said. “I hope you finish with me soon, I want to go bed.”

  He remembered the aboriginal from the all-night diner. She’d be out on the mud flats right now, stalking eels. He wished her luck.

  “The streets will fight it.”

  The voice sounded so clear that Yengec sat upright. The streets will fight it. The voice arose from the whispering in his head.

  Yengec staggered from the shed, the small building suddenly too constrictive for him. Steadying himself against the doorframe, he searched the yard for Grundlag. There was no sign of the creature, only debris. The shell of a ruined house stood before him.

  He felt it all around him now, the ancient waterway that had once drained all this land. Even now it served Longmere, draining away the dreams of the populace. Like the current where two rivers meet.

  There came a flutter of wings, the scratch of nails, and the next moment sitting in one of the ruin’s empty window sockets was Trenche’s rat-eyed homunculus.

  “Yengec.”

  Jurgen Trenche stood in the house’s shadowed doorway, two stout men at his side. “Strange to find you here. Any word from Hjel?”

  “He’s gone. He left Longmere.” Yengec drew the journal from his pocket. “He left me this.”

  Trenche stopped. He rubbed a thumb across his lips.

  Yengec waved the book before his face. “You want it? You can have it. But it won’t do you any good. Not without Longmere’s spirit. Do you want that too?”

  The guards eased back a step at a motion from Trenche. The homunculus leapt off his shoulder, chasing after a pigeon. Trenche tilted his head back and eyed Yengec with skepticism. “How?”

  “A binding. Hjel showed me,” Yengec said. He needed to squint as he spoke, Longmere seethed so loudly in his head.

  “Can you do it now?”

  Yengec nodded, and the seething shifted with the movement. He scanned the yard, searching for something he had glimpsed earlier. A pool amid a pile of scrap: wood, water, brick, rusted wire, and rags. “There.”

  At a command the guards escorted Yengec to the pool, Trenche keeping pace behind them. Yengec’s skin tingled, cobweb-touched. He stood at the water’s edge. The pool reflected the rising light in the sky. The seething wrapped around his thoughts with their cobweb embrace.

  It wasn’t hard. It only took his surrender.

  Longmere’s voice was in the bridge chains singing under the wind’s touch. It was in the sunlight on sculpted towers, and in homunculi flying to meet the dawn. It was in footsteps on rain-slick streets radiant as jewels in reflected lamplight.

  The water bulged, the rags twitched, the metal wire rang out as if struck by a hammer; and they combined.

  The men beside Yengec gasped, their faces suddenly pale with fear. Trenche froze in place, his mouth open in a silent “o”. Even his homunculus stared, its lips dotted with blood.

  The form took on a muzzled humanoid shape atop crooked legs. It drew a coat from amid the pile of rags. A black coat, like a longshoreman might wear. Grundlag. Other forms rose behind the paramental. Constructs of wood and brick, old broadsheet pages, smoky mist held in stasis, captured spark.

  One guard screamed, and they fled.

  Not cauldron-born but generated from the city itself; the suggestions waiting to be born beneath the Hex’s surface. Paramentals. Longmere’s children. Yengec’s neighbors, now that this city was his home.

  Trenche trembled before them, his homunculus scampering to hide behind his legs. “What do you want?”

  “It’s not about what I want,” Yengec said. “This is about Longmere. What Longmere wants.”

  Trenche twitched his head, his cheeks shaking. The paramentals crept about him. The homunculus hissed and spat.

  “Make them stop. Yengec, make them stop!”

  “I can’t make them do anything, Jurgen. Longmere doesn’t obey me. If you want them to stop, then talk to them.”

  Trenche began to talk and talk and talk, his voice barely audible over his chattering teeth.

  But Yengec had stopped listening. He stumbled towards the fence, drifting away from where the paramentals crowded around Trenche. This was Longmere’s decision. Not his. Longmere told him so as the morning sun cast the city’s shadows at his feet.

  Copyright © 2012 Justin Howe

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  Justin Howe is the product of late 20th century New England. His fiction has appeared previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He lives in South Korea and blogs at 10badhabits.com.

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  COVER ART

  “Tower of Babel,” by Zack Fowler

  Zack Fowler is an environment artist who has worked for computer gaming studios as a Lead Environment Artist and a Level Designer. His main focus is in 3D environment art, but he also works on environment concept art, high-poly 3D modeling, texturing, materials lighting, and event scripting. See more of his work at http://www.zackfowler.com/.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

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