Beneath Ceaseless Skies #217 Read online

  I take some small grain of pleasure in crushing Émile’s fine letter into a ball and pushing it into the very bottom of my pocket. Then I crack the casing on Requiem’s soulfire lantern and begin the work of replacing the old mantle.

  The whole assembly hasn’t been used since the Sandcutter Run two months ago. Even then I only lit it so the rich owners standing on the airfield would think they were getting their money’s worth, and I extinguished it the second we rose through the cloud and they dissolved into the nothingness below. And why wouldn’t I? There hasn’t been a geiststorm on the Sandcutter Run for twenty years now, and no one there pays you enough to keep the lantern burning for the full run anymore.

  I haven’t even so much as checked the components since then, and it stubbornly repays me now by refusing to light every time I strike the bones, even with the new mantle in place. I pretend I’m not doing this for Émile’s sake. Pretend I’m not going to take his dead-woman job. But I spit curses at that blond bastard’s name the whole time I’m working. Break up the hangover by imagining all the ways I’d ruin his life if I had all his money and all he had was a sixty-year-old lantern ship long since past its prime.

  When the marshals turn up, I hear them from halfway across the Boneyard—squabbling over Requiem’s bones before he’s even decommissioned. It doesn’t even matter which of the unpaid bills on my desk they’re coming for. If I had the money for any of them, I would have already paid. But when I look over the gunnel I see Émile’s man coming as well, quiet and smiling, and I know what all of this comes down to.

  I can take a job no better than the one that killed Christie, or I can abandon my ship. Let the marshals drag Requiem away and tell Émile’s man what his master can do with his money. I can spend the next ten years of my life scraping by in the gutter of the capital, tugging at the coats of rich women as they come by and begging for their charity until the cold finally takes me, bitter and unfinished, out into the geiststorm to be with Christie and the rest of the unchained. Locked together in a miserable death that wouldn’t be so different from our marriage, but now with no more minds of our own than rabid dogs. Throwing ourselves up against the edges of the world and burning ourselves on the soulfire that the living light against the geists, over and over again, until the Great Inventor finally puts his hands around everything that is, was, and ever will be, and rolls it all up like a carpet.

  I climb down off of the fo’c’s’le. The marshals are still coming, chattering like excited crows. Doubtless they’ll take Requiem to auction to pay for all my sins. Sell him like meat to someone like Émile Laurence. Another antique for his personal museum. Something to show off when his rich friends come to call. Oh, a charming example of the type. They were part of a more daring age, you know. When lantern ship captains flew by the seat of their breeches through Category Ten geiststorms. Just look at how close her soulfire lantern is to the envelope! It’s a miracle she’s survived this long without burning to a cinder. Maybe this one was even built before the Harrowing. Perhaps she even remembers the time before the unchained, before ships like her were needed at all.

  Émile’s man is wearing a suit as silver-grey as factory smoke. He’s the same bastard that always comes to do Emile’s dirty work. Before he even has the chance to open up his mouth, I am holding out my hand.

  “I want twenty-thousand,” I tell him.

  He doesn’t even hesitate. “Done.”

  We shake on it, and the marshals behind him finally stop chattering like a parliament of crows. They look at Requiem like someone has just snatched away their favorite toy. I can’t help but smile at that. Even if they do glance back over their shoulders as they go, like they are remembering the way.

  * * *

  The Wayward Star is already at mast in the vast green of the airfield by the time I get Requiem’s nose to the wind and start to bring him down. And a grand old lady she is at that. Émile’s pride and joy, and the flagship of his not-insubstantial fleet of luxury cloud liners. Even from a thousand feet in the air she looks like a leviathan—pink and purple sunset melting on her silver flanks, bright as a freshly minted coin.

  Rumor has it that Émile’s people are already at work building her replacement. One of those modern monstrosities—all chrome and ego and white paint. The ones the papers like to print big gaudy headlines about. They will never match the Star’s patient and elegant beauty, no matter how well-worn her claret velvet or how tarnished her filigree. She might be almost as old as Requiem, but next to her he is a squat leather bag with a splintering wooden gondola slung underneath and an ugly lantern strapped to his prow—reminding everyone how the unchained are coming for us. How death is coming for us, should we ever drop our guard.

  The handlers on the ground don’t even stir themselves until we’re almost down. Then they bundle Requiem to mast, bitching and complaining and sending petulant glances back over their shoulders. Most likely, they bully any woman who has the audacity to sail into their little kingdom here. I have known men like them all my life. Spent years watching Christie cause a fuss—yelling at them and getting us into trouble. Damned fool never did understand that while it might be fashionable these days for fine city ladies to marry each other in their silks and their sequins, women like us would always have to live by different rules.

  Since she went to the unchained, these landings have gotten easier. Instead of ending up in a scrap with a half a dozen grizzled handlers in the middle of the airfield, I reward them with spiteful disinterest until they get bored and slink back to their hangers. This time, I’m so busy congratulating myself that I don’t notice Émile until his gaggle of rich drunkards start to call me over.

  Émile doesn’t lower himself to shouting, of course. He just stands there, a stone at the center of a motley of fools, and watches me with lance-like eyes. Waiting for me to bow to his will. It’d be worth twenty thousand sovereigns just to see the look on his face if I take his money and stuff it where he won’t see it for a week.

  I don’t think two human beings have ever smiled at each other less genuinely than he and I do now. I’ve heard a lot of people say he’s beautiful. Hair so blond it’s almost white and so fine that the breeze swims through it. Dark blue dining suit buttoned up as far as it will go and eyes steely sober amongst his den of drunkards. Personally, I’ve never been able to choke down enough of his ego to see it.

  “Apologies about the wife,” he says, the moment he judges I’m close enough to punch him in the face.

  Another little game for him to demonstrate his power. I dig my nails into the palms of my hands. “I was sick of her, anyway.”

  Émile flinches. Perhaps on anyone else you could mistake it for embarrassment. On him it doesn’t look like that. It just looks, for a second, like he’s paying attention. Like he has found an animal that’s almost as malicious and spiteful as he is and has confused himself into believing it is trying to communicate with him.

  “Good,” he says, his eyes already glazing back over. “I always took her for a shriek.”

  I stop my breath before it snags and hold it for a moment, pressing it deep against the muscles in my belly. I half-expect his drunk friends to say something, but they’re all smiling and chatting as though nothing has happened. Old friends, then. People who have been around for long enough to know him. When I let the breath go, I do it slow and careful.

  “But the work ain’t any easier with only one pair of hands,” I tell him. “I trust your lordship has reasons for sailing one of his most valuable ships down the Gullet at the start of leaffall?”

  Émile raises his eyebrows a fraction of a degree, doubtless so he may better look down his nose at me, his voice knapped sharp as a glass knife. “You think that I would have asked you here if I did not?”

  This time his friends do stop talking. But they aren’t watching me, they’re watching him. A lot of them doubtless have more money than Émile, better breeding, more ancient and illustrious family history. In fact, most of them probab
ly do. But that doesn’t stop them all looking at him like dogs watching their master’s switch.

  “And that he has taken the proper precautions,” I go on, ignoring their worried glances. “I only noticed one other lantern ship on the airfield when I came down. At this time of year, a ship like the Wayward Star is going to need at least two more.”

  “Eulogy is on site for repairs,” he says, flashing a snake’s smile. “And you shall not be needing your lantern, captain. The Wayward Star has been fitted with six of her own.”

  This madman is going to get us all killed.

  I turn my head and spit. “The Emmerainian ship they tried that on ignited her own gas bags at mast and killed half a dozen handlers.”

  “This ship was fitted here,” he says. “By my own people. And will not.”

  If anyone else had asked, I would have told them that fitting a liner with her own lanterns was suicide, but I have never known Émile to be certain about anything that won’t go exactly how he wants it. Hell, I don’t know. If anyone is finally going to put me out of business and send Requiem to the breakers, then of course it would be him.

  “You know,” I say. “I’d heard that Hiron Justicae’s company has been working on something like that.” I outflank him for a moment there. Enough to see the slight twinge between his eyebrows. To know that whatever the hell he is up to here, his old rivalry with Hiron is part of it. I push my hands into the bottoms of my pockets, fishing for a cigarette. “What if I refuse? If I walk straight back to Requiem and leave?”

  “Please.” Émile extends a hand. Dinner gloves only a fraction of a shade whiter than his skin. “Be my guest.”

  Never seen a day of hard work in all his life, those hands. And here he is talking about going down the Gullet in autumn like it doesn’t mean a thing.

  I finally find that cigarette and try to straighten it between my fingers. I say, “And the Wayward Star will sail right out of here without me.”

  Émile’s smile gets worse. “And the man from the ministry will be satisfied that every attempt was made to cross with a lantern ship in tow, just in case. He will complain, but after an hour and a little brandy, he will agree that we must make the test now, before the Category Tens close in.”

  Something pulls at the corner of my mouth. “Not so confident in your new toy that you’ll risk the big ones, then?”

  I know the arrow has hit the mark when he curls his dinner glove into a fist, slowly and silently, at his side. At least if I’m going to die, I’ll do it remembering the look on this inbred bastard’s face right now.

  I strike a match and then another, but the cigarette won’t light. “None of this was in the letter you sent.” I dare to turn away from him. To start walking before he has the chance to think of some viciousness to put me back where I belong. Before I have to suffer the consequences of pissing off someone whose fingernails are of more importance than I am. “I won’t do it for less than fifty thousand,” I say back over my shoulder.

  Behind me, one of his motley splutters. I imagine Émile’s face twisting with rage and disgust, but when he speaks his voice is still perfectly calm.

  “You will get thirty-five,” he says. “Be ready to sail at first light.”

  I close my eyes, my jaw, my fist around that cigarette. Close up every part of me and screw it tight. Wrap myself around the image of Christie falling slow into the clouds with both her arms still reaching upwards. Like I could save her. Like I ever could.

  “As you say, your lordship.”

  I keep walking and strike the last match I have. When the wind smothers that as well, I tear the damned cigarette in half and toss the smoking ember down into wet grass.

  * * *

  That night it takes a whole bottle of whisky to put me to sleep. In the long and restless hours when I’m waiting for it to come, I stalk the airfield like a geist: stumbling around in a landscape populated by giants, the shadows of the four great airship hangers pressing great slabs of black on the moonlight.

  Some time just after midnight, I find my way to where they are building Émile’s latest creation—a white and chrome elephant a thousand feet long. Its skeleton is almost finished, and it looks so delicate from down here that the ship doesn’t seem to have substance. Brittle as a spun sugar ghost.

  Workers’ tools are scattered everywhere, but the whole place is filled up with kind of deep silence that has not been disturbed in a while. Looking at that bastard’s perfect suit and perfect skin on the airfield earlier, it seemed impossible that the rumors flying around about his company’s financial difficulties were true. But standing here in the hanger with the ghost of his crowning glory, my boots leave halos in the dust settled on the floor.

  In reality, it doesn’t much matter whether Wayward Star sails away from here tomorrow and into wealth and glory as the prototype for the future, or whether she burns to ash out over the headland and Hiron Justicae snatches victory back from the hands of his old rival. Standing in that hanger underneath the ghost of the future, it all seems inevitable. No matter what I do now, some day not so very far from now, Hiron or Émile or another man just as rich and pompous as them will finally succeed at the impossible. They’ll build a big gas-lifted liner that flies with its own lanterns, and Requiem and I will be cut loose from our moorings and set adrift in history.

  I take another swig from the bottle hanging like a pendulum in my hand and head back to Requiem and to my bunk. Whatever the future has in store for our kind, tomorrow we fly or we burn. And that’s as true now as ever.

  * * *

  Somehow I still make it up before the dawn, cursing and rubbing my face as the first few sunbeams stab my eyes. Perhaps it should worry me, but the truth is that over the last few years I’ve gotten used to flying with a hangover. The whole world all strange and curling at the edges. But this isn’t the Sandcutter Run and I can’t afford to take chances. I light the soulfire lantern as soon as I get up and just resign myself to what the sickly green light does to the pounding in my head.

  When it’s lit, the rest of the world seems darker. Towering black clouds spilling like smoke out of the west and a sharp wind blowing in off of the sea—catching a thousand different red and brown and yellow leaves and scuttering them inland across the airfield. I stoke up Requiem’s brazier until his envelope glows like a glob of polished amber in the dark morning and wait for the off.

  Émile doesn’t keep us waiting long. Before the sun is even high enough to be lost behind the cloud, the Wayward Star is turned towards the wind and rising. She dives upwards like a whale, all smooth grace and silver beauty. I watch until she starts steering north towards the sea, then hurry to cast off our mooring ropes.

  The air is so cold around the heat in Requiem’s belly that he rises as fast as a soap-bubble, the wind buffeting us back and forth and making my hangover as miserable as it can be. I turn the furnace high, and we climb so quick that we pass the Wayward Star. Watch her fall away into the clouds below. Only when I find a more steady wind do I level off and bank us hard to starboard to get out of her way, leaning over the gunnel to watch her surface through the storm. The thick grey nimbostratus blisters and then breaks open, sliding over the mirror polish of her body.

  Great Inventor, but she is beautiful. But old now. Growing old. Not quite all of what she once was.

  I suspect that’s why Émile chose her for this little experiment of his. The skeleton of the ghost he’s building in that hanger isn’t designed to fit six soulfire lanterns inside her body. Worse than that: she’s been so thoroughly over-engineered that modifying her to carry them will take a lot of time and money. A hell of a lot. Assuming it’s even possible. There is a real chance that Hiron Justicae’s ambition will make Émile’s crowning glory obsolete before she even launches. Perhaps retrofitting the Wayward Star just before the autumn storms isn’t an act of arrogance but an act of desperation. Maybe Émile’s money is running out after all and the vultures are beginning to circle.

  Great
Inventor, let it be true! I hope with all my black and poisonous heart that his money and his friends all evaporate like spring mist and leave him with nothing. Shivering in the streets with calluses on his pretty little hands, begging for pennies from the fine ladies and gentlemen of the capital.

  It takes me a long time to look away from the Star, to stop myself from reveling in daydreams of Émile’s downfall. Only when I do can I see the scale of what we were facing. From up here and this close to the ocean, the geiststorms are a roiling nightmare of charcoal-colored smoke spidered with green fire. A storm layered on a storm, squatting over the space where the horizon should be. And every single mote of dust in it is one of the unchained. Driven so mad by their own deaths that only the animal part of them is left—gibbering and screaming and thrashing stupidly against the soulfires we light to hold them back. Scraping at the windows of the world. I snatch at the rigging, at the side of Requiem’s gunnel, at anything that will stop my world from being sucked towards that monstrosity like water through a plughole. Somehow, I manage to claw my way inside the cabin and get my hands onto the radio.

  “Wayward Star. Requiem. Was that on the forecasts this morning?”

  There is a long pause filled with nothing but the hiss of static and the low keening of the wind.

  “Requiem. Wayward Star.” Not the captain. A woman’s voice. One of the officers? “Yes. As you would know, if you had been at the briefing.”