Beneath Ceaseless Skies #102 Read online

  “I won’t stand by your side,” he said, for he knew that had been the intent of leaving the bible with the madman. To remind Azrael of the days when he and Erafel had passed judgment on the mortals side-by-side.

  The bible snapped open in his hands. The pages turned on their own.

  “You could help transform this world into a new heaven with me,” Erafel said. “With the power that is in those pages.”

  “This world is the mortals’ now,” Azrael said. “Let them destroy it if they will. But I’ll play no role in that.”

  She stepped back from him, to stand in a pool of blood.

  “Have you grown to love them more than your own kind?” she asked.

  “I’ve walked with them enough that I’ve grown to understand them,” Azrael said. “They’re just as fallen as us.”

  “Nothing can ever be as fallen as us,” she said and smoke poured out from her lips. So the fire still burned within her. He caught scent again of the righteousness and wrath, but he didn’t breathe deep as he once had.

  “Do you remember how we once used to destroy the cities of the unbelievers and heretics?” he asked. “How we razed their false temples to ash, and then scattered the ashes to the far corners of the world?”

  “With every beat of my heart,” Erafel said.

  “You have become one of those heretics,” he said.

  She sprang into the air and hovered there for a second, but her wings were too tattered to support her. She grabbed onto the ceiling and hung from it, and the mortals trapped there screamed again. Ash drifted down from her onto Azrael.

  “You would side with the mortals!” she cried.

  “You shouldn’t have returned my bible to me,” he said. “You should have destroyed it.” And he looked down at the book and began to read aloud.

  The words sundered the air, and both the living and the dead trapped in the temple walls screamed. Erafel screamed herself, a sound that drowned out the other cries. Azrael had heard her war cry countless times before, but he’d never been on the receiving end of it until now. The sound pierced him as sure as any blade, and he staggered. Only the words of his bible protected him.

  He turned the page and read a new verse in the tongue he hadn’t uttered for ages. The very air caught fire, and now they were in an inferno. Azrael didn’t burn, nor did the book. But everything else did.

  Erafel fell out of the flames toward him. She shifted into her true form as she came at him, and he cast his gaze elsewhere. That way lay madness, even for an angel.

  She tried to knock the bible from his hand, but he was ready for it. He used its words to throw himself up, ripping free of the grasping hands of the floor and shattering the ceiling of bone and flesh above. He rose into the sky that was darkness without stars as she fell to the earth beneath him.

  He felt all his power coming back now that he had the bible again. He felt whole once more. He felt like an avenging angel once more. He knew that was what Erafel had wanted. Only she’d desired him on her side rather than standing against her. But he knew that whatever he felt, he would never be the seraph he had once been again, no matter how his bible made him feel.

  Beneath him, the temple collapsed inward around the point he’d ruptured. The wails of the dead and dying were the same cries he’d heard countless times before. He paid them no heed. He hung in the night and looked for Erafel.

  She rose out of the ruins like the phoenix they had once hunted together, on a column of fire. She held in one hand a sword that burned with black fire, and the other she drew back in a gesture Azrael knew far too well.

  He turned to the last page of his bible and read the words there. It was a part of the book he’d never dared to read before, for fear of its consequences. He realized as he uttered the words for the first time that he had been right to be cautious.

  The dead all exploded as the words released their souls. Bones and flesh erupted in all directions and then were consumed by the rising pillar of... Azrael didn’t know how to conceive of it. It was as if the air itself was rent open all the way to the heavens, exposing the very substance of the ether. There was a sound that may have been thousands of simultaneous screams, or may have just been the howling of the wind.

  The pillar of souls consumed everything in its path—the debris thrown up from the temple’s ruins, the symbol that Erafel cast at Azrael through the air, and then even Erafel herself.

  Azrael caught sight of her, for a moment, writhing in the consuming power of the pillar of souls. He saw her smile, and in that instant he knew he had been wrong about everything. Erafel hadn’t delivered him his bible because she wanted him to rule by her side. She knew better than that. She’d delivered the book to him because she wanted to be destroyed by it. She wanted to be consumed by the heavenly wrath only it could unleash. A last taste of everything they’d lost when they’d fallen.

  And then her body disintegrated into dust, and the pillar burned a hole into the heavens and was gone.

  Azrael drifted back down into the ruins. Bones crunched under his feet. It was just him and the dead now.

  And his dead horse. It stood where he’d left it, somehow untouched by the apocalypse the bible’s words had unleashed.

  He looked down at the book again and saw the last page was blank now. He flipped back to the other passages he’d read aloud. They were blank as well. The words had never faded when he’d used them in the past. He looked at the other sections, the parts he hadn’t read, and found the words still there.

  He looked up at the hole the pillar had burned in the clouds overhead. It was already closing up again.

  Azrael didn’t know what to make of the vanishing words in his bible. Maybe they’d come back later. Or maybe they’d never come back now that he was fallen. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change things much.

  Azrael closed the bible and put it in one of the horse’s saddlebags. A shadow passed overhead. He looked up, but it was just the buzzards again.

  Azrael gazed around one more time at the ruin that Erafel had wreaked. The same ruin he had once wreaked himself. Then he began to go through the bodies, one by one, looking to see if there were anyone still alive, anyone who needed the only mercy he could deliver.

  Copyright © 2012 Peter Darbyshire

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  Peter Darbyshire is the author of the novels The Warhol Gang and Please, which won Canada’s national ReLit award for best novel. He has published short stories in numerous journals and anthologies, including previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and his last weird western received On Spec’s Best Story of the Year award. He currently lives in Vancouver, Canada, where he is working on a collection of stories about the end of the world. Visit him at www.peterdarbyshire.com.

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  BEYOND THE SHRINKING WORLD

  by Nathaniel Katz

  The Knight’s Tale

  I reached the dockside dungeon at the time that would once have been dawn, and the world shrank around me, consumed ever more by the Out. The spirit, my guide, waited within.

  The atrium, the Lord of Corrections, and the entire complex seemed two worlds wed by decree. Portraiture and fine wine; offered fruits and ornate attire. Dark cells beyond a cherry-colored curtain.

  “Bring my prisoner,” I said and none dared question, not a knight and Scholar-Practitioner so august as I. They knew the glyph carved into the base of my tongue kept me from lying.

  The guards brought the being that called himself Jani in his stolen flesh. Cuts ran down his flank, long and precise, a still-living carcass torn open reach at it soul. In his eyes, spirit blues cavorted round stuck-wide pupils. I can take you Outside, he’d said, at our first meeting. Can bring you to the Mapmaker. At the time, I’d responded with drawn sword and assault, my Out-blade slipping through his dark flesh but halting at the spirit, parasitic, within. His legs bore testament to those wounds; shallow but immeasurable.

  “Dress
him,” I said. “We need to be on our way.”

  The Lord hesitated, and procedure won out. “I’ll need to see papers, Sir Rollus,” he said.

  Make it bloody, the Lady Clarissa, ruler of this world and all men in it, had told me. Leave no doubts.

  Opening my eyes to the Out, embracing the Scholastic Arts, took only a shift in perspective like changing focus from near to far. The Out’s advance did not take place in a uniform line but rather a spreading, penetrating disease, flaws of dark and empty nonsense cutting into our reality. We knew how to find those flaws in the world, how to guide our specially designed blades within them. I and my knightly brethren fought with the world’s very disintegration as our weapon.

  Those guards of Corrections, four in all, might as well have been shackled slaves against the pits’ lions. My weapon entered the gaps in our world, slipping between the particles of empty air, and there, in that shallow vein of Out, there was no concept of distance or even time to slow my strike; no obstacles to stop my blade.

  The tip slid by the first guard’s armor without touching the mail and came back to reality only long enough to sever his jugular, emerging intangible on the other side. The others fell much the same, their parries worthless as dreamt defenses. My attacks passed through blocks and breastplates both on paths to their hearts. These men were but vermin beneath my boots, blind and helpless.

  I stood in the sudden stillness that followed and listened, breathing calm. Should killing my brethren, comrades in arms if not in skill, have bothered me? It did not. Nothing did. Not anymore.

  Jani searched among the new-made corpses for suitable wear and, after taking the simple garb of a guard, decided to add the dead Lord’s own wound-red cloak. It, designed for a man of far greater girth, nicely obscured his horrid injuries when drawn up tight.

  “The Lady Clarissa commanded it,” I said, and he laughed, soul-host choking and sputtering with phlegm and derision, eyes rolling and the flakes within spinning. He was a madman. No, not even a man. And yet I needed him; I would be lost and destroyed in the Beyond without him.

  The calculations were wrong, my Lady had said. The Out grows faster than we dared dream, devouring all. Find the Mapmaker while there’s still a world to be saved.

  No one met us on the stairs. We emerged to a false night and made swift time through deserted streets in the city’s heart. All around us, domiciles and other constructs clawed skyward, seeking space amidst a city and world shrinking with each passing day as the Out beyond consumed more and more; a self-replicating devourer of worlds created by the brilliance and folly of a prior age.

  Even at that odd hour, onlookers thronged before the dock and gaped at the monstrosity of metal that occupied the sea before them. A ship of the Kriegsflotte. For those who lived and died among the Towers I called home and horizon, these interworld traders were as close as could be gotten to the Beyond. They sailed through the Out itself, journeying from world to world on ships of steel. When I’d been but a squire, the Lady Clarissa’s knights had taken me to see many such ships. Nothing held more fascination for us than going beyond, and nothing was more taboo.

  “We sail,” I said to my guide. “The Kriegsflotte can carry us through the Out’s dangers till we’re close enough to strike out on our own.”

  “The Kriegsflotte are one of the Out’s dangers, and not the least of them,” Jani told me, but he followed nonetheless.

  We boarded, my boots ringing on the deck, layers of duplicity thick about us. I didn’t let myself look over the side at the sea. Jani severed all but the most essential links betwixt spirit and flesh, leaving his pupils near clear and his steps stumbling. He would play my servant.

  A group of Kriegsflotte approached us, uniforms the violet of inked sea lines on a forbidden map and glinting with medals. They were, one and all, pale as morning sun, as if their veins ran honey instead of blood. “Captain Zursee,” the biggest man said to me, gesturing to his bearded companion. Even those two words were harsh and foreign sounding, the emphasis all wrong.

  Thankfully, though, the captain spoke our Towers-tongue with a bit more ability. “Our passengers make it at last,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “We were wondering if we’d have to cast off without you.”

  “And after all you were paid,” I said, smiling like it was a jest. Lines of Out, penetrations into the real, convulsed between us, and I saw them as intangible tracks across his face. Scars that could be.

  We shook. Pale as he was, his grip was strong. “Glad to be aboard,” I said, and Jani nodded agreement and stayed silent. “My name is Rollus, and I am knight and Scholar-Practitioner of the Out for the great Lady Clarissa, master of the Towers. I offer you my blade and service for the duration of our journey.”

  “If there’s an Out-beast close enough for you to stab, we’ll all be gone,” Zursee said, “but I thank you for the offer anyway.”

  Standing aboard the ship, I realized I’d never smelled the sea’s salt from the docks. Underneath it, emanating sickly from the ship itself, came another odor, one like a world bathed in fire fuel. I wasn’t reassured by the obvious presence of four lifeboats, each suspended high above the water by cables.

  The mate approached, a squat and mustached man, and said, “Wir sind bereit.”

  The captain turned to the crew, readying their departure. As he shouted guttural commands, I realized I’d never heard another language spoken aloud. Already, I felt vulnerable and defenseless amongst these strange men. But I’d known the dangers before I’d agreed to my Lady’s quest. I’d known that I would not return.

  The mate found one of the men near us, nigh more than a boy and one of the few unoccupied, and told him, “Bringen die Ausländer zu ihnen Kabine.”

  The man chosen had the audacity to put his hand on my shoulder, to try to lead me as if I were some unthinking beast of burden. “I wish to stay on the deck,” I said, staying civil and thinking of ways to kill him; an idle and furious game.

  Jani repeated the request in their language, and the mate responded. “He says it’s too dangerous for us to be here when we go into the Out,” Jani translated, sounding more lecturer than servant. “They said they’ll let us out when we’re through it.”

  “Let us out? We’re not to be caged and uncaged at will.” But I let myself be led. It was too early for obstinacy, and I might as well appear easily managed until the time came.

  The ship’s engines roared to life as we neared the entryway to the decks below, with a metallic scream unmatched by a thousand cutting saws. Ahead, maybe a mile from us, a veil of absolute dark towered. The air before it shimmered, the Tower’s Placement Stones keeping the Out at bay.

  And so we shuddered into motion, gliding towards that boundary, towards the Out.

  * * *

  The sliding doors to the captain’s dining room were lacquered wood, delicately engraved with a scene of a pond surrounded by spindly trees that looked more delicate still. They had clearly been taken from some people these Kriegsflotte had despoiled. I could have, should have, simply moved the clasp that held the doors together. But I was wrothful from too many hours spent confined in that steel-walled gaol they called a cabin to care, and I tore the two asunder and stormed into the room.

  At the sight of me, the mate stumbled up from his chair at the captain’s table. The wall behind him bore a trio of hanging relics. I’d never fought such firing weapons before but reached for my blade all the same, doubting not at all my efficacy against any assault. But Captain Zursee barked some calming phrase, and Jani, hurrying in after me, let loose a string of strange-tongued excuses.

  “Join us, Sir Rollus,” the captain said to me then. “I’d been about to send someone for you.”

  True or not, my entrance had achieved its purpose, had reminded these Kriegsflotte that I wasn’t to be trifled with. Face to face, in a war of words if not blades, I knew I could hold my own against anyone; convince my foe of anything. Alone, though, my fears had been getting the better of m
e, swamping me like the damn smells of salt and oil that were everywhere on this ship.

  Two servants scuttled into the room from some side door, one bearing me a seat and placing it so that, reclining in its plush embrace, I couldn’t help but look at the doors I’d ruined. I didn’t let that bother me. Jani, not having been given a chair, took up position behind mine.

  The meal began with enough wine to drown the oceans. Zursee, judging by the red in his cheeks, was already well into his. “When’s our next immersion in the Out?” I asked, trying to at least lessen the room’s tension. “Can such things be known?”

  “Not for some time,” Zursee said. “A day, perhaps.” The mate, bored already with the music of my Towers-tongue, grunted some farewell and left. Zursee ignored him, saying, “Now we sail through waters not so far from a once populous island. Do you know what happened to it?”

  I shook my head, though I’d a guess. One of the servants, both likely sailors temporarily free from deck duty, brought the first of the evening’s platters to us.

  “The Mapmaker,” the captain said, as I’d suspected he would. “We’re edging by the far westward edge of Her empire.”

  I turned to the metal walls of the ship and spied the Out through them. To our left, regular, fractured reality petered out no more than a few hundred yards from us. Past, a hale and empty world beckoned.

  “Do you know what the Mapmaker did?” Zursee asked. “With Her spies, she traced this world’s contours. With Her men, She killed its leaders. With Her thieves and Her traitors, She stole its Placement Stones. Left it defenseless and open to Her shaping whims and the Out.” He leaned forward, doomsayer and campfire taleteller rolled into one. “And do you know what happened next, brave knight of the Towers?”

  “Salvation,” I said. “The only way to survive, even if it hurt to do so.”

  His chronicler’s grandeur fell away like water scorched by the sun. “Is that what you call it when a people die?” he asked. I could sense Jani tense behind me. This wasn’t the Towers; the Kriegsflotte were used to dealing with all manner of spirits and would know just how to destroy him.