Beneath Ceaseless Skies #102 Read online

  “The Lady Clarissa anticipated your request,” he said, “and she told me to agree upon one condition: that you and your generals, your elite, accompany me, so that she may know your quest is not false. If you stand amidst the Towers as they fall, all shall know that some remnant will still stand tomorrow, lest you too be buried beneath the rubble that you and I together cause. She needs to know that there is something after; that she’s not simply driving her people to an ending.”

  The Mapmaker inclined Her head, and he could see the broad rivers winding thick on Her pate. “Your terms are accepted,” She said. “We leave on the morrow.”

  He saw through her lies. Knew that what would kill mortals would leave her unfazed, untouched. Find the Mapmaker while there’s still a world to be saved, the Lady Clarissa had told him, and he served no one but her.

  The demonstration the Mapmaker had promised, the fulfillment of someone else’s destiny, came then, a salvation equal and as long-planned as that of his own people. She strode to the edge of the Tower’s open upper level, and Her flesh was blue with oceans, black with Out, and writhing with life and death. “There’s a world dying amongst the many,” She said. “But today we will bring its people to salvation.”

  Rollus had never heard the name of this to-be-unified land, had never known of its existence. But he knew enough of the worlds, and his world, to know its story: how their borders were shrinking every day, how the Out took more and more, and how. in recent years, that process had accelerated endlessly as the Mapmaker probed and found what She needed for Her sterile conquests, sending her agents to steal its intervention-halting Placement Stones. It was the same everywhere. All worlds were shrinking, ending. And everywhere, She was there to speed the process and save the land and end all.

  Then the engraving began. From this highest level of the tower, looking over the entirety of the once-world now shattered, there were three maps. The first was Her flesh, the Mapmaker’s own body. The second was the Tower’s upper floor that they stood upon, marked and raised with landforms and rivers, mountains and trees, structures and the miniature running shadows of men moving across its ground. And the final map was below, the world itself, shifting to accommodate the thievery and masses of Placement Stones—this world’s now among them - in the Mapmaker’s grasp and soul, the sorcery of Her knowledge.

  Four master artisans worked on the map on the floor, but they were not the leaders. No, the Mapmaker blazed the trail, working with knowledge memorized and a knife made of crystal and magic most exact. She drove that blade into the flesh above Her knee, the area where the country would fit into Her jigsaw Creation, and the precision and speed She showed joined should not have been possible.

  They, Rollus and those of the Mapmaker’s court, saw genesis. It was not perfect, of course. Huge swaths of this territory and all others had been eroded by the Out by the time of their salvation. Perhaps an entire third of the world that once was had been forever lost to the Out. Still, buildings and livelihoods and art made the transition, spiraling out into the Mapmaker’s flesh with dimensions too small to be seen by anyone without one of the magnifying microscopes of old.

  “It’s too late for any measures but the drastic,” the Mapmaker said, invocation and justification.

  For the briefest of moments, a blink in their lives, the people of this world appeared all across the ground and flesh of the Mapmaker. And then they were gone, killed one and all by the transition from their world to Hers, by the shift from the reality before to the reality of Her will, ultimate. “The only paths left,” She said, “are flawed salvation and slow death.”

  In the distance, down below in the real world, representation had become fact. That new world lay on the horizon, intact, impervious to the Out, and barren.

  The Towers were to be the next recipients of the Mapmaker’s empty mercy, their land preserved and their citizenry slaughtered.

  Find the Mapmaker while there’s still a world to be saved, the Lady Clarissa had told him. And kill Her before it’s too late.

  * * *

  Rollus boarded the ship of the Mapmaker, the great vessel used to seize lands beyond sane measure. It towered metallic above the ocean and the harbor, a monolithic vessel of war stolen from the Kriegsflotte. As it sounded its sirenic bellow across the waves, as it departed, Rollus thought that name, and it grew titanic in his mind as they sailed free of the Mapmaker’s domain and into the Out beyond. Zaius, the name of safety and salvation for all those he knew and served. Zaius, the name of his weapon in the coming one-strike war.

  Rollus was an assassin, a would-be slayer of the great and terrible cartographer now so near him, a man on a suicidal quest to forever shatter all chances of a new whole world. He sat beside Her at feasts, he drank the wine She offered, and he downed the food She provided, and he reveled in the company of Her singers and musicians uncountable, Her mummers skilled and Her courtesans divine. And that name crept from his lips into their hearts, spreading among the menials of the ships like a soul plague, a corruptor and a seducer.

  Zaius, the actress spoke between her lines, the vocalist crooned under his melody and the harlot through her climax.

  With each mile they drew further from the Mapmaker’s domain, the lines of the Out spread, a multi-limbed erosion, a plague reaching unseen through the ship. And it spread, that name, unchecked, amidst this ship of those too arrogant to view the Out as a danger, and they luxuriated ever more extravagantly with each day’s slow sail towards those death-marked Towers that had always been his home.

  On the seventh day it bubbled up, impossible to banish, and, come that night, all chaos fell. The Mapmaker and Her elite, now aware of their peril, halted the ship and walked its halls, searching without a Kriegsflotte’s skill for some mark of taint. Rollus waited in his cabin through their farce, his Out-blade resting across his legs. And, when the wail that he now knew far too well came, the sound of the waves and the wave of the beast, of Zaius, he walked the halls and, with but one stroke for each, fell all those that he met.

  Out onto the decks he strode, at the apex of that Out-nearing night, and he held himself before the escape boats for their approach. Come they did, then, panic and terror, written across the faces of aides and lackeys as the Mapmaker Herself hurried clear of the lower decks, while, behind, Her warriors carried out a too-late cleansing of those helpless down below.

  “We can still make it to the Towers in one of the smaller boats,” Jani said, standing beside Her.

  “There are costs too high for any end,” Rollus said. “Deeds too dark for any gain.” Now that coming wave towered beyond the ship, and it, summoned, roared poison into all air. “We die here,” Rollus said. “We and our goals and our too-dangerous plans and our deathly dreams.”

  Jani, now realizing what Rollus had done, ran at the knight as best he could on his wounded leg. Rollus couldn’t kill the spirit-man. But he could break him, and he left him maimed and bleeding on the deck.

  The Mapmaker met his eyes, then.

  “It ends,” Rollus said, and he ran towards Her, ignoring the rest as they scattered. She met him in his charge, and She grew vaster with each step, arms swelling into the full force of shifting lands and punishing winds.

  But he was a knight and a Scholar-Practitioner, and Her attacks were but a gale spinning wide of life. His first blow bit into Her shoulder, and the land there was cleaved in two, the blue spirit mist of what She’d become leaking out of the chasm.

  She dove at him, seeking to overpower him with brute force, and he spun left and cut Her legs to pieces with a dozen Out-fueled blows too fast to comprehend. She staggered and fell, and he cut into Her again and again, leaving Her flesh and Her words and Her worlds hanging loose in ragged remnants of skin and dreams. He couldn’t kill the spirit within Her, not truly, but he could contain it.

  “They’ll die,” She said, staring up at him with a plea in Her eye and ruin in Her soul. “All of them. The world will shrink around them, come years near, and
nothing will remain.”

  “Some cures bite deeper than the disease,” he said, and slashed through Her lips and destroyed Her teeth and promises. “Better live a hundred years with none after than die now for a broken future.”

  And Zaius came, his shadow falling over all, the thousand thousand mouths of his depths roaring wide, his name filling every particle of air and Out both.

  As that end came, Rollus thought of the Towers, of worked stone and glory clawing skyward from earth and sea; of those left behind, of their descendants that he’d doomed and their lives that he’d saved.

  Copyright © 2012 Nathaniel Katz

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  Nathaniel Katz blogs at The Hat Rack (evilhat.blogspot.com). When not blogging, he pretends he can write fiction. So far, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Innsmouth Free Press, and others have gone along with the idea.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  COVER ART

  “Bandits Assault a Stagecoach,” by Ignacio Bazán Lazcano

  Ignacio Bazán Lazcano has worked for major game companies around the world (Sabarasa, NGD, Global Fun, Gameloft, Time Gate) on numerous titles for PS3, XBOX, and PC (Section 8, Section 8 Prejudice, Aliens: Colonial Marines) and has authored publications in journals and books such as Digital Painting Techniques, 2dartist Magazine, 3DTotal, and Digital Art Masters. View more of his work online at deviantArt.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.