The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight, Page 21

  “What are you taking with you?” Gilchrist had seen the case, as he saw everything.

  “The customary bag of tricks. One never knows what the situation may require.”

  “And the yellow?”

  Crane bared his teeth in a grin. “Only a little.”

  The bow crunched softly onto the surf. Starlight had seeped into the pale sand, making it shine. Their passenger stirred in the back of the sloop, drawing a glance from Gilchrist.

  “I left enough for the cartographer,” Crane assured, easing out of the boat and sinking to his ankles in the silt. He scratched at his arm for a moment, just above his Guild mark, then stopped.

  Gilchrist swung out after him, mouth tight in the way Crane knew was disapproval. They stood with tide licking their legs, Crane a spindly shadow, Gilchrist’s silhouette shorter and broader beside him. Up the beach, Crane’s welcome party was dimly discernable. They hadn’t brought a lantern.

  Crane put out his long hand. “Mister Gilchrist.”

  Gilchrist gripped it. “Mister Crane.”

  Together they pushed the sloop sloshing back into the water, Gilchrist climbing aboard as it buoyed off the sand, and then Crane turned and started up the beach.

  ~ ~ ~

  Fletcher was as squat and leathery and unpleasant as Crane remembered him, vest open on a collapsing chest, baring carefully-filed teeth. “The infamous Crane, finally come to roost.”

  “I assume you’ve been plotting that particular turn of phrase.”

  Fletcher shrugged, but his smile turned to scowl. “Search him.”

  Crane stood silent as Fletcher’s companion patted him up and down. His arm twinged as the case was discovered.

  “And what are you trying to smuggle this time?” Fletcher asked, rotating an ivory bracelet around his wrist.

  “We reached an agreement on the case, Mister Fletcher, if you’ll recall. Your snuff is at the top.”

  Fletcher’s razor grin returned as he extracted the small tin. “What’s the other shit? Am I meant to let you bring narcotics into my prison?”

  “I was under the impression that it was the warden’s prison, Mister Fletcher.”

  The scowl again. Fletcher spun his bracelet. “It is that, yeah. And he’d have me in the pit with you lot if he knew I was doing this.”

  “Think of me as a shade,” Crane said. “In a day I’ll be gone, and it will be as if I was never here.” He couldn’t help but watch the case as it turned over in Fletcher’s oily fingers. “Think of the silver,” he added, and that did it. Fletcher tossed back the case, which Crane sequestered with a slightly unsteady hand, and signaled his man to take Crane’s shoulder.

  Fletcher led the way up from the beach, along a dirt path through nettled underbrush. Crane recognized one of the New World plants by its spiny fronds and purple veins, and made a note to replenish his stock on the way back off the island. A screech from the shadowed wood made Fletcher’s man flinch.

  “Are these tenebrous trees inhabited by soul-stealers, by any chance?” Crane asked him.

  “By what?”

  “Soul-stealers.” Crane waggled his fingers in front of him. “Small, ghostly, nocturnal, with very long and very strong digits. Adapted for strangulation, I imagine.” He smiled out at the dark. “They have an owl’s eyes, very wide and bright, and if you look directly into them you go quite mad in a matter of hours—

  “Stow that rot talk,” Fletcher snapped.

  “—at which point, all you can do is wander and wail rather aimlessly,” Crane finished. “Your soul is simply. . . gone. Like that.” He snapped his fingers, terrifically loud, and even Fletcher jumped.

  “I’ll gag you,” Fletcher hissed. “One more damn word.”

  Crane gave his most beatific smile and parodied a lock and key at his lips. Fletcher, shooting looks into the dark, doubled the pace. They pushed through a swarm of silvery insects, clambered over a fallen tree, and a few minutes later emerged to the looming maw of the gaol. The stone entrance was smeared with more of the bioluminescence, giving it an otherworldly aspect, and Crane found its name fitting.

  “Welcome to Purgatory, Crane.” Fletcher grinned, straight-backed and swaggering again now that the trees were behind them. He rapped on iron, and the toothy gate groaned open. Silver coin passed from his hand to the red-eyed gatekeeper’s as they entered. The courtyard sand was stained dark in stretches, but Crane only had a moment to guess if it was blood or oil before they were in a stone corridor lit by guttering lantern-light.

  “Only one day, the warden won’t notice.” Fletcher spun his bracelet. “Just get your document and get out, understand? This time tomorrow night, I take you back to the beach and we never cross paths again.”

  “If you think it’s for the best, my dear Mister Fletcher.”

  They came to a scaled iron door, and the hand on Crane’s shoulder finally lifted. The man stretched his arm.

  “I do, that,” Fletcher said, slipping the bracelet off his wrist to fit it into a groove on the door. “Once we’re in the pen, you’re a prisoner. You get that? You’re nobody. Doesn’t matter who that Guild scar scared in Brask. There’s no Guild here.” He unlocked the door and yanked it open. “Someone sticks you, we pack you into a tinderbox and dump you into the drink like any other corpse.”

  “I do like to think that mortality makes equals of us all.”

  “In we go, then.” Fletcher ushered Crane into the holding pen, dominated by an upright wooden post with no ambiguity in its crusted red stains. Crane heard Fletcher’s man cracking joints.

  “Since we’d all prefer my presence not appear on the official records,” Crane said, “I assume from here we proceed directly to the cells.”

  “No, we don’t.” Fletcher had a spring in his step as he crossed the room to pull a scourge off the wall. “My cousin is a player in Lensa, did you know that? Could have been me, if I’d only been born a bit prettier.”

  “I think you have a rakish charm.” Crane caressed a vein up his throat. “Don’t undersell yourself, Mister Fletcher.”

  “To really pull off the masquerade, to really make the audience buy it, he says you’ve got to nearly believe it yourself,” Fletcher continued. “Queer sort, those players.” He flicked his wrist; the tails danced and snapped like a marionette. “You had a little fun in the forest, Crane, and now I get a little fun. Fair’s fair.”

  Crane felt fear souring his gut at last. He scratched at his arm. He thought of the boat winding its way in and out of the ink-dark inlets, Gilchrist and his quick knife both far away.

  “And you don’t have the gypsy here,” Fletcher said, astute.

  Crane’s fingers leapt to his case, to the liquid that would smother his nerves and turn his skin to stone, but Fletcher’s man snatched it away. Crane forced himself to shrug.

  He peeled off his shirt, folded it with boarding-school precision, and handed it over. His bare back was laddered with shiny scar tissue, from once in Lensa, twice in Brask, and once in the brig of a ship returning from the New World. His pale arms looked ghostly in the lantern-light as he gripped the ring, taking up a familiar position.

  “Nothing too nasty,” Fletcher said. “You’ll be able to walk in the morning. It’s just important we make things realistic.” He handed the scourge to his man and stepped back, smiling like a shark.

  Crane put himself elsewhere as the strokes began to fall, but he was no Gilchrist, and in the end he always did scream.

  ~ ~ ~

  By the time they took him to the cell Crane’s throat was hoarse and his back was raw meat. He collapsed facedown on the tick, then let his hands fumble for the case, for the glass syringe gleaming yellow. He slapped his itching arm only out of habit-—the blue tracery under his skin was impossible to miss. Then he plunged the needle so deep it whispered.

  Elysium. Crane exhaled in a string of relieved curses, multiple languages, as the feel of molten lead blanketing his back disappeared. He plucked a sticking piece of straw from his
shoulder with barely a twitch. He’d taken more than only a little, and as he smeared salve over his unfeeling stripes, the dark cell seemed to swell and contract.

  He closed his unfeeling lids and began to drift away from his body, watching the mess of pulped flesh from above, watching insects scurry down cracks in the stone floor. He drifted higher, through the ceiling, across the anatomy of the cellblock, through one cell and then another. Men asleep, fingers curled around crude shivs; men awake, staring into the gloom; men silently fucking; men scraping on the walls.

  Before he could find cell thirteen he was floating higher again, into star-strewn sky. From the fraying clouds he could see the rough shape of the gaol itself, the back of it clinging to a sharp cliff overhang where they dropped corpses into the sea. He could see the stone quarry. The dark wood. Before Crane disappeared into the void, he could even see the tiny shape of the sloop circumnavigating the island in its slow and stealthy circuit, waiting for him.

  ~ ~ ~

  The cartographer was awake, and that meant he was coughing. Gilchrist watched from the corner of his eye as the old man hacked up a throatfull of rust over the side. His wrinkled-tattoo hands shook as he resettled himself, tucking blankets up under his chin.

  “Air here makes it worse,” he rasped. “Thick and damp and always smells like meat rotting. Forgot how much I hated it. Three years I woke up to that stink, from sea-dreams every time.” The cartographer wiped at his pebbly chin. “Then they march you through the jungle to that damn quarry and you hew until your hands are bloody bones. March you back sweating like a hog, with the sun all baking your brainpan. And all the time, that damn stench. Three years. But I got out.”

  Gilchrist made a small adjustment on the tiller. “Congratulations.”

  The cartographer’s chuckle shredded into another heaving cough. When it was finished he tipped his head back, grimacing. “You’re a laugh, gypsy. You’re one of those bastards spinning a whole web of thoughts inside his skull, plots and tricks. But not saying a word of it.” He trailed a finger in the dark water. “When you get old like me, you’ll want to talk.”

  Gilchrist concentrated on navigating. The sloop was clinging close to shore, sliding through the shadowy inlets that ringed the island. Lampreys, attracted to the heavy motion, now slithered along in their wake. Their scaly spines glowed under the surface, signaling prey. The cartographer pulled his hand out of the water.

  “Sea sprites, I used to think,” he said. “Carrying their little lanterns and waiting for shipwrecks. I had a head full of those stories when I made the crossing.” He scratched his underarm. “Maybe thirty winters old then, maybe more. Too old for stories, you’d think. But in the New World, who was to say? The maps were blank. Those first crossings, nobody knew what to expect.”

  “They still don’t.”

  “You and the Crane, you almost understand.” The cartographer struggled upright. “You’ve been there. But me and my crew were the first, gypsy. The first on the continent. The trading companies, they already had their little islands, but we were the first on the continent. The first to find the sleeping cities, and first to sack them for all they were worth. It was like living a myth.”

  Gilchrist said nothing, but his hand tightened unconsciously on the tiller. He knew the sleeping cities, the towering temples and hieroglyphed tunnels, the abandoned silence that was deeper and older than any cathedral. He still felt it in his vertebrae, even though he told Crane he didn’t.

  “We were sinking with silver by the time our fleet pushed off,” the cartographer said, sliding into the well-worn tale. “We were greedy, maybe. But so were the trading companies. Too damn cowardly to risk funding the fleets from Brask, or ours from Colgrid, but slimy enough to blockade the way back. Some crabshit about the punition tax.”

  There were more of the lampreys now, swarming underneath the sloop, lighting it like the bubbling cauldron of some aquatic god. Gilchrist hoped no sharp-eyed patrols were watching from the prison walls.

  “So our ship, we thought we would slip them.” The cartographer’s face was ghoulish in the lamprey glow. “We came down the coast, down through the Coves, a secret way. We thought we would come up around to the south and bypass the whole lot. Those caverns are a damn labyrinth. Dark as tar. . .” His tattooed hands danced back and forth. “They wind in and out and in and out again like God’s guts. Yet. We nearly made it, nearly, nearly.”

  Gilchrist knew the story well, having heard it first in the damp bar on Brask’s wharf where Crane had found the wizened sailor, then more and more frequently over the course of the journey as the man’s memory crumbled. “The fire,” he said.

  “The fire,” the cartographer echoed. “We didn’t have these crank lanterns. Oil lamps, back then, and oil torches. That was the only way to navigate the Coves. It only takes a spark, you know.” He coughed again, deep and long. “An angel tapped my shoulder in the night and I woke up just to see the mast toppling, all ablaze. The cavern was full of smoke and the ship was a damn bonfire. So I dove, and I’m Brask-bred, you know, I can swim like a fish, or I used to. Not the others, not the sailors from further north. I listened to them drown in the dark. Can you swim, gypsy?”

  “I’m from Brask,” Gilchrist said.

  The cartographer squinted. “Right. The Crane said that. One of those orphans left on the stoop when the caravan blows through—changelings, we used to call them. But God watches over orphans, doesn’t he?”

  “Not closely.”

  “Maybe not the dark ones.” The cartographer looked off into the black. “It’s a hard thing, hearing your crew drown. Everyone all shouting directions, trying to find any flotsam to grab onto, trying to get oriented. And I didn’t dare go near any one of them, you know, because the drowning frenzy makes a man into an anchor. Wasn’t ready to die, was I?” He shuddered. “Every time someone went quiet and sank, I could picture them like a roll of canvas drifting down, picture all their tattoos, the whale bones and crossed knives and mermaids and sea-luck, none of it enough to save them. I knew their skins, each and every one. I was the inker, see.”

  He freed an arm from the blankets and tugged up his sleeve, revealing a swath of cobalt tracery. In the illumination from below, Gilchrist could see the mastery, fishtails intertwining and haunted faces emerging in the pattern.

  “I did all these.” The cartographer pulled his other sleeve. “I did everyone’s. When you ink a man’s skin, you know everything about him, all the scars and all the stories. It’s a hard thing, hearing your crew drown. But there was nothing I could have done, was there?”

  He doubled over in another coughing fit, worse this time. Gilchrist opened Crane’s rucksack and pulled out a syringe. The liquid inside shone acid yellow. The cartographer nodded, and a moment later the needle was discarded and he was far from his rotting lungs. The lampreys were leaving now, having tasted the wood, and their lights dimmed as they wriggled deep under the surface.

  The cartographer’s tattoos disappeared in the darkness, and then his body, and then there was no more coughing, and Gilchrist was alone with his web of thoughts.

  ~ ~ ~

  Crane awoke in flames. The salve had dried and flaked during the night, and now his back was searing. Hesitation lasted only an eyeblink before he reached for the case. A smaller dose this time, just enough to take the pain. He noticed his usual vein was starting to collapse, so he moved one over.

  They’d put him in an otherwise empty cell, as Crane had requested through gritted teeth during the flogging, and now, as the medicine slowed his breathing, he took stock of the three-sided room. Stone walls, stone floors, a chamber pot crowned with buzzing insects. The eviscerated straw tick that he sprawled on was the cell’s only other feature.

  Crane got up like an old man, moving slowly to the center of the room where morning sunlight blotted the stone floor. Motes of dust danced and flurried as he lowered himself to sit cross-legged. He pulled a small bowl from his case, and then the graying sliver of the g
odbone, which he set reverently inside. The ritual felt different here, so close to the New World. The air roiled with Them, the way it had in the sleeping cities, in the deserted temples.

  He wormed a deliberate finger into fresh scab and pulled it away slicked red. Then he smeared the godbone, dropped a pinch of the powder, and began his communion. The first inhalation rolled his eyes back in their sockets.

  “Up, bastard.” The barked words came distantly, through fog, accompanied by a rattling scrape as a gaoler keyed the cell open.

  “I’d rather not,” Crane felt his mouth say.

  “Doing that shit won’t make you any friends in here. The darkies don’t like converts.”

  “I have enough friends,” Crane said, with a toothy smile, “in other places.”

  The man snorted, but Crane could hear his feet shift nervously. The sharp-smelling vapor coiled through the room like a snake and hung there. It wasn’t until Crane had packed away his things and stood up, spine clacking, that the gaoler approached.

  “So why did Fletcher bring you here?” the man asked, palm flat on the handle of his club. “Who are you?”

  “I am nobody, dear gaoler,” Crane said. “I am a shade. In fact, if I so wished, I could disappear from your sight completely, ensconced in a cloak of living shadow.”

  “Not in the quarry, you won’t.” The gaoler pointed to the carved number on the wall. “You’re in an even cell. You hew today, fresh stripes or not. The sun is going to bake that blood black.”

  In answer, Crane pulled a piece of silver from the air. The coin crabwalked down his knuckles and into the gaoler’s waiting hand.

  “And that’s how you disappear, too, is it?” The man inspected the coin, then dropped it into his pocket with a clink. He shrugged. “Thirty’s an odd cell today. Never was good with maths.”

  “Nor I.” Crane made a wincing stretch. “I wonder if you might do me one other favor. Enlighten me as to the occupancy of cell thirteen.”

  “Never was good with grand words, either, bastard.”