I was drinking coffee from a wretched paper cup on a sidewalk in a city of Africa. No one here should know me or speak my tongue, this I well knew. There was only one answer I could give. “I have waited for you a very long time.” Whichever one you are, I thought but did not say.
His eyes were violet, and spread wings were reflected in them as if an angel stood just behind me. “Are you done?”
“Ever have I been done. Good for evil’s sake, evil for the sake of good.” I added, “I am tired.”
He touched me, just once, saying, “You are free to go.”
Where his fingertip had brushed the back of my hand, blood welled up. Two hours later, the scratch had not healed. The lingering pain was a marvel I had not seen since Judaea.
To test his word, I cut off the least finger of my left hand with a hunting knife. It did not grow back.
Then, I knew I was free. The only question was what to do with my freedom? I could only go where I had ever been, the battlefield, but that was no longer so easy.
In these days, the recruiters can number the lines on a man’s thumb. They can number the flecks in his eye. They can number the patterns woven into the seed of his loins. I have never bothered to learn the crafty skills of forging paperwork and changing records. Always, I could walk away and take another name.
Now, though, even the least of African tyrants wants a résumé and a cell phone number for the mercenaries who might bear weapons in his name. Tramp freighters of no fixed flag won’t hire gunmen on their deck unless references are provided. There is no place left for me.
Sunrise greets me now with a sky of fire, as it has done down the long centuries. I have made my preparations. Just in case this last promise is another deceit, I will strike my last blow so well they will not find me after.
I used to wonder what it was like to die. Eventually I stopped, but on this last morning, another wretched paper cup of coffee in my hand, it occurs to me once more that my reward and my punishment are likely just the same.
A soldier’s death, and a silent, restful peace with no grave at all. If God wants me, He will have to take some trouble to find me.
So I am walking up that dusty hill for the last time—my still-wounded left hand throbbing in time with my heart. Going over the top of the trench. Claiming the fire for my own. No one will miss this truck until it is too late. The fertilizer and fuel oil in the back will serve. If I have been lied to, not even my God-given invulnerability can survive being vaporized.
I hope.
I am tired, I am old, and I am sick of being the plow blade. The dust like stars shall be my tomb. All those who went before me have borne my name to Heaven or Hell. It does not matter which.
Really, I just wish I still had my old spear. That would bring a proper end to all stories.
Grindstone
* * *
I loves me some steampunk. I loves me some weird. Sometimes I loves me some weird steampunk. Because the world is always stranger than we can imagine.
* * *
Blood always rusts the springs in my hand. Other people’s blood, to be specific.
It’s cold up here on the fly deck where I am cleaning my weapons. There is nothing around us but empty sky, stretching to the horizons and beyond. The good airship Entwhistle is two days and more from the nearest friendly port given our current heading and the nature of the winds in this airband. I can hear her engines straining slightly. They are running under just enough load to give them a workout without redlining. Which is good, because the rest of this vessel is about to fall through the sky, carrying us all with it.
At least we beat those rat bastards off.
This time.
Laying down the last of my blades, I begin cleaning my right hand with my left. It is fastidious, demanding work. My Maker would have been proud of my diligence. His apprentices would have been appalled. “Don’t make so much work for us, Jakesia,” they used to whine.
I stare past the rail a moment, tempted by memory and old pain until my eyes lose their focus against distant, empurpled clouds.
Shadow is returning. No matter how many rat bastards we fight, there will always be more.
Meat breeds. That’s what we Tocks always said, when we were just whispering intelligences, unsighted and benchbound in the earliest days of our creation. Meat breeds. And it always breeds faster than Tocks build.
My hand is sticky and stiff. Carefully I pick flecks of cruft out, that were some rat bastard’s heartsblood not so long ago, and try not to think too hard about the breeding of Meat. I try even harder not to think about the fact that I am now in command.
The shipyards that birth our aerial vessels are as shrouded in secrecy as our very origins themselves. Ask anyone where the airships are built, and you will receive a vague wave and the answer “somewhere spinward.” But have you ever met someone who traveled far enough to the spinward to find the answer firsthand? I certainly have not.
The airships simply migrate antispinward, being handed from captain to captain through the vagaries of succession, trade, or piracy. Perhaps they gather in secret conclaves to re-create themselves in a new generation of similars, much as Tocks are said to do. Or perhaps the airships have always been here, before either Meat or Tock came to these skies.
Who can say?
—Skyborne University Inquisitor C. S. Cole, Lectures, vol. 3
Palacio Sarita bat Mardia, Skymistress of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve, watched the airship Entwhistle beat across the wind into the eastern slips. She stood on the observation deck of the Eastmost Tower, clad in the wool-padded leather of any common dockhand. The formal robes of office with their cerise banding and lacework fringes were too damned prissy for real work. Plus they picked up grease like nobody’s business.
If there was anything Lesser Grand Reserve had, it was grease. In copious amounts. At least up to now. Without grease, they would have been nothing but a bunch of starving people on a too-small island in the sky.
The scent of the pits was, as always, omnipresent. So far as Sarita knew, there was nowhere on Lesser Grand Reserve where one could escape from that odor. Tall as she was—well over six feet, unusual for a woman of this or any era—in her time of service, even she had crammed and folded herself into all but the smallest passages and bilges all through the island’s keel and decks and towers.
A Skymistress was expected to know her domain. While the endless kingdoms of the air were beyond any woman’s knowledge, her home was as familiar to her as a hutch to a rabbit.
Her tools lay beside her, racked and fastened as proper in their filigreed brass-and-balsawood case. Sarita brushed her fingers over them in their familiar order. Telescope, range finder, electrical divinatory, telelocutor, flare pistol, and shock prod. See, signal, and shoot.
Of course they were old, as all the best equipment was. Of course they were worn, as all the most properly used equipment was. Of course they were slightly slick with the ambient grease of Lesser Grand Reserve.
She wondered what would become of them. Likely there would never be another Skymistress of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve.
Panjit, her chief acolyte, snapped his own telescope shut with a crisp movement that telegraphed bored mirth. As always, he struck a pose. No leathers for him. No, Panjit favored the full regalia, identical to her own neglected cerise robes except for the azure dye and shorter fringework. He was not shy about remarking on how well cerise would favor his magnificent dark complexion and patrician nose.
Not in this lifetime, she thought. Or at least, not in my lifetime.
But what was a Skymistress without a port?
“You watch, they’ll clip the number-three east boom on the way in.” He sounded remarkably satisfied for a man predicting a minor disaster. “That’ll bring a good levy.”
“The state of her gasbag and rigging says otherwise,” observed Sarita mildly. “No matter how great the fine, we cannot wring payment out of someone who’s already wallowing in penury.
”
“You underestimate the value of salvage, Skymistress.” Panjit’s tone was so smooth and self-assured that she wanted to slap the words from his face.
Sarita didn’t bother anymore to ask herself why she was stuck with this dreadful little climber for a chief acolyte. Everyone of worth and potential had emigrated over the past two years. Once the state of the grease pits had become general knowledge, anyone with sense had been able to see which way the wind was blowing on Lesser Grand Reserve.
Due wrong, in two simple words. The wind was blowing due wrong.
The problem with basing your entire economy and raison d’être on a constrained resource was that eventually you ran out of the resource in question. Decisions which had seemed canny two centuries ago during the bright days of the port’s founding and initial construction were now foolhardy in the blindingly obvious light of hindsight.
For the past thirty years, they’d actually been burning the grease to make electrical energy. On ascending to the post of Skymistress, she’d put a stop to that, and nearly lost control of Lesser Grand Reserve’s governance in the ensuing spat. Now the few Master Mercers yet remaining in port quietly praised her foresight in doing so, and even more quietly grumbled that she hadn’t seen through the problem sooner.
Logic was not an essential element in politics, Sarita had long ago learned, to her displeasure.
“Panjit,” she said, her voice filled with the regal snap of authority. Not to mention the cold edge of the air on the Eastmost Tower. “Take yourself down to the east slips and present my compliments to Entwhistle’s captain. Dinner in my apartments, should they be so inclined.”
“We would be better showing them the back of our hand than our open palm,” grumbled the acolyte.
Sarita stroked her shock prod fondly, not trying very hard to keep her impulses from her face. “Are we so rich in visitors these days that we can afford to turn anyone away?”
“No, Skymistress.” Without making the proper obeisances, he turned on his heel and strode away.
Little bastard never had believed in the grease crisis, she knew. Panjit still thought it overblown, still believed that if you bullied and bribed the surveyors enough, they’d come back with better estimates of the depth and grade of what remained embedded within the caverns hidden at the heart of Lesser Grand Reserve.
Sarita watched the airship a while longer, pleased to see that Entwhistle beat past the number-three east boom without incident. She finally went below herself to review once more the remorseless reports that charted the death of her city in the sky.
One for wood and one for oil
One for sheep and one for soil
Wheat and barley, water and rye
Everything grows here in the sky
—Children’s rhyme
Having arranged the good airship Entwhistle to be tied up to the waiting slip and boom-braced until her gasbag is no longer under load, I am now reduced to watching the local Meat whine and caper alongside our battered hull.
The Lesser Port of Grand Reserve is a friendly port, her slips and galleries open to us, but that does not make her welcoming. It simply means that in the war of Shadow, she does not shelter those who hunt us across the endless sea of skies.
Meat does not hate Tock here, except in the vague way that all Meat fears and despises Tock. It is something in their monkey flesh, buried deep beneath Meat’s quick, erratic mind, that leads them to such animosity.
I no longer care. My hand rusts, my captain is lost, and my ship is wounded. Any of those things would distress me. All of them together overwhelm.
“You,” says the most important Meat on the slipside. I know he is important Meat because he is dressed like a fool and doing no work.
I meet his eyes, my own glittering stare encompassing the liquid brown of the man’s gaze. He needs no response from me, he knows he has my attention.
“Where is Captain Armature?” the Meat continues.
“Falling,” I answer. I am laconic truth, and find the depths of my despair yawning below me like the bottomless sky.
This imperious Meat blinks a moment, thrown off whatever script he has prepared. “An air sailor’s death, to be sure. Then who commands here?”
Fool, I think. Tock do not die. We are stopped. Meanwhile, three of my deckhands drift close. Two bear blades loosely sheathed, the third carries a long iron lever bar. The Meat grows impatient.
“Jakesia,” I finally say. Swift grins chase one another across the faces of my crew.
Anger flashes in the Meat’s eyes. This one is important, unaccustomed to a lack of cooperation in others. “Summon him.”
“She is here.” I rise and bow, the bad servomechanism in my left hip whining briefly in counterpoint to my indifferent dignity.
Three of the port’s dockhands bring over a water line, hup-hupping in time as they coordinate with my own deckhands. Our credit is good enough here for a resupply without advance guarantees. I am certain we will not be treated this well again.
The important Meat turns and walks away. In showing me his unprotected back he is telling me how insignificant I am to him. This is fine with me. He is not a rat bastard intent on claiming my life, nor is he a minion of Shadow. Therefore he is insignificant to me as well.
When fades the light, comes the night
And brings the realm of ghosts and Shadow
When fades the day, good men stray
Into the night of ghosts and Shadow
When fades our world, flags are furled
All are ghosts in the realm of Shadow
—Traditional dockhand ballad, attested on multiple islands
Skymistress Palacio Sarita bat Mardia strode down a deserted hallway. Pale patches on the wall betrayed the long tenancy of portraits recently removed. Dust, flecks of paper, scraps of cloth and grit were scattered across the polished floor. She could remember when this had been a busy thoroughfare. Now it was as deserted as any dockside lane when the airships were away.
She took a deep breath and allowed the smells of this place to settle into her nose. Grease, of course. Everywhere the grease. If there was one benefit to the not-so-slow death of the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve, it was that she might someday soon escape the perpetual reek of grease.
Beyond grease, there was the faint, murky scent of mold. As if water had gotten into some nearby carpets. Sweat, too, of dockhands working hard to shift loads while there were still decks to shift them to. Someone’s old cook fire, rancid oil and burnt beans. But mostly the dusty, silent reek of emptiness.
Already well over half of Lesser Grand Reserve’s population had departed. Most of the early migrants were from the monied classes. People with the funds or education or skills to easily find passage aboard some airship or another with reasonable expectation of new employment at their next port. Or possibly the port after that one.
Those who remained were the poor, the stubborn, and the terminally optimistic. Along with a few operators like Panjit who saw, or thought they saw, ways to profit from the collapse of a once-proud port.
The last major port failure had occurred when the springs on Flymonkey Island had dried up unexpectedly. Within a handful of months the city there had been reduced to empty ruins. Not even pirates could harbor there in later days.
Sarita had been a girl then, well into her own apprenticeship at Port Lamassu. The collapse of Flymonkey Free Port had been a subject of speculation and rumor for months.
The Lesser Port of Grand Reserve was a much more important place than Flymonkey Free Port had ever been. But she both hoped and feared its fall would be less remarked upon.
Someone—or something—had been hunting airships out in the airbands, pulling the stricken vessels to their deaths among the clouds. The disruption to communication, trade, and migration was impossible to ignore.
Shadow was coming, the laborers whispered in their dormitories and refectories, but Sarita placed little faith in such rumors. The fears of small people eve
rywhere could speak louder than any voice, and with less reason. Legends were just that: legendary.
If not Shadow, though, it was something. New and aggressive pirates. An invasion from distant airbands. Something.
And in the midst of it all, her city was dying.
The Skymistress passed quickly through a cleaner hallway and into the elegant dining room where affairs of state were often conducted, and even occasionally settled. The table awaited. Oil cups and troughs were set on one side for Tock, plates under domes on the other side for Meat.
It was set for three, she noted sourly. She would not escape Panjit this evening.
Of course this is not our original home. How could it be? Were the bones of our first fathers and mothers made of the air? Why do we have words for “dog” and “horse,” and even paintings of them, when no one in recorded history has ever seen such fabulous creatures?
The question isn’t where we came from. Somewhere else, obviously. The question is, where are we going?
—Binyan the Wanderer, Sermon at Port Ruin
I sit in a gilded room with two Meat. We are surrounded by statues of heroes of yore, and a carpet thick enough to bury corpses in encloses our feet. History and art and money reek about me. Amid their glory, I ignore the Meat blood still crusted in the joints of my right hand. They dine in the fashion of their kind. Steaming food is clutched in their soft, clever fingers and shoveled into their pursed, damp maws. I try to imagine what it would be like to have teeth. Excrescences of bone within one’s jaws. Brittle, fragile, hard and sharp.
Much like Meat themselves.
The important Meat who met me at the dock ignores me. He pretends attention and respect to the woman he sits with. Even I, a simple Tock, can see she has no use for him. She does not bother to hide her corresponding lack of respect.
She I must focus on. She is the Skymistress. It was her order that permitted Entwhistle to dock at the Lesser Port of Grand Reserve. It is her forbearance that permits us to take on supplies even now in advance of our letters of credit and our limited funds.