Beneath Ceaseless Skies #54 Page 2

  * * *

  My clock was ticking, and she and I made bread every day knowing that if the grain didn’t ripen, we were next in line to be cut down.

  A week after Crane visited her, his men began to come back after their bread run and make lazy loops around the square. I kept my head low; whenever I glanced up, Valeria was looking at them like she was just waiting for one of them to get within arm’s reach of the fire.

  But if one of them caught her eye, she tilted her head and smiled slightly, as if she was sharing a secret with him, and he’d blink and grin, and I would remember that she had been a performer dressed in veils.

  (Maybe this was why I never really remembered her when I thought of the circle of dancers; I could only see her as a soldier.)

  One day the farmers came back through the city gates, and as they crossed the square, Marie shot a dark glance at Valeria and shook her head, furious.

  For the first time since my childhood, I started looking at the walls.

  * * *

  I had never been outside the city, not even out to the little grain field that stood in the shadow of the Hall. I had done my time as a sentry inside the wall, but all it had ever done was made me suspicious of the horizon (until the circus came).

  I had memorized the jagged edges where the Hall had struck; the crater between the gate and the gatehouse where you could keep an animal, if you ever found one; the half-moon behind the smithy from a bomb that had landed just on the other side of the defenses, which saved the buildings near it but had probably been quite something for the smith.

  The walls had never seemed a prison until the circus came; but when I realized that our time was up and what Crane might have intended for us, I felt the same knot in my stomach, that need to be away from the city that had grown through every act of the circus, until I was watching the women on the trapeze, too caught up to look away, too frightened to breathe.

  * * *

  It was winter, and I had taken to sleeping on the ground in the front room of the little windowless house. I had never gone farther, though, and when I tapped on her bedroom door and opened it, she was scrambling out of bed fully clothed with a knife in her hand.

  (Crane would never have let her near a knife; she must have stolen one out from under me early on. Good for her.)

  I said, “I know a way out.”

  She was pulling on her boots as soon as she recognized me, and by the time I finished talking, she was ready.

  * * *

  Samuel was a good mason, but slow, and he hadn’t gotten around to patching up the little half-moon behind the smithy. It was too small for either of us, but we were two strong pairs of arms used to the work, and the ashy ground peeled away under our shovels.

  We were nearly finished when we heard footsteps thundering through the square toward the bakery furnace. Crane must have gotten tired of waiting for dissent before he began his work.

  (I pitied that first baker, years ago.)

  The hole wasn’t big enough for me, but it would just fit her if she was strong enough to press through.

  I felt like I was falling.

  “Go on,” I said.

  She looked at me for a moment, but she wasn’t fool enough to think we’d both make it, not now.

  “He won’t kill me,” she said. “You should go. I’ll find my way out somehow.”

  I shook my head; we knew better.

  The cry went up at the baker’s—we had no more time.

  “Thank you,” she said, and a moment later she was scrambling through the hole. The footsteps were close enough that the ground under me was shaking.

  I dropped to my hands and knees; it was dark, but I could just see her climbing to her feet.

  “Will you find the circus again?” I asked, breathless.

  I wanted it to be true, I needed it to be, and she must have known, because when she said, “Yes,” it was the sweetest lie I’d ever heard.

  She moved like a soldier through the ragged scrub until the dark closed in around her, and she was lost to sight even before Crane’s men reached me.

  * * *

  There was no time wasted with a trial; I had been caught conspiring with an enemy. Crane and his men walked me to the Hall for my punishment. (Blood cleaned easily off the marble.)

  “I’m disappointed,” said Crane as we walked. “She never had much promise, but I expected a little more fortitude from you.”

  “Or from the grain,” I said through the blood in my mouth.

  One of the men cracked the butt of his rifle against my bound hands, just hard enough to snap a bone.

  Several people were already waiting in the Hall (the commotion had spread), and they stood in little knots, waiting to see who had crossed Crane. There was some surprise amongst the others when I came in, which was gratifying. Maybe a little doubt could bring down even a magistrate, given enough time; maybe that’s why Crane had decided to act before anyone could question him.

  I was left on the landing of the stairs, the better to be seen; Crane walked down a few steps, with his men between us for safety.

  When Crane threw his arms wide, I remembered the threadbare circus tent and the silhouette of the ringmaster against the paper lanterns as she called for the circus to begin.

  “Tom the Smith,” Crane began, “has been found guilty of conspiring with a traitor to sell flour to Two Oaks. He has betrayed not just myself, but all of you, for his own petty gain.”

  The murmurs began. I remembered the sound of the crowd as the trapeze artists came out, one by one, and began to scale the rigging, all the way up to where the trapezes were waiting.

  “He must be dealt with,” Crane said.

  I remembered the pair of acrobats; he had thrown her into the air and she had come down headfirst—he had caught her an inch above the ground.

  I turned around without thinking, took the stairs as fast as I could. Behind me there were shouts, but I was taking the stairs two at a time, up and up into nothing.

  If I jumped, I would land outside the city walls. That would be enough; whether or not I lived, I would have been even once outside the gates.

  (The aerialists had done the same—you held your breath and jumped as far out as you could, and hoped the wind would carry you.)

  Copyright © 2010 Genevieve Valentine

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  Genevieve Valentine’s World-Fantasy-Award-nominated short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from: The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Federations, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and more. Her first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, set in the same world as "Bread and Circuses," is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her appetite for bad movies in insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, www.genevievevalentine.com.

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  THE POPINJAY’S DAUGHTER

  by Anne Cross

  In the House of the Mad Russian, there are many doors. You may pass through as many of them as you like and not arrive where you think you ought to, because you cannot leave the House except through the door you entered in by, and you cannot exit the House unless it be in the same state you came in. But the truth of those words is as mutable as the doors, and the magic of doors is both blatant and subtle, depending upon the expectations of the opener.

  The House is headquarters to much of the Popinjay Society, home to a very few of them, and the preferred place for them to keep their “guests.”

  In the seventh year of my incarceration, one such guest was dragged in through the front door in hysterics, incoherent with impotent rage and heavily pregnant. The shrieks of fury had already attracted my attention when they drifted in through my window, but Cook’s cries for “Ghost! Ghost!” brought me to use the quickest way down, the magic of the Unexpected Door.

  I found the nearest window with the runes inscribed on its sill, concentrated very hard on how much I expected to be anywhere but in the front hall, and d
arted through. I emerged from the coat closet beneath the stairs to the sound of the front door slamming, and with a jingle of keys, being locked.

  Cook and I had other concerns. It took us both to get the heavily pregnant woman up onto one of the low divans, where she cried herself into an uneasy doze. As Cook rose to go, she observed, “It’s just luck none of the staff’s come in through that door in a week.”

  I was more interested in my fellow prisoner. “Who is she? And what crime has she committed against the Society?”

  “The young master didn’t so much as give her name. He just told her he’d be wed to her in two months, child or not, and left.”

  I eyed the woman’s stomach and frowned. ‘Master’ meant he had completed his apprenticeship to the Society. He would be one of the gentleman defenders of the Realm, with knowledge both of the mysteries of the House and of magic. The latter incidentally freed him, by the Queen’s mandate, of any unfortunate social repercussions. It also made the woman’s refusal a little odd, but the Master’s decision to lodge his pregnant fiancée in the House for a full two months verged on dangerous.

  “How far along is she? If she’s likely to give birth here, to cease being pregnant here....” From pregnant to full-blown mother—the only greater change of state I could think of was perhaps from living to dead. “If that happens, even they won’t be able to free her, will they? Unless he plans to... well.” Some things were not to be discussed.

  Cook frowned. “Another mouth to feed. One accustomed to quality,” she muttered. Cook did not care for the over-inflated tastes of the gentry. “Lunch will be late.”

  The woman woke half an hour later, and once she’d gotten a look at the room, adopted a distinctly suspicious expression. “This is the House, isn’t it.”

  “Yes, you’re in the House of the Mad Russian,” I said. “What have you done to upset the Popinjays so? Even I didn’t inspire them to lock the front door behind me.”

  Her face brightened. “Oh! Are you that boy they locked in here, the one who never escaped?”

  I grimaced. Others had come and gone during my tenure, through bribery or guile or begging, most inside of a month. There had even been other apprentices, who shunned my company as if my ignorance were a disease that might be contagious. Still, I had learned what I could by observing, and manners were one thing that did not require literacy to learn. “Yes, miss. The staff call me Ghost. May I ask your name?”

  “I am Magdalena Selworth, and I’m betrothed against my will to Master Francis Ramond. The man who left me here.” She glanced down. “This child is not his.”

  I am certain I looked confused.

  “I arranged to find myself pregnant, in hopes that he would want nothing to do with a sullied woman.”

  The piercing gaze she speared me with and her refined beauty both dazzled me. “I, I can’t see how being pregnant would have much bearing on whether anyone would care for you or not.”

  Magdalena laughed, a sound as sweet as bells, and I could not help smiling. “It’s refreshing to meet so much innocence in such a pretty package, Ghost. But—I know the story of the boy who was locked up. It’s told as a cautionary tale now, illustrating the perils of offending the Society, but they don’t provide details. What did you do?”

  The pathetic story of my captivity would not impress her, but her attention was compelling. “I told one of the elderly Masters that anyone could do what they did. I did so loudly, as he passed me by in the public hiring fair in Harrow without a second glance. I said that anyone properly trained could guard the Realm, and win Her Majesty’s favor, and that if this Master truly cared for the good of all, he would stop lording it over us poor folk, and teach us.”

  Magdalena’s smile was balm on my loneliness. “Ah. You were brave, but very foolish.”

  “Oh yes,” I agreed. “They brought me into the House that night, while I slept, and left a marque of apprenticeship by me. But they have taught me nothing, and so here I sit, for I’m told by the staff that I cannot leave the House except through the same door, and in the same state. I tried every door I could find in the first month I was here. As you can see, nothing worked.”

  “Poor boy,” she said, sounding sympathetic, though her patronizing tone briefly etched away some of her beauty’s shine.

  After all, at fourteen years, I was accounted a young man. If I had never challenged the Society, chances were good I would have been courting, married within a pair of years. But before I could say a word, she flinched, putting one hand to her back. “Ah, if you could show me some place more comfortable to rest? He... was not gentle with me.”

  As she smiled at me, I found myself saying, “Of course, Miss Selworth.”

  * * *

  Alone in my room that evening, I stared out the window at the mix of riders on horses and smoky alchemical engines going by, men and woman walking together in the cool spring air, seeming utterly alien to me. I tried to imagine myself strolling by with Miss Selworth on my arm and strangely found I didn’t want to, though I was certain I had desired just that over lunch.

  Frustrated, I turned away to the pages of my book, the only one I had found during my tenure that I had some chance of understanding. Behind the highest window in the House, right under the cupola, was a small room, accessible only through magic, and I had inadvertently fallen in the window while trying to escape. Learning to get back to that room taught me how to use the Unexpected Door, and on my fifth visit, I found the book wedged into a gap between the wall and the window, its wood-grain spine nearly invisible beneath the sill.

  Every time I opened it, it felt as if I were opening one of the House’s doors, and indeed, the book was filled with pictures of them, marked with strange glyphs and sigils. Opposite each drawing was a single page completely filled with crabbed, incomprehensible handwritten text.

  Hundreds of times, I painstakingly copied the diagrams onto doors in the attic, and always there was a sense of impending something. Yet when I opened the doors, the symbols would vanish, and the door would be just a door. I had memorized the glyphs, knowing they were important, but I needed the words.

  I only briefly considered asking Miss Selworth for help. No one in the House knew I had the book, even Cook, and if one of the Popinjays insisted on marrying her, utterly against her will, there had to be more to her than just her lovely face.

  * * *

  For the next three days, I had no time for my book. I found myself alternating between dancing attendance on Magdalena and trying to think of a suitable bribe for the hired help, who could leave, and who therefore could bring a locksmith to open the front door. I’d tried all this before, of course, when I was first locked in, but it had not helped since I did not know which door I’d entered by. Magdalena, however, might leave easily—if only someone would unlock the front door.

  None of them were willing, not even when I threatened to resume the poltergeist behavior that had earned me my nickname. “The Masters might lock us in here,” seemed to be the universal, annoyingly reasonable response.

  After my one lapse into vengeful pot flinging, Magdalena sweetly asked where I had been, over a late, rather burnt lunch that I brought to her in the Salon. My abashed explanation of what I had been up to and why Cook had been so distracted bought me a disapproving look and, “I thought you said that you were no longer a boy.”

  When I visibly wilted, she turned that dazzling smile on me again.

  “If you really want to set me free, then you might avail yourself of what they keep here, and learn the mysteries of the doors.”

  “I know those,” I muttered.

  “The House has belonged to the Popinjay Society for over two hundred years, and they keep their library here. They come and go -” there had been one of their nightly meetings already, which I had watched as usual, trying to glean some meaning from it—”and they clearly do not fear the doors the way the staff do. You say you have tried everything, but there must be some secret to it that you don’t kn
ow.”

  “I was unconscious,” I reminded her, stung by her implication of sloth, though the smile soothed it somewhat. “And they always post a guard at the door they come in through. They always leave by the same door they came in, and they’re always careful to leave nothing behind. They don’t trust the doors.”

  “But they trust them more than the staff. The library may tell us why.”

  “It might tell you,” I mumbled, ashamed.

  “Come now, Ghost—though you may have never bothered to avail yourself of the resources here, can you at least bring yourself to help me use them?”

  I felt much like I imagined a puppet on a string might, as my head jerked up and down.

  * * *

  “Oooh...,” Magdalena exhaled as we reached the landing at the bottom of the stairs. “I do not look forward to climbing those. It’s as well I did not drink much tea at breakfast.”

  “There is a door down here that I can make open to the third floor,” I assured her. “Whenever you’re tired. But there are none that lead down here, ever. Even the Masters must take the stairs to get to this room.” Then I opened the door into the library, with its high tall windows that let in only a little light between all the shelves. It was dark and musty-smelling, and as crammed and cramped full of paper as it could be and still allow someone to stand inside.

  In Magdalena’s gravid state, she had little chance of navigating it, and I had long since given up finding anything of use inside. The one time I had vented my frustration, I found that the Popinjays had several traps in there for vandals, or for angry small boys. I now knew better than to deface the books further.

  Magdalena stared into the room with some consternation. “Ghost, you will have to help me.”