Beneath Ceaseless Skies #140 Read online

  Issue #140 • Feb. 6, 2014

  “The Face in the Window,” by Brian McClellan

  “Atonement,” by Alec Austin

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE FACE IN THE WINDOW

  by Brian McClellan

  Taniel stepped down the gangplank of the merchant galleon into his exile.

  He pulled at the collar of his cut-across coat and unbuttoned the front, letting it hang loose as he hurried to the end of the dock. He had not expected the Fatrastan spring to be so hot and humid and was eager to find a cool pub where he could hide from the sun and wait.

  More than a month by ship from Adro, then another two weeks touring the Fatrastan coastline, and Taniel didn’t care if he never saw a ship again. The quarters had been too cramped, and the only thing to keep him occupied had been drawing in his sketchbook and shooting seagulls. The view of the coastline had been nice enough, but Taniel was a soldier and a powder mage, not some foppish noble’s son. The landscape meant little to him beyond defensible positions.

  This was the frontier—a wild place with immense trees that had never seen a woodsman’s ax, red-headed natives that would kill you at a wrong glance, and immense open spaces where you might not see another soul for weeks.

  It might have been exciting, if Taniel wasn’t so angry with his father for sending him here in the first place. A ‘tour,’ Taniel’s father had called it. Time for him to see a little bit of the world between terms at the university.

  Taniel saw it more like an exile. It would be half a year until he saw his fiancé and his homeland again. Half a year before he was back with his friends, skipping out on university classes to float bullets with Sabon, or spending nights with Vlora. It was going to be a long six months.

  New Adopest, the city beyond the dock, bustled with excitement that Taniel couldn’t quite place. People spoke in hushed whispers, and boys and men were running back and forth. Everyone seemed to have a rifle or musket. Strange to see so many weapons in a city. Even one on the edge of the wilderness.

  He’d seen the whole of New Adopest from the water, and it wasn’t immense. Perhaps fifty thousand souls. The docks took up more space than the city did. All around him ships were unloading immigrants or taking on raw goods to ship back to the Nine. The city had been founded by Adran colonists over a hundred years ago, but then the Fatrastan territories had been sold to the Kez less than six months ago. Taniel couldn’t imagine that made the colonists very happy.

  He caught sight of a bronze statue of King Ipille of Kez, standing thirty feet high to look out over the harbor. As he watched, a young man climbed the base of the statue and dropped his pants to piss all over Ipille’s feet. Taniel chuckled at that, and waited for the Kez gendarmes to appear out of the crowd and chase the man off.

  None did.

  Perhaps it was a festival day. That would keep the gendarmes occupied, and would certainly explain all of the excitement around the city. His father had talked about colonial towns having a certain vibrancy that the big cities of the Nine lacked. Maybe that was it.

  “Taniel! Taniel!”

  Taniel glanced around for a moment, confused, before remembering his chaperone. The idea of some stranger looking over his shoulder suddenly seemed distasteful, and he wondered if he could lose her in the city.

  He pulled his bicorn hat over his face and headed at a brisk walk toward the closest pub. He had almost reached the building and its dark doorway with the promise of cool ale and anonymity, when he felt someone tug on his jacket.

  “Taniel? Oh, yes, it is you. I can see your mother’s face in you, my dear.”

  Taniel sniffed and tried to stifle his annoyance. “Dine?” he asked the old woman at his elbow.

  She gave a half-bow, half-curtsy. “Dina, my dear,” she said, putting emphasis on the ‘a.’ “You’re Tamas and Erika’s boy.” It wasn’t a question, and Taniel wondered if he really did look that much like his mother. That’s what his father had always said, but his memories of her were sketchy at best.

  Taniel tipped his hat. “Ma’am, a pleasure to meet you.”

  Dina looked to be about fifty and wore a man’s jacket and a loose-fitting skirt that went down to her ankles. Her Adran was slightly accented and Taniel had to remind himself—regretfully—that his mother was, or had been, half-Kez, and as his mother’s cousin, Dina probably came from that side. Dina’s boots looked like they had plenty of wear to them, and she wore a Rope of Kresimir pinned to one breast.

  A priestess. Delightful.

  “A pleasure indeed,” Dina said. She paused, a hand on his shoulder, and looked him up and down. “I haven’t seen you since you were a boy. You probably don’t remember me at all.”

  He didn’t.

  “Look at you,” she continued. “A man, now.” Her eyes fell on the flintlock rifle slung over his shoulder, and when she next spoke it was in a loud whisper. “Tell me, do you take black powder like your parents?”

  “I’m a powder mage, yes.” And proud of it, too. Taniel could shoot the hat off a farmer at over a mile with a musket. Farther, with a proper rifle and little wind. A snort of gunpowder let him see in the dark and made him faster and stronger than ordinary soldiers.

  Dina seemed a little put off by this. “Ah,” she said, before forcing a smile back onto her face. “Well, we won’t let that stand in the way of good company. Let’s take you home for the night and get you a good meal. Regretfully, I’m going to have to put you back on a ship tomorrow morning.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going back to Adro tomorrow.”

  Taniel felt his sour mood shift and had to struggle to keep the grin off his face. Home? He could leave this gods-forsaken land behind and....

  Dina kept talking. “War has broken out.” She lowered her voice and leaned close. “The colony has rebelled against the Kez crown and declared that they’re a free country. It’s the damned busybody merchants and the commoners who are going along with it.” Louder, she said, “You can stay with me and my husband tonight, but I....”

  “War?” Taniel cut her off. “With Kez?”

  “Well, yes.”

  He felt his eye twitch, and he forgot every thought of home.

  “Where do I sign up?”

  * * *

  Taniel had to shoot the buttons off a scarecrow at eight hundred yards to convince a colonial major that he was, indeed, a trained powder mage. It irked him that the man’s ears perked up at the name of Taniel’s father, but Taniel buried his pride, and three weeks later he was a captain in the Fatrastan militia, assigned to a company heading out toward the wetlands.

  He wondered whether his father would be perturbed that Taniel had gotten involved in someone else’s conflict, or proud that he’d taken the initiative.

  Taniel hoped it was the former.

  He stepped along in marching ranks beside the almost two hundred members of his new company. With his rifle shouldered and his knapsack tied to his belt, he was the only one keeping any kind of a marching rhythm. The rest of them trudged or shuffled at their own paces, the column stretching out almost half a mile down the winding road.

  He took a glance behind him. The tall trees—oak, maple, and ash—were well into their early summer greenery, keeping visibility low.

  Word had it that the Kez army was patrolling these roads. If fifty cavalry rounded the bend in the road behind them, the whole company would be run down before they could scatter.

  Sloppy soldiering.

  But then, these men weren’t soldiers. They were farmers and vagrants fighting for money or land, so that the so-called Fatr
astan Coalition could win their independence from Kez.

  “You smell that?” Dina asked.

  Taniel cast her a sidelong glance. Despite the sweat on her brow, Dina walked along at an easy gait as if she were on an afternoon stroll. The old priestess didn’t seem like much, but she’d needed less rest on this march than any of the militiamen.

  Taniel had been impressed, and more than a little annoyed, that she had come along when he enlisted in the Fatrastan militia. She had insisted that the men needed spiritual guidance, and Major Bertreau agreed.

  She had promised to be his chaperone, she said. Wouldn’t want to let his father down, she said.

  Kresimir forbid, anyone let his father down.

  “What in Kresimir’s holy name is that smell?” a militiaman asked. A few others grumbled the same question, and Taniel lifted his nose to the wind. Nothing but road dust and unwashed frontiersmen. What could it be....

  There. The scent hit him like a runaway cart full of cow shit. It was a heavy, earthy smell, like damp leaves and manure that had been sitting all winter and then suddenly disturbed.

  “That’s the swamp,” Dina said, chewing on a bit of reed she’d plucked from the roadside. “The Tristan Basin, they call it. Over six thousand square miles of forested wetlands. The smell gets worse as you go.” She glanced at him, as if that might change his mind about going into the interior.

  “How much do you know about the swamp?” Taniel asked.

  “My husband and I did some preaching here when we were younger. You see, back then....”

  “I see. I’d better check in with the major.” Taniel jogged up the column before Dina could launch into one of her long-winded stories.

  Major Bertreau sat on her charger where the road emerged from the trees and crested the hill they’d been climbing. Her face was passive, but shifting eyes betrayed her nervousness and she gently ran her fingers along the thick scarred bruise on her neck. The scar that none of the men dared talk about.

  She was originally from Kez, but from one of the mountain towns so close to the border that she might as well be Adran. Like many of the soldiers enlisted in this war, she claimed to be thoroughly Fatrastan now.

  And like every Kez citizen that had signed on with the rebelling colonists, she had a death-mark on her head.

  Bertreau pulled her collar up to conceal the scar on her neck and acknowledged Taniel with a nod. “Captain.”

  “Major,” Taniel said.

  “Looks like we’re here.”

  The hillside below them gradually gave way to a thick stand of cypress trees growing out of a marshy, shallow lake. The forest seemed to stretch on forever from their vantage point, and Taniel quickly realized why the Tristan Basin was a perfect place from which to conduct their raids: it was immense.

  Nothing was going to follow them into that swamp.

  “Past the cypress are miles and miles of sawgrass,” Bertreau said. “Grasses taller than a house, and so thick you can’t hack through it with a sword.”

  Bertreau’s fingers slowly crept back to her neck. She was a handsome woman with gold hair braided over one shoulder and pretty, round cheeks. Taniel had noted her wandering eye and guessed that had he not mentioned his fiancé waiting back in Adro, Bertreau would have had a go at him by now.

  “The savages better be true to their word,” Bertreau said. Her lips twisted slightly when she said ‘savages.’ “If we head into that swamp and they’re not there to guide us, we’ll all be dragon food by tomorrow night.”

  “Dragons?” Taniel asked.

  “Swamp dragons,” Bertreau said. “Big lizards. Longer than a horse. Their jaws will snap a man in two.”

  Taniel fingered the bayonet case at his hip. No one had said anything about giant lizards. Snakes, yes. He didn’t like the idea of them, either, but in a powder trance he was faster than a striking snake.

  Was he stronger than one of these swamp dragons?

  Taniel removed a snuff box from his belt pouch and tapped a line of black powder out on the back of his hand. He snorted it in one breath and felt the world warp and twist beneath his feet. He spread his feet to brace himself, and a moment later the world came into focus sharper than it had been before.

  He let the powder trance take him fully, and he looked out across the Tristan Basin again. He could see a big boa in the top of a cypress over a mile away, sunning itself, black forked tongue darting in and out.

  “Any word from the savages in the Basin, sir?” Taniel asked. “Or our outriders?”

  Bertreau looked down the road back the way they’d come. “Should be back by now.”

  Taniel took a step closer to Bertreau’s mount. “We need to tighten up this formation,” he said. “If the Kez catch up to us like this, we won’t get the chance to be eaten by swamp dragons.”

  Bertreau snorted. “I know my way around a company of soldiers, captain,” she said, her voice suddenly cold. “And despite your talents and your father’s name, I don’t seem to remember you having bloodied your hands before.”

  “My apologies, major,” Taniel said, forcing down a retort. He wasn’t here to tangle with Fatrastan officers. He was here to kill Kez soldiers, and if Kresimir was kind, a Kez Privileged sorcerer.

  Bertreau lifted her eyes to the road curving down the hill toward the morass. “Our destination should be right down there,” she said. She lifted a hand and called to a man nearby. “Sergeant, bring the men in tight at this hilltop. We’ll rest momentarily, and then I want a smart march into Gladeside. The town should still be ours, but who knows where we’ll run into a Kez patrol. We’ll garrison the town and wait for contact with the Basin savages. Can you—”

  She cut off at the sound of hooves coming up the road behind them at a full gallop.

  Taniel could very clearly see the small gelding maneuvering its way through the soldiers sprawled across the road. Taniel wondered why they bothered calling them a ‘rear guard.’

  The rider reined in beside Major Bertreau, a narrow-faced young man clearly exhausted from the long ride. “Five companies on foot, major,” the outrider said when he’d caught his breath. “Kez colors.”

  “Of course they’re Kez,” Bertreau snapped. “We don’t have five companies in this neck of the country. How far are they?”

  “They’ll be here by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Bertreau looked up at the sun. It was well past its zenith and headed down to the western horizon.

  Taniel noted the outrider shifting nervously in his saddle. “What else is there, soldier?”

  “Well...,” he said, glancing at Taniel’s rifle and the silver powder keg pinned to his breast. “See, there’s a problem....”

  Taniel felt his gut tighten. “Privileged?”

  The man nodded.

  “Well,” Taniel said, forcing a smile on his face, “that’s why I’m here. I’ll put a bullet in his eye from over a mile out.”

  Taniel’s mouth tasted sour as he remembered that he’d been hoping for a Privileged just a few minutes ago. Privileged were not something to hope for. A single Privileged had potent elemental sorcery at his call and was more dangerous than ten companies of Kez soldiers. They could call fire and lightning down on his company as easily as Taniel could float a bullet.

  “I don’t want him getting that close,” Bertreau said. “Sergeant, a double march down to Gladeside. We’ll quarter there tonight and head into the swamp at first light. With or without our savage guides.”

  Taniel looked back the way they’d come and had to remind himself that there wouldn’t be a company of dragoons coming up that road any time soon. They were safe.

  For now.

  If their savage guide was waiting for them in Gladeside, then they’d be deep in the swamp by tomorrow night, and by the end of the week they’d be raiding Kez towns up and down the length of the Tristan Basin.

  And if the Privileged caught them out in the open, they’d all be dead before they could load their muskets.

  *
* *

  Taniel sat on a bench in the corner of the wide room of the common house, his foot tapping out the rhythm of the pub song the other soldiers were singing. The room was dimly lit by fireplace and candle and smelled like ale and wet dog, and every so often the singing would be drowned out by the hammer of a particularly fierce shower of heavy raindrops on the roof above.

  He put a few finishing touches on the sketch of Bertreau he’d been working on, brushing softly with the stub of charcoal to shade the rope scar on her neck.

  Three weeks of stealing glances when she wasn’t looking, and he was sure of it: sometime, probably not more than a few months ago, someone had tried to hang Bertreau. Her neck hadn’t snapped when she hit the end of the rope, and they had cut her down.

  Why had they cut her down, he wondered.

  She sat across the common room, nursing a mug of local ale and bobbing her head to the song but otherwise keeping herself aloof from her men. A bit of black powder still in Taniel’s system gave him just enough of a powder trance to see the details of her face clearly.

  A squat, wide-shouldered barrel of a man slid onto the bench across from Taniel and dug a stubby finger into his ear, wiggling it about. Sergeant Mapel had told Taniel that his parents had originally been from Brudania, but his mother had been a dark skinned Deliv, and he favored her ebony complexion.

  He grinned, dimples forming at the corners of his black cheeks. “If the major catches you drawing her....”

  “She won’t,” Taniel said, taking his eyes off his battered, leather-bound sketchbook just long enough to look down his nose at Mapel. “Any word from the savages?”

  A worried scowl crossed Mapel’s face. Their savage liaison should be here, ready to lead them into the swamp in the morning. In exchange for Hrusch rifles, ammunition, and powder, the savages were going to give the company succor from the Kez and help them raid Kez-held towns along the Tristan Basin.

  A good prospect for the war, if the savages showed up before the Kez.

  “We did hear from the coast,” Mapel said.

  “And?”