Skyland (7 page)

Harpers eyes had always looked up, not
down.

Now he looked down.

He looked down as he walked. One foot
stepped down upon the metal floor of the corridor; then the other
followed; then the first again.

I can see ground. But no Sky. Where? Where
is She?

The "ground" beneath him was metal and it
was human-made and it was humming quietly and unpleasantly. But it
was there. Unlike the Sky.

Where is she?

So he walked, and so he thought, and did not
know how far his walking had taken him, and Zara silently by his
side, from their beds through the humming corridors. And
then...

The ship was not the only thing that was
humming.

Harper realized that there were other sounds
beneath the ships melody. Another hum cooing beneath the thrum of
the floors and the walls of this flying thing they stood in.

One foot stepped in front of the other, then
stopped.

From down a corridor, voices rose, voices
without words, music between a song and a wail.

Waaooo... waa... ooo. Ohhhh... ohhhhh...
iioo.

He looked up from his feet. The he took the
first deliberate step since he'd fled the night before from the
observation deck and its window onto a Skyless blankness. A pale
glow came from an open door halfway down the corridor. He walked
towards it.

Candles? Who...?

Skyland was not technologically primitive,
not most of it anyway. These rockets had been built by what the
city claimed were some of the galaxy's preeminent, Union-trained
engineers. But many of the country people not only couldn't pay to
keep the electricity on, but couldn't even afford the wax in
candles or the oil in lanterns. Their days ended when the sun went
down and began when it rose. Wax and oil were precious, gathered
from rare beasts and sold for high prices, usually to the city
folk. And burning wood or other plant matter was almost unheard of.
Completely aside from the Consumption laws (not one of the farmers
had
ever
had enough of anything to worry about being
arrested for excess), the farmers would not burn something that
could be eaten or composted or made into something useful. Even
cooking fires were rare; kale was not more palatable when heated,
and meat was rare. Hunters and scavengers kept torches only for the
most dire emergencies.

Candles, dearly bought and kept by the
honored Sky Reverends, had one purpose in the country: the Worship
of the Sky.

Harper had reached the open doorway. He
squinted into the dim room at the people seated on the floor in a
semi circle around the light. Here and there was a swatch of blue
fabric, a decorative sleeve or scarf, but the people were mostly
dressed in black.

City folk. This is not the for the Sky.
Infinite Space...

The closer to the city center one got, or
more accurately, the farther one got from the farms, the more
diverse the population got. Not that it was ever that diverse
anywhere on the crust of Skyland, isolated as it was from Union
Proper. But in the center of the city Harper had heard that there
were some – maybe one in a thousand –people who worshiped Space
rather than Sky, as they did in the Union. Their altars were black,
not blue. They prayed with eyes cast down not up. And they sang.
Their god was the invisible space above the sky, removed,
invisible, infinite.

Harper had never heard their song.

Like their god... shapeless, wordless.

The wail-song continued. It wavered up and
down. Harper leaned on the doorway and closed his eyes. He heard
Zara sigh beside him. Her hand brushed his and he held it. The
wail-song went on and on.

The sound was... not beautiful. But he loved
it.

Then it disappeared.

Harper opened his eyes. The figures on the
floor knelt perfectly still in silence. Harper stared at them. He
counted fifteen. In one corner two women stood, heads cast down
like those on the floor, dressed in the red coats of the Transport
Union workers. One had silk scarf tied at the neck, black with a
silver twist imprinted on it. The other had a rough black swatch
stuck in the collar of her uniform like a napkin. The edges were
rough like it had been torn hastily from something else. A luggage
sack or perhaps one of the curtains on the windows of the nicer
cabins. Harper had seen some of those as they wandered through the
ships. But he always looked away from the windows quickly.

Zara was tugging on his sleeve. He looked at
her. She looked from him down the corridor and twitched her head.
He could almost hear the thought:
We don't belong here.
He
started to back out.

One of the kneelers looked up.

His eyes met Harper's. The man held out his
hands towards them, palms up. He stood and came towards them,
stepping around the people still on the floor.

"Come in."

Some of the kneelers looked up. Others were
still.

"Sorry. Really, we were just walking by."
Harper moved back and turned to go back down the hall. Zara was
already a few steps away looking back, waiting.

"No, stay."

"We'll go... get out of your way. We're
sorry to disturb you."

"No. Please. We are not disturbed."

"Well we would hate to–"

"Join us."

"Oh, we're not–"

"You are here, that is what matters."

"But we are not in Infinite Space."

"All people are in Space. Come in to our
chapel. The Transport Union has been gracious enough to give us
this room for our chapel."

Harper paused, stopped trying to shuffle
away. He tilted his head and frowned at the calm man's words.
"Wouldn't you prefer to be on the observation deck?" he asked.

"We are happy that they have allowed us any
room aside where we can meet."

"But why don't you meet where you can look
at Space?"

"All Space is Space."

What?
"I don't–"

"There are Spaces everywhere. Today, this is
our Space of Infinite Space. Our chapel."

"We really don't want to bother you."

"There is no bother. This Space is for all
people. Especially today."

"Is this... the Tenth Day?"

Unlike the farmers who worshiped the Sky
with every day, every night, every look up into the heavens, the
Infinite Space devotees in the city only worshiped once every ten
days. Though he had never seen one before, Harper knew that there
were gatherings on every Tenth Day, somewhere in the city.

"No. Today we hold a vigil.

"A vigil?"

"For the dead."

"For the..."

"On Skyland."

Harper's stomach turned. "What?"

"Did you not hear?"

"We... have been walking... just
walking."

"The second ship, the one that was to follow
us today, was destroyed."

"No..."

"Yes."

Harper shook his head and asked the
unnecessary question. "How?"

"Blown up. By one of the passengers."

"It wasn't an accident?"

"Not as the broadcast tells it, last we
heard."

"Have you been watching–"

"Now is not the time to watch. Now is the
time to pray."

"Of course..."

"Come, sit with us. We pray for the lost
souls."

"No, I don't think we will. It's not our
way."

"You are welcome to join us at any
time."

The man turned around and went back to his
spot beside the others. He bent his knees to the floor and bent his
head down and closed his eyes. Harper backed away. Zara's hand was
gently pulling at his arm again.

But this time, she was stepping back towards
the room. "We should..."

"What?"

"We should pray with them," she
whispered.

"What?" One of the kneelers looked up.
Harper pulled Zara a few steps down the hall and lowered his voice.
"Why?"

"They are not so different. We both pray to
something–"

"Something–no.
We
pray to something.
They pray to something else, some... nothingness. Emptiness,
silence, wordless void... that what they pray to. 'All Space is
Space.' What is that?"

"It is what they believe. We have a god
too."

"Yes, one that I can see."

"Harper–"

"I
see
the Sky. I
see
the sun
and the moon imprinted on it. I
see
the threads of clouds. I
see
the rain when she chooses to throw it down." He was
quoting the
Sky Tomes
and he cringed internally, shrinking
from the rote, but he couldn't stop the words. "I
see
the
blue."

Zara didn't answer, her head was down.
Then,

"We did not see Her when we flew through
Her."

Harper was silent.

"Let's pray with them."

He shook his head.

Zara stood on her toes and leaned in so that
her breath brushed his face and her wet eyes shone level with his,
and she whispered so softly that her words were almost silent.

"It is the least we can do."

He turned away from the words, the
accusation.

The least we can do...

He thought back to the bridge over the dried
up river, to the scavenger and the twisted mask of hate, and the
ragged Sky-colored sleeves of the city folk of the outskirts. Then
he took a step, then another, then another back towards the doorway
with the candlelight spilling out. Then he was in the room and Zara
followed. There was a spot at one end of the semi-circle and they
went and sat beside the now-silent people. Everyone had their eyes
closed and heads bent so Harper bent his head and closed his own
eyes. The night darkness behind his lids greeted him, reminding him
of the Sky.

But She is not here.

He did not know what he was supposed to be
looking at.

He opened his eyes and snuck glances at the
others kneeling in silence around the room. He kept his head bent,
but down on the cold floor of the ship, knees grinding against the
hard surface, without any Sky above him, he did not know how to
pray.

A sigh shook the air behind him. A sniffle.
Another sniffle. Somewhere else, a sob. There were soft footsteps
somewhere in the room, and a man in a red Transport Union uniform
knelt down beside Harper. He had no black cloth anywhere on him,
but he bent his head in silence like the other. His hands shook as
they covered his face.

Shit.

Chapter
Nine

in which there is a
sign
...

Someone screamed. Or maybe it was many
someones. Or maybe it was the chair maker himself. Light flooded
into the workshop. For the first time that day, the dim shop was
bathed in light from corner to corner. But it was the scene
illuminated outside the shop that held the chair maker's gaze.

Mouth hanging open, he stared stupidly at
the blaze outside the window. He stared at the giant fireball that
was the second ship. He stared at the black cloud of smoke smudging
the Sky. He stared at the ashes and the flaming debris, falling,
falling down to the crowd. He stared at the docks full of
scrambling people. Then–

His head slammed against the ground.

He lay face down, nose folded painfully
against the packed dirt of the floor. The back of his head burned.
Glass pressed into his face. A splinter caught on the pad of his
finger, not glass but wood. He looked up. The smell of varnish
filled the air. He turned over and looked up at the window, or what
used to be the window. The wall of the workshop was burning.

Outside, between the flames, there was a
patch of dark blue and an even darker smudge running across it. The
mass of fire that was the ship had disappeared. Instead, there were
now bits of many fires, falling, flying across the Sky.

The second explosion had broken the fireball
into a rain of burning debris.

More ships were burning outside. The ships
on the ground. He could see their peaks burning as he lay on the
dirt floor. One, two... the chair maker couldn't tell how many,
couldn't count, couldn't think... Everything was sore. He flopped
his head back on the dirt. Glass crunched underneath him. Smoke
rose above the chair maker laying on the floor.

The shop... the shop...

The fires burned inside the work shop
too.

The smell of charred cherry wood floated
down to him.

No... no...

One hand reached back to his searing head.
His fingers touched something that didn't feel like hair. He drew
it back, charred bits clinging to the skin. His other hand tried,
reflexively, to squeeze itself into a fist. But it couldn't close,
because there was another hand inside his own. He rolled to his
side.

"Belle!"

He pushed himself up, glass crunched under
his kneecaps.

"Belle!"

The sounds of people shouting and scrambling
outside, the crackling of fires, the crash of debris smashing
into... something... it all vanished. Things fell silent on the
chair makers ears. The glowing blaze and the smoke outside and
inside and the screams and the rising fires all around and the
falling fires from the sky went silent. Went blank.

He rolled over to his front. He pushed
himself up and knelt. Coughing, choking, big, callused hand still
closed around the smaller one inside it, he sat back on his heels,
splinters and glass and digging in behind his knees, into his
thighs, into his heels. A sound came out of his mouth that wasn't a
cough, wasn't a scream. A pained and painful moan his own ears
didn't even hear.

"Belle..."

The white hair was gone, burned off her
head, which was tilted at an odd angle.

There was nothing living in that body.

The chair maker clutched the hand in
his.

Outside, the night glowed. The flames lit up
the burning rubble. It looked like an earthquake had rocked the
city.