Beneath Ceaseless Skies #162 Read online

  Issue #162 • Dec. 11, 2014

  “A House of Gold and Steel,” by Marissa Lingen

  “Goatskin,” by K.C. Norton

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  A HOUSE OF GOLD AND STEEL

  by Marissa Lingen

  My grandmother and I went into the almshouse together when I was seven. I was a sturdy little thing, hardy enough to survive the consumption that had taken the rest of the family, and Gran was a hale old lady. But she had no property to speak of, and there wasn’t a lot she was allowed to do to support herself as a widow, so into the almshouse we went.

  We survived. That’s about all I can say of those years: we stayed together, and we survived. There was a lot of jute and a lot of gruel. And soon I got old enough to begin going to hiring fairs, to piece together work here and there—not yet enough to rent us a room in a boarding house, but soon, we said, soon.

  When I was fifteen, I got a call to be a lady’s maid. “There must be a mistake,” I told the woman who ran the hiring fair. “I can’t dress hair, and my hands are—” I flushed and twisted my hands in my dress. They were rough and gnarled from the jute. “I’m not a lady’s maid. You mean scullery.”

  She shrugged. “Not my problem. They want a strong, hearty young lady’s maid from the workhouse girls. Sort it out when you get there.”

  I only had one dress, so there was no question of wearing my finest in case it would convince them to keep me as a lady’s maid. I rebraided my hair to look as tidy as possible, and off I went.

  The house that had summoned me was grand enough that there was a servants’ entrance and large enough that the boy who answered its door had no idea who I was or why I was there. I felt sure that as soon as I found the housekeeper, I’d hear why it was all a mistake and be out on my ear, with a few idle hours to show for it.

  Instead, the housekeeper looked me up and down and huffed out a sigh, blowing the wisps of hair that had come loose from her bun up in the air. As they settled back around her face, she said, “Well, you’ll do, but we’ll have to find you something else to wear, without delay. I can’t have you seeing the Mistress in that.”

  So they bundled me into one of the housemaid’s spares, with a promise to replace it rather than make her take it back from me, and shuffled me off upstairs. I hoped that the Mistress wouldn’t look at my holed boots or my unwashed cap. For myself, I was too busy gaping at the finery around me to pay much attention to what the dress looked like. Belowstairs was serviceable and warm, far better than anything I was used to, with threadbare castoff carpets and even some ornaments on the tables.

  Upstairs was beyond my ability to describe, except that everything I looked at either glistened or invited the touch of cleaner fingers than mine to glory in its softness. I had not ever imagined a world like I saw upstairs. The housekeeper, a gruff woman who seemed to keep things running with the tiniest glances, was kind as she hustled me along to the Mistress. I think she knew what it was like to come the way I had. Maybe she’d come up that way herself.

  The Mistress was a tall, bony woman in a dress with more lace than I had ever seen. Whatever had been done with her hair had ten loops at least and looked like something I would have to have three assistants and four days to even try to reproduce. I was even more certain that this had all been a mistake. But she looked me up and down and said, “Yes, fine, all right. Let’s go introduce you.”

  And then I saw how it was not a mistake that they had called me for the lady’s maid position, not a mistake at all.

  The young lady in question lay in her bed with her eyes closed. It took me only a moment—I had lived around enough consumptives to know—to see that she had not been out of that bed on her own in quite some time. Possibly could not. So when they said lady’s maid, they really meant nurse. They meant that I was to manhandle her body about and wipe her arse and make sure she didn’t get weeping sores, and clean them if she did.

  Well. It wasn’t as though I was too good for it.

  “Can you?” said the Mistress sharply.

  I nodded.

  “Do you speak, girl? Because you’ll be wanted to speak to her some. Gently. In case she can still hear.”

  “Does she—” I coughed, wanted to spit but swallowed it instead. I could see this was not a place to spit on the floors. “Does she wake?”

  “No, not so you can see. I want you to talk to her so she hears a human voice. We come in and talk to her, her brothers and me. But more is better.” The Mistress peered at me. “We’d better do something about that cough. Can’t have you breathing it into her.”

  And she touched my forehead, and there was a swift burning in my lungs and throat, and then it was gone. I’d lived with the consumption for at least eight years, likely more. It had weakened my Gran and killed the rest of my kin. And now it was just gone, like she would have wiped smuts off my face. Easier than that, even.

  And I wanted to fly at her and kill her, because if she could do it that easily, why wasn’t she doing it all the time? Why didn’t she come to the almshouse and cure us all? Why didn’t she cure my Gran?

  But if she had the magic to clear me of the consumption, she could fight me off with barely a lifted finger. My kicking, spitting rage would die against her, and take my chances at the job with it.

  I took a deep, ragged breath. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t make the Mistress be good. I could just take her money and try to pay for a healer for my Gran myself.

  “Right then,” she said briskly. “That’s taken care of. Dabrowski will show you where everything is and acquaint you with Miss Aneta’s routine. She’ll also give you an advance on your first week’s wages to get yourself some suitable clothes. Be here at dawn each day. We make an early start here.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” I said, and bowed my head and made as if to follow her out. She looked at me as though I was insane.

  “Wait here. Dabrowski will return. Your work starts now.”

  Dabrowski, it turned out, was the housekeeper who had gotten me the maid’s dress. She walked me through the invalid’s routines—when to bathe her limbs with infusions and when to anoint them with oils, how to hold and turn them, how to feed her the thin gruel that kept her alive.

  Like a fool, I made reference to the story of the sleeping princess with the hedge of thorns surrounding her, even though Miss Aneta was no beauty.

  Dabrowski snorted. “It’s not magic that keeps her asleep, little idiot. It’s magic that keeps her alive. Because it’s her magic they need.”

  “What—what do you mean?” I had assumed that the Mistress kept Miss Aneta alive because she was her daughter, and I said so.

  “Oh, certainly the Mistress would do her best for an untalented daughter,” said Dabrowski. “At least, I would hope she would. But in addition, the young Miss, bless her, was the best transmuting talent of her time. Before she grew ill, that is.”

  “What’s wrong with her? Is it—” I swallowed. “Is it catching?”

  Dabrowski grinned. “Not as I’ve ever heard. It’s a disease in her magic, and that’s not likely to be a problem for you and me. And the Mistress is mucking around with Miss Aneta’s talents every time you blink, so... whatever’s wrong with her magic, I’d say, no, it’s not catching.”

  I worked the whole day and went back to the almshouse—to my shame, I had started thinking of it as home—with money in my pocket. It was enough money that I could buy a hot baked apple to split with Gran to eat just for the joy of it and still have enough to give to Gran for her to find us a new place the next day while I was working. Enough that she would be warm too, when
I was gone to the big, bright, warm house.

  “So you’ll mostly work with this Dabrowski?” said Gran as we huddled together under our one blanket that first night of my new position.

  “I expect with the maids, and maybe some with Dabrowski, and occasionally the Mistress,” I said. “Miss Aneta won’t give me much to chatter about, poor thing.”

  Gran put a finger beside her nose. “Look sharp, Kasia. You may be surprised.”

  In fact I was surprised. I was constantly surprised for weeks after I started working there. Every time I thought I understood how far the luxuries of rich folk could go, I would stumble upon something more—indoor plumbing was a marvel to me in the servants’ quarters, where the basins and seats were plain white porcelain. The first time I saw the masters’ version, I could hardly recognize it for what it was.

  And that was only the beginning. Everywhere I turned, there were ornaments made of dazzling gold. If I had been a housemaid, I would have discovered from their weight when I dusted them that they were not merely gilded, but it took me longer to find out since I had no reason to heft them, and longer still to realize that not all rich people had a treasure trove spread around them in the form of gewgaws.

  More curious still were the self-propelled devices I had never heard of that were assisting the household with their work, from the Mistress herself down to the lowest bootboy. Most were made of brushed steel, and they swept the carpets and refilled the inkstands and performed tasks I could not entirely identify.

  They did nothing to help with Miss Aneta.

  That work was mine and mine alone. I changed her position on the bed, massaged her limbs to keep the blood flow high, fed her, bathed her, changed the swaddling cloths that only courtesy kept me from calling her nappies, changed the delicate nightclothes she wore above them.

  Miss Aneta’s room was filled with the things she had loved before she had fallen ill, and the maids kept them from growing dusty, in case she awakened to want them: tidy folders of music, tied shut with ribbons in shades of blue; lutes in three sizes, all kept tuned and oiled and strung but played only to check that they were still in tune; shelves with the sorts of knickknacks a much younger girl would have loved, horses and shepherdesses and tiny perfect sheep, things that you would ordinarily see in wood or porcelain, but each had been turned to solid gold.

  The boarding house where we moved was threadbare compared to my new place of employment, but it kept my Gran warm, and as her hands healed she could do more delicate piecework without the cloth catching on her calluses. The woman who kept the boarding house was hearty and kind—rather like Dabrowski, though not in such exalted surroundings. She was called Mrs. Kaczmarek, and she let Gran sit by the parlor fire in the second-best chair all day long as she worked. I loved her for that.

  When I had started my work in the employ of the Mistress, I had little notion of what a transmuting talent meant. The magical toffs who ruled our city had taken little interest in me, and I returned the favor. I had been caring for Miss Aneta for a fortnight when the Mistress first interrupted me with visitors.

  I had not expected visitors at all, but if I had, I would have expected ladies of the Mistress’s class, possibly Miss Aneta’s own age, who would sit by the bedside and chat in hushed voices or possibly sing, who would bring flowers Miss Aneta would never see, and who would leave after a decorous amount of time.

  I would not have predicted a trio of pinch-faced whey-colored men and a woman who could easily have been their sister, dressed in the fashions of the moment or possibly the next moment—brilliantly dyed waistcoats for the gentlemen and an improbable lozenge-shaped hat for the lady. I would not have expected the Mistress to fling the door wide and proclaim, “Well, there she is.” When she did so, I started and half-thought, for a moment, that she meant me. I dropped a curtsey quickly enough to avert any kind of wrath for my cheek, and I waited.

  “Oh, Kasia,” said the Mistress. “These are—some of my colleagues.” Her face curdled when she said it. I had the first inkling that something in the world might not be fully to the Mistress’s liking. “They are here to examine my daughter. Please assist them as needed.”

  I bobbed again, like an apple core on a choppy sea. She did not leave as I expected, having delivered such comprehensive orders. Instead she stood in the doorway while one of the gentlemen and the lady seated themselves in the straight-backed chairs that we kept by the bedside and started poking and prodding my charge.

  “May I... assist you?” I offered.

  “I believe we have the matter well in hand,” said one of the gentlemen who remained away from the bedside. And sure enough, the lady took Miss Aneta’s hands in her own and closed her eyes, taking the sort of deep breaths I was used to seeing from strong men about to lift something improbably heavy. I realized after a moment that her breaths and Miss Aneta’s were falling into rhythm.

  The lady nodded once, and one of the gentlemen reached around her to place an object in her lap. Her dress sagged under the weight of it, and I realized that it was a brick. She breathed with Miss Aneta, and then, still holding her hands, she began to hum different pitches on her outgoing breaths. Her voice wasn’t any great shakes—I knew half a dozen people at the workhouse who sang better than her—but the air got prickly and still, like the height of summer when no breezes blow.

  And then she let go, and the brick in her lap plummeted , ripping her dress as it fell between her knees with a great thump to the floor. I let out a gasp, because that dress could have fed me and my Gran for months, but the lady just reached down and picked up the brick with both hands, rising to her feet as though her torn dress made no difference in the world.

  The brick was now solid gold.

  When Dabrowski said Miss Aneta had the best transmuting talent of her time, I’d had no idea what that meant. We didn’t see a lot of that sort of thing in the workhouses and the slums, for obvious reasons. The Mistress returned in and saw the lady holding the gold brick. She said, grimly, “Well, I suppose you have what you came for, and you can leave us in peace?”

  “For now,” said the lady. The gentlemen surrounded her—I suppose that was what they were there for—and swept her out past the Mistress like they were afraid the Mistress would soil them.

  Like she was some servant girl.

  “Mistress, what—”

  “She’ll be hungry, after that,” she said, as though I had not spoken. “You’ll want to feed her early, or she’ll fuss.”

  I had never seen Miss Aneta fuss, never heard a peep out of her. The Mistress didn’t even cross the room to look at her face, to see that she was all right. I touched Miss Aneta’s cheek. It was like she’d been sitting too close to the fire. I got her gruel into her, though she thrashed and tossed like a child.

  I sang to her, tentatively, and she quieted down for that.

  After that I could tell when I arrived in the mornings when her mother had done the same with her the night before. The ravenous mornings, the restless mornings: those were the mornings when the Mistress had used the transmutation power for her own needs.

  I once tried to ask, “Ma’am, have you ever tried to—”

  “Tried to what?”

  “Tried to transmute her into healthy?”

  “What a ridiculous thing to say. Don’t get above yourself, girl. Go warm some more stones for Miss Aneta’s bed.”

  “Yes’m.” I fled, feeling foolish, and did not speak to the Mistress about it again.

  Every few weeks, the Mistress allowed others to come in and use her daughter as a living transmutation machine. Mostly the whey-faced group did, although it was clear that the Mistress had some serious distaste for them and they for her. The longer I worked there, the more comfortable the Mistress became with me. The more I became a piece of furniture. After a few months, she even began to allow me to be present, to hold things and in minor, unobtrusive ways assist when she used Miss Aneta’s transmutation powers. I began to see where all the golden decor
ative objects and steel automated devices around the house had come from, and how the Mistress could afford to hire more servants and purchase more luxuries all the time.

  Dabrowski saw how I didn’t like it, and every time I had to do it I found that there was mysteriously a cake for me in the kitchen, or my coat had been brushed, or some other small kindness to let me know that someone was paying attention, that someone cared.

  “Dabrowski—” I said to her once.

  “Funny world,” was all she would say. “Funny world for my young mistress and me. Funny world for us all.”

  I looked at her hard, but my gran was waiting, so I nodded and put my freshly brushed coat on.

  “I heard you ask,” said Dabrowski. “About healing my young mistress. It was kind of you to ask.”

  I ducked my head and said, “Well, it came to naught, didn’t it.”

  “It was kind to ask,” Dabrowski repeated. And then she was off after one of the steel automated devices, which was supposed to be sewing seams on a sheet and instead was pursuing a shrieking bootblack, sewing the sheet to his coat. Dabrowski managed to get the device working again, but the moment had passed.

  The whey-faced people were there the first time I realized I could use the powers myself. Miss Aneta had twitched and moaned at the wrong moment and ruined the attempt at transmutation, though all that meant was that it came to nothing, the brick lying red and sullen in the lady’s skirts. “Hold her, girl, what are you here for?” snapped the lady impatiently.

  I did not like to bind Miss Aneta like a prisoner to perform for them, and yet I felt that it would go poorly for me if I let her thrash and ruin their transmutation when the Mistress had allowed them in. So I came around behind Miss Aneta and took her by the forearms, bracing her shoulders with my elbows.

  For the first time I saw and felt clearly just how they moved, just how they acted, and how she responded... how the breath went in and then out again, and the spark... oh, I can’t explain it, I can only show it, and when I’ve finished showing it now I have a silver pigeon feather, or a copper button.