At ten minutes to noon Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, stood on her chanting verandah and murmured the last syllables of a twenty-five minute spell precisely on time.
“Go,” she said, and with a flick of her fingers the verandah’s voice fell silent and the words echoed and with a fat sucking sound that was almost exactly the opposite of any language she was ripped free from the earth and fell into the sky.
The sky was a dangerous place to be a human. The breezes were vicious and the air was harsh and around her she could feel the ill will and tremendous force that was the will of the birds, tugging on her limbs, draining from her heart, adding lead to her bones and gasps to her breath. Upstart mammal, they hissed into her brain. Wretched offspring of synapsids, thick-limbed, clumsy-footed, gut-brooding hairy rat. Know your place below.
Ar-klazion ignored them, and when that didn’t work anymore she sang to them, a long and mocking song whose simple melodies and blunt noises were offensive to their longminds and crude to their oldest souls, and they reeled away in disgust that overcame their hatred. She chuckled smugly and banked through a cloud of grudges and seething spite; most of the attitude for dealing with the very old worked across species quite nicely, if not the precise words. But now her sky was clear and her purpose was sharp and she had work to do.
She had a night to catch.
***
The night lay far in advance from her, fleeing as it was wont to, and an inexperienced sorcerer or cunningman or witch – flush in their powers and giddy with success – might have hurled themselves pell-mell after it in gleeful haste. They would scoff at restraint and mock the notion of a challenge greater than that they had already conquered to come here; the defiance of an entire planet’s heavy-handed grasp; the evasion of its ancient and crabbed-taloned rulers; the precisely correct pronunciation of twenty-five minutes of ancient words created by a species that had no actual mouths humans would recognize. This would be what would get them killed, if not in the next few hours then the next time they did something else significant. Ambition was a spice; arrogance was a poison.
So Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, crossed her legs and sat upon an icy scrap of cirrus fibratus, where she began, very intently and very thoroughly, to look at her hands.
Finger. Thumb. Finger. Finger. Finger. Times two.
She pulled them in and out, tugged on that heartbeat, rolled them back and forth and checked the palms and the knuckles and the tendons and the little scars and the bumps and the hangnails and itchy bits that were part of having a body, and she reached out and gently cupped a handful of ozone and brought it down to her. It hissed and spat most angrily at being brought low thusly, and she soothed its murmurs with one hand even as her other began to remove its skin before the lowly air could strip it loose.
Her anvil was her palm; her hammer was her thumb; her tongs were her fingers; her forge was her breath.
It lay gilded and glowing in her grip, a small knife exactly one inch long and one horizon wide, and she picked it up and swung it and it cut the lesser, lower, rarified air in half with the vicious callousness of an aristocrat overdue for the guillotine. Where it slashed, the sky bled apart, and where it did, Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, followed.
***
On the vacuum-path she spun forwards, lungs empty, heart frozen, brain alive with sparkling plans. Behind her she left a brutish contrail of puzzled oxygen molecules, peeled freshly from both the atmosphere and her ozone-blade and left to quarrel in confusion as oxygen molecules always do. Far beneath and below rust fell like rain and humans grew light-headed and giddy; cats burst into laughter and dogs wandered in dazes. A contrail of sparkling, dying metals marked the edges of her passing, and as her speed reached its zenith Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, saw the air begin to dye itself from passionate ocean blue to royal purple bruising.
She was catching up to the night. It was arrogant and old and it was used to being the fastest thing in the sky, and she would get very close to it indeed before it bothered to notice her.
When it did, she knew it. The moon had been following her for some time now, and when it veered sharply in her direction she was ready. Bodyguard of the night, wanderer of the late summer skies, it dove at her like a stooping hawk, but it was inelegant in its rush and overconfident in its surprise and she simply banked to one side and let the moon slide by, laughing in disdain as it shaved itself down to a crescent on the sharp edge of her passage. It gained her some seven high-leagues towards the target before the night even noticed its failure, the eld fool, and still, oh still, oh yet the miserable thing didn’t understand the position it was in. Stars twinkled in her path and rose in her face to bar her way, but she was ready and carefully cut herself into dimensions that slid between their light like water through a streambed, slipping past the shine and squirming closer, ever closer to that inky black that lay beyond.
The night was still not alarmed. Why would it be? Fail though its guardians may, it was still the earthbound finger of the infinite dark on this world, the touch of the universe running down the spine of the planet to bring it shivering relief from the smothering love of its upstart star-parent.
It must be remembered, of course, that fingers are very delicate in more than one sense.
So it was both no surprise that the night itself allowed Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, to come so close to it without much caring, and that when she subsequently brought out a small potted plant and turned its chlorophyll inside-out, dumping a lifetime’s-worth of sunshine out in a very sharp railroad-spike of pure photons, it was immediately, unceremoniously, and painfully nailed to the sky.
***
The heavens did not scream.
The night itself screamed. It was much bigger and older and softer and more arrogant, and so it reacted as shrilly and angrily as any such person does when pain is visited upon them, especially minor, inconvenient, meaningless pain. Actual agony would freeze them stiff.
The heavens did not scream. But at hearing that, they did cower and shrink away. And so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries was alone in the gap where the sky had been, with the immense vastness of the pinned night and a fraying splinter of purest harvested sunlight.
There was little time to waste. She brought out her spade and bucket and alit upon the night’s shores, and there she braced herself, and put her hat between her teeth, and bit down so that when her shovel breached the flesh of the night itself the tremendous and all-consuming nauseated pain and roiling horror wouldn’t make her bite off her tongue because she needed that to get back home alive very very much.
The night was now coherent enough to get over its shock and stop screaming and begin cursing, so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries stopped up her ears with small scraps of rags and began to hum as loudly and off-kilter as she could, drowning out swearwords and damnable blasphemies with lullabies and nonsense verse and filthy limericks, watering down the infinite with the ultra-finite until it could not wound or touch her. Her fingers itched with the temptation to reach out and snag a flailing tendril of one of the smaller curses, but no, her self-control won the day. Some things aren’t meant to be taken, but more common are the things that are up for grabs by anyone but with a nasty tendency to remove the hand that receives them.
She had a bucket full of something like those now, lighter than air and heavy with portent. Her arm was buoyed and her soul was weighted, and as she threw aside the dissolving remains of what used to be the idea of her shovel and the little sunlight sliver dissolved and the night began to bloom in hideous wrath all around her, she clicked her tongue three times, coughed, and from memory, yelled a loud and perfect “cock-a-roo-roo!”
And Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries slid vastly, perfectly, endlessly down the slope of above and around and into the small comfortable spaces crowded all around with matter, with ordinary matter, with ordinary things that mattered, and slammed into her chanting verandah with such force that every bone in her body came within a single degree of dislocation.
She lay there for a few hours trying to work up the energy to scream or cry. The potted plant comforted her, but greater still was the comfort of the little bucket in her left hand. It was full of the closest thing anyone on a gravity well can get to the actual universe, and it weighed a stupid amount because weight was a stupid concept to apply to it, like size, like shape, like age.
“Got you,” she said, a few minutes before dinner.
Then she screamed for a while until she felt better.
***
“That’s very nice, dear,” said Hanna, mother of Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries. She gently turned the bucket in her palms, giving it friendly little pats to soothe its noises. “But this isn’t what I meant when I asked if you could go get me some nightsoil for my garden.”
“Well what the hell else would you mean?”
Hanna told her.
“Shitting EUPHEMISMS?!” erupted Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries.
“Exactly,” said Hanna.