Issue #250, Special Double-Issue • Apr. 26, 2018

“The Thought That Counts,” by K.J. Parker

“An Account of the Madness of the Magistrate, Chengdhu Village,” by Richard Parks

“Silence in Blue Glass,” by Margaret Ronald

“Angry Kings,” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS

by K.J. Parker

         “...wanted me to marry Logo the tanner. He’s got a beautiful home, she said, and you soon get used to the smell. Mother, I said, I don’t want to get used to the smell. I don’t ever want to be the sort of person who doesn’t notice the stink of sheep’s brains. She just looked at me. That’s when I knew I had to leave.”

         I decided I didn’t like her mother. Priorities all wrong. Egging her on to marry defenceless tanners when she should have been teaching her not to talk to strange men in stagecoaches. Which raises the incidental question; am I a strange man? I guess, on balance, yes. Decide for yourself.

         “So I went home, slung all the stuff I needed into a bag, and here I am, on my way to the big city. My name’s Sinneva, by the way.”

         “Constantius,” I lied. “Pleased to meet you.”

         Another lie, but she smiled. “Are you a priest?”

         Two reasons why a man might be wearing ecclesiastical vestments in a coach on the four-way to Sempa Sacona. One, he’s a priest. Or two, the lock on the vestment cupboard at the Blue Light monastery is so pathetic a blind man could open it with a sprig of damp heather. “Yes,” I said. “Sort of.”

         “Are you going to Sempa?”

         “Stopping off,” I said. “On my way somewhere else.”

         “It’ll be my first time in the big city,” she said, “I’m looking forward to it so much. All my life I’ve wanted to go there. Is it really as wonderful as they say it is?”

         “Depends on what you like,” I said.

         “I’m going to be an artist,” she said. “Somewhere like Sempa, you can make a living as an artist. I do portraits. I’m not terribly good at it.”

         That would explain the bag full of little pottery jars nestling between her feet. I’d sort of looked at them sideways when she first got on the coach. Worth money to somebody, but rather a specialised market. Besides, I’m through with all that sort of thing.

         “Funny you should say that,” I said. “I’m interested in paint.”

         “Painting.”

         “Paint,” I said. “I dabble a bit in alchemy, and I reckon it might be possible to make synthetic blue. Instead of having to grind up ruinously expensive lapis lazulae in a pestle and mortar.” She didn’t say anything, so I went on: “There’s definitely a demand for it. A genuine deep royal blue at a fraction of the price. A man could make a nice little bit of money that way.”

         “I’ve never used blue.”

         “Too expensive?”

         She nodded. “That’s why I started doing portraits, you don’t have to have any sky.”

         “There you are, then,” I said. “When I’ve perfected my synthetic blue, you can do portraits of people outdoors. You could corner the market.”

         She looked at me. Strange man, she was thinking. At this point, her mother’s awful warning should have leapt into her mind and shut her up like a vault, but no such luck. “People like to be painted in their houses,” she said, “surrounded by all their possessions. It’s the convention. That way, you can see how rich and powerful they are, and what exquisite taste they have. Outdoors, they could be anybody.”

         “Ah,” I said gravely. “I see.”

         “Not that I want to be constrained by conventions,” she said, looking out of the window. “I want to paint what I really see. Does that make any sense to you?”

         “As opposed to what other people see? Or what’s actually there?”

         I was starting to get on her nerves. Well; it had taken long enough. “What I see,” she said. “Which may not be the same thing as what you see.”

         “Because I’m not particularly observant, and may have missed something.”

         “Because I see the world as it could be.”

         “Ah.” I pulled a couple of walnuts out of my pocket and cracked them together in my palm. I have very strong hands. “In that case, maybe you should consider religious subjects. The spiritual dimension.”

         “Women aren’t allowed to paint icons. You should know that, being a priest.”

         “Sort of a priest. And I didn’t specify icons.”

         “If it’s a portrait and religious, it’s an icon. So I can’t do those, it’s illegal.”

         “I read somewhere,” I said, quoting myself—well, I sometimes read my own books, when all else fails— “that the object of portraiture is to capture the soul of the sitter.”

         “That’s an interesting way of putting it.”

         Thank you, I nearly said. “I reckon you’d have to know a lot about human nature. Do you?”

         “Everybody does, don’t they? Like fish know about water.”

         And still thirty miles to go until we reached Sempa. But you don’t get to choose your travelling companions on the public coach. Next time, if there’s any justice, I’ll get a couple of rich tallow-chandlers who think they’re good at playing cards for money.

* * *

         Actually, I was telling the truth about blue paint. I came across the tantalising possibility a few years back, when I was making my living as a fraudulent alchemist, and I dream of the day when I can settle down and do the thing properly, in peace and quiet, not always having to jump out of windows in the middle of the night to avoid creditors, disillusioned investors, or the Watch. It’s a sad thing to say about yourself, but I’m not the most honest, upright citizen you’re ever likely to meet—which Sinneva the would-be portrait painter should’ve noticed at first glance if she was in any way suited to her chosen profession. I won’t tell you my name, because you’d recognise it immediately; and either you’d say, My God, it’s him, or, Oh God, it’s him, depending on the context in which you’ve heard of me. But you will have heard of me. Everybody has.

* * *

         The reason I’d come to Sempa was to see the Polyglypton brothers. If you know Sempa, you’ll know their stall; it’s under the lime tree in the old Bird Market, and you’ve probably spent far more money there than you care to admit. They have their warehouse and scriptorium (rather a grand name for a long, draughty shed) out back of the stockyards, where the air is always heavy with the stench of blood. You get used to it, so they tell me, but I can’t imagine how.

         As I walked there across the Victory Bridge I amused myself with the thought of Sinneva the aspiring artist; suppose she managed to land the job of her dreams, doing the illustrations for the extra-special-deluxe editions (no, not those ones, they don’t let women work on those). She’d turn up for her first day at work, and the smell would hit her like a hammer—a tannery is roses and lavender compared to what the breeze wafts down from the slaughteryards—and someone would grin at her and say, it’s all right, you get used to it. I stopped at the outer gate and splashed a fat blob of attar of violets onto the lapels of my coat. It helped, but not very much.

         Sivia and Massimo Polyglypton receive visitors in their office, which is more a sort of hayloft over the warehouse; you climb up a ladder, for crying out loud. I’d never met them before. Sivia is tall and thin, Massimo looks like the sort of man they hire to throw undesirables out of brothels. They told me to sit down and offered me ginger tea.

         “We liked it,” Massimo said, “very much. But—”

         “But?”

         They looked at each other. “I mean, it’s very clever,” Sivia said. “Well argued and very well written. It’s just—”

         “What?”

         Awkward pause. “I think,” Massimo said, “the word we’re looking for is ‘derivative’.”

         Derivative. Good word; not one you’d expect to hear in a loft downwind of an abbatoir. “Derivative of what?”

         Massimo pursed his lips. “You’ve read the Metaphysics, obviously.”

         The book he mentioned wasn’t called that. I’ve changed the name. Why shouldn’t I? I wrote the damn thing. “Well, yes.”

         “And Reflections on the Abyss and Sunrise.”

         “Oh yes.”

         “That’s what we’re getting at,” Sivia said apologetically. “Frankly, if He’d written this, we’d be all over it like ants on a dead donkey. Coming from you, though—”

         “Someone nobody’s ever heard of,” Massimo added.

         “It’s a question of authority,” Sivia said. “Credibility. To get away with the sort of thing you’re saying here, you need to be—well, someone like Him. You think all this is very startling and original, but if He says it, obviously there must be something to it. No disrespect, but you don’t carry that weight. You haven’t earned that right to be listened to. It’s not the same.”

         Annoying, because the Him they were talking about was, of course, me; universally respected as one of the greatest philosophers of my generation but wanted in all the major jurisdictions for every crime in the book short of actual murder. “I see your point,” I said. “So, you don’t want it.”

         They looked at each other. “We didn’t say that.”

         “Ah. So what are you saying?”

         They said it, and then we haggled a bit, and the upshot was, I settled for thirty angels instead of the seventy-five we’d originally agreed. Annoying, because I needed the money, but thirty angels was twenty-nine angels ninety kreuzer more than I had in the whole world at that time (that’s putting the value of one set of stolen ecclesiastical vestments at ten kreuzer), so I was, of course, pleased to accept.

         Not, I reflected as I scrambled back down that ridiculous ladder, that I had much to complain about. Writing the wretched thing had kept me mildly amused through the long dreary months I’d spent holed up in a half-derelict sawmill in the hill country north of Copis City, waiting for the fuss to die down after one of my more misguided indiscretions; the parchment and ink had cost me maybe two kreuzer, so nobody could pretend I wasn’t well ahead of the game. Even so. To be fined forty-five angels for not being me when I really am me is a bit hard. And since being me is such a wretched, troublesome business at the best of times, it sort of rubs salt into the wound, if you see what I mean.

* * *

         But never mind. There I was in Sempa Secona, a place where there were no outstanding warrants for my arrest and no extradition treaties with either the Eastern or Western empire, with thirty gold angels in my pocket. For once in my life, I could walk down the street without looking for places to run to if I heard someone yell my name. That set me thinking: artificial blue paint. Well, a man has to have a dream. The fact that mine is so utterly prosaic is neither here nor there.

         I hired a shed not far from the bone mills, for thirty kreuzer a week. One unfortunate by-product of alchemy is the smell (you get used to it, but...); my neighbours at the bone works would be in no position to get stroppy about a few noxious fumes, except on the grounds of breach of monopoly. I managed to buy the glassware ridiculously cheap from someone’s gullible widow, with enough left over to keep me in stale bread and no-longer-perfectly-fresh salt fish for several months, by which time I was absolutely certain I’d have cracked the last few remaining problems. A life of honest endeavour; well, why not? Everyone ought to try it at least once before he dies.

         I won’t bore you with the results of my researches. Suffice it to say, I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that making artificial blue paint using certain specific ingredients and a certain method, which I won’t specify here, is absolutely impossible. As a scientist, I was pleased to have added to the sum of human knowledge. As a moral philosopher, I was able to conclude that living a pure and upright life doesn’t of itself lead to happiness or even peace of mind. The day before the money finally ran out, I did come across a tantalising possibility which, one of these days, I really must get around to following up, since it might just be the missing ingredient that would make all the difference; but of course I was in no position to do anything about it at that time, so I sold the glassware for even less than I paid for it and wandered into the centre of town, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

         A number of rather unpleasant things have happened to me over the years in and around law courts, so I really can’t tell you what possessed me to drift across Haymarket and down the Snailshell into the Forum of Justice. But I did, and sure enough, it being a week-day in Middle Term, the court was sitting. I guess the novelty of the situation—a court of law in session, and me not being the unwilling centre of attention—piqued my interest; anyhow, I sat down on an empty seat in the back row, next to couple of fat rich women eating apples, to watch the show. It was a fairly slow day, interlocutories in disputes over shipping manifests and bills of lading, and I was just about to leave when the magistrate banged his little hammer and four grim-looking gaolers led out, in chains, my annoying young friend from the coach; yes, her, the would-be portrait artist.

         Four gaolers; in my prime I only ever merited three, and I was pretty hot stuff, though I do say so myself. True, she was taller than average and no willow-wand, but four kettlehats, for crying out loud. What could she possibly have done? And, come to that, was it something so awful that the authorities might be interested in her known associates? I kept perfectly still and started paying attention.

         It was a simple short-form arraignment, rather than the actual trial. The prisoner Sinneva was accused of treason, attempted murder, and grievous bodily harm. She had entered a plea of Not Guilty, and the prosecutor was asking the magistrates to commit her for immediate trial.

         The magistrate asked if the prisoner had a lawyer. The prosecutor didn’t actually grin; none of the accredited public defenders were prepared to represent her. And therefore -

         Remind me, when I’ve got five minutes, to have my legs cut off. They’ve come in useful over the years—running away, they’re really good at that—but on this occasion they got me into serious trouble, and I can’t risk them doing it again. They stood me up—I swear, I had nothing to do with it—and there I was, on my feet and listening in horror to my own voice, asking permission to approach the bench.

         The magistrate looked at me, took in the ecclesiastical gown, and nodded. So, feeling incredibly bewildered and stupid, I waddled slowly down the main aisle until I was practically nose to nose with the magistrate, a small, red-faced man with thick wavy white hair. I cleared my throat. “This woman,” I said, “has no representation.”

         “That’s right.”

         “On a capital charge.”

         He peered at me. “I don’t know you,” he said.

         “I’m from out of town. Is this how you do things in Sempa?”

         He sniggered. “No, not in the normal course of things. Are you a lawyer?”

         “Yes,” I said—truthfully, as it happens; at least, I have four degrees in civil and criminal law, though most of my experience has been on the other side of the fence, so to speak. “Constantius of Beloisa. I have diplomas from the Studium, the Imperial Institute in Mavortis, the Purple Chamber in Scona—”

         “Mphm.” He was impressed. “You don’t want to get mixed up in this, trust me.”

         I gave him a polite scowl. “I make formal application to defend this prisoner.”

         “Don’t you want to know what she’s done?”

         “Is alleged to have done. No, not particularly.”

         A gentle sigh. “All right, mister Out-of-Town, and on your own head be it. Duly accredited.” He looked at me. “Give your address to the clerk, you’ll be notified.”

         I hesitated. “The fee,” I said.

         “Ah.” He looked at me again, taking in the frayed cuffs of the robe, the sweatstains inside the collar. “Standard rates, one angel twenty a day. Want me to cross you off the docket?”

         “It’s not about the money,” I said.

         “Of course not. Dismissed.”

* * *

         Naturally, I asked around. Information wasn’t hard to come by; it was the scandal of the month. This weird female had blown into town, nobody knew where she’d come from, and set up a stall in the market; your portrait painted, one angel. No takers, naturally; so she started doing portraits for free, and actually they were really rather good; you know how crazy fashions suddenly spring up out of nowhere, suddenly she was the new big thing. You had to have your portrait painted by the little peasant girl, or you were nobody. Soon she had a waiting list long as your arm.

         Naturally, the best people wanted to jump the queue, started offering her good money. She refused; one angel, no more, no less. Now an angel is a tidy sum in some contexts; you could buy the farm I was raised on for three angels, including the live and dead stock, the standing crops, and my kid brother. In Sempa, you could live elegantly on one angel for a month, or any-bloody-fashion for a year. But the high class portrait artists, who were suddenly finding themselves with time on their hands ever since Sinneva showed up, routinely charged fifty angels for a cameo, three times that for a regular canvas. This curious reluctance on her part to make out like a bandit had been duly noted as significant, in the light of what followed.

         The first case was Governor Scaevola, just back from three years in one of the northern provinces. There’s a saying in revenue circles; the good shepherd shears his sheep, he doesn’t skin them. Scaevola flayed his sheep alive, and was therefore nicely set up for life when he came home. He was one of her first high-class commissions; and three days after his portrait was delivered—he was delighted with it, by all accounts, and so was his wife—they found him in his study late one night, sitting in the dark, not moving at all, staring at the wall.

         After that, Senator Juppito, the Friend of the Poor; the Lady Iphianassa, patroness of the arts and Sempra’s leading society hostess; Genseric, the banker; Mediobarzanes, the playwright; Massimo Polyglypton the bookseller (oh dear, I thought, never mind), and half a dozen others—all the same, struck dumb and motionless, empty-eyed and living-dead, soon after the little peasant girl had painted their portraits.

         Sempa is a rational, secular sort of place. They repealed their witchcraft laws about seventy years ago, and people only go to Temple to be seen in their new clothes. Be that as it may. There’s only so much weird stuff people can take before they start jumping to conclusions. Poor little Sinneva was arrested and slung in jail, while they tried to figure out what to charge her with.

         First, they had a go with administering a noxious substance, arguing that she must have poisoned their drinks. But she always painted her subjects at their houses—she didn’t seem to have a studio or anything like that, and she lived in a nasty little garret over a fishmonger’s, where presumably she was in the process of getting used to the smell when they took her away. They examined her paints and solvents, but all they found was the usual stuff that every artist uses; besides, if it was something she was using that had done the damage, surely she’d have poisoned herself in the process. The debate moved up to the Senate, where Juppito’s mob, the Optimates, tried to ram through a new witchcraft law, applicable retroactively. But the Popular Tendency talked it out of time, simply because it was the Optimates who’d proposed it, and so nothing could be achieved that way. Meanwhile, the families of the victims were howling for something to be done, and the attorney general was up for re-election. He resolved to charge her with treason, attempted murder, and grievous bodily harm, on the strict understanding that anyone who defended her would never work in Sempa again, and trusted in Justice to run its ineluctable course.

* * *

         As accredited counsel for the defence, I had the right to make certain investigations. So there I was, with two kettlehats making me nervous, climbing the stairs to Sinneva’s rotten little lodgings and wishing, really wishing, I’d never got involved.

         The kettlehats were along to make sure I didn’t touch anything or interfere with evidence. They had a really quiet morning. It was a tiny little room under the eaves; bed, chair, second-best dress hanging behind the door, plain plank table with half a loaf of stale bread and a pitcher of badly gone-off milk, and a copy of Human, All Too Human open at the bit about the immortality of the soul (which nearly made me smile; I remember writing it, with a murderous hangover and the rain dripping through the roof), and that was it, nothing else whatsoever. Evidentially neutral; no hit list or subversive literature, correspondence with fellow-conspirators, jars of poisonous chemicals; no evidence that the stupid girl had been spending her new-found wealth on anything nice, which is what any normal, innocent person in her circumstances would surely have done. No money, come to that. Her known commissions must have netted her at least forty angels; the rent on the garret was three kreuzer a week—she was robbed, if you ask me—and bread and milk, ten kreuzers a month, tops. Where was the rest of it? In a bank? Or was she sending it home to her poor impoverished parents? Unlikely, I thought, given the terms on which she’d parted from them, but I wasn’t going to tell the prosecutors that. Even so; I felt like I’d been dealt a piss-poor hand with which to defend the stupid child. Served me right, I suppose, for sticking my nose in.

         It was what wasn’t there, of course, that interested me. For that, I could see no alternative but to visit my client, something I really didn’t want to do. Also, if the hypothesis I’d formed about five seconds after hearing the facts in the case was true, there was nothing she could tell me that would be any use to me in getting her neck out of the noose. No, the hell with that. I was going to have to wing it, make it up as I went along. So happens I’m good at that—very good indeed, which is how come I’m still alive and writing this. Actually, I told myself, I’d had so little experience with positive favourable evidence (because I’ve always been guilty as charged), probably this wouldn’t be a good time to start trying to learn how to use it. Stick with what you know, is my motto.

* * *

         I took a deep breath. “Your honour,” I said, “I’ve listened with great interest to the facts in this case, so ably presented by my learned friend. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when he stopped where he did. I was expecting so much more. I was waiting patiently for evidence—hard evidence—connecting my client in any way to the tragic events we’ve just had described to us. Surely, I said to myself, there must be something. But apparently not. My learned friend has just told you that he rests his case. Being a fair-minded man, I would like to give him one last chance to add to what he’s just said. No? Sure? Very well. But please, don’t say I didn’t give you every opportunity.

         “Let’s consider the facts. My client, an innocent country girl, comes to this great city to fulfil her lifelong ambition. She is a naturally talented, I may say quite brilliant, artist; entirely self-taught, I might add, she’s never had the benefit of any formal education—unless my learned friend would care to tell us about it, the schools she’s studied at, the masters she’s been apprenticed to. No? Are you absolutely sure? Very well. No formal education whatsoever. She grew up milking cows, churning butter, sweeping floors, and dreaming of a better life.

         “After only a week or so in this uniquely cultured and appreciative city, her talents were recognised. Despite her disadvantages of class and gender, this plucky and determined young woman starts to make a name for herself. Clients besiege her door with commissions. My learned friend has tried to make her refusal to gouge her clientele for large sums of money into something sinister. I see it as evidence of the purity and integrity of her artistic nature. This poor innocent child, living only for her art, wasn’t interested in money, or status, or any of the glittering distractions of the world. All she wanted to do was the one thing she’d always wanted to do. What, I ask you, could be more natural?

         “And so she painted portraits, at least forty of them that we know about. And of these forty clients, a dozen have—most unfortunately—fallen ill. I feel sure that nobody has more sympathy for them and their families than my client. But what the prosecutor has signally failed to do—because it’s impossible—is establish any faint thread of a connection between these misfortunes and my client. Unless and until he can do so, I honestly believe there’s no case to answer.

         “Consider the so-called victims. All of them are in late middle age or older. All of them—how can I put it delicately?—have enjoyed to the full the delights of the table and the wine cellar. All of them are men and women of great spirit and passion, with a tendency—a perfectly natural, indeed laudable tendency—to express themselves fully, to take matters to heart, to get excited and passionate about things they feel strongly about.

         “In my hand, I have a copy of the standard work on diseases of the heart and brain, written by no less an authority than—” Well, modesty forbids. “In the passage in front of me, the distinguished author describes the causes, symptoms, and effects of a stroke. I won’t take up the court’s time by reading it aloud, the matter is common knowledge. A stroke is an affliction of the brain, caused by an interruption of the blood supply. It leaves the victim paralysed, unable to speak or move. It is caused by excessive eating and drinking, combined with violent exertion of the body, mind, or spirit.

         “Consider what you know about the alleged victims in this case, all prominent members of society. They all ate and drank to excess; they all were involved in public life, in politics, government or the arts; they lived passionate, stressful lives. They were, in short, prime candidates for the terrible illness I’ve just told you about. That this scourge should have come upon them, cutting them down in their prime, depriving us of their talents and their usefulness to our society, is to be deeply regretted. For once, the word ‘tragedy’ would scarcely be an overstatement. But to ascribe these disasters to my poor young client—on what grounds? I have heard none today, and once again, I call on my learned friend to enlighten me. Nothing more? Nothing at all? Well, then.

         “Just in case you still aren’t convinced, let me point out a few more relevant details. This comprehensive and universally respected book in my hand contains no mention of any poison, drug, or artificial stimulant capable of deliberately causing a stroke. Leave aside the fact that no chemical apparatus was found in my client’s possession; ask yourself this: could this simple country girl have discovered or invented such a poison, on her own, uneducated, brought up among the cows and goats? I think not. As it happens, I know a little about alchemy. It would take a genius a lifetime of research to come up with such a complex toxin. My client is nineteen years old. Draw what conclusions you wish.

         “As I’ve already mentioned; as the prosecutor himself admits; my client has painted at least forty portraits, almost certainly more. Twelve from forty leaves twenty-eight. If my learned friend’s allegations have any substance at all, there should be at least twenty-eight other helpless victims in this city, sitting in chairs, staring helplessly at the wall. If so, we haven’t heard about them, and their existence is therefore not admissible in evidence. In fact—I’ve made my own enquiries, since the prosecutor seems to have neglected to do so—all twenty-eight are in perfect health. Among them, please note, are senators, members of the aristocracy, leading figures in commerce, business, and the arts.

         “My learned friend made a perfunctory effort to connect the status of the alleged victims to their dreadful fate, as though my client had sought to strike down the flowers of our society. The fact is, all her customers came to her clamouring to be painted; she didn’t choose them, they chose her. Twenty-eight rich, famous, influential, talented men and women were painted by my client and have suffered no ill-effects. Once again, the facts don’t simply speak for themselves, they shout at the tops of their voices.

         “Recently, the wise and distinguished Senate of this city ruled unambiguously that there is no such thing as witchcraft or sorcery. But witchcraft and sorcery, I put it to you, are precisely what my client is accused of; tacitly, because to say so openly would be to invite ridicule. Therefore, for consistency’s sake, if for no other reason, I call on this rational, truth-loving court to dismiss these ridiculous charges and let my poor, long-suffering client go free. I rest my case.”

         God, I’m good, though I do say so myself. The magistrate shook his head, blinked a couple of times like a dazzled rabbit, and said the magic words: case dismissed. You could have heard a pin drop.

         I left, quickly.

* * *

         Having done what I’d set out to do, I rushed off down West Street, through Absolution Square, short-cut through the Shambles, up Pin Street. I’d known from the outset that the wretched girl had to have a studio somewhere, or where else did she keep her paints, her easel and her money? I’m good at ferreting out stuff like that, so it hadn’t taken me long to discover where it was. I hadn’t gone there, because—well, like I said, nothing helpful to my case to be learned there. Now that I’d won, however, I had no such compunction. I wanted, make that needed, to know.

         Stupid cheap lock, I don’t know why anyone bothers with them. Inside, I saw a chair, facing a shuttered window; two shelves lined with little pottery jars; two easels, on which rested two portraits of the same man, almost but not quite identical; a cheap earthenware plate; a pestle and a mortar; a tinderbox.

         Oh God, I said to myself. Here we go again.

* * *

         I thought; this time, I’m not involved. Nothing to do with me. True, I stuck my oar in, but even so, none of this is my responsibility, my job, my fault. I can just go a long way away and be free and clear. Above all, I owe no duty of care to the truth—me, of all people, perish the thought.

         More to the point; if I interfere, what can I possibly achieve? Nothing.

         I walked down to the Flawless Diamonds, where the stagecoaches leave for Mezentia and all points west. I had just enough money for the fare. The stage pulled in. Mezentia is lovely in the spring, when the cherry trees are in blossom. All aboard, they called out. It left without me.

         Truth is, despite ferocious competition for the job, I am and always have been my own worst enemy.

* * * * *

         Let me take you back a few years; I won’t specify how many, because I don’t suppose you’ll believe me. I was a student at what was at that time the finest university in the world, though it’s gone downhill a lot since then. I wasn’t the smartest kid in my year, not by a mile. I did my best to make up for my shortcomings through diligence and determined effort. You have faith in stuff like that, when you’re young.

         I don’t know when I first noticed her. She wasn’t a student (no women at the university in my day) but she wasn’t a local’s daughter. She hung around in the square and the library forecourt, sketching in inks or charcoal; she wore a big straw hat which shaded out her face, and there never seemed to be anybody chaperoning her or keeping an eye on her, which was odd enough in itself. I can’t say I remember any of my fellow students making any sort of play for her whatsoever, which was stranger still. It was almost as though she was invisible and only I could see her. Now there’s a thought.

         I have my faults, but chivvying unattached females isn’t one of them. Besides, in those days I was desperately earnest, and I knew exactly what I was going to do with my life: graduate, join a respectable Order, teach, research, write papers, win a chair, tenured professor by the time I was thirty-five. It was all I’d ever wanted.

         But things weren’t going all that well. I was smart but not quite smart enough. I could feel the boundaries of my abilities, and I knew that what I wanted to achieve was just the other side of the rope. I could picture myself getting stuck somewhere in the middle, like a man stranded halfway up a mountain, unable to go further up or turn back. I could see myself scraping a doctorate; then what? Fine if I had private means; I could spend the rest of my life floating around the university, taking twenty years to write a modest paper on some peripheral issue, adding a footnote to the great book of human knowledge. But I had a living to earn, and for that I would have to be good enough, not just quite good, and there were so many better men than me. So, in due course, the scholarship money would run out and then it’d be back on the coach, back home, to the farm, or else a job as a clerk or a tutor to some rich man’s loathsome son. It’s a dreadful thing to be twenty-one and realise that you have no future after all.

         Which may go some way to explain what I was doing on the bridge (not the famous one; the other one, about half a mile downstream), one foot on the parapet, staring down into the water. Whether I was thinking about jumping, or using the thought of jumping to force things back into perspective, I really don’t know; anyway, I was too preoccupied to notice someone walk up behind me until I eventually took a step back and trod on someone’s toe.

         “It’s quite all right,” she said, grinning at me. “I’m just glad you decided not to.”

         I looked at her. “That obvious?”

         She had the enormous hat pushed back on her head, so I could see her face. Not beautiful exactly but striking. “You’d be amazed how many boys your age come and stand on this bridge, thinking what you were just thinking. Hardly any of them actually do it. What’s the matter? Debts, exams, girl trouble?”

         You know how easy, how fatally easy, it is to tell things to a stranger you wouldn’t dream of telling anyone else. Also, unlike anyone I’d ever met in my entire life, she sounded interested. So I told her, the whole story, everything. She didn’t interrupt, and when I finally ran dry, she smiled at me. “Is that all?” she said.

         I pulled a face. “I know,” I said, “it does all sound a bit stupid when you say it out loud. And of course there’s millions of people in the world far worse off than me—”

         “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “You have a real problem, a very serious one. I’d be suicidal too, in your shoes, if there wasn’t a perfectly simple way out.”

         She’d lost me. “What?”

         And then she’d linked her arm through mine, and we were walking side by side, down the broad steps to the towpath. “You come here a lot,” she said.

         “My lodgings are just down there,” I said, pointing vaguely. Poor Town. Well, she’d probably guessed that from the deplorable state of my shoes, if she was even remotely observant. “I take the short cut through Long Meadow to the Schools.” I stopped. She grinned.

         “I’ve noticed you,” she said. Curious way of putting it, I thought at the time. “You’ve got an interesting face.”

         Of course, she was an artist. “Interesting,” I said. “That’s not actually a compliment.”

         “It’s a statement of fact.”

         “Ah,” I said. “One of those.”

         When I left my room that morning, I hadn’t decided what I was going to do with the day; either a short drop and a splash, or go to the library and read Psammetichus on essential transfiguration. What I hadn’t anticipated, one little bit, was a stroll along the riverbank with a girl in a straw hat. “What perfectly simple way out?” I asked her.

         “I’ll tell you, if you’re good,” she said. “Later,” she added. “Right, here we are. Now stand under that willow-tree over there and look thoughtful.”

         Out with the slate, the sheet of paper, and the stick of charcoal. Ah, I thought.

         “You’re going to be Parthenius,” she explained, “and the river’s the Aurus, and somewhere over there out back of the charcoal sheds is presumably violet-crowned Olessa, though of course that won’t be in the picture. No, keep still, you’re no use to me if you keep moving about.”

         Keeping still isn’t one of my strong points, as various law officers have discovered the hard way over the years. But I tried my best, and eventually she said, “All right, you can breathe now.”

         My left foot had gone to sleep. “Can I see?”

         She turned the slate to her chest. “It’s only a sketch.”

         “What on earth is the point of a picture if people can’t look at it?”

         “It’s not terribly good,” she said. “Now turn that way, and look melancholy. No, that’s not melancholy, it’s heartburn. That’s better. Hold it exactly like that.”

         We ended up spending the rest of the day together, and the next day, and the day after that, but still she hadn’t told me the perfectly simple way out. I tried reminding her tactfully, but she changed the subject. Besides, I’d sort of figured it out for myself by that point. The simple way out of my frustration and despair was to fall in love with a wonderful girl, which apparently I’d now done. Silly me for not having thought of it earlier.

* * *

         “What would you like,” she asked me, at some point, “most of all in the whole world?”

         We were watching the swans on the river. Apparently they mate for life. “That’s a good question,” I said.

         “Pretend I’m a goddess or a witch and I can grant wishes. Money?”

         “Money isn’t everything,” I said. “No, what I’d like is to be clever.”

         She pulled her poor-baby face. “You are clever.”

         “I wish I was the cleverest, wisest man who ever lived.”

         “Mphm.” She nodded. “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather have the money instead?”

         “The wisest man who ever lived would never be short of money,” I said. “But a lot of rich men are idiots.”

         “All right, then,” she said, and threw a crust for the ducks.

* * *

         “Can I ask you a personal question?”

         She frowned at me. At that precise moment I was being Teudra dividing the upper and lower heavens, which is a confoundedly tricky pose to hold for more than ten minutes. “What?”

         “It’s a very personal question. You may not want to—”

         “Keep still. What?”

         I couldn’t draw a deep breath without wobbling, so I just made myself say it. “Where does all the money come from?”

         “Oh, that.” What had she been expecting me to ask? “I’ve got a rich uncle in Permia. I’m all he’s got, and he wants me to enjoy myself. What do you want to do most in the whole world, he said, and I told him, this. So here I am.”

         “Ah.”

         “Talking of which.” She appeared to be peering past my ear, looking intently at something that wasn’t there. Painters do that. “What do you want, most in the whole world?”

         “Right now? To itch my nose.”

         “Tough. What else?”

         “To stay here like this, with you, forever.” Well, it seemed the thing to say at the time.

         “I see,” she said clinically. “So as far as you’re concerned, this is the perfect moment.”

         “Apart from the itch. Look, do you think I could just—?”

         “No.” She took a step back and looked at me, or at the god creating the firmament through me his temporary proxy. “I once read that if there’s a moment so perfect that it couldn’t possibly be improved upon, it could never ever be any better than this in any respect whatsoever, then Time would stop still, everything would be trapped motionless like a fly in amber, and that would be the end of the world.” She squidged the end of her brush between her fingers. “That’s what made me want to paint.”

         “To bring about the end of the world? A bit antisocial.”

         “The perfect moment, captured for ever,” she said. “A painter can do that. No more old age, no more death. In a painting, you can be forever young, beautiful and happy. There would be no later, no decay, no decline, no consequences.”

         “I don’t see a future in it.”

         She clicked her tongue to acknowledge the wordplay. “All right, relax, before you fall over. Take the weight off your feet, I’ll make us some tea.”

         She made the most wonderful tea, full of obscure, delicate scents and flavours. I sat on a chair, massaging the calves of my legs. She perched in the window-seat, with the light behind her.

         “And that’s not all I can do,” she went on. “I can make people what they want to be. I can make old women look young, poor men look rich, sad people look happy.”

         “Stupid into clever?”

         “Piece of cake.” She turned the easel slightly. “See for yourself.”

         She really was very good. Teudra, not only as the Creator, but in his aspect of bringer of wisdom; perfectly represented, a whole college of theologians couldn’t have found fault with it. And yet it still looked just like me; weird.

         “Anyway,” she said, turning the easel back. “How are you getting on with Induiomarus?”

         “Going through it like a knife through butter,” I said cheerfully, and it was true. Ever since I’d met her, the standard of my work had improved dramatically; all my tutors had commented on it. Hence Induiomarus; we weren’t supposed to get on to him until third year, but there I was, soaring through the notoriously obscure and elliptical Shadow Analects like an eagle. “Actually, I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

         “Is that right?”

         I nodded. “He says everything in this really cryptic, mystical, up-himself way, but actually what he’s saying is pretty obvious. And I think I’ve caught him out in a false premise.”

         “Ooh,” she squeaked. She was alarmingly well-read. “Which bit?”

         “Book seven, the clockmaker analogy. I don’t think it works, because if the clock is found lying on the seashore—”

         “How’s it supposed to have got there? Yes, I wondered about that, too.”

         I gazed at her. Talk about your perfect moment. “I’m so glad I met you,” I said.

* * *

         She was excited. She’d gotten a commission to paint a portrait of the Professor of Alchemical Theory. I was stunned. As far as I was concerned, the man was a god. “How on earth did you manage that?” I asked.

         “Through my uncle,” she said. “He knows all sorts of people.”

* * *

         “All the best portrait artists do it,” she explained. “Move, you’re in my light.”

         She was sitting in her studio, with her back to the window. Before her were two easels, on which stood two almost but not quite exactly identical paintings of an old man with a bald head and whiskers. “You paint two pictures,” she said, “precisely the same. But one of them will be perfect.”

         “The one on the left,” I said.

         “You see? It works. It’s an old trick. I read about it in a book somewhere.”

         “Twice the work,” I said.

         “That’s why the best artists get paid ridiculous sums of money.”

         I studied the painting for a moment. “I’ve never met him,” I said. “But I feel like I’ve known him all my life.”

         “Euphronius says the job of the artist is to capture the soul of the sitter.”

         I smiled. “Well, you’ve done that all right,” I said.

         “I’ll make us some tea.”

* * *

         Three days later, the Professor suffered a devastating stroke. He was found in his study, surrounded by his books, mouth lolling open, eyes fixed on the wall. He never moved again.

         “Just as well I got cash on delivery,” she said. “For the painting.”

         That struck me as a bit insensitive. “At least his family will be able to remember him as he was,” I said. “Thanks to you.”

         “When he was perfect.” She smiled at me. “That’s the point,” she said.

         She went to bed early. I sat up finishing an essay. As I sprinkled it with sand to blot the ink, I remembered that she’d left the lamp lit in her studio. That would never do; smoke from a guttering wick, with all that drying paint. I went in to put it out.

         There was a distinct smell of burning; not just the lamp. I noticed a little brass stove, the sort that elegant people use for making omelettes at the table. There was something in it, smouldering. I investigated. The charred ends of splintered limewood board, the stuff she used to paint on. I looked round and saw the two easels. On one of them was a finished portrait. I recognised it at once; my tutor, Lacasta, the most amazing likeness. The other easel was empty.

         Three days later, Lacasta had a stroke.

* * *

         (I only found out how she did it years later, in a digression in a book about witchcraft among the Permian nomads. To steal someone’s soul, apparently, you paint a picture of the victim, burn it and grind the ashes up fine, into dust, which you seal in a small pottery jar. When you want to consume the soul, thereby adding its wisdom, force of character and other virtues to your own, you mix the dust with certain herbs and make an infusion; a bit like tea. All complete nonsense, of course, said the book I read; there’s no such thing as sympathetic magic, and probably just as well.)

* * *

         I was out of there like a shot, as you can imagine. I ran up the street in my nightshirt, hammered on the door of a good-natured friend, borrowed a change of clothes and two angels, and caught the night mail to Solitene. From there I wrote to my supervisor explaining that for urgent personal reasons I could no longer continue my studies at the university; however, I would be eternally grateful if he would write me a letter of recommendation to the faculty at the Golden Hook. The letter arrived by return, and it must have said something nice because the Dean of the Hook gave me a place on the spot. A year later I graduated top of the class, was awarded a fellowship, assistant professor eighteen months later, all the rest of it. Some bad stuff happened after that, but it’s not relevant to this story.

* * * * *

         She was in her studio when I got there. She looked different. She reminded me a lot of someone I used to know. “Hello, you,” she said.

         “You again,” I said.

         She smiled at me. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

         Behind her, the shelves were empty. On the floor, about a dozen little pottery jars, with their lids off. She had a little brass stove, on which sat a silver kettle. She’d just made a pot of tea.

         “It wasn’t a coincidence, was it?” I said. “You being on that coach.”

         “It was awfully sweet of you to defend me,” she said. “Did you know it was me?”

         “No.”

         “Fibber. Of course, they couldn’t have hurt me. Nobody can hurt me, physically. Would you like some tea?”

         “No, thank you.”

         “I made it for you.”

         I stood there rooted to the spot. “How did you find me?”

         “Very easily,” she said. “I only started looking recently. You see, I was very much in love with you back then, and when you ran away I was heartbroken, but then I met someone else and we were very happy together for a very long time. And then he ran away too, and I remembered you. Sure you don’t want some? It’s good for you.”

         I felt sick. “You ruined my life,” I said.

         “Rubbish.” She had a nice smile. “I asked you what you wanted, and you said, to be the wisest, cleverest man who ever lived. And you said money wasn’t everything, and you’d always be able to get some from somewhere. I gave you what you wanted, because I loved you.”

         I managed not to scream at her. “You made me a thief,” I said. “A con man. Some days I wake up and even I can’t remember which name I’m using.”

         “You can be anyone you want to be. That’s another special gift.”

         I looked at her. “I don’t think I’ve got anything more to say to you,” I told her. “I don’t ever want to see you again. Don’t come near me. Just leave me alone.”

         She shrugged. “You don’t mean that.”

         “Trust me.”

         A little sigh. “You won’t know it’s me, the next time, and the time after that.”

         “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

         “You didn’t in Blemya.”

         Oh God, I thought. But she’d died, surely. “Keep away from me,” I said. “Do you understand?”

         She didn’t say a word, just carried on smiling like an angel. I reached the door.

         “Cobalt,” she said. “It’s what you’ve been missing. For the blue paint. I love you,” she said.

         “See you in Hell,” I said, and slammed the door.

* * *

         Knowing her, I probably will. One day I’ll be sitting there, burning quietly, up to my manacled ankles in molten sulphur, and there she’ll be, smiling, holding a bunch of keys and a teabowl.

         Draw your own conclusions about the doctrine of the perfect moment. For me, the world ended a long time ago.

Copyright © 2018 K.J. Parker.

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

K.J. Parker is the author of the best-selling ‘Engineer’ trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous ‘Fencer’ (The Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and ‘Scavenger’ (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies, and has twice won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. K.J. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

AN ACCOUNT OF THE MADNESS OF THE MAGISTRATE, CHENGDHU VILLAGE

by Richard Parks

         Mei Li, the former snake-devil my father and I were training to be human, had agreed to teach me her trick of transforming a simple flute into various weapons, but so far the lessons were not going well. I didn’t want to risk my own precious bawu on such a tricky undertaking, as the instrument had been a gift from my late mother. We were making do with a wooden dowel of similar size, and the latest result sat on a small cushion between us.

         “What is that?” I asked.

         Mei Li studied the object. “Mistress Jing, it appears to be a small bronze spike of the sort used to post official notices.”

         I sighed. “Yes, I thought so. What am I doing wrong?”

         “Wrong? You’ve managed to turn a piece of wood into a metal spike. As they are differing elements, that is no small accomplishment, especially for a human. Besides, it’s not far from a sword. At least the metal is right.”

         Mei Li had a point. It wasn’t nothing, yet I still felt a twinge of jealousy at the ease with which Mei Li, a snake-devil currently in human form, used magic. To her, such things were as natural as breathing, whereas I could barely manage the occasional equivalent of a gasp.

         “It’s a start, I suppose,” I finally said, though as I watched, the spike lengthened and changed color, reverting to its original form.

         “To be expected,” Mei Li said. “When my flute transforms to a sword or a bow, it’s still really just a flute. Left to itself, it will eventually turn back to its true form with no encouragement from me.”

         The implications of what Mei Li said slowly dawned on me. “Not to be indelicate, but doesn’t that apply to you as well? I mean, I know you’re trying to learn to be human, but...well, the change cannot be very far along. It’s only been a few weeks.”

         “It’s true I am bound by the same laws,” Mei Li said wistfully. “The first several days were probably the hardest. Now it still requires some concentration on my part, mostly before bedtime, to keep this form, but not so much. I want to take that as a good sign, but I cannot be sure.”

         “Perhaps, in time, you won’t have to think about it—” I never got to finish, since we were interrupted by a door slamming shut.

         Father?

         Mei Li and I hurried downstairs in the village’s guest house to find my father, Pan Bao, standing just inside the doorway and scowling, so far as I could tell, at nothing. He had been drinking, but that wasn’t unusual. The surprise was he wasn’t stumbling drunk.

         “The magistrate,” he said, “is insane.”

         I wasn’t sure if he was speaking to us, because after a moment he blinked and then looked at Mei Li and me as if he had just noticed that anyone was there.

         I bowed. “I take it your consultation with the magistrate was not completely satisfactory?”

         “If by ‘not completely satisfactory’ you mean ‘the magistrate is insane,’ then yes, Daughter, you may take it that way.”

         This was not a hopeful sign. We had been sent to Chengdhu village by the governor of the northernmost province in the state of Qin, a very important personage. If the magistrate’s dilemma was of a sort that we could not relieve, our failure might mean we could forget seeking further assignments in the north, or perhaps all of Qin. Considering the current tensions between Qin and the southern states of Zhou, Wei and Chu, seeking employment beyond Qin’s southern border was problematic as well.

         “Pardon my asking,” Mei Li said, “but is the magistrate’s mental state the crux of the problem, or is it more in the way of a complication?”

         Father sighed, and his scowl softened a bit. “Honestly? I wish I knew. I find the situation very vexing. So much so that I forbore most of my customary evening pursuits to ponder the matter.”

         Which explained his current lack of intoxication. Since my mother’s passing, Father had considered too long a stretch of sobriety an insult to her memory. For his carousing, on the other hand, Father had yet to offer any explanation at all.

         “As I understand it, you were told that the Magistrate himself would make his dilemma clear,” I said. “Was there no explanation?”

         Father sank into his chair as if he didn’t remember how to stand. “Not directly. He seems a perfectly healthy young man and insists that he is perfectly fine and doesn’t understand what the Governor was talking about. Then he poured a glass of wine over his head and ordered his Chief Eunuch to perform and characterize the Eight Tenets of Kong Fuzi as a peasant work song. The man failed, probably because he didn’t know any peasant work songs.”

         “What happened then?” Mei Li asked.

         Father sighed. “The magistrate ordered the eunuch to think about what he had done and then sent him to his room. For the eunuch’s sake I hope the Magistrate doesn’t expect a report on his conclusions in the morning.”

         Mei Li and I exchanged glances. “If this is normal behavior for the man, I expect his counsellors are in a state of confusion,” I said.

         Father grunted. “More like panic. The magistrate, Shi Gan, is a minor son but from a very ancient and well-connected family, as could be deduced from the Governor’s interest in sending us here. But what he expects us to do about this? I am at a loss, as are, I suspect, the bureaucracy. Any attempts to remove the magistrate, however justified, would likely bring consequences.”

         “While failing to remove him also has consequences, clearly,” Mei Li said.

         “I don’t want to talk about this more tonight,” Father said. “I need to think.”

         We left him there in his chair, pondering. When I came down to check a little later I noted the slow rise and fall of his chest. As I expected, he was fast asleep.

         “Come,” I said to Mei Li. “We need to prepare.”

         She frowned. “Prepare for what?”

         “To do what Father cannot.”

* * *

         I had reservations about taking Mei Li on this excursion, but since this was part of our duties, it was past time she made a start. As I expected, Mei Li was not quite as stealthy in human form as I was, but fortunately she was a quick learner.

         After a change to more night-friendly attire, we slipped out of our quarters, and in almost no time we were perched on the peak of the magistrate’s mansion like two roof-tile dragons, and hardly more noticeable. I paused to loosen my jian in its scabbard across my back, even as I envied Mei Li her bawu. At need, her flute could transform into a sword instantly and was much easier to manage in the interim. I made a mental note to try even harder in my next lesson. Meanwhile Mei Li had noted my attention to my weapon.

         “Are we come to assassinate the magistrate and thus solve the issue that way?” she asked in a whisper.

         “I wish things were so simple. Now that we’re here, if he is killed, we’d likely be blamed for not protecting him.” That was only a bit of a lie. The fact was that I didn’t really wish matters were so straightforward they could be solved with a sword in the dark. I had killed before out of necessity but prayed I never came to prefer it, given any other option. “We need to observe the magistrate when he thinks no one is looking.”

         “What will that tell us?”
“Perhaps nothing, but until we try, we will not know. Do you have a better idea?”

         Mei Li admitted she did not. We crept forward along the roof line toward what I believed to be the magistrate’s private quarters. As a village magistrate, Shi Gan employed only a few guards, but they were not to be taken lightly, and a careless step could be disastrous. Scaling the compound wall and reaching the roof had been mostly a matter of timing, but there was always the chance of a loose tile or bad step to make the guards look up.

         Fortunately, we approached the end of the building without being spotted. To our left was a balcony hung with gauze curtains, and there sat the magistrate, illuminated by lamplight, being served tea by a concubine. I signaled Mei Li to hold her place as I did the same, and we watched. I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen, but after a few moments he sent the young woman away, put his hands over his face, and began to weep.

         “Is this a sign of madness?” Mei Li asked after several moments.

         I glanced in Mei Li’s direction, though I could barely see her in the darkness beyond the balcony. “I rather think it is a sign of great pain, though caused by madness or something else, I do not know,” I said. “Clearly, there is much here we do not yet understand.”

         Nor were we going to be enlightened further that evening. The magistrate soon rose, extinguished the lanterns, and disappeared into his mansion. I moved closer to my companion.

         “We’ve done all we can tonight. I want to be back before Father awakens.”

         Mei Li hesitated. “There is something wrong with the magistrate,” she said.

         “We know that. Which is why we are here, remember?”

         I could barely see the shake of her head in the darkness. “That’s not what I meant, Mistress Jing. I meant there is something not right about his person itself, not his mental state.”

         “You sense something?”

         While Mei Li’s human senses and understandings needed a great deal of work, her intuition as a snake-devil, I believed, was more to be trusted than most statements of fact, especially in the circles we moved in. “Yes, but it is unclear to me what I am sensing. I am sorry I cannot be more specific.”

         I did not claim to be as sensitive as either my father or Mei Li, yet I had sensed something as well. A spirit? I wasn’t sure. “Perhaps if we were closer? Something to consider later. For now, it is best we were gone from here.”

         We got back to the village’s guest house without being seen, and I was already congratulating myself for managing to return before Father awoke from his nap. However, we had no sooner crept to the stairs to go and change when Father opened one eye.

         “What have you learned, then?” he asked.

         I sighed and told him everything Mei Li and I had seen, including the weeping and Mei Li’s and my own suspicions. Father stroked his wispy beard in that way he had when he was deep in thought.

         “You’re certain he was unaware of you?”

         “Yes, and as he was alone, I am equally certain that his tears were not for our benefit or anyone else’s. He is truly in distress, but whether this is an effect of his mental state or something else entirely, I do not know.”

         Father asked the same question of Mei Li, and received essentially the same answer. It was only when he asked her about her suspicions that she appeared hesitant. “I can only be certain that I was made aware of something about the magistrate, but what? I am at a loss.”

         Father seemed to consider. “I have to admit, in my dealings with the magistrate, I have felt something as well, but to me it seemed more about his vicinity than the man personally. I dismissed it as an effect of his derangement. Perhaps I was hasty in that regard.”

         “If I could get closer to him without arousing suspicion, perhaps I could refine my impression,” Mei Li said.

         “I’ve been thinking about that,” Father said. “And I believe I have a solution.”

         I glared at him. “Father, surely you’re not suggesting....”

         “Suggesting what?” Mei Li asked, but all I could do was blush.

         Father looked puzzled for just a moment before his expression changed to pure amusement. “Oh, I see. No, Daughter. I have a better idea, but I don’t think you’re going to like this one, either.”

* * *

         I could never truly hate my father. Yet there were times when I did not like him very much. One of those times was the following evening, when Father, Mei Li, and I presented ourselves at Magistrate Shi Gan’s official residence, though at the front gate and openly this time.

         “Remember to smile,” he said as a servant left to announce us, and dislike inched just a little too close to hatred for filial comfort. I took a deep breath and made myself remember the reason we were here, though the pretext was the part I was most uncomfortable with—we were there to give a private concert to the magistrate.

         While the bawu was a well-known instrument in the southwest, here in the northern state of Qin it was relatively unknown and thus a novelty, so the magistrate eagerly agreed when Father made the offer. Yet even though Mei Li was a master of the instrument, I was on a much less sturdy foundation. Still, she had been teaching me, and I had practiced faithfully, so I hoped for the best even as I feared the worst.

         “You’re better than you fear,” Mei Li had said. “Just remember to breathe as I taught you and follow the flow of the music. If you do, even the occasional wrong note will sound as if it belongs.”

         Since I knew more than the occasional wrong note was in our future, I couldn’t take as much comfort from her words as she intended. A servant led us into the magistrate’s audience chamber where we were to perform. Fortunately for my peace of mind it was not a large assembly, merely the magistrate and his immediate household and a few court officials.

         He looks so young.

         This was my first close look at the magistrate, without the previous night’s darkness and the gauze curtains partially blocking my view. He couldn’t have been more than twenty or so, handsome enough I supposed, though he had a bored, or rather a distracted air about him, as if he could not concentrate on any one thing for long. In a way he looked child-like, as if he did not fully understand what was going on around him. I wondered briefly if he was feeble-minded, but I dismissed the notion. No one, including the son of a noble family, could achieve an official position—even one as relatively minor as magistrate—without scoring at least decently well on the royal examinations, which were notoriously difficult.

         I glanced at Mei Li and my father, but if either perceived more in the man than they had already said, their expressions did not reveal it. For my part I felt what I had felt before, but stronger.

         Is there a spirit in this mansion?

         At the magistrate’s invitation, Mei Li and I bowed and began to play. Normally a bawu is a solitary instrument, but Mei Li had identified an implied call and response pattern in an old herding song, “Spring Grass on the Mountain,” which allowed us to easily alternate verses. Fortunately for me, it was not a terribly complicated tune, and I held up my end well enough. I could hear my few mistakes, but the audience either didn’t or did not care; mostly they kept their eyes on the magistrate, who was waving two fingers in the air in time to the music and seemed to be enjoying himself.

         We were barely through the second verse when Mei Li, instead of going to the third verse, blew a quick sequence of high-pitched notes that were not in the song; then she lowered the tone to match the third verse and signed for me to take over, a sign which I almost missed because of the reaction of the magistrate.

         I swear, if the man had the ears of a dog or cat, they would have been perked up, listening for something we could not hear, but then the moment passed and he went back to keeping time as I assumed the third verse. I managed to get through the rest of the performance without many more mistakes, nor did Mei Li vary from what we had practiced for the rest of the session.

         When we were done, the magistrate called us forward and praised us politely if a bit absently, as if his mind was elsewhere. Then he summoned Father for a private word. We didn’t hear what the magistrate said, but Father was clearly surprised, though he concealed it from most of those present, if not from me—I knew him well enough to tell. Whatever the magistrate had said to him, it was nothing Father expected. Which in turn surprised me, since nothing the magistrate said should normally be perceived as surprising, given his mental state.

         Father said nothing about the matter as long as we were at the magistrate’s house, but when we were on our way to our quarters, I noticed him pulling his beard again.

         “What did His Excellency say to you?”

         “Only that he would like all three of us to attend a private audience tomorrow afternoon. We must expect treachery.”

         “We must? Why?” I asked.

         “Because I think the magistrate is possessed by a fox spirit, and I think he knows of my suspicion. I sensed a strong spirit energy around him.”

         “So did I, though I was uncertain as to what it meant,” I said.

         “Forgive me,” Mei Li said, “but I believe the situation may even be worse than that.”

         Father frowned. “Oh? How so?”

         “While the spirit aura is strong, I don’t think Shi Gan is possessed by a fox. I believe he is a fox.”

         Father paused for a moment. “I hope you’re wrong,” he said. “Because, if you are right, we will have to kill him.”

* * *

         “It was those odd notes you played, wasn’t it?” I said when we were back in the room the two of us shared at the Chengdhu guest house. Mei Li had kept silent for the rest of the walk back, but I had a hunch that her certainty had something to do with the music.

         “I had already sensed the presence of a fox once I was close enough to him,” Mei Li said. “Those notes were for confirmation—it was the call of a fox vixen, or rather as close as a bawu can mimic. His reaction told me the rest.”

         “I don’t understand. Wouldn’t someone possessed by a fox spirit react as well?”

         “Yes, but not like that. A possessed person still hears with human ears, speaks with a mouth used to forming human words, and reacts mostly as a human would. A fox transformed into a human is different. At its core, it is still a fox. Whatever is human about him is just pretense, a façade. When I made that vixen call, he answered. His true nature would not allow otherwise.”

         Now I understood my impression of the magistrate’s reaction, noted even when I had not understood what Mei Li had done. More, I did not miss Mei Li’s implication—it applied to herself as much as the magistrate.

         “Mei Li—”

         “Young Mistress, if you please I think we should get some sleep. Tomorrow promises to be difficult.”

         More than difficult, I thought, though I wondered if perhaps the magistrate would be one of our lesser worries.

* * *

         The day dawned sunny and insufferably cheerful. Sparrows called outside our window, and the breeze through the open window was gentle. Whatever dark thoughts Mei Li had harbored the day before did not appear in evidence.

         I hoped this was more than pretense, since our survival might soon depend on her. Father could conceal his peachwood sword easily enough, but there was no way I’d be allowed to bring my jian into the magistrate’s presence, on any pretext. I took my own precious bawu for no good reason that I could think of. I knew only Mei Li could reliably conjure a weapon out of hers at need; so far all my attempts at this transformation had come up short, often comically so. The bronze spike incident was the closest I had ever come to success.

         Still, I thought, a bronze spike would be better than nothing.

         Father was waiting when we descended the stairs. “Let’s go,” was all he said.

         We were well on our way to the audience before anyone spoke, and I was the one who broke the silence. “You think the magistrate suspects us?”

         “I am certain he does,” Father said.

         “Then we must assume we are walking into a trap.”

         “A reasonable assumption,” Father said affably. “But what sort?”

         “He could have his guards arrest us on one pretense or another, and what could we do without proof?”

         “Assuming he is present during the audience, I could reveal his true form in an instant,” Father said. “Which, I have no doubt, he knows I can do. So if his guards are present when we arrive at the designated place but the magistrate himself is not, we can safely assume that your scenario is the correct one.”

         “You seem rather calm about that possibility,” I said.

         “What are our options, Daughter? We could flee this kingdom, but under the current tensions, that is risky in itself. Assuming we are able to pass to Chu or Jin safely, what then? We might re-establish ourselves, if we didn’t starve first or turn to banditry, which would not suit any of us. No, Daughter. Our fate lies here. Today we must face it, whatever it may be.”

         I had no answer, but Mei Li had grown more and more thoughtful as we walked.

         “Honorable Pan Bao, you mentioned a ‘designated place’ we are to meet. Is that not the magistrate’s home?” she asked.

         “No. I was told we are to meet at the magistrate’s lakeside pavilion. It is just outside of town on the north road.”

         “If it is typical of such places,” I said, “it will have been built out on the lake itself, reached by either a bridge or causeway long enough to allow for privacy. It’s the perfect place for dalliances, poetry readings and the like but also for ambushes, for one who controls access.”

         “Yes,” Father said. “The thought did occur to me. If his mental state is not a sham, our only real hope is that he will be foolish enough to be present, as I mentioned.”

         “That is the one thing which gives me pause,” Mei Li said. “The possibility that his condition is a sham makes no sense to me. Why would he deliberately draw attention to himself? For a fox pretending to be human, that’s the last thing he would want.”

         Now my father was stroking his wispy beard again as we walked. “Mei Li, you make an excellent point. And since our survival may depend on the magistrate’s faculties or lack of same, it is perhaps a crucial one.”

         “Only one way to find out,” I said grimly.

         We left Chengdhu village by the northern gate. I looked for signs of any large groups of soldiers previously on the road, but as a prosperous and well-positioned village, Chengdhu had a great deal of traffic on both northern and southern routes through the village and beyond, and it was impossible to make any distinctions among the chaos of footprints and wheel ruts. Still, I kept a close watch on the trees flanking the road for any signs of a lurking force. We walked for a while behind a caravan headed north, but they soon outdistanced us, and before long we were alone.

         “Now would be a good time for an ambush,” I said. “No witnesses.”

         Nothing happened. I wasn’t exactly disappointed, but I was surprised.

         Father shaded his eyes. “I can see the pavilion ahead.”

         So could I, now that I bothered to look. In fact, the pavilion was in view for almost a bowshot before I saw the lake beneath it. The pavilion had been built to resemble a temple, and was taller than it needed to be, with white arches and a golden spire crowning it. While the structure was open, there were curtains hung along its entire perimeter that could be lowered in the case of inclement weather or just for privacy, but they were fully raised at the moment. The term ‘lakeside pavilion’ was a bit of a misnomer; the entire structure was built well out over the water, and the bridge to reach it looked to be a good hundred paces long.

         As was to be expected, there were guards. What was not to be expected—at least by me—was that there were only two of them, standing sentinel at the approach to the bridge.

         That can’t be all. Where is he hiding the rest?

         Look though I might, I could see no others, not near the road, nor on the shore of the lake. Except for one or two fishermen further out on small boats, there was no one save the one small figure seated in the center of the pavilion. Of course I could not see his face, but there was little doubt in my mind that there sat the Magistrate Shi Gan, waiting for us. Alone.

         Strange.

         “Mei Li, do you sense anything?” Father asked.

         “Other than the presence of the magistrate? I feel something, but I am not sure what. A threat, perhaps, but I cannot tell where it is directed.”

         I frowned. “Not at us?”

         Mei Li sighed. “I would assume so, and yet...I cannot say. It is possible there are other forces at work.”

         “We knew we must be on our guard, but there is no sense delaying the inevitable,” Father said. “We have a summons to obey.”

         We approached the guards at the bridge head, but they were clearly expecting us and silently moved aside upon our approach. We walked out upon the bridge and started toward the pavilion where the magistrate was waiting. I halfway expected archers to appear on the opposite shore from the tree line and begin firing at us, but I quickly dismissed the notion. It was simply too far, even for a proper marksman, and the closer we got to the pavilion, the less likely such an attack would even be attempted, since the magistrate himself would be in harm’s way. The shore remained empty, the fishing boats intent on their own business. There was simply too much about the situation we did not understand, and that alone was a very dangerous thing.

         Perhaps that was the threat Mei Li discerned—our own ignorance.

         Regardless, I knew that ignorance was soon to be remedied, one way or another. I put my hand on the bawu in my sash, but it was just a wooden flute and offered no comfort. We entered the pavilion, and as we had seen from the shore, there was no one there except for the magistrate seated in state upon an oversized chair.

         “Greetings, Honorable Pan Bao .”

         We all bowed, and Father spoke. “We are answering your summons.”

         He inclined his head toward us. “We have matters to discuss, but first I think a bit of privacy is in order, don’t you?”

         He raised his hand, and all the curtains gently lowered themselves as if pulled by invisible servants. I looked around, half expecting soldiers to materialize out of thin air, but nothing of the sort occurred. Only now every lantern within the pavilion suddenly lit itself to compensate for the lack of sunlight.

         Father looked around, an almost-smile on his face. “Impressive, Your Excellency.”

         The magistrate sighed. “I note that you may be impressed, but what you are not is surprised, yes? You know what I am.”

         “I had thought you were possessed by a fox, but that was clearly in error. You are either a shape-shifting fox or a fox-devil,” Father confirmed. “Considering your skill at magic, we must assume the latter. I gather you invited us here to settle the matter?”

         “Precisely,” said the magistrate. “And I’m afraid there is only one way open to me.”

         Father had already produced his magical peachwood sword, and Mei Li held her own sword, transformed from the bawu she carried. I had reached for my own without thinking, but instead of a flute I now held a bronze jian, the twin of Mei Li’s sword.

         It worked?

         I was so startled at my success that I almost missed what happened next. The magistrate clapped his hands, and there was an expression of delight on his face; it was only this which pulled my attention away from the sword.

         “Excellent!” he said. “You do not disappoint.”

         Father had his peachwood sword at the ready, but he used his free hand to stroke his beard.

         “Our failure to disappoint implies expectations on your part, Your Excellency. How can that be, when you barely know us and claim to have no real idea why we are here?”

         The magistrate, to my astonishment, actually looked a bit sheepish. “Well... Honorable Pan Bao, I must confess that this was a lie of sorts.”

         Father smiled, and I looked from one to other, trying to ascertain what, exactly, was going on. Father continued, “I had assumed it was a member of your staff who had written to Governor Sun Fu in your regard, but it wasn’t, was it? It was you.”

         The magistrate sighed. “That is true. My reasons need not concern you, but yes, and now that you know that I am an imposter, it is your duty to kill me, a course which I see your two charming ladies are more than prepared to follow.”

         Mei Li glanced at me, but I didn’t need her warning. This was Father’s game now, and it was his turn to throw the dice.

         “I am afraid that your reasons must concern me,” Father said. “You call attention to yourself, your pretense at madness—”

         “—is barely pretense, I assure you. I am going mad. I feel myself slipping away, bit by bit. If my behavior seems strange for a human, imagine how it would look to one of my own kind. Keeping my thoughts and words coherent? That takes the sort of focus that I am rapidly losing. It is only a matter of time until either my true nature is revealed or my loss of wits forces those around me to act, regardless.”

         “So you brought us here—”

         “To kill me, yes.”

         This again? I glanced at Mei Li, but her expression would have done a stone god proud.

         The magistrate frowned. “Why hesitate? Your course is clear.”

         “I trust you will not die quietly?” Father asked.

         Magistrate Shi Gan just shrugged. “Oh, I think it appropriate to struggle. I cannot say that I am anxious to die, even though in truth I arranged it. So I will fight. I could even win, as I am not without resources. But it will surely be over one way or another before my guards can reach us. If you are dead, I will simply claim that you tried to assassinate me. If I am dead, the sight of my true form will be more than enough justification for your actions.”

         Now Mei Li and I exchanged glances, because now I knew we sensed the same thing. And it wasn’t simply the promise of a life or death struggle with a fox-devil.

         “Father—” I began, but Father raised a hand for silence.

         “None of this,” he said, “explains why, if you were weary of the charade, losing your way in this human form which is not your own, you did not simply leave.”

         The magistrate frowned. “What are you talking about?”

         “Simply what I said. If you are a fox-devil impersonating the, I presume late, Shi Gan, you could simply stop doing it, if the game had become tiresome to you. Slip away, in either human or fox form and be rid of the burden. Why didn’t you do that?”

         “You don’t understand,” he said.

         “Clearly. Enlighten us,” Father said.

         The magistrate sighed. “I’m going to call my guard. I advise you to kill me before they arrive—”

         He didn’t get the chance. Father, moving faster than I had seen him move in quite a while, darted forward before the magistrate could react. When he withdrew, there was a paper ward stuck to the magistrate’s forehead.

         “How dare you...,” the magistrate began but somehow forgot to finish.

         Father smiled a grim smile. “As I suspected. That ward would dissolve a normal transformation of your type, only it didn’t. And why is that? Could it be because your transformation was not of your own doing?”

         The magistrate plucked the ward from his head and tossed it aside. “I swear I will call my guards—”

         Father laughed. “Feel free, though we won’t make convincing assassins if we have no weapons. Jing, Mei Li—disarm.”

         Without a word Mei Lei’s sword was a flute again. I struggled to remember the correct technique, then glanced at my sword and realized that it had already reverted to its true form without my help or intention. I was at once relieved and more than a little annoyed.

         “If you are intent on this ‘assassination’ charade, go ahead. Just know that we were sent to help you,” Father said. “And that is our mission. But we cannot do so unless you help us first. Either call the guards or tell me how you came to be here.”

         “It would have been simpler if you had just killed me,” the magistrate said, and he looked like someone who had lost the battle before it had even begun. “Very well, I will tell you, for all the good it will do. It’s true I had first assumed human form as a lark, but not as Shi Gan. I took the form of a humble scholar and joined Shi Gan’s household with the intention of making mischief. Turns out that he was as fond of pranks as I am. We became friends, despite....” The magistrate hesitated, but my father finished the thought for him.

         “...despite the fact that he knew what you were?”

         “It’s hard to believe, I know, but I have no reason to lie to you.” He paused, then added, “About that, anyway.”

         I looked at Mei Li. Not that difficult, ‘magistrate.’

         “Well, one thing led to another, and I remained a part of Shi Gan’s household longer than I intended. Before I knew it, two years had passed by. By then I realized he was not in the best of health. He concealed it well from the family, but I knew. When his magisterial appointment came, I strongly advised him to refuse, but he would not hear of it. So I accompanied him on the journey. Unfortunately the stress of travel worsened his condition. He died two days before our scheduled arrival.”

         Father looked thoughtful. “And that’s when you took his place. But there is more to this than you’ve said so far, isn’t there?”

         “I think you knew he was a minor son, perhaps fourth or fifth, I lost count. His older brothers were groomed for great things, but no one expected much of him and that irked him quite a bit. He was the one who pushed for an official appointment, not his family. He was determined to prove his worth. I had no doubt Shi Gan would have done well, but that was not his fate. I was with him at the end, and he made me promise to take his place so that at least he could accomplish this one thing, even if by proxy.”

         “So you agreed,” Father said.

         The magistrate sighed. “In truth I agreed merely to comfort him, but upon his death I found myself compelled to honor the promise in every regard! I assumed his appearance. I used my arts to disguise his body so that the rest of our entourage thought it was I who had passed away from an undisclosed illness. His body was buried along the route, and I became magistrate in his place to honor his commitment.”

         Mei Li frowned. “Compelled? What do you mean?”

         He smiled wistfully. “Lady, I mean exactly that. I’m a fox. Believe me when I tell you that I had no intention of honoring that promise, fond of the man though I was. And yet somehow I had no choice! I cannot change back—I’ve tried. I cannot kill myself because that would stain Shi Gan, whose promise I am compelled to honor. Half the time I cannot remember if I am a man pretending to be a fox or the reverse. It’s maddening!”

         “It is also a complication,” Father said. “Your agreement, even if insincere, may have created a karmic debt. I’m afraid, even if we kill you, there’s a chance your body would remain as it is, and thus we would be outlawed as assassins, not devil hunters. Your Excellency, we both have a problem.”

         The magistrate sat back in his chair wearily. “I am open to suggestions, but I frankly see no way out of my own dilemma short of death.”

         “Because of your promise to a dead man.” Father stroked his beard. “Perhaps there is something we have both overlooked. What were the circumstances of your—meaning Shi Gan’s— burial?”

         The magistrate blinked. “Why does that matter? I wasn’t actually dead.”

         “No, but he was,” Father said.

         “Well, I was told everything was done properly, or as best they could under the circumstances. I’m not familiar with the procedure, but Shi Gan’s own priest conducted the rites, so I know they were done competently.”

         Father smiled. “Yes, I’m sure all was done with proper respect and correctly to the degree they were able, but in whose name?”

         The magistrate simply stared at my father for a moment, but then his mouth formed a little ‘o’ of surprise. “Lin Bingwen. It was the name I was using as a human.”

         Father nodded. “I thought I sensed something other than a fox. If you will indulge me for a moment....”

         Father lit a stick of incense using one of the lantern flames. He muttered something I could not hear. Suddenly beside the magistrate another figure appeared, translucent but distinct enough—a mirror image of the magistrate. Father bowed and addressed the figure directly.

         “Honorable Shi Gan,” Father said. “I think you’ve put your friend through quite enough on your behalf, don’t you?”

         The spirit returned the bow. We could see its lips moving, but I could not hear the words. Even the fox-magistrate appeared confused, straining to hear. After a short while Father nodded, bowed again, and the magistrate’s spirit-double slowly vanished.

         The magistrate appeared as surprised as I was. “That was—”

         “The real Shi Gan, of course. When Shi Gan was buried as Ling Bingwen, the lack of funeral rites in his own name left his spirit free to accompany you. It seems Shi Gan himself compelled you to honor your promise, not the promise itself,” Father said.

         The magistrate’s astonishment was evident. “You mean I am finally free?”

         “Not quite, but your late friend has agreed to release you from your promise. Under one condition.”

         The Magistrate sighed. “Anything.”

         Father smiled wider. “I think another funeral—for the correct person—is long overdue.”

* * *

         The one temple at Chengdhu village was lit up like a sun. As we watched from our balcony, even more lights blossomed through the windows.

         “That will be the ‘Jade Reflection of the Numinous Treasure’ ceremony,” I said. “It shows the spirit of the dead the way out of darkness.”

         “Why are we not in attendance?” Mei Li asked.

         I looked at the light. “Since my mother’s death, I have not handled funerals very well, so Father thought it best. You’re here to keep me company.”

         I could feel the intensity of her gaze even before I turned back to look at her.

         “Why else am I here?” she asked.

         Since I didn’t know what else to say, I took a breath and told her the truth. “Because there are parts of the ceremony where talismans are handed out and protections against spirits are created for those present. Father was still uncertain about what effect they might have on the magistrate, and, well....” I didn’t finish. I didn’t have to.

         “On me,” Mei Li said simply.

         I sighed. “Father didn’t want to take the risk. It was for your own protection.”

         “Perhaps there is no point,” she said softly. “We both saw what prolonged time in a body not his own was doing to the magistrate.”

         I had been both expecting and dreading this, but to my own surprise an answer came to me.

         “He was fine for two years. Fine? Say rather he was enjoying himself immensely. Then the time came when he was human, not because he wished to be but because he was forced against his will. Are you where you are against your will, Mei Li?”

         She considered the question, and for an answer she resumed her snake-devil form. One moment the Mei Li I knew was there, and the next she was gone, replaced by a coiled serpent no less than twenty paces long, with a brilliant green and yellow diamond pattern on her skin and a body as thick as my leg. I couldn’t suppress a gasp. Another moment and she was Mei Li again.

         “I’m sorry if I startled you,” she said. “But I wasn’t even sure myself. It seems I am not. I am exactly where and what I wish to be.”

         “I am glad of that,” I said, and meant it, yet I thought it best to change the subject. “I wish I could have seen the look on his counsellors’ faces when the magistrate ordered them to arrange his own funeral.”

         Mei Li shrugged. “Doubtless they saw it as another manifestation of his madness, but if your father is correct, the spirit of the real Shi Gan will finally be laid to rest, and his attachment to this world and Lin Bingwen’s promise to him will both end. Yet that still leaves an issue.”

         I shook my head. “Father thought of that. The magistrate wrote two letters before the funeral began. One was to his family stating that he has decided to join a monastery in the mountains. The other was to Governor Sun Fu, thanking him for our assistance. Together they should ease the way for the magistrate’s eventual disappearance and our own safe return to the capital.”

         “Then we had best prepare for our next journey,” Mei Li said. “I noticed your success with the bawu at the magistrate’s pavilion. While I was unable to address it at the time, I must say I was pleased, and would very much like to see that again.”

         So would I.

         I took my flute in hand, speaking with all the confidence I did not feel. “Certainly.”

         Now, I thought, if I could just remember what I did right that time.... I tried, but the answer was—apparently not.

         “Damn, another spike.”

         Mei Li frowned. “Young Mistress, it seems we both still have work to do.”

Copyright © 2018 Richard Parks

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Richard Parks is an ex-pat Southerner now living in central New York state with his wife and a couple of grumpy cats. He is the author of the Yamada Monogatari series, just concluded with Yamada Monogatari: The Emperor in Shadow from Prime Books. In addition to appearances in several Best of the Year anthologies, he has been a finalist for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

SILENCE IN BLUE GLASS

by Margaret Ronald

         Not long after my release from the convalescent wing of St. Thecla’s Hospital, I received an invitation to join my brother Theodric for dinner. It would be inaccurate to say that this was the first contact I had from him since I went off to war in the uncanny lands to the north—certainly I had received encouraging letters from him and from my sister, and the sisters at St. Thecla’s assured me that both of them had been to visit me not long after the great retreat, though in my condition I could not have been expected to remember. This was some years back, of course, before some of the elements of our alliance with the Fair-in-Exile had become clear and while we in our border city were still hoping to return to normality. Dinner invitations were, I believed at the time, one way the Swift family tried for that return.

         At the time of his invitation I was living off my veteran’s pay, which though adequate to keep body and soul together was by no means guaranteed to remain sufficient. I had fallen out of touch with what few division-mates had survived the war, and while I had hopes of employment, they were hopes only. In such a situation, a renewing of family ties seemed prudent. I sent my response by post, as Theo had never been fond of the mechanical sparrows that had been introduced into the city shortly before the war. The next day I packed a small kit and followed my letter on foot.

         Theo lived on the edge of town, in one of the neighborhoods that had grown up quickly in the past decade. The houses stood close as soldiers, the style of doors and windows aping those of the more well-off neighborhoods on the other side of the river. None of those houses would have used such new glass, though, giving these houses a bright-eyed, over-earnest feel, and all of them were positioned so that they did not face the delicate spiraling towers of the Fair district, so that they could pretend to a vista of human lands alone. Having walked half a day from my flat in the river district, I felt distinctly out of place as I approached, and in all honesty I did not expect Theo’s welcome to change that.

         The first indication I had that something was awry was that Helene, my sister-in-law, had gone to the country to assist my sister with the birth of her second child. Theo does not relegate all social duties to his wife (as that would draw her away from the love of financial minutiae that unites them), but to entertain without her seemed chancy. “Are you sure you don’t need a hand?” I asked, trailing after Theo as he returned from belowstairs with another list of changes to the menu.

         “Quite sure.” He paused at the door to the game room, checked off a line on his list, and rounded the stairs. “Helene and I have hosted plenty of dinner parties. Would you even know what to do?”

         “No,” I said cheerfully, following him upstairs. “But I remember Papa hosting plenty.”

         “Watching through the railing does not count, Arthur.” He gestured to the third floor. “I’ve put you in the sunroom, which gets most of the street noise. Will you have trouble there?”

         “I don’t believe so.” I had, after all, managed to sleep the past two nights running and so expected to be fine for a while longer barring surprises. I glanced up to see Theo regarding me with a flat mouth, eyes hidden behind his lenses. “What?”

         “It’s nothing. Try not to wake anybody if you have an episode.”

         I sighed, unwilling to explain that my own ‘episodes’ differed from those veterans whose wounds bled smoke or turned their flesh to plant matter or made them speak in tongues during moonlit hours (all of whom had shared my ward at St. Thecla’s). “Theo, if you don’t want me here—”

         “I do.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, then took off his glasses. “Go downstairs, have a drink, meet the guests as they come in. I’ve got to check on the towels.”

         I was very tempted to tease him about those towels, but teasing him had never worked when we were young and was unlikely to do so now. Instead I left him to his last-minute checks and descended to the game room. While I had some difficulty imagining Theo playing games that didn’t involve monetary policy, it was still a comfortable space with a chaise, chairs drawn up by the hearth (no fire was lit, as we were approaching midsummer), and even a baize-covered table. To my greater surprise, Theo had evidently developed an interest in mixed drinks, to judge by the small and elaborate bar tucked into the corner. I eyed the variegated bottles, considered when I had last had a drink and the context, and had water instead.

         I was just laying out a solitaire game of Hangman’s Habit when a chime in the hall announced that the guests had begun to arrive. I peered out to see Theo’s maidservant taking a set of bags from a tall, commanding woman and her shorter, stooped companion. “Ah, Theo, there you—” she boomed, then stopped, peering back at me.

         “Arthur Swift,” I said, extending my hand.

         “Arthur! Of course! I was just thinking, there was no possible way that Theodric could have gained such, ah, breadth, not within the space of a fortnight. Georgina Brennec, of the North Mountain Brennecs.”

         “Ah,” I said without comprehension. Georgina Brennec was tall for a woman, in her mid-forties by the look of her, her brilliant red hair bound up in a curiously out-of-fashion coronet. Her grip through dove-gray gloves was as firm as any colonel’s, and she had a very piercing look to her that indicated she had just calculated my net worth and filed it away for future reference.

         Theo cleared his throat on the landing. “I’m afraid my brother is not up-to-date on business matters,” he said. “The Brennecs own a mining concern in the north mountains.”

         Georgina laughed, the kind of booming laugh that alerts one that here is a person without a single regret, deserved or otherwise. “That’s a rather gentle way to put it.” Her companion finally claimed his odd, boxy case back from the bewildered maidservant and came to stand by Georgina’s side. “My brother, Quinn,” she said without looking. “He did insist on coming along. I expect he thinks he’ll get a commission out of it.”

         “Georgie,” Quinn Brennec said but left the reproof at that. I could not immediately tell whether he was older or younger than his sister, as his red hair had thinned to a ginger fringe and a number of lines had dug themselves into his face. He gave an apologetic shrug and offered his hand. “Good to meet you, Arthur. You’re the younger brother, yes? Marched off to war and went a bit—”

         Mercifully, he stopped there, before went a bit mad could be more than implied.

         Georgina cleared her throat. “Your brother has been so kind offering the use of his home for this party. I’d have hosted it myself, but our house is rather far out in the country and, well, it does help to have a space for these preliminary negotiations.”

         I shook my head. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

         Theo descended to stand beside me, folding away his little checklist. “The Brennec Concern is hoping to open up a labor contract with some of the people new to our city,” he said. His delivery was oddly flat, as if he were reading it off the now-secreted checklist. “As negotiations are a bit fraught at the moment, I thought it might help if I could offer some neutral ground for the initial meeting.”

         That did not sound in character for him at all, nor for the bank at which he was a junior partner. It also made me wonder why on earth Theo had invited me, since “not up-to-date” understated my business knowledge tenfold. But Georgina Brennec swept all disagreements aside—a familiar action for her, I thought. “A labor contract! Your brother is really too much, Arthur.”

         The door chime startled my question away, and by the time I’d shaken off my first instinct to duck behind cover, the maidservant had opened the door, and I realized why it had surprised me so. The door had one of the mullioned-glass windows that were popular in my parents’ day, and so a new guest should have appeared as a shadow through the curtains. But the figure who stepped over the threshold was much shorter than the window would allow, about the height of a four-year-old child. She wore a neat, navy-blue suit far too formal for any child, and her skin was brick red, a few shades darker than Georgina’s hair. Clawed hands clasped the handles of a heavy carpetbag, and even the shape of the head was not quite right, being a bit flat on top and mostly bald save for wispy white hair in a fringe over the large, pointed ears. Even the wide eyes were a brilliant shade of gold, crinkled at the corners in amusement.

         It was, in short, a kobold, one of the refugees cast out for choosing the wrong side in the recent war; that is to say, our side. I had been their guest briefly during the war but had seen few since leaving St. Thecla’s.

         She bowed neatly, first to the maidservant, then to Georgina, Quinn, and Theo, in order. “Good evening, Miss Brennec, Mr. Brennec, Mr. Theodric Swift. I am Mieni, and I have been appointed by my kin and kind to open negotiations with you.”

         “Good lord.” The words escaped me without thought. Both Theo and Quinn glanced at me, but I ignored them. “Mieni, is that really you?”

         The perceptive kobold peered around the corner and, seeing me, grinned, exposing quite a lot of pointed teeth. “Nom de solelh! My good friend! My friend Mr. Swift! I did not expect to see you so soon!”

         I set down my glass and crossed the hall to her, taking her hand in both of mine. “I haven’t seen you since before the retreat! You seemed so worried when I left – I’d guess you didn’t expect to see me at all.”

         “Nonsense, nonsen! Here, I said to myself, here is a man who fights an Ursa Davala to a standstill—he will survive what is to come. Has he not told you of this?” she added, peering around me at Theo.

         “No,” Theo said faintly. “No, he hasn’t.”

         “It’s hardly important,” I said. “It’s so good to see you, Mieni. I’d heard that your village relocated, but I hadn’t quite made the connection—”

         “You two know each other?” Quinn burst out.

         Georgina shook her head. “Sorry, all, Quinn’s a bit slow on the uptake. Don’t expect much from your portrait if you do commission him, Theodric; you’ll have to tell him where to put every brushstroke.” She clapped her hands. “But let’s not stand here telling stories in the hall. Send up your bags, Madame Mieni, and let’s have a seat. And a drink, if Theo’s got one.”

         He did indeed, and made a set of them to match, busying himself with shaker and strainer. I let Mieni tell the bare-bones version of how we’d met during the war (after the disastrous Battle of Cire, in which most of my division was scattered), while I found a seat by the hearth. Quinn, for his part, began unpacking the case that I only now recognized as an artist’s kit, complete with a small prepared canvas and paintbox. If he were truly angling for a commission, as his sister said, he was not taking any half measures.

         “So when the children find Mr. Swift, of course they bring him to me, as I am—ah, the title does not translate. How did you phrase it, Mr. Swift? ‘The one to whom we bring the bodies.’ Not euphonious at all, and so much nuance lost, but it covers the reason.”

         “In rough shape, was he?” Georgina chuckled and cast me a glance as much appraising as amused.

         “Enough that the children were not sure whether to find me or a mètge, a physicker! I am afraid, Mr. Swift, that in the days before you regained consciousness I used you as a lesson. You were, after all, evidence of how close the war had come to our doorstep.”

         “I’m just sorry to have brought it there,” I said. Theo was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite place. Exasperation was his usual state with regard to my ill-considered decision to join the army, but something like disappointment ran through it now as well. I finished my water and turned away to see Quinn looking from one to the other of us with a knowing, rueful smile. He scratched absently at one of the reddened patches on his wrists.

         Mieni waved away my regrets. “Blame rather the Usurper, who started that war, may her reign fall as cut grass. But, benanan falhida, without her war I and mine would not have come to this great City, and I and mine would not have found ourselves in such a position to contract with Miss Brennec!” She bowed, and Georgina merrily raised her glass.

         I leaned forward, setting down my glass. “So what exactly is this contract—”

         Another chime at the front door interrupted me, and Theo looked up, smiling. “Ah. That would be the final two to round out our table.”

         Quinn glanced out the window and muttered a curse under his breath. Mieni’s eyes narrowed, and she rose from her seat as a tall, broad-shouldered man strode into the room. He was sandy-haired and practically glowing with health, enough to make even Theo seem small beside him despite their even height. The woman on his arm was much younger, perhaps just out of school, but she had a cool composure to match her short brown curls. That composure hardened, or crystallized, as her gaze lit on Georgina Brennec. “Hello all!” the man said. “Sorry to be late, but you know how these things—”

         He saw Georgina, and an equally drastic change came over him—though in the opposite direction as his young lady. A wicked delight rose to his smile, and Georgina Brennec returned it like coals under the bellows.

         Theo edged past them. “May I present Jeremiah and Anastasia Greene. Another drink, anyone?”

         I have never been accused of being swift on the uptake, but it did not take the skills of a Helene to notice the shift in the air, particularly as Jeremiah Greene let go of his bride’s arm. “Georgie,” he purred. “I had no idea you’d be here! How are you, my dear?”

         “Jeremy, dear.” She glided over to him and smirked as he kissed her hand. “And who is this again?”

         “I think I’m missing something,” I murmured as Jeremiah made his hurried second introduction and Anastasia presented Georgina with a reserved smile.

         “I think you can guess at it,” Mieni said.

         Quinn murmured on the other side of me, “Georgie and Jeremy were a bit of an item off-and-on for several years. More on than off.”

         I thought about asking when that had changed, but a second glance told me the answer: it hadn’t. Theo, meanwhile, seemed blindly happy that all his guests were finally present. “Well. Shall we go in?”

         Dinner would probably have been delightful for the sort of person who enjoys the theatre, particularly the sort of rife-with-misunderstanding comedies that have always left me wincing. Theo, showing the same social acumen, had seated Jeremiah Greene and Georgina Brennec next to each other, with Anastasia across from her husband and unable to break into their conversation. Instead she had oblivious Theo on one side and morose Quinn on the other, and I am afraid that Quinn showed more interest in talking to me than to her. Mieni was across from me, next to her ostensible business partner Georgina, and to top it off Theo had failed to account for the difference in body size between human and koboldim. Mieni preserved as much of her dignity as possible when sitting on piled cushions, and halfway through the dinner she took advantage of a moment’s inattention to discard them and simply kneel on her chair like a child. Even if I had known what to do in this company, the combined awkwardness would have erased any social acumen.

         As Theo’s butler Vickry removed the soup course, Mieni cleared her throat. “Your pardon for interrupting this dinner, Mr. Theodric Swift,” she called, though the only thing she’d interrupted was Jeremiah and Georgina’s flirtation, “but I have a gift to present, and it is a fair custom among us koboldim to share such gifts over food. May I use this time, then?”

         “Certainly,” Theo said after a moment, seemingly taken aback. “Yes, of course, go ahead.”

         Mieni took from her bag a small box, about the size of two thick books. “In honor of the offer of comity between the Brennec Consortium and the koboldim of Three Wells, a mark of our work.” The room seemed to quiet, as if we’d been moved underwater, and she opened the lid to display a ball of deep blue glass, luminous with reflected candle-light and etched with dizzying patterns.

         Georgina laughed and clapped her hands. “Excellent! And certainly appropriate for our agreement! Almost makes me wish I had more of an appetite, since we’re meant to share this over dinner.”

         “Yes, could you explain a little bit of this business, Miss Brennec?” Anastasia said it all sweetly, but only Jeremiah missed the slight stress on business.

         Georgina nodded in assent. “Easily, my dear girl.” Anastasia’s eyes narrowed. “Look at your plate. What do you see?”

         We all looked at the plates as Vickry set them down; Vickry, uneasy from the attention, retreated as soon as he’d set Mieni’s down. “Fish?” Jeremiah hazarded.

         “Not the food, you old silly, the plate!”

         I pushed aside greens to reveal dishes much like those my parents had had: white porcelain with a delicate blue pattern. “Smalt,” Quinn murmured beside me.

         “Oh, pooh, Quinn. Just because you’ve heard this so often doesn’t mean you get to spoil it.” She grinned at my confused expression. “It’s really his own fault for tagging along to so many dinners lately. I just hope it’ll improve his commission rate.”

         “I’m still in the dark, Georgie,” Jeremiah said, tapping his fork against his plate in a way that made Theo wince. “Isn’t smalt a kind of fish?”

         “It’s a pigment,” Quinn said, not quite raising his voice over Georgina’s giggle. “Blue paint, for use in ceramics or oils. It’s made up of tiny pieces of blue glass. Sometimes called—” He paused, raised his head, and stared at Mieni. “Sometimes called cobalt blue.”

         Mieni raised her water glass to him. “Indeed, the name is accurate. The trick of extracting it from the ore without poisoning oneself on the arsenical fumes—that was our trick to begin with, and one my kin taught yours long ago. And thus the glass was given our name. Miss Brennec and her consortium have asked my kin and kind if we would partner with them in both extending their mining and investigating new ways to extract our name-given element.”

         “Good smalt is difficult to make, but it is in high demand,” Georgina said. “We haven’t come very far since your ancestors taught us, though. But I am hoping that with your help, we could expand the mining, set up new furnaces, make enough smalt to supply a legion of painters. Who knows, we might be able to set up a whole new blue glassworks, possibly using some of the skill that made such a—”

         She touched the blue glass ball, and her next word was swallowed up, as if she had suddenly receded from us. I startled, dropping my fork, and even that clatter was muffled.

         Georgina withdrew her hand, returning sound to us. “Good heavens,” Theo said.

         Mieni cleared her throat again. “Your pardon, Miss Brennec, but the gift is not the glass itself. The gift is silence, kept in blue glass. See, when the ball is touched once, it dampens sound.” She lifted the ball from its cushioning, and again the air seemed to go heavy and distant, muffling all noise in the room. “Held thus free of its case,” she cupped it so that a single blue gleam showed, “the silence is directed.” She turned it slowly, and it was as if silence were a wave, crashing over me and passing on. “Held by two, or passed between, it may keep their speech silent to all others, or make all others’ speech silent to their ears. There are words telling other specific uses within the box; I leave their discovery to you.”

         “Judas, that’s strange,” Quinn murmured.

         Mieni held her hands over the cushion and let the ball drop. “—thus,” she finished. “We koboldim may only have small magics at our hands, and ones that take time to craft, but they are good and they are ours, and we guard them as we guard our more material skills. Though,” she added with a glance at me, “perhaps I should have chosen a different trade-gift.”

         “I’m fine,” I said. I was not fine. The magic was innocuous, yes, but the blur of sound and silence had shivered some memories to the forefront. I looked down to be sure my hands were where I thought, and the table still wood and immobile, and the floor still beneath me.

         I was not very aware of the rest of the dinner, as my concentration had to be spent on not fleeing the table. I must have finished it with some semblance of courtesy and been escorted to the game room, since when I next noticed my surroundings, I was seated in one of the chairs by the cold hearth, and no one in the game room seemed to be wary of me. Though for two of the party, I doubt anything short of a frothing fit could have interrupted them. Jeremiah and Georgina had claimed the chaise, passing the glass ball between them so that the noise level in the room dropped and surged like waves, and every now and then they would cup it between their hands and exchange a few words in silence, then laugh together.

         A sigh beside me alerted me that I was not the only one in the hearth-chairs; Quinn Brennec slouched in the other with a drink in hand, eyeing the two on the chaise. He gave me a grim half-smile. “Could be worse.”

         I nodded, glancing over my shoulder. Mieni was inspecting the books on Theo’s shelves, while Theo was again at the drinks table, talking to Anastasia, who did not appear to be hearing a word. “Did I—did I say anything, just now?”

         Quinn shook his head. “You’ve been looking a bit green all evening, though.”

         “I don’t do well with magic.” Everyday stuff, like the sparrows that carried our messages, or the occasional brush with a draugar or the smokeweaving that had briefly been popular in my youth, that was not a problem. Other things, though, could set off unwelcome memories.

         “I thought you were friends with the goblin there.”

         “I am. But koboldim aren’t known for their magic.” Mieni’s ear flicked back toward me. “I’d rather not talk about it. I see you’re a painter—what are you working on?”

         Quinn grimaced. “Nothing, apparently; not any more.”

         He would have gone on, but Anastasia appeared at his shoulder. “Gentlemen,” she said, her voice a lovely low contralto. “Is the conversation over here any better than over there?”

         I groaned. “Oh, Judas. Did Theo try to explain microfinance to you?”

         Anastasia shook her head. Her gaze darted up to the chaise and back. Quinn followed the look. “That doesn’t bother you?”

         “Should it?” She smiled, confident in a not-entirely-comforting way.

         Quinn tried again. “I suppose you know that Georgie and your husband—er—”

         “I know a lot of things, Mr. Brennec. I only choose to act on some of them. For example, I know that’s a wig,” she added in an undertone. Quinn chuckled. “To change the subject: Mr. Swift, I understand you too are looking for work.”

         If I’d been drinking, I’d have choked on it. “I—no, I’m afraid not. Where did you—” I glanced over to where Theo was very carefully ignoring me. “Ah. Theo said something, did he? I’m afraid he’s mistaken.”

         She raised one dark eyebrow. “Are you certain? He did give you a good recommendation, and as we’re expanding our export business, we do have need for a clerk. Two clerks, but as Miss Brennec has made some arrangements –” She nodded to Quinn, who raised his glass and grunted assent. “Well, we could use you, if your skills are as your brother says.”

         “There’s no need.” The room stilled a moment, and I thought briefly that I’d spoken too loud, but it was just another effect of the blue glass as Jeremiah and Georgina passed it back and forth, giggling. “I’ve got that well in hand, though I appreciate the offer.”

         Anastasia nodded. “Very well.” She returned to Theo, presumably to give him the news about his obstinate little brother.

         Now it was my turn to sigh. Quinn chuckled. “I take it your brother also has ideas about how your career should go?” I nodded. “Georgie’s always had the better head for business; we both know it. I just wish she didn’t grudge me my art. I’m going to make a rotten clerk.”

         “You’re the younger one?” He nodded. “I can’t fault Theo, really. After our father passed, he really believed he had responsibility for us, and he wanted to be sure we were raised right.”

         “Sorry to hear that. How old were you?”

         I picked up my water glass and found it empty. “Nineteen.”

         “Ah.” He chuckled. “I think I see.”

         “He means well.”

         “God save us from those who mean well.” He levered himself out of the chair. “I’m going to need another drink, if I’m going to be starting my career a clerk in the morning. You?”

         “Maybe later.”

         I closed my eyes, then opened them when the footstool dragged near. Mieni settled onto it. “Mr. Swift. I should offer apologies for bringing the ball.”

         “I’ll be fine. It’s just memories. You know.”

         “I do.” She tucked her feet up beneath her. “We had an easier passage through the mountains, I think, but even then it has been difficult for some of us. I am glad to see you, though, and to see that you are doing well.”

         “And the same for you. I had heard you made it out, but I wasn’t in much condition to visit till recently.”

         “Then visit you shall. Tuesday, I think, or perhaps Friday? I will make you a proper salad. Not to say that your brother does not keep a good table,” she added after a moment. “But I think greens were not his cook’s strong suit.”

         I smiled. “It’s been a disappointing dinner all around, I think. Did you get a chance to negotiate with Miss Brennec?”

         She shrugged. “I will in the morning, I hope. In truth, some of the elders have concerns about our role in her contract, and I had thought to find out more detail...ah, it can wait till after her amor is concluded. I think we will have much to discuss.”

         I shook my head at that. “Judas, what a mess. It’s because Helene isn’t here; Theo wouldn’t know awkwardness if you pushed his nose into it. Not that I know much more, but, well.”

         “Does he not?” Mieni asked thoughtfully. “Then he has a rare gift for creating it.”

         “That’s Theo.” I hesitated. “He’s trying to get me a job with the Greene export business. I—already have one. I applied to the Quarter.”

         Mieni blinked, then smiled, lips pulling back from her long teeth in delight. “That is wonderful, Mr. Swift! So you shall be an Inspector, one to whom they bring the bodies?”

         “Only Patrol. I’m likely to get in; they need people, and I may get promoted eventually. Theo knows that,” I added, reluctantly.

         The smile abated a little and a knowing nod accompanied it. “Ah. And still he seeks to divert you.”

         “He means well,” I said for the second time.

         “So do all siblings.” She turned her gaze again to the cold hearth, then rose to her feet. “Mr. Brennec! Is there a tonic perhaps at the bar?”

         Quinn seemed startled to be addressed by a kobold but nodded to the bar. “You’d have to ask Theo. He seems to know his way around it.”

         He turned just as Georgina rose from the chaise a little unsteadily, enough that Jeremiah caught her waist to help her. “I believe I’ll turn in. Mieni, can we continue our conversation in the morning?”

         Though they had shared little conversation to continue, Mieni offered her a short bow. “Indeed we may, Miss Brennec.”

         Georgina nodded to her and to Theo, then to Jeremiah (who winked at her in a way that made me embarrassed to even be in the same room), and headed upstairs. Theo held up a deck. “Who’s up for a hand of trionfi?”

         Mieni grinned. “If you will explain the rules.” I covered my face with my hand to hide my reaction; Mieni had won most of my money and a good portion of imaginary money in games of trionfi while I recovered, and every time, she had protested she didn’t really know the rules. Still, if Theo was going to host such an awkward dinner, maybe he had this fleecing coming to him.

         “I think we’re fine over here,” Quinn said, settling in. “Georgie’d probably blame it on my ‘artistic temperament,’” he added in an undertone. “Might as well use it while it’s still an excuse.”

         I raised my empty glass in a futile toast, and he clinked his own against it. “I—have tried my hand at the occasional painting, now and then,” I offered, a bit shyly.

         “Hm? What’s your preferred medium?”

         I hesitated—I’d been allowed watercolors, at St. Thecla’s, and my best work hung in a sister’s cell there, but there is a shyness that affects amateurs when speaking with professionals. “Pen and ink, mostly. Nothing special.”

         “Nothing special? And I suppose the goblin there really doesn’t know the rules of trionfi.” I shrugged to hide my pleasure at the compliment. “Don’t put yourself down. If we don’t claim our status as artists, who will? Myself, I work in oils mostly, though I start in pencil. Here.” He brought over his canvas and drew a few quick lines, catching Theo’s look of increasing consternation. I chuckled at the accuracy of the expression but felt considerably outclassed. “Not that it’s likely to make a difference, now,” he said, setting it back by the case of paints. “I suppose clerks have to learn to work with pencil in a different way. Still; leave it for the morn.”

         We talked influences for a bit—Quinn had a liking for Turner’s work, while I was much more provincial and knew few artists from the world outside our City. Behind us, the card game slowly redistributed money (to Anastasia as well as Mieni) and broke up not long after. Quinn and I finished up around the same time, but I did not want to try the stairs, feeling a need to remain on solid ground a bit longer. “You sure you won’t go up?” he asked as he arranged bottles at the bar.

         “I’ll be fine here for a bit. Just thinking.” I glanced at him as he moved to the door. “Oh, Judas. Don’t tell me Theo’s started stocking absinthe as well.”

         “Hm?” He glanced down at the green drink in his hand and chuckled. “No, this is my private stash. Don’t tell Georgie—she teases me enough already.” I nodded and sank back into the chair.

         I did not rest well. I do not know how prevalent this is among veterans, but when an unsettling thought has me, it is hard to withdraw from it. Every time I began to rise to take myself upstairs, I remembered the very ground shifting underfoot, solid stone rejecting our feet, trees weeping blood and recoiling from our touch, cut wood screaming as it was set alight. Even closing my eyes didn’t help me hide from a land far on the other side of the border, and when I edged into sleep I dreamed of glass. Blue glass breaking, blue glass imprisoning me, my old drawings growing blue glass eyes and vomiting green smoke...the images are lurid to the point of ridiculous, now that I come to write them, and yet at the time I took comfort that they were not as brilliant as reality had once been.

         I woke expecting to hear the stones of the hearth shrieking, and it was not until the second shriek that I realized it was not my dream at all. I lurched out of the chair and stumbled into the hall and up the stairs in time to see the Greenes emerge from their room, just as puzzled as I. Quinn Brennec followed a moment later, and Theo peered down from the second landing. At the door of Georgina Brennec’s room, a maidservant was in hysterics.

         Georgina Brennec lay on the floor, soiled bedclothes trailing back to the bed, the red wig knocked from its place on the bedside table. It had not been a quick or an easy death; she had vomited and voided herself, but even that had not been enough to purge her agony. She had been robbed not only of life but of dignity. “Judas,” Jeremiah whispered. “Is she—”

         “Georgie?” Quinn said in a small voice behind me. We all moved aside to let him through, and he bent to touch her forehead. “Georgie,” he repeated softly, as if calling her to wake up.

         “What is going—” Theo pushed through, stared, and recoiled. “No.” Mieni, two steps behind him, drew a long, hissing breath. “Everyone out,” Theo went on. “Out, now.”

         Quinn didn’t pay any attention to him, instead taking the red wig from where it had fallen and draping it over his sister’s thinning hair. “There you go,” he said, and started to rise—stumbling, to be caught by the Greenes. His shoulders started to shake, and he put his hands over his face.

         “Who has a sparrow?” I asked. No one responded, and I turned to face them. “Who has a sparrow? We need to send one to the Quarter right now—call for an Inspector. This is murder.”

         “No!” Theo caught at my arm, eyes wild. “There’s no need for that,” he said more calmly. “If everyone would just step out for a moment—”

         “Theo, what are you doing?” I whispered.

         “The Quarter?” Jeremiah scoffed. “That corrupt bunch? They’re for someone stabbed in a tenement, not this.”

         “They’re notably less corrupt these days,” Anastasia noted, distantly.

         “Not my point, Stasia!” He pushed Quinn at her and hurried to the side of the body. “Why didn’t I hear anything? We were right next door—” He stopped, staring at the far wall. We all turned to see the blue glass ball, or what was left of it. Fragments glittered on the carpet among larger shards, their dizzying patterns now lost and mundane. He wheeled toward Mieni, who was now at the sideboard, inspecting a chocolate-stained china cup. “You! You miserable goblin! You killed her!”

         “I have done no such thing, Mr. Greene,” Mieni said, turning the cup around.

         “You as much as admitted it last night! Arsenical fumes, right—the things that your damn cobalt produces! You gave her that ball full of arsenic!”

         Mieni turned to face him. “You have absolutely no basis for that accusation, Mr. Greene, and I would thank you to withdraw it. My sorrow that the gift of silence was thus misused to cover her death—look, even Miss Brennec realized it, though too late.” She pointed to Georgina’s outflung arm, and I realized that the line of it led to the shattered glass. Her last act before her death. Perhaps she had realized why no one heard her cries; perhaps her attempt to be heard was the final strength she had. “Did none of you hear anything last night?”

         “I—no,” Jeremiah said. “I heard very little outside our room.” Anastasia shook her head, though not too soon to cover a quick smirk that she very quickly realized was out of place.

         “You, Mr. Swift? You, Mr. Brennec?”

         Quinn shook his head, still leaning on Anastasia and refusing to look at his sister’s body. “No,” Theo and I said simultaneously. “I was downstairs,” I added, as if my rumpled clothes were not their own explanation.

         “Will you please all leave the room?” Theo repeated weakly.

         Jeremiah cast him a scornful glance, then bent and gathered up Georgina in his arms, heedless of her condition. Mieni made a muffled sound of protest, but no more as he laid her down on the bed and drew the stained coverlet over her. “Come on, Quinn,” Anastasia said.

         Theo started to follow them out, but I collared him at the door. “What on earth is wrong with you?” I demanded. “Send someone for the Quarter, now, or I’ll do it myself!”

         “This isn’t how I meant it to go!” My shock must have shown, because he shook his head. “No—no, not that! I offered this dinner as a meeting place because one of the senior partners asked me to. He doesn’t want the Brennec contract to go through, so he asked me to sabotage it.”

         “So you invited the Greenes,” I said slowly. “I thought that was tone-deaf, even for you.”

         “Yes, but that—that was all! But I, I did mention it to Helene, and if the servants heard—if one of them decided to—” His gaze went to the sideboard and the cup that had held chocolate.

         I let out a long, slow breath. “Are your servants really so loyal that they’d risk prison just to help your career?”

         Theo blinked. “I don’t know.”

         “Let us hope they are loyal to you, Mr. Theodric Swift.” Mieni joined us at the door. “They may yet exonerate you if they are. Tell them to cease all cleaning at once. Not a single dish may be rinsed.”

         “I—you heard her,” he said to the maidservant, whose horror had turned to fascination as the drama unfolded. “Tell Vickry to hold everything as it is.”

         “But there’s the breakfast waiting, and the rooms—”

         “Everything. Unchanged.” Theo shook his head. “I hope you are right, Meeny.”

         “Mieni,” she corrected, and as he turned away, beckoned to me. “Mr. Swift, please. I would have the advantage of your eyes.”

         I followed her back into the room. Jeremiah Greene had pulled up a chair next to the bed and sat staring at Georgina’s face. “She looks older, like this,” he said as we joined him. “I never minded that she was older, but this—she really was starting to show her age, wasn’t she?”

         Mieni did not answer, instead taking Georgina’s hand in her own and turning it over, inspecting the fingernails, which were warped and bitten to the quick. No wonder she had worn gloves. “I suppose so,” I said for lack of anything else.

         “I was going to see her, last night. I would have joined her.” He gave a little shudder, again for uncertain reasons. “Do you—if I had, do you suppose she’d still be alive?”

         “Perhaps,” Mieni said with I thought a startling lack of tact. “Why did you not do so?”

         He turned red and looked away. “I was distracted.” I thought of Anastasia’s smirk and her lack of concern last night—the young wife believing she had nothing to fear and, in this case, proving right. Jeremiah looked up. “You don’t suppose Stasia—no, she was with me all night, she couldn’t—”

         “I think you should go downstairs to your wife, Mr. Greene,” Mieni said. He nodded and rose. “And do not leave,” she added. “Do not leave, do not allow anyone to leave, do not even think to try leaving.”

         He turned pale but nodded again. I waited till I heard his feet on the stairs before speaking. “That was a bit harsh, Mieni.”

         She snorted. “His lover has had the bad taste to grow old, while he marries young. Should I be sympathetic, when had he not rekindled his amor with Miss Brennec perhaps I could have spoken with her. Perhaps I could have prevented this.” She sighed and lowered Georgina’s hand to the bed. “So much is all perhaps.”

         “You don’t suppose Anastasia could have poisoned her? I don’t know how she could have done it, but if there’s anyone with cause—”

         “She did not believe she had cause, Mr. Swift. I think I will let her opinion stand.” Mieni ran one clawed hand over Georgina’s face, smoothing away some of the contortions of death, and twisted two of her thinning hairs between her fingers. Age had not been kind to Georgina; her hair was not as thin as Mieni’s white tufts, but it was close. “Look, Mr. Swift. What do you see?”

         I looked down at poor Georgina Brennec. “I see she died in pain.”

         Mieni’s hand stilled, then withdrew. “Ah, Mr. Swift. You are a kind man. I think that, maybe, is why you have taken so long to recover. But set aside that kindness for now. See: she had been in pain for some time.”

         She held up Georgina’s hand again, pointing to the warped fingernails. “This is not the first time she had been poisoned. Nor even the tenth, I think. But last night was not the result of slow poison finally taking effect. This was acute, a large dose.”

         I glanced sidelong at her. “Who poisoned her, then?”

         “That should be obvious, Mr. Swift. You do not observe? But knowing who does us no good without knowing how, or why now.”

         I shook my head, feeling as I often did around Mieni that I was lost in a fog while she navigated ahead. “Perhaps there’s something present now that wasn’t before—the contract, maybe? The glass ball?”

         “Perhaps.” She eyed the fragments. “I regret the gift more and more. If I had thought more, if I had considered, then perhaps...”

         “The contract, then? Something about the contract?” I turned away, picked up her chocolate cup. It was one that had belonged to my parents, white with a lacy blue pattern of butterflies. “If it was so big a contract that Theo’s senior wanted him to stop it, it must have been important. He invited all of us here, after all.”

         Mieni sniffed, unconvinced. “That is some of why now, I think—more cover, more who might have reason, more suspects to hide behind. But without a source of the poison that we could point to before a court, this is all so much smoke.”

         I thought of the vomited green smoke in my nightmares and shivered, setting down the cup. “This whole thing—contracts, bankers, dinners—it seems just a lot of fuss over pigment.”

         Mieni drew in her breath with a hiss. “Say that again, Mr. Swift!”

         “Ah—a big contract, Theo’s senior partner, a lot of fuss over color?”

         “Color! Sang, Mr. Swift, that is how! I am a fool for not looking more closely!”

         We hurried down to the game room, Mieni two steps ahead of me. Theo was in the hall, explaining something to Vickry, but she pushed them both aside. Inside, the Greenes were on the chaise, Jeremiah clasping Anastasia’s hands and staring at her as if to read her thoughts, while Quinn had turned his back on this domestic scene to pack up his canvas. “Mr. Brennec!” she called. “You are not packing that up with so little done, are you?”

         “Oh, go easy on him, you little ghoul!’ Jeremiah snapped.

         “He doesn’t need to paint,” Anastasia said more evenly. “He’s got a job with us, a clerkship.”

         “Offered last night? At his sister’s request?”

         Anastasia nodded hesitantly. Quinn still stood with his back to us, one hand on his canvas.

         “But Mr. Brennec, you work in oil paints, or so I understand from your conversation last night. Are your paints mixed, then?”

         Quinn turned to us with a face like stone. Even Anastasia drew a sharp breath at the sight of his expression.

         “Mr. Swift, his case,” Mieni said.

         I stood before Quinn and bent to take the case from him. “Don’t,” he said softly. “From one artist to another. Don’t.”

         I met his eyes. “She died in pain,” I said. I had seen enough of that already, and I had failed to stop it here too. I took the case from his hands.

         I opened it to reveal several small pots of powder and a tin of linseed oil, unopened. One pot was nearly empty.

         “In vert vertadier. Scheele’s Green, I believe that is called,” Mieni said. “Arsenical green. A dangerous pigment to work with. If we were to look in your room, would we find traces of this in a glass? One that you brought her before bed?” She ran a claw around the lid of Scheele’s Green. “How long have you been poisoning her, staying with her so you might be sure she never goes a day without your paints?”

         The chime of the doorbell startled us all—all save Quinn, who it seemed would not be moved again. “I suggest, Mr. Theodric Swift, that you let the good Inspector in,” Mieni said. “I sent my own sparrow as soon as I heard the scream this morning. After all, in this your City, I am not the one to whom they bring the bodies.”

* * *

         The City Inspector took our stories, took Quinn and his paintpots, and took away Georgina as well. He gave me a curious look and said he recognized my name from the applications but let it stand at that. When all was done, I stood in the game room where Quinn’s easel had been, watching the Greenes depart hand-in-hand.

         Theo joined me at the window. “That was awful,” he said. “I can’t imagine why you want to be involved with that on a daily basis.”

         I thought of my reasons, then decided not to list them, as Theo would doubtless find fault with each. “I think I figured out why you invited me,” I said instead.

         There was a moment’s pause. “Oh?”

         “You wanted this to be at least awkward and at best a catastrophe for the contract.” Which had been the case. “And you knew a kobold would be joining you. So you invited a veteran, and one you knew had been unstable in the past.”

         Theo was silent.

         I turned to face him, but he did not look at me. “Did you really think I’d have a, a break of some kind? That I’d lash out at Mieni because she reminded me of the war?”

         He sighed. “I don’t know. I thought—I don’t know.”

         I was silent a moment. “My application to the Quarter stands, Theo. Thank you for inviting me.”

         He let me go without speaking further. I see him now and then, still, but matters are unlikely to be the same between us again.

         Mieni was outside as I left, turning one of the shards of blue glass between her claws. “You will be well, then, Mr. Swift?”

         “Reasonably.” I thought of telling her Theo’s motives, but she probably could guess at them anyway. Brothers meant well, after all. “And you?”

         She nodded. “I think so. I may ask the Quarter to be lenient, given that Mr. Brennec may have been poisoned in his own right.”

         “How so?”

         She held up the shard so that it caught the light, blue twinkling like a lost gem. “You saw the rashes on his hands, the hair he had lost. Arsenical green is not the only poisonous color. Cobalt blue can also poison, to the point of madness.” She smiled, but it was a sad one. “So it seems we koboldim have done our harm to the Brennecs twice over.”

         I thought of Quinn’s thoughtless skill, of his sister’s contorted face. “I think,” I said finally, “that the poison had been laid long before any color came into it.”

Copyright © 2018 Margaret Ronald

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Margaret Ronald’s short fiction has appeared in such venues as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and over ten times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including a series of stand-alone stories set in the same steampunk world that began with “A Serpent in the Gears” in BCS #34 and includes “Salvage” in BCS #77 and “The Governess and the Lobster” in BCS #95 along with four others, as well as an ongoing series of fantasy mysteries beginning with “A Death for the Ageless” in BCS #134 and continuing in “Sweet Death” in BCS #161 and “Murder Goes Hungry” in BCS #182. Soul Hunt, the third novel in her urban fantasy series and the sequel to Spiral Hunt and Wild Hunt, was released by Eos Books in 2011, and she was a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Short Story Award in 2017 for “The Witch’s Knives” in Strange Horizons. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston. Visit her website at mronald.wordpress.com.

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ANGRY KINGS

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

         The closer you get to the city, the less you see it. From far away, approaching from ten miles down the dusty road, the white-brick windmills gather breezes with their turning metal blades at the edge of the walled arena. The highest nobles’ houses preen around the perimeter of Royal Square. Smoke and an eerie red light waft from the great bonfire. The top of the palace’s tallest turrets shine tipped in gild.

         Up close, the trees seem to grab with their dried-out branches, dead for twenty years at least, since well before the time I left the city. Grasses sway by the roadside, thick enough to hide people like me: escapees from the throne. Arena fighters roar. A child cries from inside one of the huts outside the gates. It seems like a contradiction, that you should see less from this distance, but it’s just the law of perspective.

         When I lived under the same roof as my father, the king, I believed his excuses for why the storytellers called him Philip the Malignant: evil makes for better villains. When I moved away, I realized that they had every right to call him that. His actions, after the death of my mother, had ruined the kingdom and hurt his people in every way imaginable.

         I stopped before the gate and its protectors, two burly knights, and breathed in the air of home: cold but fresh, filled with the odor of sweat and blood and shit and my own nostalgic pain. I saluted the knights as they crossed their spears over the entrance.

         “Who are you?” one said through her visor. Not one of my old friends, then, or had I changed more than I thought? The other remained silent and stared at the road ahead.

         I let my hand fall back to my side. “You know me as the Lady Magritte. If you know me at all, that is.”

         “Magritte!” the silent knight exclaimed, her helmed head creaking to face me. “The Lady of Cards! You’ve rounded out since you left us.”

         I squinted at her hidden eyes. “Who is trapped beneath all that metal?”

         The friendly knight straightened again and focused her gaze back on the road. “It is Samira, my Lady,” she said.

         “Sir Samira.” I nodded my respect. “You have grown too. When I last saw you, you were but a child sneaking her way into our games.”

         “I must send word to the king,” the other said. She reached up and pulled a rope that dangled from the top of the gate; a bell rang in the distance. Another knight appeared on the other side of the wrought iron bars. “Please alert the king at once! His daughter has returned.”

         The king sent his personal guard to fetch me. They gave me a horse to ride. I was grateful after the long journey by foot. The king’s men led me around the maze of circular walls the king had ordered erected around his palace when I was a little girl.

         “Do you know why the king takes men for his guard but leaves women at the gates?” I asked as my body swayed to the horse’s rhythms.

         “He does not trust women with his deepest secrets,” the knight who rode beside me said. “I do not fault the king this.”

         “Well, you wouldn’t say if you did, would you?” I adjusted myself on the saddle. “Because if you did, he’d cut your head off. But no. That is not the reason. Well, it is and it isn’t. Would you like to hear the true reason?”

         The knight sighed. “I imagine, my lady, that you are going to tell me anyway.”

         “He does not trust anyone, my father. But he has less of a problem with severing the heads of men than of women, so when you knights of his guard do break his trust, he can enact his full revenge. The women he sends away, into the woods. He’s a chivalrous, man, my father.”

         “He is,” the knight said. “The king is gentle to his core.”

         “A joke!” I said, though the knight did not laugh; of course he didn’t. “I didn’t realize my father paid you to be amusing.” I laughed to myself, the noise bouncing off the maze walls, until all around us resonated a mad cacophony. The knights did not react; they were used to misplaced laughter, to madness in its most frightening of forms.

* * *

         We daughters of angry kings tell ourselves terrible stories. We do this to convince ourselves that what we went through, what we witnessed, could have been worse.

         Take the king who lived three kingdoms away. When the local fortuneteller informed that king that his daughter would marry a common soldier, the king panicked. A marriage of no benefit was a waste of everything he wished for his daughter, whose beauty, of course, rivaled the sun. He locked her up in a tower where the sun could not reach her, but he also installed a peephole in the door. Through this peephole traveling princes would peek, admiring the pristine, chaste lady within. The king, after all, knew the value of a well-stoked mystery, of an untouchable thing. He received many offers. He held out for something better.

         Then came a soldier who longed for riches and a wife. On his way home from one of the king’s distant wars, this soldier met a witch in the woods who taught him her magic, spells of transformation, for the price of a kiss upon her long-ignored lips. The soldier made his way to the castle, turned himself into a dog with eyes the size of dinner plates, and snuck through the gates. The lady’s handmaidens cooed to find such a sweet animal in their halls. They let the dog into the lady’s locked room, where the soldier gazed long upon her sleeping face.

         In the end the soldier performed for the lady his impressive transformation and promised her an elsewhere life. With his puppy eyes, he won her heart, along with three wishes from the witch’s magic matchbox, a prize the witch traded him for a job in the castle. The soldier used these wishes this matchbox to pay the king riches beyond imagining, though of course the king had so many riches already he barely noticed the extra gold in his stacks. The lady married the soldier and moved into a new tower and birthed her own children, and the cycle continued happily forever after.

* * *

         They called me the Lady of Cards not because of my skill at games or divination but because of my ability to flatten myself like a card against the walls of the palace maze. Over and over again during my childhood I escaped using this trick of my body.

         It was the only spell I remembered from my schooling with the tutor the king tried to force upon me, a fake of a man who only taught me the spell because I would not stop begging until he did so. He preferred to train his ladies in the feminine arts, as he put it: how to make table conversation, how to remain beautiful while sleeping, how to speak riddling nonsense when a prince comes to court you. I retained no magic but that.

         After arriving again at the palace, after the king’s guard led me to the king’s throne room of stone walls and echoes, I stood before my father and wished that I could flatten myself from his view. He sat with his knotted white fingers twisted tight over the ends of his throne, which was no more than a fancy chair embellished with gold. His long silver hair was draped over one shoulder, covering half his blue velvet robes. His thin mouth twisted before he spoke.

         “Magritte, why have you returned?”

         I bowed low, a façade to earn his favor. I pulled the wrapped bundle from the end of my stick.

         “What is this?” he asked, but his lips trembled with fear. He stood from his throne and pointed one long finger at me. I unwrapped the cloth. Out drifted an amber haze. The cloud surged forward, toward the mouth that opened to unleash his command: “Seize her—”

         As two of his men lunged toward me, my father doubled over, a cough wracking his body with a furious shaking. I bolted toward the cold comfort of the wall. I made myself so thin that even the strongest of knights could not peel me from it. They did not try. Instead they rushed to save their king from what they must have been sure was an attempt at patricide and not, as I intended, a saving of my father’s life.

* * *

         There are other stories whispered by the daughters of angry kings. Take the king whose daughter fell prey to a sleeping curse despite the warnings of the local prophets, who could not bear the uselessness of a daughter who could not marry. He moved her sleeping body to the middle of his country and hid her in a tall tower and built a maze around her. In his own palace, he removed every memory that would prove she had once lived and breathed and ran vibrant through his courtyard playing games he did not teach her. In her new home, he left the door unlocked.

         Take the second king who found her and claimed her for his own.

* * *

         It was not until I lived outside the castle walls that I learned the truth of my father’s condition: his ghost no longer dwelled within his body. My mother died when I was a child, and though I remembered a time when the three of us picked moonflowers in the castle gardens and gifted those flowers to the children who ran through our courtyards, I thought my mother’s kindness had merely masked my father’s meanness. I believed that cruelty must be part of his nature, and as a result, it must be part of mine too. I worried that one day I would feel my father’s murderous rage, perhaps toward the knights who managed to catch me in my adolescence those failed times I tried to flee from the front gate into the whispering night. Contrary to my fears, I joked with them as they led me back to my chambers. I made friends with those most willing to bend from out of their servitude.

         My father existed as a temper taken form. Our dinners in the banquet room were filled with his outbursts over any number of slights I made, translated into mistakes my tutors and guardians had made in their training and caring for me.

         One evening I ate too quickly. My father sliced off the tip of the cook’s tongue for adding too much syrup to the marinade of the boar meat. He threatened that for each of these mistakes, he would slice another piece until the cook could not speak at all for the nub in his mouth. Another evening I did not wipe the sauce from my chin; my father ordered the cook to make a whole pot of the stuff and poured the near-boiling red over my tutor’s head. I did not answer his grating questions about my whereabouts in the afternoon; I had been calming Samira, not then a knight, not then a woman at all but a girl who needed me from time to time to explain the aches and pains presenting themselves to her like so many unruly suitors. He locked the knight who was supposed to supervise me into the dungeon, despite my too-late begging cries, where he forgot him until the man starved alone in his solitude.

         As I aged I learned not to step out of the lines my father stretched across my life; I learned to spare the lives of those who worked around my periphery. But he found anger in everything: in my very face, influenced by my mother’s olive skin, her narrow nose, her thick mouth, her pronounced cheekbones. If I ate too much. If I ate too little. If I weighed too much. If I weighed too little. Until I moved through my young years as in an indecisive fog, never sure which action might lead to outburst and which, if any, would garner his favor. I did not realize at the time how frightful each day had become, how laborious each breath.

         Until the day my half-hatched escape plan worked. I did nothing different, but when I broke from the inner city’s front gates and took off running, no knights followed me into the dark. I kept running only because I did not know what else to do, the fear of being on my own not yet seizing me. That would happen later, once I reached a safe place in the woods far from the road, where I made myself a camp beneath a giant fallen sheet of tree bark on a bed of moldering leaves.

         Later still, once I had sneaked then talked my way into a derelict chapel run by a devout young man in long black robes, worlds different from my father, I finally wondered at why this attempt above all others had succeeded. Perhaps the knights had let me go; many of them would be punished, but many fewer than would face punishment if I stayed within the castle walls incurring my father’s daily wrath.

         In the chapel, I helped to rebuild what had been lost. I had not been raised religious, and the young man called Milo who lived there did not talk of giving my life to any particular deity. Instead he focused on creating a space for any who needed comfort, rebuilding brick by brick the building where he would offer salvation in its many forms. I feared him, at first. In the closet he gave me to use as a chamber, I nailed a long board each night across the door so that, should he try to enter while I slept, I would hear him.

         Instead of anger, he showed me kindness and taught me how to bestow kindness upon others. We often brought apples from the chapel’s orchard to each door in the village or gathered the children for ball games so that their parents would be able spend a few moments dining alone or making love. I knew nothing of love, only that, had I stayed in the castle, I would have been expected one day to marry someone my father chose for me and that I had no interest in the carnal aspects of such an arrangement, though some nights I had dreamt of a partner who would take me away. That I had taken myself away seemed to alleviate any need. The kindnesses I was able to offer through my work at the chapel were enough to light a small flame in my chest that warmed me from the inside out.

         I struggled with the thought that one day my anger would emerge. Perhaps my father had been sweet as a boy and even as a young man; perhaps his true temperament had arrived with the first pains to plague his back or his first gray hair or the placement of a crown upon his head. I dreamt myself a monster, half bear with long claws, half serpent with two poisonous fangs behind my lips. As my distance in time from my father and the cold comfort I had known in the city and the palace grew, I slept less and less for fear that I would wake and the nightmares would have transferred themselves into the waking world. It was Milo who sat me down in the kitchens where he baked sweet bread for us and for the village’s holiday festivities and gave me two wet tea bags.

         “For beneath your eyes,” he said. “The shade beneath them has almost swallowed your whole face.”

         I took the bags and thanked him.

         “What are the nightmares that plague you?”

         “What nightmares?” I squeezed the bags until they dripped what water they had left onto the dirt floor.

         “At night you scream. I hear you all through the chapel.”

         I started to lie, then remembered the cook and his tongue and all the punishments I had incurred for lies. “I dream of monsters,” I said.

         “Of monsters? But surely those are the fears of children.”

         “I dream myself a monster.” I bowed my head, sure he would see it now I had spoken it aloud.

         “You fear you have a monster inside you,” he said. “I fear the same for myself. I understand this fear.”

         I looked up at him, at his earnest face, his kind eyes. “The place I came from. My father was a terrible man.”

         Milo nodded. “Some men are.”

         “My father—” But if I told him that I was a lady, he might be forced to send me back. “I fear I might have his anger in me. It scares me so much I can’t sleep. I wish I could stay and help you forever and live in kindness as you do, but I cannot sleep in a fantasy.”

         “Wherever you need to go,” he said. “Whatever you need to do.”

         “I will let you know,” I said, “when I know myself.”

* * *

         Take the princess, the friend of a friend of mine, whose father held a contest to marry off his daughter to the first suitor to find a way to kill the black crow that followed her everywhere she went and sent her into daily fits of despair. The crow, now that a member of the royal family was afflicted with it, proved an embarrassment to the throne, the source of whispers and budding disloyalty.

         The princess sent her own best friend, her knight, to find a weapon capable of piercing the crow’s feathers. The knight brought back bad news from the witch who lived in the woods: there was no such thing, but if the knight lured the creature away from the princess, if the knight took on the burden herself and lived deep in the woods, the princess would remain safe and unhaunted.

         The princess lived the rest of her days nursing her anger toward those who had abandoned her: a dead mother, a distant and cruel father, a loving best friend. Finally she stole the throne for herself, murdered the husband who had helped her secure her reign, and demanded more of her city’s people than they had to give: their money; their loyalty; the very blood from their fingers, a poor substitute for love.

* * *

         During one of Milo’s kindnesses, bringing food to the vagrants who lived in the trees, I came upon a cave with an upturned palm carved into the rock beside its entrance. I traced this symbol, the same symbol of the oracles who had served my father. I descended into the cave’s cold damp dark. Water trickled in the distance as I led myself along a narrow ledge, one palm pressed against the wall. With nostalgic delight, I pressed my body flat. Though the sensation reminded me of home, the glee of accomplishment after being so long out of practice made me cry out. My cry, too, echoed.

         Deeper in, the woman found me. She grabbed my flattened wrist and pulled me back to form.

         “I sensed your magic from miles away,” she said, her voice trapped between a growl and an echo from deep within her throat and not the cave. I was overcome by the smell of decay.

         She pulled me away from the wall. My foot slipped on the edge and then we were falling, air whipping across my ears. When finally we landed at the cave’s bottom, guided by whatever magic she had unleashed, I finally saw who had captured me in the light of a dozen candles situated in carved holders in the walls. The woman’s sea-green knots pulled back from her cave-pale face, her cat-like yellow eyes glowing in the dark; how had I not seen her coming? She wore a skirt of dried leaves on strings, and dead earthworms wrapped in spirals around her nipples.

         I rushed to the nearest wall and tried to flatten myself, but with a wave of her hand she wiped away my magic.

         “Are you one of them?” I said. “A teller of fortunes?”

         “Why are you creeping around my cave?” She bent to a pack on the floor and rummaged inside, pulling out a round glassy piece of candy that she popped in her mouth. As she came closer, I jumped at her advance. “I won’t hurt you.” She held out her palm, a second candy nestled within. “For you.”

         I took it. It felt like glass. “What is it?”

         “I will tell the truth if you will,” she said.

         I ran the sphere in my palm. It wasn’t candy at all but a stone of some sort.

         “Truth stone,” she said. “Give it a taste.”

         I pursed my lips.

         “You came here because you seek knowledge? You came here for truth,” she said.

         I popped it into my mouth and held it against my cheek; it tasted like the honeysuckle that clung to the fence at the chapel’s north-facing side.

         “It’s good,” I said.

         “Yes, well, don’t swallow,” she said. “Unless you want to be bound to truth for all eternity. Now why are you snooping around my cave?”

         I moved away from the wall. “I reside in the village.”

         “You were born in the village then?” The woman sat down cross-legged upon the floor.

         “I am originally from a city.”

         “And what made you leave this city?”

         “My father.” I sat down in front of her, my legs weakening at his mention.

         “I had no father,” the woman said. “I was born of magic, a consequence to a spell performed by two kind but greedy fools. They were given what wealth they entreated, but it came with a burden: me. Whoever sent me seemed to count on the fools’ kindness forcing them to keep me. They did, keep me, but we lived a spare life, hoarding our gold. I practiced spells to bring some color into my world. When they died I kept to a spare life but continued the magic that brought me so much joy.”

         “Are you worried about your own consequences?”

         “Yes,” she said. “Now tell me your story. I cannot help you if I know nothing about you.”

         I thought about spitting the stone out, about forsaking this chance to unload the burdens haunting me, this chance to know the truth of myself. But her face was kind. She had lived a difficult life too, one of the women from our stories come to life. “I’m the daughter of an evil king,” I said. “He hurt people in my name. I don’t know if I really wanted to leave, but I tried and finally it worked. I’ve been living in the chapel in the village, as I said, with a kind man. I am unhappy there, but I’m grateful for the time to heal a little. But the nightmares. I dream bad things. I dream myself a monster.”

         “What sort of monster?” The woman leaned in closer.

         “A monster inside me, trying to get out,” I said. “She is terrible. She is my true self.”

         The woman shook her head. “Monsters are made, not born. Your father was kind once. You have forgotten, but it is true. Once you loved him. He left something for you, inside you, but you have blocked yourself against recognizing it, against remembering its presence.”

         Metal clinked as the woman rummaged through the unknowable dark. She emerged with a pair of pincers she’d salvaged from some animal of the sea, red and horrible as she snapped them open and shut.

         “What are those?” I said, which was the wrong question.

         She knelt before me. I moved my head back and away from her, preparing myself to stand, to run, though there was nowhere to go in that closed-off den.

         “I promise this won’t hurt,” she said. I let her grab hold of my cheek and bend back my head, opened my mouth when she asked me to open it, let her reach her hand with the pincers inside across my tongue and down my throat as far as her hand and the tool would reach. They smelled like rotting fish and I nearly gagged, but then she pulled them out, slowly and steadily, and along with them came a silver shape that struggled and pulled and scratched against the sides of my throat then my mouth then formed a ghostly copy of my father’s form in the space between us, the pincers attached to the top of his head. I shrank away from him, from it, as I spat several globs of blood onto the ground.

         I tried again to press myself flat, but it seemed whatever protective spells the woman enabled were still present.

         “Why would you do that?” I said. The specter hovered in the same spot, his silver smoke twisting with the air. He searched frantic about the cave, but he did not settle his eyes on me or on the woman and he did not move in any direction. “And it did hurt, by the way.”

         She pulled her truth stone from a pocket sewn into her skirt; I had not seen her spit it out in the dim light.

         My throat stung, and my belly felt light, as though I had not eaten all day. Which was mostly true; I had eaten little when I usually ate much more from the chapel kitchens, with my appetite returned now that I no longer lived under my father’s terrible eye. This woman had brought him back.

         “Let me go. Make him go away.”

         “No, this is your father.” She gestured to the ghost. “That other man? He is but a shell.”

         “This is my father?” I stood and circled the ghost, who stopped and moved in a circle with me. “The other one is false?”

         “Not false. But not real.” The woman reached again for my hand. Into it she placed the stick handle of a bundle. “Wrap your father in the cloth. Take him to the chapel. Live there in peace, for as many days as you have left with him. The memories of this father may return to you. Know the father you never knew before.”

         “Thank you,” I said, unsure what else there was to say. I untied the cloth bundle from the handle and stretched it across my father. He shrunk into the shape. I tied it closed, leaving a hole for air, though the woman told me I did not need to take that measure. I hung the bundle from the stick and faced her.

         “You must leave now.” She gestured to the back of her den. “I have carved stairs into the cave walls back there. Follow those up, then follow the only ledge out. You are not far from the entrance. You will see your way.”

         I slung the stick over my shoulder. I removed the stone from my mouth and slipped it into my pocket. “I hope to meet you again someday.”

         She smiled. “You never will.”

* * *

         Take the woman, my mother’s mother, whose king brother loved her more than any brother should love his sister. When their daughter, my mother, came into this world, my grandfather told his kingdom that my mother was born from the leaf of a rose. As she grew, the kingdom compared my mother’s beauty to a rose; she collected roses in her garden, wondering always which one of them was her father, as the king would never lie. He was beloved by all who served him, even the woman who sat each night silent by his side and watched the little girl as a hawk might watch the mouse it both envies and adores and loathes in the same death-swoop of its wings. My mother bloomed like an overnight rose, and when she went to dinner, her true father was so taken with her, he abandoned his place beside the woman who thought she loved him, having known no other love but his for the whole of her life.

         “She is a treacherous witch,” my grandmother whispered to her brother in his sleep, to see how it sounded across her tongue. But it hurt her to say so, and she snuck into her daughter’s room and leaned over my mother’s bed and cried across her sleeping form. The next day the king sent my mother into the woods, despite her mother his sister my grandmother’s protestations, despite her insistence that the girl was theirs, not born from the leaf of a rose but born from her own body, even if they convinced themselves there was truth to their lies.

         The kingdom loved their king, but they loved the magic little girl more. They rioted outside my grandfather’s castle.

         “My sister has cursed me,” he said, throwing my grandmother against the rails of his balcony. He ordered her put to death.

         When my mother returned, he married her off to a prince in a faraway land and lived the rest of his days alone and chaste and haunted to his core.

         My mother kept a drawing she’d made of her wedding day pinned inside her dress. When I was a little girl, not born from a rose but born from a mother and father who loved one another first as an escape from their childhood cages and then as water loves the body it wraps itself fully around, my parents used to show this drawing to me. I traced their shapes and envied the solitude they shared before I came along; I wanted to have been part of their lives since the beginning.

         As I exited the cave with my father’s ghost wrapped in its pack, I remembered this warm envy, and the memory stopped me, for a time, in my tracks.

* * *

         Once I had regained my ability to carry on, I did not go back to the chapel. I did not want to experience the painful goodbye that would accompany that journey. Instead I walked north along the main road, toward the kingdom where I was born.

         The summer heat had stopped the bulk of the fruit trees from producing, but a little ways from the road there would be the occasional leftover apple, mealy on its limb, and wild onions and wild asparagus along the rivers whose paths danced along my own. I stopped at the local market to gather additional provisions: bread, boiled eggs, jerky, and dried fruit. I put the food on Milo’s bill, certain he would not mind, as the very existence of the bill was mere courtesy; Milo paid for nothing in that town.

         As I stood at the edge of the village, I looked back over the rooftops with the sun glancing off of them, the soothing bird songs of the forest, the warm smells of bread and meat and spice. I shifted the weight of my father’s ghost onto my other shoulder and walked on.

         Day faded to night. The closer we came to my father’s kingdom, the heavier the pack became. I panted, unused to such long walks even if the muscles of my arms and legs had strengthened from rebuilding the chapel, but each breath seemed less labored than it once had been. For a while no more memories came to me. Once the pack was heavy as stone, I heard the first noise rise through the blanket: a low wail, like the wind through trees. No wind blew on my skin.

         I stopped and placed the pack on the ground. I lay on the ground and placed my ear to it; the wail came from within. I shivered but hefted it once more and walked a few more miles. The wailing increased, louder and louder the further north I traveled. Sweat broke out on my forehead and soaked me under my arms. I stopped again. I could not go on like this; the wailing would drive me mad and the heaviness would drive me to an exhaustion I could not overcome even with my lighter breath.

         I untied the cloth. My father’s ghost burst from it and into the air. He hovered above me. He stared down at me, the lost look gone from his ghostly face.

         He opened his mouth. “My daughter,” he said, his voice strong despite the spectral body from which it erupted. I jumped.

         I reached toward the ghost, but my hand went through him. “Father.”

         “My daughter,” he repeated.

         I tried to get him to say more, but he would not or could not, and after a little while I grew tired and marched away in frustration. He followed.

         “My daughter,” he said.

         “Say something else!” I cried, my old anger at him returned, now mixed with a hazy warmth. “Anything else!”

         “Daughter,” he said. “My.”

         I continued down the road toward the city, each step hard upon the packed earth. My confused anger boiled in my belly, so much so that I did not long for food until the sun had set in its entirety, washing the road and the woods in pure dark, the moon’s light held back by a cloud-filled night. I spread the cloth that had once held his specter upon the forest floor a little ways from the road and settled face-down on the ground for what I knew would be a restless night of sleep. I shivered against the cool of the wind.

         I dreamt another memory: my father tucking me into bed one night, singing a lullaby, as my mother stood behind him.

         In the morning I woke to a brilliant sunrise’s warmth in my chest, as cozy as an embrace. My father’s fog spread over me, hovering above my body shaped like a blanket that trapped what heat there was to trap. I rolled out, suddenly wanting the touch of the fog gone. As I pulled back on my boots, my father twisted into his own shape.

         “My daughter,” he said. “Good morning.”

         “Good morning,” I said as my heart hammered in my chest.

         “Did you sleep well? You were shivering so badly I thought you would catch ill.”

         I could not help it: I smiled to hear such kind attention in my father’s voice. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

         I pulled a stick of jerky from my pocket and tore off a piece with my teeth.

         “You are taking me to reunite with my body?” he said.

         I nodded. “I am.”

         He pursed his ghost lips. “I will allow this. It is time.”

         The meat burned my throat with its spice. My eyes watered. “How did you get separated from it?”

         My father’s ghost turned from me and moved back and forth through the air. When he turned back, the blue of the sky filtered through him, an eerie hint that what he meant to say next might wound me.

         “I did it to myself,” he said.

         “To yourself?” My stomach sunk. “You hid yourself from me on purpose?”

         “I hid myself from you. On purpose. It was not my intention. But after your mother died—I could not go on. I needed escape, needed to leave that place with all its memories. But a king cannot abandon his kingdom.”

         “You left because of my mother?” I stood and paced until the ground showed both the path I’d taken and would take again and again, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. “What about me? I needed escape. I needed you.”

         He turned. “I needed escape.”

         “You said that already.” I bent and picked up a rock and lobbed it toward him; it went through him. He winced. I threw another one. “You’re a terrible father. You’re a terrible king.”

         “I needed escape,” he said again, his specter falling to the ground, where he melted like dew on the leaves. “Put me back in the cloth. Put me back and take me to the cave again.”

         I grabbed up the cloth and threw it over him. “No. I don’t need you anymore, but your kingdom does. You’re going back there. I’m taking you.” I folded him up and hoisted his heaviness back over my shoulder. I would ache all over by the time we arrived at the palace gates, but it would be the final price to pay.

* * *

         Take the story about the princesses who only wanted to dance each evening and were instead sold to the bravest bidder. Take the story about the princess who just wanted to sleep a full night’s rest without the vegetable smell emanating from beneath her mattress. Take the daughter who wanted a childhood, who wanted to run and play and remembered a time when her father played with her in the palace courtyard until she blocked out such happy memories. The princess who grieved at a young age two parents: one whose grave she could visit and the other who still moved through the palace and walked and talked like her father but who wasn’t him where it mattered: in his missing smile, in his words, in his missing laughter. Take that little girl. Take her away from there, someone, anyone. Take her and hold her in warm arms. It’s all she ever needed.

* * *

         Before you think me cruel: I stopped when I first came in sight of the palace gates. I opened the pack once more. I had calmed; my father’s ghost had calmed.

         I forced myself to face the ghost. “You said, at first, that you wouldn’t mind being returned. Is that so? Or do you want me to release you?”

         “Would you release me?” he said. “If I asked you to?”

         I pursed my lips, unsure. Then I nodded, recalling the drawing, the lullaby, the moonflowers’ too-sweet scent. “If you want me to let you go, I promise I will let you go.”

         He shook his head. “No, it’s time. Take me to the palace. Give me back to my body.”

         “Good,” I said. “I’m not quite sure if I was telling the truth about being willing to let you go.”

* * *

         After I released my father’s ghost in the throne room, after it climbed down his throat, I snuck into the room where the guards had sequestered him. They ordered several doctors, who examined the body and found it healthy enough but struggling against some foreign invader. I watched, flattened in the shadows as medics came and went all with similar diagnoses: they had no way to help him but to recommend rest and nourishment. Thus the kitchen was ordered to boil as much stock as they could manage, which the palace nurse poured down his throat. He did not speak and he did not seem to sleep, his dead eyes open to the ceiling.

         When finally, for the briefest of moments, he was left alone, I emerged from the shadows and approached the bed. I lay my hand against his. Still he did not stir.

         “Are you in there?” I said. “Please, Father, tell me you’re still in there.”

         From his belly I heard a small wail, like the one that had plagued me on the journey. I squeezed his hand as the door creaked open once more. I fled back to the wall.

         For three days I watched them try to heal him. For three days I watched him writhe on his bed at night when I most longed to rest. My eyes grew heavy, but I didn’t dare move from that spot, not even when my feet throbbed so badly I feared they may require amputation. Not even when I forgot, in my delirium, how to make myself full again and worried I might be stuck as wall and shadow forever.

         Finally, on the fourth day, he writhed one final time, and from his mouth the ghost broke free with a rattle fit for death. The ghost shook as my father’s body coughed, mucus spilling out of his mouth. The body rolled to its side then bolted upright. The ghost’s edges faded into the air, but I could still see my father’s once-kind smile in the specter.

         “Father,” I cried out, undoing my spell and rushing to the bedside despite the presence of a guard at the inner door. The guard rushed forward, spear outstretched. I dodged a jab, then another, crawling over the foot of the bed. “Father, make him stop.”

         My father’s body held up its hand. “This is my daughter.”

         “And that?” The guard pointed at the disappearing ghost.

         “That is no threat any longer,” my father’s body said. “Merely an illness, which I thankfully expelled.”

         I grasped at the ghost but could not catch hold. “Why are you dying?”

         “There is no place for that abomination in this world anymore,” the King of Anger, King of Fury, Philip the Malignant, my father, said.

         The ghost reached one hand down to me, but the hand was barely distinguishable from air, from a sorry cloud in a soon-to-rain sky. The fog was lifting to the ceiling, dispersing even as my father spoke.

         “You killed your own ghost,” I said.

         “I did nothing so dramatic. I only rejected the poison my own daughter tried to feed me.” My father held his head in his hands. “I am still weak, but that doesn’t mean your plot against me won’t go unpunished. Guard.” He gestured toward the guard, who lunged once more in my direction. Before he could catch me, I pushed myself against the wall, as thin as a card, as thin as a fog that pushed against the ceiling of a place it didn’t belong.

* * *

         Take the story we royal children told one another most often. Children with whom I used to play when they would come to visit with their king fathers and their prince brothers. The stories where, in the secret rooms where the kings conducted their businesses, we pretended they sat around in circles and, as we cried to one another about the ways our parents did not love us enough to fix themselves, they cried to one another about the ways they wished they could be more than they were. They wished they could change. They patted one another on the back. “There, there,” they said, the same way the little girl whose father eventually waged war against our kingdom said to me, “We have each other. We can do better. We can try harder.”

         In our stories our fathers spoke of happy kings, studied their examples, tried to crack open their successes. In our play room, we little ladies spoke of happy children: we braided flower crowns to show our fathers we forgave them, we traded big words we could use to impress them, we searched forbidden spell books for ways to bring our mothers back—sure that fixing these mistakes the world had made would make our fathers kind again. We imagined our fathers in their secret rooms consulting books on parenting; we were sure that one day they would stumble on good advice, would emerge from those rooms changed, would pull us close and promise never to be angry again.

         Take the lady, take all the ladies, who one day each decided to rid themselves of their own ghosts, to push down the tears they’d once expressed in the comfort of friends, to blind themselves to the want, to the longing. Take those ladies, those monstrous ladies, who followed in their father’s footsteps, trapped in palaces of people who did not love them enough because they knew no other way.

         I will not be one of them.

* * *

         Sir Samira leads me through the front gate. “This is the Lady of Cards,” she says to her companion at the watch.

         “So you’ve said.” The other knight waves me on. “They’ve since told me about you. I’m told it’s best for all of us if you’re not in the city to incur your father’s wrath.”

         As I stand far enough away from the palace that the guards can no longer see me, I take the lady of the cave’s stone into my mouth. I swallow. It is the opposite of removing my ghost; it is giving in to truth, especially the truth of myself.

         To understand the reason my father was a monster was not to forgive him. To sympathize with his shell, to have desired to turn off the well of pain that lived in my own gut, was not to let my anger at him free. But it was something, at least, to understand him, even if it left me feeling more like him than I had ever wanted to be.

         The fear returns even if I choose honesty. Fear feeds on vulnerability and the ability to ache. With fear comes the still-lingering dreams of monstrosity morphing inside of me, changing me. The coming and going of fear is as normal as the weight that clings to then falls from my bones as the weather changes, as the changes in how much I smile and laugh, as the fluctuations in the amount of time I am able to go without remembering him, without remembering my childhood.

         Some days I remember good things, new memories. It is easier to hate than to cycle between hate and love, a daunting task, more daunting than any other I have accomplished. I live as in my childhood never knowing which of my own temperaments will greet me with the fresh sun.

         Still, I will not remove my ghost no matter how strong the sorrow or the loss. Instead I will walk this road of uncertainty, the path that leads away from the city and toward it at the same time.

Copyright © 2018 Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

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Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies both literary and speculative including Clarkesworld, Fairy Tale Review, Lightspeed, and numerous times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and for Selected Shorts’ Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Award. Her audio fiction-jazz collaborative album, Strange Monsters, explored the theme of women living unconventional lives. She’s been reprinted in French and Polish, for numerous podcasts, and on io9. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program and created and curates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas. She is active on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle and on her website www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.

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COVER ART

“Legendary Passage,” by Jereme Peabody

Jereme Peabody is a software engineer in the DC area and is also a freelance concept artist, 3D artist, and game designer. He started his artistic career dabbling with clay sculpting, pencils, and eventually still-life oil painting. As tablets became available, he switched from oils to digital by first applying the skills he gained from oils to digital still-life painting. Through experimentation and practice, he transitioned from still-life to digital landscapes both real and imagined. Now, he’s merged his software engineering background with his artistic background to become a budding a game developer. You can view more of his artwork on his DeviantArt site and view him in action on YouTube.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2018 Firkin Press

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