Issue #235, Ninth Anniversary

Double-Issue • Sept. 28, 2017

“On the Road to the Hell of Hungry Ghosts,” by Richard Parks

“The Fisherman and the Pig,” by Kameron Hurley

“The Fall of the Mundaneum,” by Rebecca Campbell

“Grassland,” by T.S. McAdams

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

ON THE ROAD TO THE HELL OF HUNGRY GHOSTS

by Richard Parks

         I knew that Mei Li was still not entirely comfortable in her human body. She had worn it before, certainly. For a snake-devil such transformations were extremely useful for moving freely among humans and finding prey, but those were passing needs. Now that she was in my father’s service, her role as human-in-training required wearing her human form at all times.

         “Daughter Jing,” my father, Pan Bao, said to me from the fallen log where he rested at the roadside, “by all the Courts of Heaven, what is she doing in there?”

         ‘There’ was a small copse of tallow trees we had passed on our trek to eastern Qin. After our success in the affair of the snake-devil Jianhong, His Exaltedness Governor Sun Fu had seen fit to offer our services to an associate in the east, and refusing would have been both impolite and dangerous. We had been on our way there when Mei Li had suddenly excused herself and hurried off the road and into the trees. I could tell by the way my father scratched his beard that his patience was beginning to wane.

         “Perhaps she needed to relieve herself,” I said.

         He scowled. “Has she forgotten how?”

         “It’s possible she never knew, at least in the form she currently holds.”

         Father considered. “Good point. Go see if she needs assistance.” I had almost opened my mouth to protest when he added, “That was not a suggestion.”

         “Yes, Father.”

         There was nothing for it but to follow after Mei Li into the woods. The trees were thicker than I had thought at first, but there was a path, of sorts, leading through to the other side. To my surprise, I found Mei Li standing just beyond the trees, looking out over what at first appeared to be no more than a rocky meadow, until I realized I was not looking at natural rocks but dressed stones, badly weathered and covered in lichen and weeds. Whatever structure they had originally formed was long gone, leaving nothing but these fallen stones.

         “Pan Jing,” she said without turning around. “Don’t you hear it?”

         “I don’t hear anything.”

         That wasn’t entirely true. Just beyond the stone ruins there was a fast moving stream, and now I could hear the water tumbling over stones. Across the stream were more trees, from which came a chorus of birdsongs.

         “It’s very close,” she said.

         I had already drawn my bronze jian, blessed and imbued with multiple wards and charms against living monsters and things that death had claimed but not entirely bound. I had neither my father’s nor Mei Li’s skill in magic, but I could sense the presence of something unnatural.

         “Why did you come here?” I asked.

         “I heard it calling for help,” Mei Li said, “and came to discover the problem. It is our purpose to help people, is it not? The tenet of compassion?”

         Again, not entirely true. I mean, yes, one of the Three Jewels of the Tao was compassion, as my father would expound at great depth—and length—to anyone foolish enough to sit still for it, but in practice we asked a price for such assistance. Nor did we usually offer such services to creatures both invisible and unnatural, and I said as much to Mei Li.

         “Why not?” she asked. “Forgive me, but much of what is commonly accepted among humans is still strange to me. How does the nature of the distress and the identity of the supplicant change the tenet itself?”

         “It doesn’t,” my father said. He stood at the edge of the trees, glaring at us. “Is that what’s taking you two so long?”

         Neither Mei Li nor I had noticed his approach, so intent were we on what, though I could not see it, I knew was mere paces away and likely very dangerous.

         Mei Li bowed. “So we are obligated to be of assistance?”

         “Not at all,” Father said. “There is also the tenet of moderation, in my interpretation meaning the avoidance of extremes. Poverty is one such extreme.”

         “I don’t understand,” Mei Li said.

         I sighed. “He means, as I mentioned earlier, that we must view our ‘compassion’ in our role as devil-hunters as a service, not an obligation. We must make our living.”

         “Not quite, Sarcastic Daughter, but in this case an accurate enough assessment. The Tao is balance, and balance requires compensation. Ghosts don’t have gold or silver or even bronze. And we have employment awaiting us at journey’s end.”

         Ghosts?

         So that was what I was sensing. Ghosts were dangerous, certainly, but less so in open daylight. This one was likely hiding among the ruins of its crypt to avoid the sun’s touch. As long as we put some distance between ourselves and this place, there would be no problem.

         Father had already started back along the path to the road. “We’re wasting light. I want to be in Chengdu Village before sunset.”

         We didn’t make it, but not because of Mei Li’s delay. By evening it was clear to all of us that Father’s map was approximate at best. We appeared to be heading in the right direction, but otherwise there was no sign of Chengdu or any other village when we were finally forced to give up and stop for the night. We found shelter in a cave some distance from the road. There was a circular firepit inside to show that the cave had served the same purpose for other travelers, but it had clearly not been used in a long time. I gathered firewood while Mei Li searched the cave for any signs of danger. She had just returned when I came back with an armload of dead wood.

         “Nothing,” she said. “About a bowshot further in, the tunnel is blocked by a collapsed ceiling. Nothing larger than an insect could get through it. Pity. This place would have made a good lair.”  

         “A consideration that should no longer concern you,” Father said as I dropped the firewood by the pit. “Yet still, it is good. Now we only need ward the entrance and no one will know we’re here.”

         Mei Li glanced out the entrance to the cave. “I think she will know.”

         She?

         I stopped looking for my flint and striking stone and went to stand by Mei Li at the cave mouth. “Father, I think you should see this.”

         He joined us there and saw what we saw—standing no more than thirty paces from the cave entrance was a little girl, perhaps nine years old, finely dressed in silk of an antique pattern. To any casual observer she would have passed for what she appeared to be—a pretty little girl with long hair and big, dark eyes. We, however, were not casual observers and understood immediately that we were looking at a ghost.

         “She’s the one from earlier today,” Mei Li said. “I’m sure of it.”

         “Unlikely,” my father said. “Unless she is a yun guÐ.”

         Mei Li frowned. “What is that?”

         “A ghost who harbors some grievance,” I said. “Usually when ghosts arise, they don’t stray far from where they died or were buried. Yet this one followed us. Honestly, I would have expected a snake-devil to have more such knowledge.”

         Perhaps that last sounded more harsh than I intended, but Mei Li simply shrugged. “I could tell you quite a bit about snake-devils and other sorts of creatures. I’ve had little experience with ghosts.”

         “You heard this one calling out,” Father said.

         She bowed then. “As did you, Honorable Pan Bao, unless I am sadly mistaken.”

         Did Father actually look a bit guilty just then?

         He grunted. “Fine. I chose to ignore it. You should have done the same, but now she’s attached herself to us. I suppose we’d best find out why.”

         Father left the cave and headed toward the ghost, but in that instant, she disappeared. When he returned to the cave she was back, as if she’d never left. He rubbed his beard. “Daughter Jing, see if she will talk to you.”

         I followed Father’s instructions but achieved the same result. The little girl phantom vanished as soon as I left the entrance to the cave. When I returned to Father and Mei Li, she was back in the same spot. Father nodded, looking thoughtful. “Mei Li, you try now. Daughter, please get the fire started.”

         Again I looked for my flint and striking-rock, found them, and began shaving slivers of wood to act as kindling. Yet all the while I watched as Mei Li left the cave, greeted the ghost courteously, and was soon, as far as I could tell, in intense conversation with her. Father merely acted as if he had expected no less. I had a decent fire going in the pit before Mei Li returned. She appeared puzzled.

         “Well?” Father asked.

         “She is asking for our help, just as I said before.”

         “Our answer must be the same. Or does she intend to follow us indefinitely?”

         “I think she might.”

         Father grunted. “Did you happen to learn her name? It would make an exorcism much simpler.”

         “She merely referred to herself as ‘Lost Princess.’”

         Father frowned. “Did you say ‘princess’?”

         “I did. Or rather, she did. If her clothes and bearing are any indication, I would think she’s telling the truth.” Mei Li said.

         Father was still stroking, rather than simply scratching, his beard. I knew him well enough to know the wheels in his mind were starting to turn. “What does she want?” he asked.

         “To lie quietly in her tomb. She cannot do so without our help,” Mei Li said.

         “There is obviously more to this. Perhaps you should tell us all she said.”

         Mei Li nodded. “She said she was the sole princess of the Kingdom of Kai, and her father planned to marry her to the heir to another kingdom, thus uniting the two. Before that could happen, her father’s Chief Counsellor had her poisoned.”

         I blinked. “Why?”

         “Because he was having an affair with the queen, who was pregnant with what he believed to be his child. Removing Lost Princess would place his own heir on the throne if a boy, or queen of a combined kingdom if a girl. Or so he thought.”

         Another reason any such close officials of the courts tended to be eunuchs these days, I thought.

         “I have heard of Kai,” Father said. “I assumed it was merely a legend. Regardless, how could she know all this? She was just a child.”

         Mei Li smiled. “She was a ghost for a lot longer, and ghosts are good at moving silently and listening. Especially when they are barred from their tombs. The Chief Counsellor placed a ward on her tomb after she was interred; it seems he was worried that she might return as a ghost and seek vengeance. As her burial was conducted properly, he had no reason to believe her spirit would not remain in her tomb at least for a time. The irony is her spirit was confused after her death and remained close to the court as the only home she knew. When her body was placed in the tomb, she did not follow it right away.”

         “So instead of locking her in, the scheming Chief Counsellor accidentally locked her out,” I said. “But what happened then?”

         Mei Li’s face was expressionless. “Once she knew the truth, she went a little mad, and in her fury she drained the life energy from the Chief Counsellor. She claimed it happened before she even realized she was doing it. As for the Counsellor’s child, a boy, it was stillborn. She also swears she had nothing to do with that. Regardless, the lack of an heir led to internal dissension and war. It was the end of Kai.”

         “Unfortunate all around,” Father said. “Though if she’s telling the truth, the Chief Counsellor got what he deserved. But this doesn’t change anything. We’d lose two days by returning to her tomb to remove the ward, even if, as a compassionate act—”

         “She said, as she was a princess, there would be gold in her tomb.”

         Father blinked. “Gold?”

         Mei Li nodded. “Gold, silver, jade and bronze vessels. That sort of thing.”

         Father shook his head. “A stolen treasure is a cursed treasure.”

         Mei Li demurred. “She said we were welcome to as much as we could carry. She’s tired. She wants peace and rest so she can finally pass from this world. How can the treasure be either cursed or stolen if the owner grants permission?”

         “A good point,” Father said. “But the time lost...” He shook himself. “No, it’s impossible.”

         “Actually, the place where we found her was the ruins of the royal palace of Kai, not her burial site. Her tomb is quite nearby.”

         Father was silent for several long moments. “I suppose, then, I am out of objections. Tomorrow we will be glad to assist Her Highness. Please tell her so.”

         “As you wish.”

         Mei Li turned to go, but I stopped her. “Mei Li, I’m curious... did she say why she was only willing to talk to you?”

         The snake-devil in training to be human actually looked a little embarrassed. “She said I had a kind face. I cannot tell. Do I have a kind face?”

         I sighed, and though it annoyed me for reasons I could not express, I told her the truth. “You do, Mei Li. A very kind face.”

         “I hope one day to deserve it,” she said and went to speak to the princess. Father looked thoughtful.

         “Jing, did you notice anything strange about the appearance of the ghost?”

         I frowned. “Other than being able to see through her? No.”

         He nodded. “Exactly. All that remains of her now is a desire, even if that desire is to lie quietly in her grave. So why did she not turn into a hungry ghost?”

         I understood my father’s point. Normally one who died with unfulfilled desires or was greedy in life became a hungry ghost, twisted and distorted by the thwarting of those desires. Lost Princess was an ancient ghost but still a little girl, neither more nor less. I answered my father with my best understanding.

         “Because this was not a desire of her life and only arose much later. Still, if her situation continued... well, I would hate to think what might happen.”

         Father scowled. “Understand that I must always consider what is best for us,” he said. “And yet... so would I. Becoming a Hungry Ghost is not a fate I would wish on anyone.”

* * *

         The next morning Mei Li led us farther into the hills at the ghost’s direction, though naturally the ghost kept out of sight. We soon arrived at the entrance to a small valley, really little more than a canyon, marked by the remnants of a massive gate long since fallen into ruin.

         Mei Li closed her eyes for a few moments, opened them again and said, “Her Highness says this is the entrance to the royal necropolis of the rulers of Kai.”

         “Left completely unguarded once the kingdom collapsed. Likely the place was plundered centuries ago,” Father said. “I think this may be a waste of time.”

         Mei Li shook her head. “Not completely unguarded, according to Her Highness.”

         “We’ve come this far,” I said. “We may as well see what’s here.”

         My first impression was that Father was right. As we passed old rock-cut tombs carved into the valley walls, every one we saw had its entrance smashed in and the contents emptied ages ago, their ornate carvings and stone decoration mostly gone as well, long weathered away, their stone guardian images shattered or missing. The valley walls blocked the direct rays of the late morning sun, and we could see a few ghosts lingering about, but they were weak, pallid things, even allowing for the daylight, and no danger to anyone. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of Lost Princess timidly following us.

         “I doubt any of them remember who they were or why they remain,” Mei Li said. “I think this is... sad?”

         “Sad isn’t something you think,” I said. “It is what you feel. But yes, many would consider this sad. I do.”

         “It is what it is,” Father said. “Yet Daughter Jing is right in this respect, Mei-Li—sadness is a natural human reaction to a sad situation. If you ever begin to feel this emotion the way you might feel hunger or anger, you have taken a great step toward becoming human.”

         “What does sadness feel like?” Mei Li asked.

         “There are different types of sadness,” I said. “Grief, for example, can feel like being angry at everyone and hungry for something you can never have again, mixed with pain and regret and unfocused sorrow. It’s complicated.”

         Father grunted. “Daughter Jing lost her mother. It’s why she is angry all the time.”

         “Well...,” I said, sparing a glare in his direction, “it’s one reason.”

         “Do you still grieve for your mother?” Mei Li asked.

         “Always. Like a wound that closes but leaves a scar. It doesn’t really end.”

         “Being a snake-devil was much simpler,” Mei Li said. “No matter. I never thought this would be easy... ah. Lost Princess says to be on your guard; we’re getting close.”

         I frowned. “It’s a spirit-warded tomb. What is there for the living to guard against?”

         “I do not know, but she is rather insistent.”

         When we came into sight of an unplundered tomb, I still had no answer, but I understood the warning.

         “I count five skulls,” Father said.

         “Six, Honored Father... plus pieces of two more. Their appearance suggests they came to be here at different times.”

         “Apparently the later ones failed to heed the example of those who came before them,” Mei Li said. “That was greed. Something even a snake-devil understands.”

         The bones were scattered in front of a sealed tomb entrance. While the carving on the rock surrounding the opening had weathered no less than the other tombs in the fissure, the tomb itself appeared to be untouched.

         Father stroked his beard. “It seems we are not dealing with a conventional ward. Please stay back for the moment, all of you. Jing, Mei Li, be on your guards.”

         I drew my jian, and Mei Li took the bawu, the bamboo transverse flute she always carried, murmured something inaudible, and transformed it into a magnificent double-edged sword. I resolved to have her teach me that trick at our first opportunity, assuming we survived.

         Father drew his peachwood sword and held it out before him as he slowly approached the tomb. He muttered something under his breath, which was really more of a chant than a mumble, and then addressed the empty air before the entrance.

         “Show yourself!”

         The ward was no simple barrier; it was a giant with a massive club of spiked bronze. Its appearance echoed paintings of a guardian of the underworld which I had seen once in a temple—the same bulging eyes, the same armor of overlapping bronze plates, the same gnashing teeth. There was a shimmer to it in outline which suggested that the behemoth wasn’t entirely real. The bones scattered at its feet suggested otherwise.

         “Whoever conjured this one had great skill,” Father said. “Everyone stay where they are.”

         He studied the figure for several long moments, then let out a long, slow breath and took a step back.

         “This isn’t a creation of magic,” he said. “This creature was summoned from the underworld and bound here.”

         “So how do we get rid of it?” I asked. “Since defeating and destroying it physically seems unlikely.”

         “More than unlikely—impossible,” Father said. “But notice the shimmer? It doesn’t belong here. The binding ritual will have attached it as if with a chain to a physical object of our world, and that prevents it from leaving. We destroy that, and the creature will immediately return whence it came. We don’t, and it destroys us.”

         Father did have a way of boiling a situation down to its essence. Mei Li and I glanced at each other, and she asked the obvious question.

         “Honorable Pan Bao, what are we looking for?”

         Father started to stroke his beard, but after a moment he lowered his hand, looking a little defeated. “I have no idea. It could be anything, but it has to be nearby.”

         All the while we were discussing the guardian, I kept a careful watch on it, but it merely stood blocking the entrance to Lost Princess’ tomb, glaring at us but not attacking. If, as Father had said, the object anchoring it to the living world was nearby, it stood to reason that there was a proximity limit to the creature’s scope of action. I took three careful steps toward the guardian.

         “Jing!”

         Fortunately I didn’t need Father’s warning. As soon as the creature moved, so did I. Even so, the club missed crushing me into the earth by only one step.

         “That was foolish, Daughter,” Father said gruffly, which is about as close to ‘I’m glad you’re not dead’ as he’d ever spoken. I suppressed a smile.

         “Perhaps, but useful. Whatever we’re looking for,” I said, “has to be within about twenty paces of the creature itself. That is its boundary.”

         We all looked from where we stood, but in that area all we could see were a few stones scattered about. Some appeared to be no more than natural shards of stone shed from the canyon walls. However, there were a few which seemed to be the result of weathering of the tomb itself, including one showing decorative carving.

         “Father,” I said, “does it not stand to reason that someone wishing to bind this guardian to the tomb would literally bind it to the tomb itself?”

         “It would have to be a specific part, rather than the entire tomb,” Father said thoughtfully.

         I pointed to the carved stone, which I now could see was a discrete block rather than a broken stone. I could even see where it had fallen from. “Like that piece of the lintel?”

         Father smiled. “Exactly like that. Well done.”

         “Can we be sure?” Mei Li asked. “It is unlikely we’ll have another chance.”

         I had an idea. “Father, what will you need to do to break the binding?”

         “Unless it is stronger than I think, touching it with the proper ward should suffice,” Father said. “The problem is we have to reach the stone without being smashed to bits.”

         I turned to Mei Li. “I’ve seen you transform your bawu into a sword. Is that all it can do?”

         Mei Li looked puzzled for a moment, but then her eyes widened and she smiled. “There is this.” Again she mumbled something inaudible and the sword transformed into a powerful-looking recurved bow of horn with ivory tips. She took the silk bag she carried her flute in and spoke again, and there was a quiver full of arrows with barbed bronze points.

         “Surely you’re not suggesting we stand at a distance and fire arrows?” Father asked. “Even if they had any effect—which I doubt—the guardian would simply cease to manifest and thus avoid them.”

         “I suggest no such thing, as he is not the target. The ward has to simply contact the stone, yes? It doesn’t have to attach to it.”

         I saw the understanding dawning on my father’s face. “Clever girl. You do take after your mother. Mei Li, I need you to remove the point of one of those arrows.”

         While Mei Li complied, Father got busy with ink and pen to create the appropriate ward. When he was finished he took the arrow from Mei Li and wrapped the paper ward around the arrow with the paper just protruding from the end. He then tied it firmly in place with a bit of silken thread.

         “I do not claim to be an expert archer,” Mei Li said, and it sounded like an apology. “My eyesight is not first rate. Yet the bow will only work for me.”

         “So I suspected,” Father said. “Can you see the stone?”

         “Yes, though the guardian is obscuring part of it. I will do my best.”

         “We need a clear shot, so we’ll have to make the guardian move to one side or the other. Jing, take the right side. I will take the left. Wait for my signal. Mei Li? As soon as it goes after either of us, aim for the stone.”

         “Understood,” she said.

         I didn’t say “try not to miss.” I think that was understood, too.

         When Father was in position, he probed for the exact limit of the boundary with this peachwood sword. I knew he had found it when the creature’s eyes suddenly swung in his direction. Clearly Father saw it too.

         “Now!”

         Father darted in, moving with great alacrity for a man of middle years. Mei Li drew her bow, but the creature leaned forward to strike at my father, who withdrew with equal alacrity. At Father’s signal, I also darted forward, and no sooner had my father cleared the boundary, the guardian turned toward me, but now changing direction required him to shift his balance to the right. No sooner had he lifted his foot when I heard the twang of Mei Li’s bow.

         She hit it...?

         Apparently not, for the creature did not even blink. In an instant it was after me. Its first swing missed me but struck the ground with such force that I was jarred into a stumble. It was only my frantic roll to the left that put me just beyond the creature’s club rather than beneath it, but I was still within the boundary, and I did not think I could avoid the third strike.

         I had almost closed my eyes when I noticed something odd—the shimmer around the creature’s outline was moving inward, and as it moved, the guardian started to shrink in on itself. It struck again from where it stood, only this time its club was too short to reach me. In another moment both the guardian and its club were gone, and Mei Li was at my side, helping me to my feet.

         “You are unhurt, Young Mistress?” she asked.

         My pride had taken a blow, but fortunately the rest of me had not. “I’m fine. Thanks to you. You’re a better archer than you’d have us believe.”

         “Fortune smiled on all of us,” she said.

         Father spared a hard glance in my direction—either to make sure I was all right or to scold me for my clumsiness, I didn’t care to guess which—and was now examining the entrance to Lost Princess’ tomb. “Look at this, you two,” was all he said.

         We approached the tomb under the shadow of the high valley walls. I noticed the ghost of Lost Princess loitering behind us, but she came no closer. Father was standing by the tomb’s bronze door.

         Door?

         “I could have sworn that this portal was not there a moment ago,” Mei Li said.

         “Apparently it was part of the warding in place,” Father said. “Concealed to appear as solid stone.”

         “The tombs we passed earlier were sealed with stone blocks, originally. Why is this one different?” I asked.

         “I don’t know,” Father said, “but I can tell you that this tomb was originally sealed the same way. This door was added later. Why? I have no idea.”

         Mei Li frowned. “Lost Princess still advises caution. She says there is something else.”

         Even as she was speaking, Father hesitated. “I sense it too.” He turned to Mei Li and myself. “Jing, Mei Li, I want to know what you can detect.”

         I never claimed to be as attuned as my father to these currents in the ebb and flow of energy, the balance of yin and yang, but I understood the necessity. I placed my hand on the bronze door and immediately snatched it away.

         “Evil,” I said.

         “Power,” Mei Li said.

         “Yes,” Father said. “To both. Did Lost Princess know about this?”

         Mei Li went to speak to her again and soon returned. “No, she sensed it just as you did. She only knew about the first ward.”

         “So we have a Chief Counsellor so afraid of a little child ghost that he conjured and bound a demon of the underworld, but that wasn’t enough?”

         I spoke up. “Honored Father, when I said ‘evil’ before, I meant it. Malice, hatred... The guardian wasn’t evil, it was merely doing what it was bound to do. Whatever is waiting for us within? That is something different.”

         Father sighed. “Daughter, I believe you are right. No matter—we’ve come this far. Everyone, be ready.”

         Mei Li had already transformed her bow back into a sword. I drew my own. Father threw the bolt on the bronze door and pulled it open. Even after so many years, it balanced perfectly on its hinges and moved, as I could see, with very little effort.

         “A fine door,” Mei Li said. “But on a tomb? It doesn’t make sense.”

         “It does if someone wanted to access it more easily later,” I said. “It would be ideal for a grave robber.”

         Father glared. “A grave robber? How could a grave robber have a door installed?”

         “One who had the authority to do so and the means to make the guards look the other way,” Lost Princess said.

         We had not noticed her approach. Not surprising, as ghosts moved about as silently as it was possible to move. She bowed. “Forgive me for taking so long to speak directly to you. My experiences when alive made me wary of those I had every reason to trust.”

         “Whereas you had no reason at all to trust us,” Father said. “Though surely you must understand by now that our intentions are as much mercenary as compassionate, Highness?”

         There was a smile on the little ghost’s face which I found more than a bit unsettling. “Which is a motivation I understand, Good Sir. At court, it was one of the first made clear to me. Unlike those of Counsellor Wei, which I only understood when it was too late. It was he who ordered the door. I didn’t understand why. Then I learned it was he who killed me. That’s when I...”

         “—did the same to him, Highness, if what Mei Li told us is accurate,” I said.

         She bowed. “It is. Even if I didn’t intend to do so or understand how I did it. All I knew was the living energy I took from him made me feel alive, at least for a while. I knew, if I remained among the living, I would hurt others to feel that way again. I did not wish that. So I fled to my tomb and found it sealed against me. Since then I have hidden in the forgotten places until all of Kai became a forgotten place. Then gentle Mei Li heard my cries.”

         “You do me too much honor, Highness,” Mei Li said. “This form may be human, but I am a snake-devil and far from gentle.”

         The ghost regarded Mei Li with her large, dark eyes. “You are not human, true, but neither are you what you were, or at least not completely so.”

         “Oh...”

         For a moment I held my breath as it appeared Mei Li was about to burst into tears, but then Father broke the mood.

         “Highness, what awaits us in your tomb?” he asked.

         “I do not know,” she said, “unless it is some further insult by Counsellor Wei.”

         He frowned. “I suppose we have to go find out.”

         “Please be careful... and whatever happens, you have my gratitude,” Lost Princess said again. Then, as if the effort of speaking to us had somehow drained her, she shuddered and slowly vanished.

         “If we live, we can discover what that gratitude is worth,” Father said. “Still... quite well-spoken for a child.”

         “Who happens to be a hundreds-of-years-old princess,” I pointed out.

         “A child is a child,” Father said, then spared a pointed glance in my direction. “Even at seventeen. Let’s go.”

         I lit a torch first and took the lead as we filed in. I’m not sure what I expected, but this was no mere stifling crypt chiseled into the rock. The entrance opened into a large chamber, perhaps forty paces square and at least twice as high as I was tall.

         Completely empty.

         Mei Li was the first to express the obvious. “There’s nothing here.”

         The stone walls had been painted with colorful murals of life in the Kai royal palace: courtiers in antique clothing and hairstyles, servants, musicians, everything a princess might need to remind her of the palace she had grown up in, but there was nothing else. No furnishings, no guardian statues, no grave goods of any kind. Also no coffin or other obvious resting place.

         Father pointed at a dark square on the wall across the room. “This is just an antechamber. It goes on.”

         The doorway lead into another chamber, if anything more richly painted than the first, but also empty. Or rather, almost. Near the far wall there was a raised stone bier on which rested an intricately carved casket. Beside that was a throne of granite, also intricately carved. On the throne there sat a dark, skeletal figure, its once fine robes in tatters.

         “That’s not the princess,” Mei Li said. “That is a jiangshi.”

         I felt it too. This was the source of the evil, the malice I sensed. A creature neither alive nor dead. It would feed on the living if given a chance, but what was it doing in Lost Princess’s tomb?

         Father already had his peachwood sword at the ready, and Mei Li and I quickly followed his example with our own blades.

         “Be prepared to fight,” he said, and then he spoke directly to the corpse. “Counsellor Wei, I presume?”

         There was a creaking, crackling sound like dry wood on cloth or bone on bone, and the thing spoke.

         “You have the advantage on me, Sir,” It said. “Who are you?” Its voice was like an echo of the tomb itself.

         “A humble scholar of no great importance,” Father replied.

         “Hardly,” the jiangshi said. “You banished my guardian or you wouldn’t be here. I suppose then I must deal with you myself.”

         No less impossibly than it speaking, the creature rose from the stone chair. No mere ghost, it carried its boney, tattered frame with the dignity of a king.

         Father smiled. “Before we begin the inevitable, may I be impertinent enough to ask a few questions? Surely as a change from your lonely vigil, it would not inconvenience you greatly?”

         The horror seemed to consider. “Ask,” it finally said.

         “Whose tomb are we in?”

         “Why would you assume it was not mine?” he asked, turning the question back.

         “It is a royal tomb. You, of high status though you may be, are not in that category.”

         “This is the tomb of the Princess Chunhua of Kai,” it said. “While it is true what you say, nevertheless I would have been the father of a king, except for her. She killed my son. She killed me. I have taken her tomb as my own.”

         “She did not kill your son,” Mei Li said.

         The lich turned to look at her with its sunken eyes. “Sweet flower, I knew you had been speaking to that little insect. I smelled my own life force lingering about you from the moment you entered. She took that from me. I will take it back from you!”

         “The way you stole her tomb offerings?” Father said. “You had planned that, even before you poisoned her.”

         The lich shrugged. Its bones made a grinding noise as they rubbed together. “Why shouldn’t I? There were those who would know the truth of the queen’s son. There were bribes to make, assassins to hire. Becoming royal is all very expensive. Regardless, when I realized what had happened to me, I left my own tomb and came here to find revenge, only to discover that I already had it, having barred Chunhua from her resting place. That was too wonderful. Once you three are dead, your shades will serve me, and I will bind another demon, a stronger one this time, to guard the entrance. That little brat can howl in the dark forever!”

         “I think I’m beginning to understand ‘evil’ now,” Mei Li said. “Thank you for the lesson. Now please be so good as to die again—”

         Mei Li froze in place, her sword extended toward the lich. I tried to reach her side only to discover that I could not move. A sideways glance showed that Father was in the same condition.

         “What have you done?” I said, or thought I did, except the sound was only in my head. It never reached my lips. The thing that had once been Counsellor Wei approached Mei Li, its footsteps sounding like bare wood on the stone floor.

         “You first, my lovely.”

         What flesh remained around his mouth pulled back and cracked into a horrid parody of a smile as he stopped just inches from the tip of her sword. “Frustrating, is it not? So close, and yet you cannot strike me. Honestly, how did you fools live this long?”

         “With the help of friends, perhaps, Counsellor Wei?”

         Mei Lei’s blade plunged into Counsellor Wei’s chest, through the breast bone and into the shriveled lump that had been his heart. It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t responsible. Princess Chunhua, the lost princess, had appeared at her side, grasped Mei Li’s elbow, and shoved the sword forward. I don’t know what charms and spells the blade must have carried, but the effect was immediate—the lich screamed.

         “P-princess—”

         She smiled at him. If I never see such a smile again in my time on earth, that will be fine with me.

         “I did not kill your son, Counsellor Wei, traitor and murderer though you are. That was the Judgement of Heaven. Wait for me in Hell, for I will surely find you... in my own sweet time.”

         She gave the blade one final twist, and Counsellor Wei collapsed into a pile of moldering bones. In that instant we could all move again.

         “I wondered,” Father said. “When he said he smelled his old life energy on us, I rather thought perhaps he was sensing you instead.”

         The princess bowed again. “Once I had somewhat recovered, I followed you in. If Counsellor Wei hadn’t been so intent on gloating, he might have taken a moment or two to realize this,” the princess said. “I placed you in greater danger than I knew, and for that I must apologize. I did not expect him to be here, and the tomb offerings I did expect are not evident.”

         “You saved our lives,” I said. “That is payment of a sort.”

         She looked unhappy. “But not what I promised.”

         “I will not lie—that fact is disappointing, Highness,” Father said grudgingly, “but hardly your fault.”

         The princess yawned, covering her mouth with her sleeve. “Forgive me, but I am weary. I want to rest now.”

         “Of course,” Father said. “With your permission, we will remove what is left of Counsellor Wei from your tomb. He can lie with the bones outside.”

         “Thank you... oh! I have an idea. The seal on my coffin is unbroken. Please look inside.”

         “It isn’t necessary,” Father said.

         “To me it is,” she said. “If there is anything at all of value there, please take it. With the guardian gone, robbers will follow. If there is anything there, I would prefer it leave here with you. Despite what I said to Counsellor Wei, I do not plan to linger for very long.”

         “As you wish,” Father said.

         Mei Li and I helped him lift the coffin lid and break the seal. Inside, covered in discolored silk wrappings, lay the mortal remains of Princess Chunhua of Kai, the lost princess of a lost kingdom. On top of the wrappings there was a single small pendant of jade.

         “Please take it,” she said. “It was a gift from my father when I was four years old. A small thing, but I cherished it. Even so, it is a connection to this world I no longer require.”

         Father took the pendant and presented it to Mei Li. “A token. For recognizing evil.”

         Mei Li accepted the trinket as if it were the most precious gift on earth. We then carefully replaced the coffin lid as the princess delicately yawned once more.

         “Goodbye,” she said, and she was gone.

         We gathered up the dry bones of Counsellor Wei in silence and tossed them outside to mingle with the rest of the thieves.

         “Princess Chunhua will not become a hungry ghost,” Father said, “but I think it is safe to presume that Counsellor Wei is now on the road to that particular hell. “So I do not think they will meet after all.”

         I remembered the look on the princess’s face when she twisted the sword. “Fortunately for Counsellor Wei,” I said.

         By then the sun was dropping in the western sky, and there was no point in attempting to get back on the road that day. We returned to our previous campsite and settled in for the evening.

         Later I awoke to find Mei Li sitting by the dying embers of our campfire, holding Princess Chunhua’s jade pendant, turning it this way and that. She looked puzzled.

         “Is something troubling you?”

         “I don’t think I do recognize evil,” she said. “There are many who would have called me evil, when I was just another snake-devil. Perhaps they were right.”

         “You saw evil in Counsellor Wei,” I pointed out.

         “Yes, but you felt it,” she said. “Before we entered the tomb. I felt only power, remember?”

         “You weren’t wrong about that, but what I sensed was maliciousness and anger. I called it evil, but anger isn’t evil. Everyone gets angry and sometimes for good reason. Even maliciousness can be justified, at times. The truth is that we all have to decide for ourselves what evil is. You knew what he had done and what he would do, solely for his own benefit, and with no thought for anyone he harmed or the lives he ruined. You called it evil. I think you have at least as good an understanding of the subject as I do.”

         “Now I think you’re being kind,” she said.

         I shrugged. “Perhaps. That’s also part of being human.”

         “Just as is getting some sleep,” Father growled from his blankets.

         “Sorry, Father.”

         “You might be,” he said. “Because, with or without sleep, you both will be joining me on the road to Chengdu Village by dawn. We have paying customers waiting!”

         So we did. Yet before I returned to my blankets I wasted just a little more time and said a silent prayer, no charge, for the Lost Princess of Kai.

Copyright © 2017 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 and a dozen stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, he has been a finalist for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE FISHERMAN AND THE PIG

by Kameron Hurley

         Nev sat on the end of the charred pier, casting his line again and again into the murky water in the hopes of catching a corpse.

         A new war raged thirty miles upstream, and if Nev was patient, he could often hook one of the bodies that washed down the river. Beside him, Pig, a little pot-bellied pig, lay snoring softly in the folds of the cloak he had shed as the suns rose over the gray water. Mist still clung to the waters’ edge, and he caught a glimpse of crested herons poking around in the shallows for breakfast.

         The rise of the suns made the horizon blaze red-orange. Nev felt a tug at his line and reeled in his catch. It was not a body, alas, but a little trout with a pouting face. He tossed it into the basket beside him with the others. Today’s catch wasn’t good; the river had been fished out upstream, or maybe there had been a change in the fish runs. They came and went, those runs. He only had about six small fish to sell at the market this morning. He might as well just eat them.

         Nev packed up his gear, eager to get to the market before the last of the stalls was taken. He poked Pig in his belly to get him to wake. Pig gave a little snort and rolled back over and went back to sleep. Nev gently pulled the cloak out from under him, dumping Pig on the pier, and that woke him properly. Pig rolled to his feet and regarded Nev with a perturbed look.

         “You’re the lazy one,” Nev said, and shook out the cloak and wrapped it around his shoulders. He grabbed the basket of fish and threaded his pole through the top and turned back up the smoky pier. Mist made it difficult to see more than three paces ahead, but Nev spent every day but Prayer Vigil on this pier, and his knew how to avoid the worst of the cracked and worn boards. Pig followed, so close Nev felt the whisper of Pig’s little breath on his ankles.

         As he walked off the pier and onto the road, two men waiting there moved into his path, effectively cutting him off from transitioning from pier to boardwalk. Nev tensed. They didn’t have the look of government people, or Body Guild enforcers, but times changed quickly, and he couldn’t be certain what agents of either were like anymore. He had lived out here in this backwater town for eight years. The death of his body manager, Tera, had left nothing for him in the cities. Tera had died in her sleep a year before she turned seventy. She had a little smile on her face and a bottle of her favorite bourbon in her hand. If he were to ever die, really die, he hoped to go the same way.

         Tera had preferred to be near people and public houses. He didn’t. So, he had packed up himself and his pet turtle and come out here. The morning he arrived, the little pot-bellied pig had burst out of the butcher’s door and squealed across his path. Nev had bought the pig, and called him Pig, because he had expected he’d eat it himself, eventually. Eight years on, that seemed less likely. Between him and the turtle and the pig, that was company enough for Nev.

         These men were not welcome. And by their aggressive postures, they knew it.

         “How’s your catch today?” the one on the left asked. He was a beefy man, without tattoos or piercings, lean and brown, with an unremarkable complexion and forgettable face.

         “Not well,” Nev said. He did not attempt to summon a smile, but he held out the basket for inspection.

         The man on the right leaned over, though he was barely tall enough to clear the basket’s rim. “You sell these?” the man asked.

         “I suspect you know I do,” Nev said. “I have a stall reserved in the market.”

         “Too late for us to get one,” the short man said. He nodded at the railing behind them where two large baskets overflowing with fish were just visible through the mist. “My name’s Parn, and this is Shotsky. Think you can help? These will just go bad. You can keep a good cut. Say, seventy percent.”

         “Eighty,” Nev said.

         “Sure,” the one called Parn said, and that made Nev’s spine tingle, just a little. They had offered too high, and not bothered to haggle. Bad sign on top of bad sign.

         Nev glanced down at Pig, who was snuffling at the men’s bell-shaped trouser hems.

         “I’ll take a basket,” Nev said. “To see how it goes.”

         “Sure, sure,” Parn said. “Shotsky here will carry them for you, eh, old man?”

         Nev grimaced at being called “old,” though by every measure he was certainly old. The body he currently wore was the sort that accumulated a great deal of hair, from bushy white head to busy white toes. He had tried, in vain, to tame some of it but had given in and grown it out long and scraggly. His beard ended in a little tail that nearly reached his belly button, and the braided rope of his hair was the same length in the back. He had longed for some of the spry, smoother-skinned bodies of his youth for years, until he remembered that no one would even think to look for him in a skin as foreign to his people as this one.

         Unless these men had?

         You are too distrustful, Nev thought, but it was that distrust of and disappointment in people that had kept him alive this long. He had learned to measure time in bodies instead of years, until he lost count of the bodies, too, sometime after the third war he’d fought in for the Body Mercenary Guild.

         Nev called Pig back to him and waved at the men to follow him to the market. The entire enterprise was not auspicious, but he couldn’t figure out their game. What did he have to lose if this was legitimate? Perhaps the fish were bad. If the fish were bad, no one would buy them anyway, and he could say so honestly. There were some criminal enterprises making their way down the river, and if this was the first foray of such a family into town, he didn’t want to be on their bad side. What bothered him was why he had stood out to them at all. Was it the age of the body? He must look old and feeble to them, an easy mark.

         The man called Shotsky put the big basket of fish in the middle of Nev’s stall. Now that the suns had fully risen and he could see the fish properly, Nev saw that they were fresh, gleaming things, so radiant and dewy-eyed one could almost believe they were alive. Early morning shoppers were already moving to the stall, drawn by the beautiful fish.

         “We’ll come back tomorrow,” Parn said, and winked. “Good luck!”

         Nev had no trouble selling the fish. They were lovely, cool, and intact. They didn’t appear to have been tampered with and bore only the usual damage to fins and scales that one would see from wild trout. Nev decided the fish must be stolen goods, something the men had taken out of the back of a cart and didn’t want to be found with. The sooner Nev sold them all, the better.

         The fish were nearly all gone by mid-afternoon when the market closed for the hottest part of the day. Only two remained in his basket, and those were the smallest of the bunch. He added them to his own catch. What he didn’t eat for dinner, he could cook up for breakfast for he and Pig.

         Nev trekked across the thinning market and out of the village square. He lived up on a little rise about a mile outside the village in the rough hewn cottage that the man who inhabited the body before him had built, likely with the two well-worn hands that Nev used to open the door.

         The coals from the morning fire still smouldered in the stove. He went out to the little pond in the back where his pet turtle lived. The little turtle had grown large over the years and was now as long as Nev’s arm. It surfaced in front of Nev, and Nev fed it one of the little fish. He watched contentedly as the turtle ate, then went inside and stoked the fire and cooked up his little fish.

         He left the door open in the front and the back to invite a breeze. While the village was small, his neighbors had learned to leave him be. He had found this body much further up the mountains, dead for a few hours, no more, because the beasts up there had yet to tear it apart. Nev had been ready for a change, then. When he came back into the village, he found that the man had been a hermit, and that suited Nev just fine. He could pretend at being an old, mad hermit. He had been pretending at that most of his life.

         Pig sat at the base of the table where the two large fish remained, snorting his complaints about not being able to eat them. Nev got up and took one from the table and tossed it to him. Pig squealed and pawed at it.

         He noted some movement outside and peered out. Shotsky was making his way up the path to the house. Nev felt a chill, though surely, the man was just coming for his money?

         A sharp, familiar scent caught Nev’s attention. He scrambled back to the table where Pig was tearing into the fish and snatched the fish away from him. He grabbed its body so hard that its guts escaped through the tear Pig had made in its belly, and the tangy scent of cloves and lemon assaulted his nose.

         The gooey insides splattered all over Nev’s hands, and in that moment he was transported back to a battlefield eighty years back, when he bore some other body. The air smelled just like this, and all around him were the dead and dying. A woman on the ground reached out to him, her fingers grasping for him, and he had scrambled away from her, shrieking, because he knew she wanted to kill him and take his skin, the way he wanted to kill her and take hers, because the bladders full of toxic goo that had exploded on the field were murdering them all...

         Nev gasped and wiped the toxin off on the table. He hurled the fish into the sink and scrubbed his hands, knowing already that he was far too late. His flesh puffed up around where the liquid had touched him, and his tongue went numb. He turned just as Shotsky entered.

         “You sell them all?” Shotsky said, and then he stopped still, because he must have smelled it too.

         The toxin was rushing through Nev’s bloodstream now, and in his experience, that meant he had about two minutes on his feet before his organs failed.

          Shotsky folded his arms and shook his head. “Shouldn’t have opened those up, old man,” he said.

         Nev knew for certain, then, that this man had no idea who Nev was. If the man had known, he would not have stood so close to him. The man would have run.

         Nev did not like violence, as a rule. He knew too much of bodies. But violence was his profession, had been since he was just a young girl in a rural little wastewater like this one. Eight years, and the outside world had let him alone. They had been good years. But the outside always intruded, eventually.

         Nev kicked Shotsky in the kneecap. The man howled. Nev thrust a palm into his face and felt his own bones jarring in protest. His mind knew how to fight, but this body was not fit for it.

         Shotsky pinwheeled back and tripped over Pig. Pig squealed and ran behind the loft ladder, shrieking.

         Nev picked up his stool and bashed Shotsky over the head with it. A sharp pain ran up Nev’s arm, causing him to drop the stool. He hissed and clutched at his arm. Tingling numbness was already running up his hand and into his shoulder; the toxin doing its work. He grabbed the fish from the sink and sat on Shotsky’s chest and shoved the fish into his throat. Shotsky’s eyes bulged. He flopped on the floor, clawing at his own face.

         Nev suspected he would regret doing this, later, but all he could think about now was murdering this man as quickly as possible. Nev had fished no corpses from the river this morning. He had no fresh bodies to save him. The only corpse he could jump into today was one he made himself.

         Shotsky choked and swung hard. The punch took Nev clean off him and onto the dirt floor. Nev saw blackness, heard a terrible crunch. Something felt strange in his mouth, and he knew his jaw was broken. Shotsky came up spitting toxic fish mush, yowling at Nev in some language he didn’t know.

         Nev drooled blood and spit. The numbness had moved into his chest now, and into his other arm. He could only kick his feet helplessly against the floor.

         Pig romped over to him. Nev tried to yell at him to go back, to stay away or he was going to become Shotsky’s dinner, but he couldn’t form any words. It all came out a garbled moan.

         “You have killed us, you stupid little man,” Shotsky said, and slapped Nev. The pain was so intense that Nev saw a brilliant, glaring light spill across his vision. Heard his bones grating against one another. “We are lost,” Shotsky said, “lost to the God of Light. Lost to the cause of the righteous, you foolish old man.”

         Shotsky fell heavily onto his side. He gasped and clawed at his face, which was likely going numb.

         Nev tried to reach out a hand to him, for his own comfort more than any other, but neither arm worked. Pig clammered up on top of Nev, pushing his snout into Nev’s hair. All that gory hair. Nev would miss the hair. He stared into Shotsky’s bullish face, wondering which of them would die first. Nev had more experience at holding it at bay, but death came to every body sooner or later, even body mercenaries.

         Pig snuffled and pressed himself into the crook of Nev’s neck. Nev wanted to comfort him. It’s all right, little pig, he wanted to say, it’s all right. But it was not all right.

         Shotsky huffed out a breath. His eyes went still.

         I beat you, Nev thought, grimly. I outlasted you. He said a prayer to God’s eye, out of habit.

         And then, he leaped.

* * *

         Nev experienced a moment of darkness, then a buzzing softness, like that muzzy place between sleep and wakefulness. And suddenly: blazing consciousness. It was always shocking to come awake inside a new body. Nev gasped. He tasted fish, and the tangy acid of the toxin still swimming in the body’s throat. His throat. My throat, he thought, because the sooner he claimed the body as his, the easier it was to use it.

         Nev heaved himself up and stumbled to the sink. Shotsky’s body... my body, Nev amended, was tall and beefy. It had been a long time since Nev had been in such a body. He pushed his hands into the sink and turned on the tap that ran water down from the cistern on the roof. He scrubbed his hands and washed out his mouth. He vomited, then, fish and toxic goo and whatever the body had last eaten. His bowels loosened, and he shat and pissed himself. His limbs felt like dead meat, but that would pass. His second wind would come soon, the wind that burned out whatever ailed this body and refreshed it for its new host.

         He stood over the sink, breathing heavily, until his new body filled with a cramping, searing pain, like birth. His legs buckled, and he fell to his knees, big hands gripping the edge of the sink. This was how he had been reborn a thousand times, a mercenary who would never time, leaping from body to body as long as there were fresh bodies on the field that he could put his hands on. He had fought this way for so long he hardly remembered who he was or where he had come from.

         But the toxin, he knew. The toxin had murdered a good many people. Soldiers he loved as brothers and sisters, back in those days when he could still care for anything human.

         Nev pulled himself upright and peeled off his clothes. They had been filthy before he soiled them. Nothing he had here would fit this new body, so he would have to wash them.

         He balled up the clothes and washed his body as best he could in the sink. When he was clean, he turned.

         His former body was curled on its side. It looked vulnerable and delicate, like a twisted flower. And there, tucked into the crook of the neck, was Pig.

         Nev approached the body, still naked, calling to Pig. “Can you come here, Pig?” he said. “It’s me, Pig?” His voice sounded strange, because of course, from inside this head, the voice that he had heard as Shotsky’s sounded very different.

         Pig raised his head and peered at him, then buried his face back into the comforting braid of hair that had fallen across his former body’s shoulder.

         Nev knelt next to the body. Blood pooled from the mouth. He was careful not to touch anything, as some of the toxin could still be on the floor and on the body’s skin. “Come, Pig,” he said softly, but still, his voice sounded deep and gravelly.

         Pig did not stir.

         Nev didn’t want to leave Pig alone with the body because it could still be contaminated. So though it pained him, he pulled on a pair of old gloves and picked Pig off the body and rolled the body up in an old sheet. He hauled the body up into the loft, grateful for this new body’s strong arms and legs. Nev avoided looking into the face of his old body. When he was done with a corpse it became a thing, a tool, like a pen or an ax.

         Pig squealed at him throughout the ordeal. He ran around in circles, irate at what was being done to the body it knew and loved.

         “Come, Pig,” Nev said, one last time as he moved to the threshold. But Pig trotted up to the end of the ladder and lay down and gazed up at the old corpse there in the loft.

         Nev rubbed at his eyes. He needed to keep moving, because if he paused to think about what he needed to do now, he would lose heart. Someone had deliberately used him to offload those fish. Maybe they had even meant for him to die, too, and he didn’t take kindly to that. People who tried to kill him often came back to finish the job. He took his cloak from the wall, which was a cast off large enough to cover him, and knotted it around his thick waist with an old length of rope.

         Nev walked outside, shielding his eyes in the low afternoon light. At the bottom of the path leading up to his house was a llama. Two llamas, in fact, hitched to a small cart filled with empty baskets. Llamas. It had to be llamas.

         “You know where you’re going?” he asked the llamas. One of them bared its teeth at him. “Good,” Nev said, “because I don’t.”

         Nev climbed up into the seat of the cart and took up the reins. He had seen a few llamas around the village, but never driven a cart pulled by them.

         “Forward,” Nev said. “Go?” He flicked the reins.

         The llamas looked back at him sedately. “Dinner?” Nev suggested. “I’d like to have a word with Parn.”

         That seemed to spur some latent memory, and the llamas trundled up the path and around Nev’s house, heading back toward the village. Nev held the reins loosely, hoping they knew where they were going. If nothing else, maybe they would take him to a tavern where he could drown out his memory of this whole day.

         But the llamas took him instead through the village and halfway to the next, down a little pebbled path to a dilapidated wreck of a mill along the waterfront. They halted in front of a big empty feed trough and made a little humming sound, oddly soothing after Nev’s day.

         Nev got down from the cart and turned just as little Parn came out from the mill, wiping his grimy hands on a leather apron.

         “What in the seven hells have you been?” Parn said. “What happened to your fucking clothes?”

         Nev considered his options. He walked toward Parn, the mud squelching pleasingly between his toes. Nev took Parn by the throat and lifted him. It had been a long time since he could do something like that, and he reveled in it.

         Parn kicked and gurgled.

         “What’s the game?” Nev said. “Who’s handing that weapon out?”

         Parn moved his lips. No sound came out.

         Nev lowered him so his toes touched the ground, and eased up his grip. Parn gasped. “The fuck are you?”

         Nev tightened his grip again. “I had a very happy life here as a very happy hermit, and you’ve fucked it up.”

         “Just a job,” Parn sputtered. “Who the fuck... oh fuck... fuck... you’re... you’re a corpse jumper! Corpse mercenary! Fuck you! Fuck!”

         “Let him go!”

         Nev turned. A young woman was scrambling out from underneath the musty blanket in the back of the cart. She was in her late teens, all knees and elbows. Her dark hair hung into her face. She leveled a crossbow at Nev; not a homegrown version, either, but the sort carried by soldiers. Her clothing was torn and filthy; it was a wonder he hadn’t smelled her from his place at the front of the cart, but his senses were imperfect when he was still getting used to a body.

         “This doesn’t concern you,” Nev said.

         “It sure as shit does!” she said. “He murdered my sisters with that shit in the back.”

         “There’s a great deal of filthy language being bandied about,” Nev said. “Is it necessary?”

         Color flooded her already dark face. “I’ve been at the front,” she said. “I can skewer you through the eye.”

         “To what end?” Nev said. “You can murder him when I’m done.”

         “You can’t murder him,” she said. “He knows where the necromancer is.”

         “Necromancer?” Nev said, because he had not heard that word, in any language, in decades.

         “Necromancers make that shit in the fish,” she said. “It brings the dead back to life.”

         Nev had a moment of dissonance. “It... does what?”

         Parn was still struggling, limply. Nev released him. Parn tumbled to the ground, gasping and clawing at his throat.

         Nev turned to the girl. “I know that toxin,” he said. “It murders people.”

         “Sure it does,” she said. “Then it brings them back to life. They’re testing it up there at the front, and out here, because no one gives a shit about backward people out here.”

         Nev said, “I think I need to find this necromancer.” He couldn’t help but put a hand to his own throat. This body had swallowed the fish, and the toxin it contained. So had his prior body. But if it brought the dead back to life... which dead was coming back into this body? Nev broke out into a cold sweat.

         He kicked over Parn and pressed his bare, muddy foot to the man’s throat. “You heard the girl,” Nev said. “Where’s the necromancer?”

* * *

         The girl’s name was Branka, and according to her she was seventeen, “nearly eighteen,” and had enlisted the year before to fight in “the war.” Nev did not ask what the war was about because it was assumed, in every age, that when one spoke of “the war” everyone else knew exactly which war they were talking about.

         Branka insisted on coming with him, though he tried to dissuade her. She did know how to use a crossbow, and that seemed handy. Nev found some clothes inside the mill that fit him, though no shoes. Nev took it upon himself to drag Parn up into the mill and strangle him. It was done cleanly and without malice. A body mercenary needed a body. It was quite possible he would need this one later.

         Branka saw him come out alone but did not ask about Parn.

         “If he was telling the truth,” she said, “the necromancer’s only four days away by cart. We can do that faster, in two days maybe, if we take turns driving.”

         “Llamas need rest,” Nev said, “like people. You can’t drive them into the ground.”

         “Sure, sure,” Branka said. “I knew that, you know? I’ll drive first.”

         Nev said nothing, but neither did he protest as she got up into the cart. He spent some time gathering a few supplies around the mill, and then they were out onto the road again, bumping along.

         “So you’re really a corpse mercenary?” Branka said. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. The world lay at the cusp of evening, but it was nearly summer, and the day would stretch on another couple of hours. Nev wanted as many miles between them and the mill as possible before dark.

         “We called ourselves body mercenaries,” he said, “back when we did that.”

         “I wondered,” she said, “when I saw you come out of that house. I mean, a/etc guy went in, but it was clear some other guy came out. I thought maybe that old man put a spell on you.”

         “Not far off, really.”

         “Yeah, I guess. So you could jump into my body, then?”

         “Only if you were dead.”

         “Was that meant to be comforting? Because it wasn’t.”

         “I’m simply clarifying,” Nev said. “It’s not as if I cast out your soul. Your soul is already gone when I inhabit your body.”

         “Like a parasite,” she said.

         “I prefer to think of myself as a snail,” Nev said.

         Branka nodded. “Sure. A worm.”

         Nev sighed. “What are you intending to do when you met this necromancer?”

         “Same as you, I expect,” Branka said. “I’ll kill him.”

         “Because he killed your family?”

         “Sure,” she said. “You?”

         “He murdered my life,” Nev said, and he thought of Pig. “This life, anyway.”

         “There’s always some other life for you, though, isn’t there?” Branka said.

         Nev shrugged his broad shoulders. He was beginning to get used to this body. He enjoyed the heft of it. He rubbed at the stubble on his face. “I liked my life,” he said. “I don’t always like the lives I have.”

         “So why not just jump into some other one? You know, I thought all you guys were extinct. Burned out. Hunted down. I’ve never met a real corpse mercenary.”

         “I haven’t met another one like me in a long time,” Nev said. “The world was different then.”

         They rode on in silence until dark. They didn’t make camp so much as simply halt. Nev wrestled with the harnesses for the llamas and let them graze. After a time, they started up their humming, which he hoped was a good sign.

         Then he lay in the back of the cart with Branka and pulled his cloak up over them both. They lay pressed together, warmed mostly by the heat of their bodies. Above them, the great spinning orbs of the God’s wheel tracked across the sky. Nev was reminded of the night before, when he had sat out under the stars with Pig and his turtle and breathed in the scent of the new grass and been still, so very still.

         “Can you have sex?” Branka asked. “I mean, not now, but just... generally?”

         Nev started. “What sort of fool question is that?”

         “I mean... do you shit like other people?”

         “You’ve seen me piss. These are very personal questions.”

         “I’m a curious person,” Branka said. “Plus, if we’re going to fight a necromancer together, I want to know something about you.”

         “Better not to,” Nev said. “I haven’t asked about you.”

         “I noticed,” Branka said. “It’s polite to ask people questions.”

         “I find it rude,” Nev said.

         “Not me,” Branka said.

         “Clearly,” Nev said.

         She sighed heavily. “My sisters raised me,” she said. “I was the youngest. I enlisted last. My brothers stayed home and made some good matches, you know, but we all had heads for tactical stuff. Well, my sisters did. Not me, so much. They looked out for me. But on the field, that day, this same smell... like rotten lemons...”

         “I know it,” Nev said.

         “Everyone died,” Branka said. “I saw them die. I was up a tree, though, acting as lookout, trying to get us back on the road. Navigating from maps is shit, you know? I don’t know how they got us. Catapults? From where? But that stuff ended up in the air. Pretty big wind. I guess it all blew out when I came down. But that guy came by later, Parn. And I followed these guys for weeks. Weeks! And I heard about the necromancer when they talked at night.”

         “Long time to track them,” Nev said, because she seemed to want some kind of human response. It had been so long since he’d engaged in a sustained conversation that he had the urge to flee.

         “They were my sisters,” Branka said.

         Nev had a fleeting moment where he remembered his own sisters, all older, all dead now. “I understand,” he said.

         “Have you ever fought a necromancer?” Branka said, and he heard the hopeful expectation in her voice.

         “No,” Nev said, “but there’s a first time for everything.”

* * *

         Four days later, they wound their way into the little green valley that Parn had told them about before Nev wrung his neck. Torture, as a rule, did not work often, but Branka’s earnestness had helped. Parn may not have believed that Nev would spare him, but he hoped Branka might. It had been enough.

         The valley was lovely; a little crease in the world, set against the sparkling, wine-dark sea. At the center of the valley was what had once been a little village, now just a charred ruin. The only building that still stood was the silver temple to the Eight Sisters of God.

         Nev reined in the llamas beside the temple and tied them to the hitching post outside.

         “Now what?” Branka whispered. She had her crossbow out.

         “First,” Nev said, “put that fool thing away.”

         Nev stepped up into the temple and pushed open the double doors. The benches were all focused around the center of the room. There, an altar stood with a great orb fixed atop it. The light of the suns drenched it from a hole in the roof, sending dazzling little colored spots of light/etc dancing around the room.

         A woman sat at the farthest seat from the door, head bent over a book. She was an old plump woman with a cloud of white hair and a kind face. She reminded Nev at once of his grandmother on his mother’s side. He remembered his grandmother braiding back his hair and telling him to be a good strong girl.

         The woman raised her head from her book and smiled at them.

         “You must be the corpse mercenary,” she said.

         “Everyone keeps calling me that,” Nev said. “I’m a body mercenary.”

         “New words, same profession,” the woman said, and stood.

         “Are you the necromancer?” Nev asked.

         “I prefer the term ‘knowledge seeker’.”

         “New words, same profession,” Nev said.

         She laughed at that. “Oh, you are clever,” she said, “but I suppose one has to be, to survive as long as you have.”

         “You don’t know me,” Nev said, with more conviction than he felt. It was impossible that he had given away who he was. He could be any number of body mercenaries. They had fled like insects after the last great war, set loose by a terrible act.

         “I know your type,” the woman said, and she began to walk toward them.

         Nev raised a hand. “That’s far enough,” he said. “I’m inhabiting a body killed with your serum. I need to know what happens when it comes back to life.”

         The woman raised her brows. “Indeed,” she said, “so do I.”

         “You don’t know?” Nev said.

         “Of course not,” she said. “Why do you think we’ve been testing it? Many governments have been working together over the last fifty years to eradicate the last of the rogue corpse mercenaries. The body-hopping must stop. You must rest.”

         “I decide when I rest.”

         “That’s a selfish thing,” she said.

         “Hold on here,” Branka said, and out came the crossbow, too fast for Nev to bat it back down again. “You’re murdering people. You murdered my sisters.”

         “I murder a lot of people’s sisters,” the woman said. She pointed at Nev. “He has murdered more. He has even murdered himself.”

         “She doesn’t have any answers,” Nev said. “Let’s go.” He would find out soon enough what would happen to him.

         He turned just as he heard the clink and hiss of the crossbow bolt.

         “Dammit, Branka!” Nev said as the crossbow bolt thumped into the necromancer’s chest. She grabbed at the bolt and grimaced.

         “Foolish,” the necromancer said. “Foolish.”

         The air around her began to darken. Nev thought it was a trick of his eyes, but no. A swirling mist kicked up around her, darkening the room.

         Branka yelled and barreled toward her.

         Nev called after Branka. The air filled with a low buzzing sound – flies. They seemed to burst out of the mist, made from motes of dust. The flies clogged his mouth and eyes, and he began to scream. He had woken up like this many times, covered in flies, screaming.

         Branka was tangling with the necromancer, using her crossbow like a blungeon. The waves of flies pelted her, buffeting her away from the necromancer like a strong wind, but she was persistent.

         Nev clawed his way through the swarm of flies. He gripped the necromancer by the collar and headbutted her in the face. Blood burst from her nose. Her legs buckled. She collapsed. The wall of flies collapsed with her, becoming a misty cloud, like smoke, that dissipated.

         Nev let himself collapse on one of the benches, spent. He was trembling.

         Branka stood over the body of the necromancer, crossbow still in hand. “Is that it?” she said.

         Nev coughed. He spit up a couple of flies. Grimaced. But there was something deeper, something caught way down. He coughed again, harder this time. Again. He had trouble catching his breath.

         “Are you all right?” Branka asked.

         Nev heaved. His whole body trembled. The world began to feel fuzzy, that warm feeling he caught as he came awake.

         “Go,” Nev said. “He’s coming back, Branka. Go.”

         “What about you?” Branka said.

         Nev showed his teeth. “There is always another body.”

         The darkness took him.

* * *

         Nev woke in the loft of the mill, gasping and screaming. He rolled over and vomited and gazed at the little hands that had once been Parn’s.

         The necromancer had done it. She’d thrown him out of a body. If he hadn’t had another backed up somewhere/here... if he had only relied on the others on/from the battlefield, dead and contaminated.... He shivered. They were coming for him, and people like him. He had been foolish to think that if he lived a peaceful life, they would forget about him. People like him could never be peaceful. The world didn’t let them.

         Nev walked all the way back to the hermit’s cottage, unsure of what he would find there.

         When he stepped up to the door, it was already open. He gazed up into the loft and saw the sheet he had used to cover his former body. But the body was gone.

         The old hermit was alive again, brought back from the dead. He shivered.

         Nev walked into the back. He didn’t see the turtle anywhere, but the turtle was likely as safe here as he would ever be. And there, at the corner of the house near a rain barrel, he saw Pig.

         Pig lay there in the mud, very still.

         Nev approached, resigned. They took everything, all of them.

         The little pig stirred, then, and Nev’s heart leaped. “You silly pig,” Nev murmured. “He didn’t know what to do with you either, eh?”

         He knelt beside Pig. “It’s me,” he said. “It’s me, Pig.”

         Pig snorted and shook his head and trotted away a few steps. He cantered around the yard. Pig came to rest in the doorway to the house, legs splayed, and stared at Nev.

         Nev sighed and leaned back on his heels. “You can’t stay here,” he said.

         Nev took up a sack on top of the rain barrel and managed to corner the little pig in the kitchen and scoop it up. Pig shrieked and flailed inside the sack. Nev always hated the sound of pigs shrieking. It sounded too human. He knotted some twine around the top of the sack and collected a few other things.

         He didn’t like to take much when he moved from town to town. Too many unique items could identify him from body to body, and then it was only a matter of time before someone from the Corpse Guild caught on and captured him, and that would be the end of his very long travels. As much as he wanted closure some days, the deep fear of death, of going where he had watched so many others go, won over every time.

         Nev knotted the sack of his belongings to the end of the sack with Pig in it and slung both over his shoulder. It would be dawn soon, and he wanted to be well clear of the town by then.

         As the suns rose, he traveled up and up into the hills, mile after mile. The way was rocky, churning with mud. Finally, they came to a little clearing. Light brightened a soft blue puddle way back in the woods, and on the other side of that, Nev saw a little family of wild pigs snorting around in the undergrowth.

         Nev untied the sack with Pig in it and gently released him.

         Pig cankered out into the light, kicking up his heels. He trotted away from Nev a few paces, turned back.

         Nev was down on one knee in the mud, the sack in one hand and an apple in the other. He tossed the apple to the pig.

         “I know I don’t look like him,” Nev said, “no beard. Not enough hair, eh? That’s all right. You take care, little pig. You’re more human than any of us.”

         Pig snorted at him.

         Nev got up. He shook the filth from the sack and tied it back up with his other belongings. All he had in the world, again. On to the next town, again.

         Where to, next? War upriver, death downriver. It was time to cross the river.

         Nev headed further up the path, kicking up dirt and loam as he went. He wondered if Branka had headed his warning or murdered Shotsky. No matter how far Nev ran away from the world, it always came back for him.

         He heard a little snort behind him, and turned.

         Pig had come forward a few paces. He stood there, head cocked, snorting.

         “What is it, Pig?” Nev said. “Pig?”

         Pig kicked up his legs and barreled toward Nev. Nev got down on his knees and opened his arms, and the little pig hopped into his lap and pressed his nose to Nev’s face, snorting and snuffling all the while.

         “Are you coming then?” Nev said. His throat closed, and his voice shook. He cried as he rubbed the little pig’s waggling butt.

         After a time, Nev stood. He took a few hesitant steps forward. He called for Pig. And then, Pig trotted after him, content to follow his new family. Together they forged across the road as the suns broke through the trees.

Copyright © 2017 Kameron Hurley

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Kameron Hurley is the author of The Stars are Legion, the Worldbreaker Saga, and the God’s War Trilogy. She has won the Hugo Award, Locus Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer; she has also been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, and the Gemmell Morningstar Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Popular Science, Lightspeed, Year’s Best SF, The Lowest Heaven, and Meeting Infinity. Her nonfiction has been featured in The Atlantic, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Locus, and the collection The Geek Feminist Revolution.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE FALL OF THE MUNDANEUM

by Rebecca Campbell

A Village in Belgium. August 1914.

         By midmorning Oskar had answered a dozen queries and accumulated a neat stack of outgoing Manila envelopes on the corner of his desk. Among these replies on the Mundaneum’s heavy, official stationery were brief discourses regarding the material Noah used to construct his Ark and the consequences of new laws regarding suffrage, questions from around the world, asked for the cost of a postage stamp. He opened the next letter, childish writing on lined school-room paper:

Dear Sirs:

Can you tell me the true location of the cave in which the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa is asleep? When I was at school I met a boy who said that his friend had visited the cave and that he woke up and he asked about the ravens. Is it true that Kaiser Wilhelm is a reincarnation? I await your reply.

Sincerely,

Maxwell Greenwood, aged 11

         In the last months Oskar had received too many of these letters, enquiring after Avalon and the cave in which Charlemagne slept, reporting on shadowy creatures that crossed the full moon. Oskar preferred questions regarding advances in chemistry or geology, but nevertheless he answered all queries in the elegant, spare language dictated by the Mundaneum’s purpose as collector and disseminator of the world’s knowledge.

         Oskar answered Maxwell’s question quickly in his fine blue-black hand; he did not need to climb the three flights to the European atlas room to confirm what he knew: according to most sources he sleeps in the vicinity of the Kyffhäuserbirge, though the exact location of the cave is unknown. Before he sealed it, he added a postscript regarding the possibilities of metempsychosis. He hoped it was the last such question he would answer that day. It was not.

         After that he quite badly wanted coffee, and he left through the empty atrium on the ground floor with the marble-and-ormolu world map on the walls and the enormous double doors to the porte cochère. Standing on the front steps he saw that the little café across the square was closed. He stepped out into the vestibule and watched as a country-looking man led a stout pony through the village, dragging a cart, with his wife and two children walking behind.

         Oskar waved. “Where are you going?”

         “On to the coast, sir,” said the man, “You should, too! Sooner rather than later, I think, or they’ll be on you. They’ll be on you in no time at all! Did you hear about the cavalry at Liege? A great charge, sir! The greatest charge!”

         It was fine for a farmer, Oskar thought, to leave that way. But he was not so lucky, bearing as he did the civilized man’s sense of duty. Even in conversation he felt the heavy keys in his pocket, the private charge Gilles had made that last day: that he stay with the Mundaneum, wait for instructions from the Köln office regarding a peaceful handover of its resources, and how to ensure their safety in the event of hostilities.

         “Where will you go?”

         “My wife’s sister is outside Antwerp. We’ll go to her. And sir, you know they’ve burned the railway to Brussels! There won’t be any trains. Not anymore. It will be the old bridge next—you see if they don’t blow it sky high!”

         With nowhere to buy his coffee, Oskar returned to the office and boiled a kettle for tea. He thought of the empty railway stations, and then of his sister and mother waking this morning to newspapers and searching the pages for word of home, and how they would look for the letters he had sent and be comforted knowing he was well. It was good to think of them both held safe between sea and the fortresses of the redoubt.

         Most of the staff had left for the coast when his mother did, so Oskar worked alone in the Mundaneum’s halls. He had adopted Gilles’s office, a cool, airy room that faced the square. The last time they met, it had been in this office. They had sat together at the window, the fields green not yet gold. The buzz of a fly trapped in the drowsy room.

         “It’s the end-times, apparently, and they won’t stop asking questions about King Arthur,” Oskar had said, “but if we are doomed I would like to finish my days with the English queries resolved up to 1 August.” It had sounded bold the way he said it. Gilles had clapped him on the shoulder and said “good man!” Oskar had liked that.

         Gilles enquired after Oskar’s mother and sister—Oskar had sent them both to stay with an aunt in Antwerp two days before; though his mother had complained about what would happen to the geraniums, Oskar had promised to water them religiously. When it was over in a week or two, they would return to abundant salmon-pink blooms in the window boxes.

         Gilles had agreed, of course, yes the ladies should be sent away, though there was no danger, no danger at all.

         “These are civilized days, Oskar,” he had continued. “You mustn’t be concerned. I wrote again to our colleagues in Köln. I’m sure they have prepared the necessary documents, and will inform the General der Infanterie. We will continue to fulfill our obligations without disruption. It is, truly, an opportunity for a young man! We’ll put you in the Annual! Indeed, you will have a whole page with a portrait! The Hero of the Hour, we’ll call it, who handled the unpleasantness of August!”

         Listening to Gilles, Oskar grew tall and straight in his suit. Even these weeks later he could hear his mentor’s words, and his own answer: yes, Gilles, of course I will be the Mundaneum’s guardian.

* * *

         Oskar cut short—with a few terse and ironic words—a long correspondence criticizing the Mundaneum’s tendency to discount metaphysical experience, the secret histories and truths revealed by, for example, the Voynich Manuscript. It was a pleasure to write freely and unsupervised:

We are in possession of the Voynich Manuscript, sir, and I believe you overestimate its contribution to world knowledge, though of course it is a compelling curiosity—

         He wrote with the usual machined precision, thinking all the time that he would have preferred to know what their colleagues in Köln had planned, whether they would send someone to liaise with the Deutches Heer, or whether he would receive forms, first, perhaps a letter of introduction that outlined the importance of the Mundaneum’s work.

         In June, after the assassination, the gentlemen from the Köln office had visited one afternoon and talked about securing the collection in the event of hostilities. They had insisted on taking copies of the site’s catalog, which was of course impossible considering that the collection grew two and three times daily. The meeting had seemed helpful, and the gentlemen from Köln had promised to look into the matter. Gilles had been mollified at first, but despite strongly worded letters, no further instructions had been forthcoming. What the Köln office wanted, he could not tell, but the work continued and all queries were answered, for the time being.

* * *

         Since meeting the gentlemen from Köln and hearing news of events in Sarajevo, Oskar had often imagined the handover, until in his mind it developed the composition and texture of an oil painting. It should happen at night, he thought. It always was night in those sorts of paintings, with the fires of, say, the Great Bombardment of 1695 illuminating the horizon. Peasants in attitudes of terror. One stalwart, defiant, at the composition’s center, standing protectively over the body of a girl, her breasts tastefully exposed as the sky overhead sank into blue and black. The light of a burning city glazing her skin.

         A painting like that hung in the entrance hall to his grandfather’s house. He remembered looking up at it while his mother buttoned him into his coat on snowy nights, imagining that he was such a hero, with a feather in his hat and a sword at his hip.

         Now he saw himself in similar tableau; with his hair a little wild, his suit rumpled, he would stand in the marble atrium across the canvas from a Prussian General in grey, framed by the large doors. Oskar alone, his head thrown back, his shoulders square. He imagined other officers behind the General in attitudes of curiosity and doubt. The whole scene suffused with fiery light, like smoke and blood.

         He had not yet composed his speech, but he thought his voice would possess a heroic quaver, born not in cowardice but from the depth of his feeling. The General would know from this quaver and his defiance that Oskar would defend the Mundaneum to his last. Perhaps that fevered conviction alone would be enough to stop the Prussians’ advance, as it had done in the painting. The more he thought of it, the more clearly he saw the man’s aristocratic bearing, his perfectly cut uniform, and the shine on his high boots dusted over from the chalky road into the village. He imagined that the man would sense the Mundaneum’s significance, and—spontaneously—remove his hat.

* * *

         To Whom It May Concern:

         I am writing to enquire about the history of Drake’s Drum.

         The sun declined and shadows crossed the empty marble atrium. Climbing from basement to attic and back again, Oskar answered another dozen queries regarding the nature of the metric system, the Albigensian crusade, the educational innovations of Napoleon Bonaparte, the bones contained within the foot of an ostrich, and the possibility of second sight among the seventh son of the seventh son.

My name is Randall and I am looking for information regarding the existence of the great ape-man of Pacific coast of the North American continent. I have found a number of footprints, and include here diagrams of each species of print. It is my hope that you may integrate this information into your archive and share it with interested parties—

         That query sent Oskar to the chaotic room in the second basement that contained all references to animals either extinct, imaginary, or unconfirmed. They should take that room in hand, Oskar had thought, and had talked to Gilles about the strangeness of the enquiry. “This is a peculiar season,” Gilles had said, “I received a note from a village outside Sarajevo where someone insisted the night had been full of cries and the earth shook beneath his feet. Don’t let it trouble you. You are here to disseminate knowledge, not evaluate its significance.”

         For Drake’s drum he had to climb all the way to the second cupola, and he did not descend until late afternoon. When his foot touched the marble floor of the atrium he heard the main doors shut with a sharp, terminal click. He glanced toward the noise and saw a shadow in the doorway, but outside the square was empty. The only evidence of this stranger’s visit was the valise sat in the middle of the floor. Dark leather, expensive and worn, the sort of thing he admired for both its elegance and its restraint.

         “That is a very handsome bag,” Oskar said to no one. “Bespoke, no doubt. It is very kind of the Köln office to send such a handsome bag, but it would be even kinder if they sent the necessary instructions!”

         The valise was far heavier than he expected as he carried it up the stairs to the office, composing a response regarding the Adriatic Sea Serpent. In Gilles’s office he admired its patinated brass rivets and heavy leather.

         The town outside silent, not even the turn of wheels on the pavement, not even the late cry of children home from school, nor the shrill-voices of office girls and the trip of their steps down the corridors as they carried files and queries and the Manila envelops and the telegrams. And Gilles inviting him in for mille-feuille and a cup of black coffee from the Turkish set he kept just for those afternoon conversations. But the girls were gone to the coast, and Gilles was gone to Normandy.

         It was good to stand in Gilles’s room, though, with the faint ghost of cigars and coffee.

         When he opened the valise and there came the scent of something sharp, something that burned his nose, that reminded him of bleach and the sulfur from a match, as though in opening the valise he had released something, a scent he could not name that reminded him of lilacs and horseradish, the earthy burn of mustard. The sweet, dense scent of hay lying in the fields, and the odor of sweat and of cold wool, and the faint stink of ozone before snow fall, and the taste of metal and salt on his tongue, too. As he breathed valise’s exhalations, he felt all those scents inside him, particles swarming through his lungs to his blood—

         There was a letter addressed to him and beneath it a chaos of paper, the slips and sheets and scraps in no obvious order.

         “Oh dear, oh dear,” he said, and composed strong words about the Köln office’s rampant unprofessionalism.

         Dear Oskar:

         We hope this letter finds you well. We regret to inform you that your village will soon be occupied by German Imperial soldiers of the Third Army, under the command of General der Infanterie Alexander Adolf August Karl von Linsingen. He is Prussian.

         We are writing to request that you include the enclosed items in your archive, on the principle that they are of some significance to the record of human experience. If you are unable to complete this work, we hope you will protect them until you can.

         You might consider the London office; though they are not yet properly established, they may be in a position to help you.

         Fare well and good luck.

         Ridiculous, he thought, if Köln thinks this is at all helpful.

         He began arranging the valise’s contents on Gilles’s desk beside a stack of the Mundaneum’s embossed index cards. He was interrupted by an unfamiliar sound: the faint, distant shiver of a bombardment.

         Somewhere a slow fuse had burned into the interior of a shell and triggered a compression wave that rippled first through the bursting charge and then the steel casing, and as it scattered through the air it disordered earth and buildings and trees and roads and dogs. And it passed through skin into bodies, through bones, through the remarkable machinery of a human jaw, the tympanic membrane of the ear, the nervous architecture of the spine. It carried hot metal through the elaborate and looping guts of a hundred nearby bodies—it sliced tangled nerves and tangled hair and split the fragile casing of an eye. It revealed the skull beneath the skin, and then the brain beneath the skull, and then the outpouring of—

                                            —though this all happened, it was very far away, and Oskar felt only a tremor through the soles of his feet. The door rattling in sympathy and the dishes ringing in the little kitchen. He wondered where all the girls were, if they had fled to farms outside the village, or clustered along the coast looking across the channel and wondering how far the Prussians would march, and if they would reach the sea.

* * *

         Oskar’s time at the Mundaneum had prepared him for most things: he possessed the rules for cataloguing maps or codexes, for photographs or sketches or an elaborate missal in the language of the Voynich Manuscript; he was prepared to find the answer to any question. But what fell through his fingers onto Gilles’s desk seemed only to be the fragments of a man’s pockets: ticket stubs and postcards; a little file of photographs; letters, pay-books, and a field service manual.

         And—he had not noticed it—now his fingers were sooty, and the pages were speckled with the fine black mold of an ancient library. He opened the photographs

                                            —Somewhere, nearer this time, something exploded.

         He reached further into the valise’s interior, which seemed to stretch ever so slightly to match the capacity of his grasp. He found picture postcards of salacious poses—tinted girls in the frilled and corseted costumes of pornographic milkmaids. Among one’s Grecian draperies the sweet, wispy shadow of pubic hair where two curving thighs met. A downward glance across a round shoulder, so smooth it might boneless, her hands entangled in velvet. The flowers at her tiny feet.

                   —Somewhere, a detonation. A tremor rose through the desk and into his hands.

         Oskar turned over cufflinks and dust, violet pastilles and the stubs of theatre tickets, a fine straight razor with a bone handle. He found a lock of yellow hair in tissue paper, and a brass shell casing.

         And then, his arm reaching so far into the valise’s depths he wondered at its capacity, he found the photograph of a man with no jaw, and without eyelids; old wounds, Oskar saw, healed over, but nevertheless a face no longer entirely human by reason of some earlier violence. A skull showing through his scarified skin. Then another photograph, this face noseless. Then a face caved in where it was once supported by cheekbones. Then the eyeless, the lipless, skin patched, naked teeth, then the throbbing red—how did he know it was red? But he knew it was red—palate exposed where the mouth had been blown away. Mutilé de guerre read one photograph.

         Reaching further in Oskar pulled out an object—not paper but bone. A fingerbone, he thought, though he had never seen a fingerbone, except in drawings. It was still faintly damp as though fresh from beneath the skin of a man’s hand.

         It was then he stopped, and arranged all these objects on Gilles’s desk, and stood back to survey them, his eyes drawn to and glancing past the mutilated faces and the chit from a gentleman’s club.

         Despite the shudder in his hands he reached for the next index card. For a moment the room was illuminated by distant fire.

* * *

         With an imaginary Gilles standing over him, Oskar worked through the contents of the valise—writing descriptions cross-referenced by class and subject, making suggestions for a new category perhaps called “Atemporal ephemera.” More and more and more fell from the bag, upended now on Gilles’s desk, beside the neat stack of Manila envelopes and the miniature of his wife on their wedding day. As he wrote index card after index card to describe them, the little tableau of the handover seemed to shrink in his mind.

         The arriving Prussian, the staff, the other ranks who clustered the witnessing margins—what could he offer them to ensure the Mundaneum’s survival in this time of chaos and night? It was ridiculous if Köln thought they could get away with it. They had a duty to submit the correct forms. He had shipped them the directory himself—they knew exactly the resources that were at risk if the handover wasn’t properly managed.

         He thought of the day of his first meeting with Gilles. How the old man had invited him into his office, and they had taken coffee together and Gilles had described the Mundaneum as seamless machine, the voracious creature that contained within its rooms, its directories, its ledgers the whole sum of human knowledge made accessible to anyone with the money for a postage stamp.

         When, after that first meeting, Oskar had looked at the gold world-map in the atrium he imagined the great world city that the Mundaneum’s organization would soon usher into being: a city of towers and telephones and aeroplanes, where glassy motorcars traveled at unimaginable speeds along carriage-ways that traversed the poles and the equator. He had seen plans for cities built in great concentric circles, where crystalline towers overlooked a green earth, full of people animated by exquisite sentiment. He had imagined unearthly vistas, and a human hand touching the deepest reaches of the sky.

         It was the same hope he felt when he heard the pneumatic tubes hiss and deliver to him questions from all around the world. Where is the true location of Avalon? What is the origin of the phrase per ardua ad astra?

         That was Progress, with his shining sword. A great gold-robed figure, he thought, who handed knowledge down like mana, like soma, like ambrosia, his inhuman countenance as blank and lovely as the sun.

* * *

         As Oskar unpacked the valise and laid it out on Gilles’s desk, and then his floor, it replenished itself: more ticket stubs, and postcards; more bones and locks of hair and field service manuals in languages he did not recognize; more buttons bearing eagles and thistles. Like an untended wound, the valise disgorged detritus until he imagined its contents spilling out through the hallways of the Mundaneum, overwhelming its collections with brass shell casings and bones and pictures of shattered limbs.

         Somewhere, Oskar thought feverishly, as he drew out another handful of scribbled action reports and telegraphs, somewhere the king in the mountain was awakening, or perhaps he already had, stirring in the dark caves of Europe, and soon he would rise and flood them all with wonders and terrors unforeseen.

* * *

         It was dark when the Third Army reached the village.

         Oskar, having paused in the unfinishable task of cataloguing the valise’s contents, was in the atrium to meet them. It was unfortunate that he had had no opportunity to speak with the General der Infanterie, who was reputed to possess an excellent liberal education and would have appreciated the Mundaneum’s work. That gentleman remained outside while a member of his staff—Oskar never knew the man’s name nor rank—a man dressed in a dirty grey uniform, strode into the atrium. He did not seem to notice Oskar at all. Behind him, the shouted imperatives of an active army.

         “Franc-tireur, sir, across the square in the café—”

         “—not anymore. Quite dead—”

         “Herr General—” Oskar began, his voice cracking not with the fervor of his defiance but with fear.

         “—does well enough for temporary command if we can secure the bridge. Some fool mined it—”

         “Herr,” Oskar began again. “The gentlemen at Köln will have told you about our work at the Mundaneum—”

         No one stopped to speak with him, but one man lifted his rifle to his shoulder. For a moment he watched Oskar down the long barrel.

         Oskar’s hand, still gripping the valise, knuckles whitening, and his guts falling inside him, sweat collecting in a trickle down his spine. A finger on the trigger.

         The atrium filled with noise, not Gilles’s slow footsteps, nor the quick trip of the girls Oskar missed so painfully, but the noise that men make in great number, their voices, their boots on stone, the breaking of glass.

         The finger squeezing, and Oskar considered the action of the rifle, a Mauser Gewehr 98—

                                        —that was Room 732, where Old Mixon liked to prattle his discourses on the history of gunpowder, the arquebus, and the Brown Bess, and the iron cannons of Han Shizhong. Oskar knew—he had taken Old Mixon hot tea in the January before, when his throat was bad, and heard him speak on the mechanism of the rifle—that when squeezed, the trigger would release a hammer that, on striking the base of the cartridge would initiate a controlled explosion in slow-burning cordite, traveling faster than sound so that Oskar would not hear the noise of the bullet before it burrowed through the bone of his skull, and into the meat behind it, and out the other side to spatter brains on the gold-and-ormolu map that dominated the atrium’s wall.

         At such close range he would be burned, too, by the powder that would also spatter the soldier’s fingers—

                                                   —the man shifted his weight from left to right. Somewhere inside the rifle the hammer fell, the pin shot forward—

                                                   —Oskar’s ears rang with the gun’s discharge, and he heard the bullet crack the marble wall beside his head in the same moment that the earth rumbled underfoot. That was the bridge, he thought, outside the village, on the road to Brussels. That was good, then, the road severed, and the capital safe.

         Through the incessant ringing of his ears and the pain where he had fallen and the dusty air he thought of Room 231, which contained in its display cases diagrams of ancient architectures, forts and castles, the old bridge grooved by a thousand years of passing wagons and footsteps.

         Finding he was still alive, and the men in grey uniform temporarily distracted by the disorder outside, Oskar picked up the valise. He fled the atrium and along one corridor, and then down another, upstairs, downstairs, past the room where Daan tended the collected works of BashM, translated into a hundred languages. Past Gastronomy, with its instructions for drowning ortolans in Armagnac and smothering dormice in honey. Past the little corridor devoted to derivatives of The Metamorphoses. Past map-cases and bookshelves, and those rooms brimming with uncataloged collections in dead languages. Through it all he felt the weight of the valise, and thought how light it is, for all it contains dead men’s bones.

         Oskar climbed to the attic, and slipped out one of the little windows to a roof, and stayed there until dawn. Then he crept from rooftop to rooftop, his head down, until he dropped to the earth on the edge of the village. He picked up the valise and began his walk along white coast-road that ran west, past his own home, past the farm of his grandparents, and through the August world, in all its richness and flower, the deepening blue of its skies and the fragile golden harvests ripening all around him.

         Crowds on the road west, thronging. Men like him, carrying all their belongings in their arms. Oskar worried sometimes that someone would take the valise from him and discover that he carried chaos itself. He saw men and women shoulder old hunting guns and set out across the harvest fields. He heard distant bombardments and woke to the sound of larks. When he slept it was with his head on the valise, and through its leather side he heard the sound of fire.

         Often he heard stories: “You know they burned the library at Leuven? Yes, the whole of it doused in gasoline, the shelves turned over, and the manuscripts trampled underfoot.”

         First it was Brussels, and when Brussels fell it was north to Antwerp. Even while he listened to the voices around him, he found himself arranging what he heard according to the infinitely flexible catalog with room not only for facts but for the impossible: a faceless man of 1930, his jaw blown away in the as-yet unfought battles of a war Oskar could not yet imagine.

         One night in early September, Oskar sat beside a campfire on the shore of the Yser, distant bombardment a counterpoint to the conversation. There were three of them, marveling at the new, dark age that had settled upon them. Here was a young boy alone and angry. Here was an old man numb with regret. Between them, Oskar.

         “If you can get across the Scheldt you will be safe—”

         “—that’s not far enough! You must go north to Rotterdam.”

         “I’ll join the young King Albert beyond the Yser.”

         “Did you hear that Barbarossa has risen? And Drake’s drum is sounding across England.”

         “Someone found the great olifant and now Roland rides again out of Roncevaux, his brains dripping down his temples.”

         It was more than Oskar could stand. “That cannot be,” he began, reflexively tightening his grip on the valise’s handle. “You are ridiculous. That’s legend!”

         The men around the fire shook their heads. They granted his words a moment of silence. Then they began again.

         “I heard that they raised an army of Teutonic knights with blind eyes and bloody hands—”

         “—there was an angel, they say, who descended with the cavalry at Haelen—did you hear? An angel in a silver helmet, standing fifty feet high and brandishing his sword at the Deutches Heer.”

         “They should be afraid! And there were a hundred thousand phantom bowman from Crecy and Agincourt, you know, who stood with the English host at Mons. And they say the English have harnessed poison itself, and send it out into battle to burn the eyes and lungs of any who breathe!”

         “They crucified a private, you know. And they roasted the children of Flanders and ate them up.”

         Having exhausted their catalog of wonders, the two strangers sat again in silence around their fire, until one turned to Oskar and asked, “What is it you keep in your valise, sir? Anything to eat?”

         “It is nothing,” Oskar answered. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

         At his feet the valise expelled a letter regarding unpaid bills in a London club. It spit out a book of French verse stained with blood and oil. Oskar reached in so deep he rested his cheek against the worn hardware of the clasp and brought up a fuse, a cartridge, a broken revolver, a love letter, a chocolate bar, a can of beef, a punctured skull.

         The darkness around the fire filled with the things Oskar pulled from the valise: a blood-stained smock; a flaccid French letter; an Italian pamphlet about venereal disease; the knucklebones of a dead Canadian drowned in some muddy battlefield Oskar could not name but which—somehow—he felt was there in the darkness, awaiting them.

         He thought of his mother’s geraniums in the window of their little house, and of Gilles on the Normandy coast, and the gentlemen of Köln, and the bloody revenants of ancient kings who hid in caves and rode forth on skeletal horses, leading the armies of the dead, and soon-to-be-dead, and still the valise disgorged the detritus of an un-fought war.

         The two men stared at the ground around it. The young man reached out his foot and turned over a diagram of a man bound ankle and wrist, illustrating best practices for Field Punishment Number One. “You’ve dropped your things, Sir.”

         The other man picked up a field service manual and offered it to Oskar. “You should be more careful.”

         Oskar—hesitating to touch it—took the book and returned it to the valise’s open mouth, along with the diagram of the bound man, and a handful of pastilles, and a lock of yellow hair. The two men watched him in silence.

         Then he stood—he did not say goodbye—and again lifted the valise. He did not know where he’d carry it, but he would find some haven where he could unpack all of its contents and make some sense of them. Without looking back, he returned to the road, walking toward a horizon lit by the false dawn of a burning city.

Copyright © 2017 Rebecca Campbell

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and academic. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. She can be found online at whereishere.ca.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

GRASSLAND

by T.S. McAdams

         Sunset brings relief, whatever darkness hides, but cows, with the instincts of prey, prefer the measured suffering of the hottest afternoon to the sudden terrors of night. Marcus speed-mumbles a dusk prayer to the sun, a habit he’s trying to reacquire, and sings “The Gods of Texas,” not so much to soothe the cattle as to make familiar sounds and drown out noises that might set them off. Breed is the only one who can sing them calm when they’re already riled. Now a rumble from Breed calls halt in a spot like any other but past a small rise that may ease the wind. Patrick, with crooked shoulders from that time his horse stepped in a hole, complains about prairie dogs, but Patrick is a fool and this is not a dog town. Those are ground squirrels.

         They forded the Cimarron this morning, into country where chollas grow taller to replace proper trees. They’ll cross the Arkansas tomorrow. Marcus has an errand tonight. A man needs a god, at least, if he doesn’t have a home.

         Marcus has the last watch, beginning at three ante meridiem, and he hopes to return and sleep some before then. Still chewing pan bread and bacon, he transfers his saddle to Emma, who has the steadiest nerves of any horse in the remuda. Marcus has kept her fresh for this. He nods to Lonnie, the guard, and trots Emma east. He rides with one hand on his pistol, which, with one exception, has never killed anything larger than a rabbit. The hard butt is comforting, and creatures you can’t kill with a pistol still hesitate sometimes when you shoot them in the face.

         Four days of this would take him from wheatgrass and little bluestem to Indian grass and turkey claw and the Flint Hills, also called Flint Islands, rising from a lake of deep prairie holding out against Deere’s steel plow. Cowpen herds disappear overnight there, and sodbusters don’t work alone, but Marcus isn’t going that far. When he hears Rattlesnake Creek, or imagines that he hears it, he begins to zigzag and circle, and soon finds the pile of rocks where Ajax is buried.

         He doesn’t tether Emma. There’s nothing to tether her to but the cairn, and she’s too smart to wander off alone. After he moves the rocks, which makes him sweat though the air is now cool, Marcus fishes in his pocket for a leather pouch full of herbs. They cost him forty dollars and a detour to New Mexico, but they say in Fort Sumner that Señora Elena, the bruja, has lived twenty years or more in the same adobe east of the Pecos, on the edge of the llano. If the herbs don’t work, she knows Marcus will be back. He draws the bowie that belonged to Ajax, jabs himself in the wrist, drips blood into the pouch. Without the blood of a relative, Elena says, she couldn’t raise at all. He lights the herbs with a phosphorous match and sets them at the foot of the grave. “Well,” he says, “you rested enough?”

         The ground heaves, feebly at first, then breaks apart, uprooting a scraggly lump of evening primrose, making way for Ajax’s skeleton. Ajax sort of twists himself and brings one shoulder out at a time, and his ribs seem to scrunch up easily enough, but he has to force a bigger opening for his hip bones. Finally, he crouches in the dirt like a monkey. Scraps of flesh hang from his ribs like a tattered Confederate flag. “You couldn’t dig me out a little?”

         “Nothing to dig with. Used to be a little tree, a juniper. Broke off branches to dig your grave. Guess somebody fetched it for wood.”

         “How long?”

         “Almost a year,” Marcus lies.

         “Feels longer.”

         “Compared to what? You got a lot of experience being raised from the dead?”

         Ajax glares as best he can with the eyes like shriveled apricots nested in his eye sockets. “I could kill you.”

         “Maybe. Then I suppose you could pile those rocks on top of your own grave so your bones aren’t chewed by coyotes.” If she had a phoenix feather, Señora Elena told Marcus, she could raise him permanently. Ajax wouldn’t have to be back in his grave by sunrise. But Señora Elena didn’t have a phoenix feather, and Marcus didn’t ask where he could find one.

         “What do you want?” Ajax says.

         “Brought some whiskey. Store bought.”

         Ajax doesn’t have much expression, but his back straightens, which could be eagerness. “Pour it in.”

         Marcus takes the bottle from Emma’s saddle bag. “Pour it in—?”

         “In my grave.” Ajax watches whiskey drain into the hole, or at least keeps his sockets tilted in that direction.

         Marcus says, “Where’s Mithras?”

         “Why should I tell you?”

         “It’s the only way you’ll be climbing out of that grave again, much less getting any more whiskey. Unless you think Father will come out here and visit you.” Ajax still has part of one eyebrow; that helps Marcus tell when he’s glaring. Marcus waits him out. He doesn’t mention finally riding to Illinois last fall and finding his parents gone, half-forgotten by neighbors who couldn’t say whether they were alive. Ajax was never sentimental about things like that.

         “In the Dakotas, where the Belle Fourche pours into the Cheyenne.”

         “I know it.”

         “A few miles north of that,” Ajax says. “A rock that looks like an owl, tilted across the end of a coulee. There’s a cave underneath. A den. Wasn’t anything living there in the fall of ‘67.”

         “What were you doing so far north?”

         “Went to fight Indians, but Yankee troops don’t have much stomach for it. Or Indians don’t. Too much sitting around.”

         “They fight Indians plenty up there, since you died. Don’t always win, either. You’re lucky to be out of it.”

         “I feel lucky.”

         Marcus says, “Mithras is just sitting in this cave?”

         “Piled up some bones to hide him.”

         “Bones, but nothing living there?”

         “Nothing there when I went in.”

         Emma nickers, wanting to leave. Waves of grass that look like the creation of the world at dawn are deep enough, at night, to hide end-of-the-world monsters.

         Ajax says, “Forsaken place you buried me in.”

         “A man could do plenty worse.” The wind smells of dung and chalk, and deceptively of water. Before humans, Breed says, these plains were a sea, and the ghosts of aquatic gods are embedded in limestone beneath the soil. “They took you in the Union Army?”

         “It’s the United States Army again. And I’m from Illinois.”

         “Born in Illinois. Loyal to no one. If Mithras isn’t there, I’m not coming back.”

         “You won’t be back anyway.”

         This is true, but Marcus says, “You should have more faith in me, big brother.”

* * *

         Marcus supposes more of childhood than he remembers. He doesn’t remember looking up to Ajax, but he supposes that’s why he followed when his brother left Macomb, which he supposes must have had as many stars as Kansas, Colorado, or Nebraska, though he doesn’t remember them either. He remembers the mithraeum, with the mural of dog, snake, scorpion and bull, none of which can have been very accurate, since Marcus to this day cannot find them in the sky.

         He also seems to remember things he only heard about, such as Henry and Ida Leeds’ arrival in Macomb with baby Ajax in the fall of ‘43. Macomb is above the crease on a horizontally folded map of Illinois, but it’s in the southern portion of the Military Tract taken from Indians to reward the veterans of 1812, its population initially distrustful of Yankee Hellenism. That changed in ‘44, when Henry single-handedly destroyed the vampire of Wigwam Cave. Parlaying local heroism into the first Mithraic Society in Illinois, he became Pater, and also a cabinetmaker, since frontier priests are paid more in prestige than coin.

         Based on Father’s telling, Marcus used to think he remembered the Second Age of Revelations, after the Pagan Reformation, three centuries ago. Father described, as if he had been there, how Mithras and other gods returned to those who had forgotten them under Popish domination. Years later, Marcus recalled to Breed his father’s derision of the Jealous God who boasted of destroying rivals when gods live forever. Breed said never mind forever; if you say thousands of years, that should be impressive enough. Marcus is sometimes shocked at how irreligious Breed can be, for all his meticulous observance of range customs like respect for the lead bull.

         Henry Leeds could cite proof texts on demand, but he needed no proof texts to know that Mithras, in declaring himself a soldier’s god, didn’t mean a god of war, as those fools in Carthage believed; he was a god of soldierly virtues: courage, loyalty and discipline. Father used to observe ruefully that, if he hadn’t first made Mithraism reputable in Macomb, his rival Walter Julian never could have rounded up heretics enough to make it disreputable in Carthage. Marcus supposes he was right, but Ajax had his own opinions.

         Ajax was the wonder of Macomb’s Pankration Society, in which Raven-grade initiates learned the character of men, but he would rather destroy an opponent than collect the wreath and often forfeited, due to some prohibited move, a boxing or wrestling match he would otherwise have won. This brutality had admirers; Ajax, endorsing Pater Julian’s notion of raids to honor Mithras, contributed his own disciples to the more warlike faction. Henry Leeds countered with reason and remonstration until 1859, when Ajax planned to join the Carthage Congregation in crossing the Mississippi and marching up the Missouri, to root out remnant bands of defeated Indians. Then Father confronted Ajax at the edge of town, bearing the staff and ring of his authority, and forbade him to go. When Ajax rolled his eyes and moved to pass, his first wrestling teacher handed his staff to Marcus, threw his eldest son to the ground, clapped him in a simple butterfly lock, and held it, right there on the weedy bank of Crooked River, all the hot afternoon and all the damp night.

         Marcus ran to the river first thing in the morning, in time to see Father release Ajax, who stood panting for a moment before felling his father with a blow to the face. Father climbed to his feet, not to strike back but to stand facing Ajax, close enough that blood from his nose pooled on Ajax’s boots, and say, “That, son, was a sign of weakness.” Three days later, the few survivors of the Carthage expedition straggled home to report that the Fox and Winnebago weren’t yet defeated enough to be exterminated by shopkeepers and hog farmers. Marcus supposes Father thought this would chasten Ajax. Instead, one year later, Ajax took his little brother and the temple statue of Mithras and set out for Texas, in the confused hope that someone was still fighting Mexicans, though that war ended before Marcus was born.

* * *

         Near the edge of camp, Lonnie says, “Who’s there?”

         Marcus says, “It’s me.”

         Lonnie tosses him a pipe, and Marcus catches it without spilling. He lights and puffs, blowing ostentatious clouds of smoke. If it were some kind of fairy pretending to be Marcus, Lonnie’s herbs would break the illusion, probably. It’s a traditional precaution, and Breed runs a traditional crew.

         One boss, two guards, one cook, eight hands. Marcus's experience and skill earn him right point. Silas, who soldiered with Ajax, is left point. Six other hands ride swing, flank, and drag, each traveling with several Texas ponies or, like Marcus, two or three Texas ponies and a big Oregon horse for rivers.

         Lonnie nods. “You owe me a dollar for the weeds. Little less than three hours till your watch.” Over six feet tall, over sixty years old, and hard as the old black walnut in Illinois that bent Father’s axe blade, Lonnie says he spent thirty years fighting Indians, Mexicans, and Yankees, and they all die too easy. He says guarding beef on the plains is a challenge. Lonnie’s sister Constance, the other guard, is a little smaller and younger, and was never a soldier, but she has a saddle and chamfron made from the hide and skull of a prairie dragon she killed with a spear. Along with the six-shooter every trail hand wears, a guard always packs a boar spear, a sword, and a rifle; Lonnie and Constance have had the 50-95 since Winchester came out with it. They never sleep on a drive, as far as anyone can tell, but they don’t handle cows. If something attacks the herd, they’ll kill it; but if the herd stampedes, guards don’t get involved.

         Other standouts are Black Robert and Mexican Robert (also known as Roberto), riding right and left drag. Drag, a position that leaves a man coated with dust, is ordinarily reserved for the newest, least capable riders, and both of the Roberts are better than that. Black Robert was a cattle man in Louisiana when Texans, he says, thought longhorns were Mexican deer. He’s perpetually offended that Texas hands refuse to use cattle dogs, but he’s at least as good as Marcus. He and Mexican Robert take drag to keep their distance from the Anglos, mostly former Confederate soldiers who make Silas their role model and unofficial second-in-command.

         Marcus doesn’t even think the Roberts are friends, particularly, any more than either one is really named Robert, but they share a separate fire, where Roberto prays to the Virgin and Black Robert offers birds to a god called the Baron. Something in Black Robert’s face makes Marcus think he has friendliness he isn’t using, and Marcus sometimes fetches him coffee, but Robert responds with impassive courtesy, carefully looking Marcus in the eye, as he does everyone, to distinguish politeness from servility. Every man has to be what life has made him.

         The Roberts sleep like Indians, building a small fire and crowding close to it. The others build large fires, searching longer for wood these days, since the juniper, sumac, and redcedar, never very plentiful, were mostly burned on previous drives. None of the hands like burning cow patties, though they didn’t mind buffalo chips, before they became scarce as well. Marcus wraps himself in a blanket next to a fire of cholla and a small mesquite tree, roots and all.

         Silas props up on one elbow. “Had an errand, Leeds?”

         “I did.”

         “This is pretty near where you buried Ajax, isn’t it?”

         “It is.”

         “Didn’t bury that Mithras idol with him, did you?”

         “No.”

         “Do you know where the idol is, Leeds?”

         “No.”

         “It’s pretty valuable, though, isn’t it?”

         “Maybe in Macomb, Illinois, if they haven’t replaced it in near twenty years.”

         “I’ve got my eye on you, Marcus.”

         “Sorry, Silas, I prefer a man with a less weaselly face.”

         “Like Breed?” Silas says, but Marcus has found a good position, matching the lumps on the ground to indentations in his body, and he falls asleep.

* * *

         Marcus understood leaving Illinois had been a mistake when Ajax tried to pimp him at a seedy temple of Cupid in Alexandria, Missouri, an enterprise doomed by Marcus's small size and bad attitude. The next night, Marcus denounced Ajax as a panderer to patrons of a rectitudinous Edina saloon, and the brothers had to flee when Ajax killed a man who overplayed his indignation. Not until the third night, in Macon, did Ajax find time to give Marcus the beating that clarified their evolving relationship.

         Crossing Indian Territory, Ajax somehow managed not to bother the Cherokee and Choctaw, and no one bothered them, except one hairy, manlike creature that chased them in the dark, running as fast as their stolen horses. Ajax swore he’d kill it if the horses would stop running, but they bolted for that little cluster of burial mounds or altars north of old Fort Towson, and the creature wouldn’t go near them. Two days later, the brothers were in Texas, where Marcus learned to love willows as the only shrub without claws, and Ajax found no more warlike occupation than hunting down escaped slaves.

         In ‘61, before he took up soldiering, Ajax returned a last slave, Lucius, to the Salanav Ranch in Shelby County and sold Marcus as an octoroon. This was bearable. Old man Salanav, possibly not convinced Marcus was afrykanin, treated him less harshly than Ajax had. Marcus became a household servant and chief attendant to the god Volos, represented by a skinned log with a face carved at the top, to which Marcus made offerings of tobacco, bread, and salt. Of course, the family didn’t socialize with a suspected African, and the outside slaves, whether they thought him African or not, knew he wasn’t one of them. One man told him, not unkindly, “It doesn’t pay to associate with house negroes.” Marcus supposes he had his reasons.

* * *

         The Nebraska sandhills are a hundred miles from the cave where Mithras is waiting, or not much more than that if Ajax told the truth. You see a long way here, but a lot is hidden by the dunes. The sand hides water, too, and the grass is probably not as dry as Marcus's dinner. Some outfits, they give you beans to sop up with the bread, and it goes down easier, but Marcus isn’t the kind of fool who complains about the food right to the cook’s face.

         Silas is, but he has other concerns. “Gone again, nobody knows where, leaving a white man to take care of business! I’m getting tired of running this outfit when he disappears!” Silas glares about, but none of his followers challenge this account. Silas decides to pull Marcus in. “You like to disappear too, don’t you Marcus? Care to tell us where you and Breed are always running off to?” Marcus shrugs, swallowing coffee as hot as he can stand it, to erode the bread lumped in his chest. “We want an explanation,” Silas says. “His job is to stay here and watch this herd.”

         Marcus says, “Guess you went ahead and told Breed that, right Silas?” This gets a laugh from the smaller campfire, and Silas takes a step in that direction. He stops because Roberto is scratching his temple with his Johnson flintlock. He carries a modern revolver too, but the Johnson pistol fires a ball the size of a dog’s eye. Silas pivots on his hocks and reengages Marcus. His face darkens when he’s angry. It doesn’t get red, just dark, like he’s turning into an Apache but can’t get the cheekbones right. “Be careful, Leeds,” Silas says. “Breed’s not here to protect you.”

         Marcus says, “Protect me from what? I don’t see anything dangerous.” The problem is, there’s no time to think. If there was time, he’d figure a way not to back down but not to push Silas too much, either. Silas rolls his shoulders as Patrick, Smith and Frederick line up behind him. Roberto has put away his pistol. This is not his concern.

         The hands jump more than the cattle, for once, when Constance takes a shot at something, but the cattle jump enough. Most just toss their heads and complain at a noise they’ve heard before, but several hundred take off for Canada like they mean to get there tonight.

         Marcus and Silas, the fastest riders, are soon in their usual positions. They should be talking or singing in the dark, but they’re both angry, so Marcus doesn’t always know exactly where Silas is, or even whether he’s still mounted. When he sees Silas crowding the leaders on the left, Marcus fades to the right, and they begin turning the runaways east to circle back to the main herd. It gets easier as they get closer, because Breed is back, lowing his magical bovine lullaby.

         Patrick asks what Constance was shooting at, and Marcus says “prairie dogs” in a serious voice, and even Silas laughs. Later, Marcus asks Lonnie the same thing. “Well,” he says, “it was something that didn’t agitate the stock before she shot at it. Something Constance couldn’t hit. And something that didn’t take any steers when they were spread out halfway from here to Manitoba in the dark.” When he sees that Marcus understands, he says, “Might not work again, and she wouldn’t do it twice, anyhow. Constance ain’t your fucking babysitter, kid.”

* * *

         Somewhere between twelve and thirteen, Marcus became a stable hand. Salanav had loosed his cattle at the start of the war, when northern markets closed and stockmen became soldiers, but he hung on to his horses. Marcus tended Salanav horses for two years, until Lucius decided he couldn’t wait for Yankees to set him free. Marcus was leaning on a fence listening to the night-calls of cricket frogs, which Salanav called “Jew frogs” because they sounded like clinking coins, when Lucius emerged from the slave quarters, carrying a small cloth bundle. Possibly, Marcus was considering a prayer to Volos, even if he was just a log; by that time he had begun to fear Mithras couldn’t hear him from Texas.

         Marcus wouldn’t have hindered Lucius's escape, but Lucius didn’t know that. He did know Marcus had been with the man who shot him in the leg and dragged him back the first time, a memory Marcus aggravated by growing to look so much like Ajax. People said Lucius was lucky to be whipped about to death instead of getting his foot chopped off, but a man could only lose a foot once, maybe twice; Salanav had him whipped every year on the anniversary. If Lucius had been impressed, on the way back to Shelby County, that Marcus gave him extra beans, it didn’t show as Lucius drew the knife from underneath his shirt.

         Marcus kicked Lucius's bad leg, tumbling him into the spines of a dwarf hawthorn by the fence. Marcus had three years in the Macomb Pankration Society, and another year of brutal tutoring from Ajax, and his opponent’s limp offset years without practice. By the time a whippoorwill caught the beetle Lucius flushed tearing himself from the hawthorn, Marcus had gashed and bloody forearms, but it was Lucius curled around the knife as though the blade was his last comfort, as though he feared someone might pull it from his body. Marcus did exactly that, cleaned the blade on Lucius's pants, and used it to cut bandages from the back of Lucius's shirt. Marcus wondered: if the Confederacy fell tomorrow, would he be punished as the killer of a free man? This being unlikely, it was probably the thought of facing Lucius's mother, also owned by Salanav, that led to Marcus taking the bundle of cornpone and sweet potato and escaping in his place.

         After that, Marcus was a meat hunter for close to a year, killing the half-wild, unbranded cattle that multiplied during the war. When a giant rider stopped to watch Marcus hack a dead steer, Marcus expected the man to criticize his technique or challenge his right to the cow. The rider had a broad forehead and small, calm eyes, and there were bits of dry grass in his hair and beard. His voice was predictably deep and unexpectedly nasal, an avalanche heard through a basset horn. He said to Marcus, “That’s how I’d like to go. Returning to the earth that fed you, like a buffalo. That’s better than a railcar to a butcher in Chicago.” He twitched his cheek and ear to dislodge a stable fly. “But it’s not the future.”

         That was Breed. Cattle were becoming profitable again, and Breed was hiring a crew to round them up for the Walking X Ranch. After ascertaining that Marcus knew something about horses, he hired him with the warning that Marcus might be replaced as soldiers came home. He wasn’t. Over the next fourteen years, Breed worked as trail boss in four different outfits, but Marcus only worked for Breed.

* * *

         Near the southernmost curve of the Cheyenne, Breed dismounts to scratch his back against a boulder he uses every year. It’s shaped like a big whitish head, or isn’t really but looks like a man’s head after his hat leaves his hair flatted down, because of a smooth stripe where Breed rubs against it. Breed didn’t do that alone; buffalo used to rub boulders this way, and they left smooth patches on rocks all over the plains. Marcus watches from horseback and says, “I was wrong about Silas.”

         Breed doesn’t open his eyes. “He’s a good rider.”

         “He’s looking for trouble.”

         “It doesn’t matter.”

         “He’s stirring up other hands.”

         “It doesn’t matter.”

         “Breed” means what it sounds like, short for “half-breed.” Marcus has seen him pass as half Mexican with sheepherders in New Mexico, half black negotiating for water with black settlers in Kansas, half Chinese in a Chinatown in Colorado, half Indian on Blackfoot land, even half German with settlers bound for Oregon in new Studebaker wagons. Why not all German? Who could tell German stock from English or French or anyone else they took for a white man? But Breed never claims to be more than half.

         Patrick, who rides right swing, tells a rumor that Breed once passed as half goblin and stayed three nights in a warren in Arkansas. Marcus has been with Breed the longest and never saw him venture as far east as Arkansas, but Patrick asked him who his people were and Breed said they were “people of the sun who lived underground,” and Patrick says that’s proof. Patrick says that’s where Breed disappears to some nights when they’re days from any town; he’s visiting Goblin warrens no one else knows about. Silas says Breed is too big to be a goblin, but whatever he is, he’s wrong in the head and he shouldn’t be trail boss.

         Patrick and Silas weren’t around yet the time Arapaho hunters told Breed there were no buffalo left. After the Arapaho moved on, Breed mumbled a song that made two buffalo squeeze out of the earth, out of gopher holes it looked like. They were thin and unsteady on their feet, but they were live buffalo, swaying and gasping in the dust as Breed rode away. That seemed like an Indian thing, but Marcus didn’t ever remember hearing Indians could do that. That’s when Marcus asked Breed what the half was, and he said, “Feels like I must be half longhorn by now.”

         Already, some northern cattle towns were banning longhorns on account of Spanish fever, and even Texas ranchers were turning to Herefords and Durhams. Marcus said, “Guess you belong to a vanishing people.”

* * *

         It’s easy enough to find. The shadowed gully stands out in moon-pale needlegrass, and the rock covering one end is like a granite owl tipped on its side. The gully is choked with wild plum branches, dark and tangled, and something else. Marcus circles until moonlight hits it at a certain angle, revealing a web of viscous strands, like ropes of saliva. He’s seen it once before, just scraps, clinging to the entrance of Wigwam Cave. Kids thought it was jellied and sticky because it was old, but the fresh product is worse, as though a bilious cloud hawked and spit into the thicket. But it didn’t come from the sky.

         They say it takes a soldier and a priest to kill one, which is why Marcus's father was selected, since a priest of Mithras was assumed to be both. He killed his, according to the story, after days of prayer and preparation, but he made his assault on a bright afternoon. Marcus finds his packet of matches, strikes one, holding his breath against the fumes, and lights a dead branch plumed with dry leaves. He holds the branch near one translucent strand, hoping to see it burst into flame; instead, it sweats pearly phlegm that reaches for the torch as though drawn to heat, and the vampire scuttles from its hidden nest. Spindly limbs and fat belly gleam damply as a frog’s; protruding mandibles stretch its lips to the hinges of its jaw; but it still looks more human than anything else. It advances gracefully over the swaying web, crawling, crabwalking feet-first, crawling belly-down again, joints swiveling as it flips orientations without losing speed.

         Marcus draws, fires, hits; drops of tarry liquid bead at the edges of the wound, not more than you would expect if you shot a pine tree. He remembers a guard from the Bar G outfit telling Constance and Lonnie a 45-70 had better penetration than their 50-95 rifles; Constance told him some creatures ignored penetration, and a 50-95 would knock them back a step while you drew your sword. Marcus shoots twice more with no better result, then he’s saved by a clatter of hoofbeats. He and the creature both look southwest, which is the direction of camp, and the creature prances back into the shadows. Marcus runs to the rock end of the gully, holds up his guttering torch to check for glistening strands, slides between coarse rock and scaly foliage, and finds himself crouching at the mouth of the promised cave. There’s more wood here, and he blocks the cave entrance with a respectable fire, more concerned about the vampire then the risk of igniting the thicket.

         Inside, he finds gray and brown drifts of bone, and two desiccated mummies, male and female, dressed for temple or for courting. There are a dozen pistols, some rustier than others. If he makes it to Montana, Marcus is buying a sword in Miles City. Projecting from bones at the back of the cave, where they are piled about eighteen inches deep, he sees a bronze head. He hasn’t actually decided what he means to do with that.

         Marcus clears bones away with his hands and feet until none touch the statue or the bowl-shaped base. The figure isn’t detailed. It’s probably wearing a helmet, and may be wearing breastplates. It definitely holds a sword, point-down, not brandishing it. There is something steadfast or indifferent in the featureless face and tilt of the head. Marcus polishes the statue as well as he can with his sleeve and some spit. He hears a wail outside, then shouts and gunshots. Silas must have seen him leave camp. Their excursions were equally ill-planned. What would Marcus do with the idol? A priest of Mithras, like his father, is not afraid of vampires. Marcus is no priest. Thanks to Ajax, Marcus never reached the Soldier grade, much less the mystery of death and rebirth as a full initiate. But he can’t just turn and go. He wishes he had brought a calf, though he knows he could not have dragged it into the cave.

         Marcus kneels, rolls up his sleeve, picks a spot next to the scar from raising Ajax. He makes a point of pushing the blade in farther this time, making the new cut wider. Mithras deserves more than his brother. He grunts because the deeper wound pains more than he expects, an ache that flares briefly from elbow to wrist, and extends his arm, directing blood into the dish at Mithras's feet. He recites the first sacrificial prayer he remembers, the prayer for a good harvest. He kicks dirt on the fire, enough to tilt the odds against a general conflagration, and scrambles up the embankment.

         The vampire squats in the center of the web, with Patrick’s corpse, already deflating, hanging from mandibles clamped in his neck. It starts towards Marcus, but it holds on to Patrick, and he sticks to the web. Marcus, realizing the creature will likely defile his offering, stills his breathing and takes careful aim from six or eight yards away. When the bullet puts out an eye, the vampire drops Patrick and surges towards Marcus, who sprints to where he left Emma and keeps on running when Emma isn’t there. He’s still running when Emma appears beside him, and he drags himself into the saddle. Halfway back to camp, he hears something following and draws his pistol again, mentally counting shots expended, but he holds his fire long enough to recognize Patrick’s horse.

* * *

         There are many cattle gods. They don’t always incarnate as cows, but no one wants to offend them when they do. Breed’s crew, like most, tries to identify the one most dominant bull, which is never to be sold, slaughtered, or insulted. Not many years ago, Heavy Red, lead bull of the Cabot herd, spoke up and told cowhands he was the god Apis. He said the herd should stop and rest for ten days, so they did. When they finally met the owner, who rode a train west from Boston to sell his stock, he had missed out on a good price. Cabot told the men from then on, they would only take orders from him, not from cattle, and every hand quit on the spot. Old Black, top bull of the Nelson herd, seems to be just a bull, but Breed shows him respect, even if cattle gods are losing power to gods of commerce like Mercury and Volos, whom Marcus never suspected of much ambition.

         Incarnation used to be more common with buffalo. Jasper, who rides flank, grew up in Missouri, and his father or grandfather was half Osage. One year, when crops were bad, his father or grandfather—Marcus wasn’t in the conversation, and couldn’t ask for clarification—met a buffalo herd at the edge of his field and asked permission to kill some for food. The lead bull told him he could kill two buffalo to feed local settlers, but someday he might have to return the favor. Jasper’s father wasn’t sure what that meant, but he only killed one bull, an older animal, nearly blind.

         Jasper wasn’t with Breed—none of them were but Marcus—on that Kansas drive in ‘67 or ‘68 when a man approached Toro Grande in Indian Territory with pretty much the same question. He said his family was hungry and he only wanted one cow. Toro bit carefully into a prickly pear and dribbled a little dung. Marcus called Breed over, and he said the man could kill the first cow that walked up to him, but he should always remember what he owed to Toro Grande’s herd. Marcus asked Breed later if the herd might eat a settler sometime when grass was scarce. He was kidding, though he once saw a cow eat a bird, a baby prairie chicken she found under a clump of rabbit brush. Breed said that was mostly just an Arikara story. Marcus thought too long about his next question, and never got around to asking.

* * *

         Marcus does not consider himself a nostalgic person. He hasn’t been to Wichita since ‘73, and hasn’t missed it; but he hasn’t forgotten it either. Wichita was built on the east bank of the Arkansas River, built with ash, elm, hackberry and cottonwood, and not all the trees went for lumber, but Marcus doesn’t remember much shade when he was there. You probably couldn’t drive a herd to Wichita now, surrounded by settlers as it is. The last few years, Breed has driven cattle to Montana, once all the way to the Blackfoot reservation. But the early ‘70s were about Abilene and Wichita, and ‘73 was the year they drove to Wichita with Ajax, hired partly to get Silas, who grew up on a Texas ranch, and partly because Marcus recommended him.

         That was also the year of the cattle glut, when they waited weeks for the herd to sell, wasted days advising but never helping the men who unloaded trains, spent evenings attending to the ladies of the dance hall. Breed attached himself to a new woman every night, a liability for her, since he followed her around, chasing other men away, but might or might not escort her to the back rooms himself. If not, she had nothing to show for the evening, except the food and drinks he bought her. Men excused these faux pas in a man of Breed’s size, even if they didn’t work under him, until the night Ajax found no priestess of Aphrodite free to take his offering. Gopher Kate, who looked nothing like a gopher but kept one as a pet, was suffering Breed’s attention at the time. Ignoring Breed, Ajax told her, “Kate, you look like a woman who wants to dance.”

         Breed stood up, expelling air through his nose, and Kate said, “Thank you Mr. Leeds, but I’m a little tired tonight. I’ll just sit here for a while.”

         “You’re right,” Ajax said. “All this waiting around tires me out more than any day of work. Maybe I’ll sit with you.” Breed stepped toward him, very slowly, and the slowness itself was a threat. The way Breed nodded and bobbed his head also looked aggressive to Marcus; witnesses who didn’t know better thought he might be feebleminded. Breed wasn’t carrying a gun. As trail boss, he set an example by leaving it at the marshal’s office, as local ordinance required. Marcus knew Ajax would have one concealed on his person; maybe that was why he hung on to his own. His first shot caught Ajax in the side, with his gun half out of his pocket. Ajax turned toward Marcus, and Marcus shot him in the chest, causing him to drop the gun. The third and fourth shots were just because once Marcus finally started, it was hard to stop.

         Marcus left town at a gallop, and a lot of hands said he’d been in the wrong, but none would help Kansas authorities track down a Texan, which they believed him to be. They nudged one another when Breed claimed the body on the grounds Ajax’s brother ought to bury him, but only Silas seemed put out about it. The next year, Breed convinced the owner to sell in Ellsworth, and in ‘75, he and Marcus switched to the Nelson outfit, importing cattle to Montana. In ‘76, Breed hired Silas again, and Marcus affected not to care.

* * *

         One or two days south of Milk River, two or three days from Nelson Ranch, there’s an undersized bull pine, tilted by the wind and too far from water to thrive. Marcus pauses here before a brown slope speckled yellow with gumweed, goldenrod, and wallflowers. He sees little grass, just sage and greasewood and flowers that are mostly done blooming, and for a moment, he imagines a herd of buffalo has passed. Unlike cows, which Marcus accepts as the ponderous locusts they are, buffalo used to eat grass and move on, leaving forbs undisturbed; but Marcus's mind soon catches up to his eyes, which have already seen that the ground is not hoof-churned and there are no buffalo droppings.

         Ambrose, the new man hired in Miles City, reins in Patrick’s horse to see what Marcus is looking at. Ambrose is half Mexican and dark, but he doesn’t speak much Spanish. He sleeps by the white fire and says Roberto’s churro wool poncho was made from his grandmother’s beard. Ambrose ties his rope to his saddle horn, Oregon style, instead of wrapping it like a Texan, and the boys tease him about that, but it sounds like friendly teasing. Marcus ties his rope as well, always has, but no one ever mentioned it. Ambrose says to Marcus, “Listen, Marcus, I’m new to this outfit. I don’t know you, and I’ve got nothing against you. I’m giving you some friendly advice. You have to pick a side, Marcus. Pick a side, and if you’re with us, you should say so.”

         Marcus says, “There are sides? What are we taking sides about?”

         “Listen, I don’t pretend to know everything. I already said I don’t have history with this outfit.”

         “Which side is Old Black on, have you asked?”

         “You ought to take this seriously, Marcus. It’s a question of leadership. Of accountability.”

         “Maybe it’s us against the gods?”

         “Listen, we’d like to have you with us.”

         “Think you speak for Silas, Ambrose?”

         “I speak for myself.”

         Marcus laughs. “You fucking sheep! You definitely don’t speak for yourself.”

         Ambrose rides back to his position, to Patrick’s old position, his jaw set and his choice confirmed. Constance appears in his place. She rides a big black stallion, bareheaded because it shies from the dragon-skull helm, but an impressive animal. Constance is about Marcus's height, and he knows she outweighs him, though she isn’t fat. Sometimes, when she’s not around, the hands like to ask each other who would share a bedroll with Constance. They don’t ask Marcus. Neither has she. “Nice sword,” Constance says.

         “Thanks.” It’s not a heavy, two-handed monster slayer like Constance’s and Lonnie’s. Johansson Dry Goods had a few of those for sale, but Marcus settled on a well-kept cavalry saber, which is easier to manage. Ajax might approve, not that Marcus cares about that.

         “Slow year.” Constance says. “Parade two-thousand cows past the Black Hills, you expect to attract at least one of the Old Creatures. This year, nothing. Never even saw a big footprint.” Constance is older than Marcus, and her eyes are crinkled at the corners, but vivid as an owl’s, gold-hazel, going from slits to improbable disks and back again as she talks. Constance and Lonnie both worship Marduk, but Constance is more religious; for her, monster-slaying is a sacred rite.

         “Don’t give up,” Marcus says. “They have dire wolves up north that come down the Frenchman River sometimes as far as the Milk.”

         “I’m not holding my breath. Closest thing to the Old Creatures we’ve seen this year is Breed.” She grins. “And we like Breed.” The smile goes, and shining eyes flicker. “Still. We’re here to protect the cattle. Maybe you boys, too, from something that attacks the herd, but mostly cattle. Not to protect the hands from each other. That’s not our business.”    She looks at Marcus like he should say something, so he says, “Okay.” When that’s not enough, he says, “If you want to hear a man scream, the new hand is afraid of snakes.” After Constance rides away, Marcus fingers the hilt of his sword, a wire-wrapped leather grip with a three-branch guard. In Marcus's childhood, Suitor initiates practiced with blunted swords, but Marcus didn’t, much; he had scarcely advanced to Suitor when he left to follow his brother and his abducted god. He’s heard some Societies now have boys strip and reassemble Spencer rifles instead, as if that developed any of the classic virtues. Marcus draws the sword and slashes experimentally at the air. Three feet long and half the weight of his pistol, the sword gives him a feeling of deftness. A little stirred up, he menaces the stunted pine before resheathing his blade, but it pretends not to notice.

* * *

         Sometimes, when things are calm, Marcus dismounts to watch the grass. Easterners think it’s just a tall tale, but on the plains, bunchgrass seeds search out the best spots and actively dig themselves in with wiry little tentacles. They’ll jump like fleas to escape from a sparrow or pipit, and Marcus once saw a seed defeat an ant in single combat, only to be carried away, exhausted, by one of her comrades. Marcus intervened to save it, but Breed said he was wasting his time. When a seed depletes its energy fighting off an insect or escaping a bird, Breed told him, it almost never has enough left to sprout. “Can’t blame the seeds for trying,” Breed said. “Be unnatural if they didn’t. But you might as well let creatures eat.”

* * *

         Breed calls halt early, while the sun is still well up. He watches the strung-out herd bunch up some, checks on Old Black, and takes off on one of his mysterious overnight rides. He’ll be back tomorrow to trail the herd to Nelson Ranch. Approaching the wagon, Marcus sees only Jasper sitting on a rock to eat. Silas and a few others stand over him.

         Jasper says, “I’m not against you boys, I’m just not going.” Marcus pretends not to hear, collects his bacon and bread, and walks away. He manages to eat most of it on his way to the remuda, and throws the rest into brush half hiding him from Silas's group. He rides a mile west before circling the camp and pointing Emma northeast, which is the direction Breed went.

         Even late in the summer, there’s color. Soapweed and other yuccas are green. Russian thistle, lately spread to Montana from Dakota, where it arrived in shipments of flaxseed, is green with purple streaks, weeks away from breaking loose and tumbling across the plains as aimlessly as any cowhand. Aster and late horsemint bloom lavender. Jutting rocks are pink or yellowed ivory. People in New England, maybe even in Illinois, think magic is everywhere the same, but on the range, you smell and taste the differences, and new powers born from mixing. Power of gods who came west with the Omaha or south with the Kiowa, gods who came with the Americans, gods the Pawnee left when they retreated to reservations, gods of older tribes the Pawnee drove out long ago. Magic that came with the Chinese, and magic smuggled here by slaves. Magic of Spanish and Mexican Catholics, which they say doesn’t mix, but it does at the edges, more than any. And magic that was always here, that you don’t always feel, but when you do your heart hunkers like a rabbit, because you’re alone between land and sky, and it’s still deciding about you. Even gods must feel that, Marcus is starting to think.

         Pushing Emma a little bit, Marcus catches Breed when the shadows are just past medium-long. Time for the dusk prayer, almost, but prayers feel too much like apologies since he left his god with the vampire. He tells Breed, “I think Silas intends to find out where you’re going.”

         Breed says, “It doesn’t concern him.”

         Marcus says, “That’s what I figured.” They ride in silence to a hill surrounded and covered by white sage, and it’s not a hill but a solitary earthlodge, worn by years of wind and rain. Breed cuts an armload of sage branches, then leads Marcus in, or maybe he doesn’t, but Marcus follows. The floor is two or three feet below ground level, and an impressive quantity of split logs form the walls. After Breed lights the sage, Marcus sees a big buffalo skull on a rectangular earth platform. Four smaller platforms, in a semicircle behind it, are empty. Breed circles the lodge with burning sage, spreading smoke, which Marcus recognizes as a purification. That’s mostly an Indian thing, but other people do it too.

         Breed squats in front of the skull and sings in a language Marcus doesn’t recognize, if it’s a language at all; there are only ten or twelve words, repeated in different combinations. The deerskin bundle Breed pulls from his shirt turns out to be full of grass. Marcus identifies grama, needlegrass, wheatgrass and bluestem; all appears to be chosen, maybe stalk by stalk, for greenness and perfection. Breed sets most of it on the platform with the skull, but keeps a substantial fistful, which he eats, half closing his eyes and sinking all of his attention into the circular grinding of his jaw. When he stands, Marcus asks if this is an Indian ritual. Breed says there are a lot of tribes on the plains, or there were, and all have their own ceremonies, but none do it just like this. If he has to bring his own offering, he says, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be what he likes. He sits on one of the empty platforms and looks toward the doorway before Marcus hears the horses.

         Silas calls, “Come out, Breed! We’re fed up!”

         Marcus says, “There should only be four of them.”

         Frederick, probably, says, “Look at this thing. A hill with a door. He is a goblin. Or a troll.”

         Ambrose says, “Shit. Listen, he’s just an Indian.”

         “Maybe an Indian minotaur. I never saw an Indian that big or that hairy.”

         Silas says, “Shut the hell up and drag him out.”

         Marcus feels his pistol grip with his thumb, and it feels good, reassuring, but he draws his sword instead.

         Breed tells him, “It doesn’t matter, Marcus. I’m tired.”

         Marcus says, “Good thing I’m full of pep.” He looks at the buffalo skull, feeling he ought to make some kind of gesture, some kind of salute, whatever old-time knights did before a battle.

         Breed says, “Marcus, this altar is used up. It doesn’t need new worshippers.”

         Marcus feels his face warm, as though he’d been turned away by a dance hall girl. “Got an altar,” he says. “Private altar to Mithras in Dakota. He’s a god of loyalty.”

         Marcus exits, sword-first, and they must be friends after all, because Breed gives him what he wants, bellows a challenge from lungs big as the room, a chest the size of the hill, with strong log ribs. Sound rolls across the prairie, silencing men and horses, nearby cicadas and distant coyotes. While it lasts, stars are legible and the ground beneath them is home. When it fades, and Breed with it somehow, killing Silas won’t bring it back, but every man seizes what purpose he can, and Marcus only hopes, punching the blade between Silas's ribs, that the blood he spills is good for the grass.

Copyright © 2017 T.S. McAdams

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T. S. McAdams dropped out of an MFA program late in the 20th century and spent much of the 21st teaching high school. He lives with his wife, son, and bullmastiffs in the San Fernando Valley, where he is not working on a screenplay.

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COVER ART

“Riverhome,” by Veli Nyström

Veli Nyström is an illustrator and concept artist mostly in the games industry. He currently works as a freelancer and resides in Tampere, Finland. View more of his art online at www.artstation.com/vablo and velinystrom.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press

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