TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 143, April 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: April 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

Advice from the Civil Temporal Defense League
Sandra McDonald

The Day It All Ended
Charlie Jane Anders

Everything the Sea Takes, It Returns
Izzy Wasserstein

A Sword Has One Purpose
Phoebe Barton

FANTASY

A History of Snakes, Part I
Ashok K. Banker

A History of Snakes, Part II
Ashok K. Banker

Dance of Bones
Maurice Broaddus

The Fairy Godmother Advice Column
Leah Cypess

EXCERPTS

Kalyna the Soothsayer
Elijah Kinch Spector

NONFICTION

Book Review: Siren Queen, by Nghi Vo
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Unlimited Futures, edited by Ismail and van Neerven
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Ashok K. Banker

Izzy Wasserstein

Phoebe Barton

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2022 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Dreamstime

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: April 2022

John Joseph Adams | 212 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 143rd issue!

This month, we return to Ashok K. Banker’s Legends of the Burnt Empire series with their novella, “The History of Snakes”—a story so epic we’ll be serializing over two weeks. Our other fantasy fiction includes a charming flash piece from Leah Cypess (“The Fairy Godmother Advice Column”) and a reprint from Maurice Broaddus (“Dance of Bones”).

Our first SF short is a story of climate change, violent apocalypse, and somehow the hope for healing. If you want your heart touched, don’t miss “Everything the Sea Takes, it Returns” by Izzy Wasserstein. Phoebe Barton returns to our pages with the swashbuckling SF adventure “A Sword Has One Purpose,” and Sandra McDonald dabbles in time travel in her flash story “Advice From The Civil Temporal Defense League.” Our reprint this month is from Charlie Jane Anders (“The Day it All Ended”).

Our interview team brings us spotlight interviews with our authors, and of course our crew of expert reviewers have provided their latest book recommendations. Our ebook readers will enjoy a book excerpt from Kalyna the Soothsayer, the debut novel by Elijah Kinch Spector.

It’s another terrific issue—and thanks for joining us at the speed of light!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Advice from the Civil Temporal Defense League

Sandra McDonald | 1451 words

Do

Be Aware of Strangers Who Ask You What Day It It.

Be Aware of Strangers Who Ask You What Year It Is.

Be Aware of Stunned Looking Strangers Who Murmur “Mom?” in The Squeeze-In Diner When You Stop By After School For a Chocolate Malt, Though Clearly You Have Never Given Birth to Them or to Anyone At All, Thank You Very Much.

Be Aware of Strangers Wearing Clothing, Footwear, or Accessories That Seem Just A Few Years Out of Fashion or Incongruent With the Season, Climate, or Weather Forecast, or Perhaps Not Gender Appropriate Because No Woman Needs to Wear Trousers Anyway, or Who Are Not Wearing Their Mandatory Orange Chrono Radiation Badges.

BE ON ALERT At All Times for TIME TRAVELER Arrivals, Especially In Empty Parking Lots, in Poorly Lit Alleys, or On Sparsely Traveled Roads Like Old Highway Seventeen Just Outside Town. Signs that a TIME TRAVELER Might Be Arriving:

Unexpected Flashes of Bright Light, Sometimes With A Dramatic Strobing Effect;

Unexpected Gusts of Wind Stirring Trash Along the Sidewalk or Against A Chain Link Fence Like The Kind You Can Purchase At The Feed & Seed From Earl Hynes, Chairman of Our Very Own Civil Temporal Defense League;

Unexpected Noises Indicating A Sudden Explosion of Energy, A Change of Temporal Pressure, and/or A Gate Opening Between Worlds That Will Inevitably Lead To Chaos and Tragedy Such as That Time Betty Newell’s Grandson Sired Betty’s Grandmother And All Hell Broke Loose.

Be Aware of Strangers Who Stand In Telephone Booths By The Side of Highway 17 With Perplexed Expressions and/or Rip Pages Out Of Phone Books And Now The Next Person Can’t Find The Listing for Betty Newell, Thanks So Much.

Be Aware of Strangers Who Hitch A Ride Into Town With The Milkman And Ask Where Is The USB Port Because Their Battery is Almost Dead Even Though They Thought They Put It On Airplane Mode.

Be Aware of Strangers Who Gaze at The Picturesque Town Square as If They’ve Seen It Before But Somewhat Different, Who Ask for Something Called A Frappuccino No Whip From Your Aunt Doreen at The Squeeze-In Diner, Who Seem Surprised By Pictures of President Adlai Stevenson in The Morning Newspaper, Who Try to Play Elvis Presley’s song Funny How Time Slips Away On The Jukebox Without Inserting a Nickel First, And Who Seem Even More Surprised to Learn that Corporal Elvis Presley Died in That Tragic Accident at Fort Hood in Texas And Your Aunt Doreen Will Never Get Over It.

Be Aware of Strangers Who Follow You Home from The Squeeze-In Diner and Wait Until Your Dad Goes off to His Night Shift at the Hospital and Wander Up Your Driveway to Your Kitchen Door and Then Call Your New Puppy By The Name You Just Decided on A Few Minutes Ago.

Be Sure You Don’t Think His Sad Smile Is So Oddly Familiar That You Take Pity on This Lost Stranger and Invite Him in for Lemonade and You Always Did Follow Your Heart, Mary-Ann Newkirk, Even When You Should be Following Your Head.

Be Concerned When He Squints at Common Household Devices (Transistor Radio, Stereo Console, Television Receiver) as if He’s Wandered Into a Museum Instead of Your Dad’s Living Room and Reaches a Reverent Finger Toward the Framed Photograph of You and Tommy Hardy at the Senior Prom, Both of You So Happy in Your Formal Wear and Silver Chrono Helmets.

Be Especially Wary When He Apologizes to You with Vague Details but Heartfelt Emotion About Something He Says You Will Some Day Understand, Who Gives You a Gold Locket That Looks Just Like the One You Gave Tommy Before He Shipped Off in the Army to West Germany Back in August, and Who Leaves Abruptly With Tear-filled Eyes and a Vow to Fix What Has Been Broken.

Isn’t It Curious That His Eyes Are the Same Beautiful Blue-Green Color as Tommy’s?

Isn’t It Strange That Tommy Hasn’t Written Back Since He Went To West Germany?

REPORT THAT SUSPICIOUS STRANGER IMMEDIATELY TO THE DEFENSE LEAGUE, Mary-Ann.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THAT, Escort Yourself to the League Offices for Your Mandatory Debriefing, Chrono Radiation Evaluation, and Temporal Scrub Down.

Don’t

Don’t Wait Until A TEMPORAL EMERGENCY Happens to Know What To Do and Who To Call.

Don’t Try To Warn Your Future or Past Selves. They Never Listen.

Don’t Go Into The Streets During The Emergency, Which Will Probably Be Announced on All Radio Frequencies Long Before It Actually Occurs Because Cause and Effect Don’t Work During a TEMPORAL EMERGENCY, Didn’t They Teach You That in School?

Don’t Go Looking for a Safer Shelter. During a TEMPORAL EMERGENCY, No Place Is Truly Safe from The Five Threat Categories of Time Disruption: Discrepancies, Oddities, Disruptions, Paradoxes, and Shenanigans. Hiding In a Root Cellar Won’t Save Your Timeline from Cracking, Snapping, and Fracturing as The Universe Itself Realigns.

Instead, Find Comfort in a Place That Is Familiar and Cozy, Like the Cedar-Lined Closet in the Hallway That Henry Newkirk Built for His Bride Alice Back When They Were Young and Madly In Love, Long Before the Chrono-Cancer Stole Her Years and Ovaries and Thyroid Function, Before She Took to Bed and Faded, Faded, Faded Away While Her Husband and Daughter Watched Helplessly.

Don’t Hesitate to Subdue a Suspected TIME TRAVELER By Any Means Necessary and Make a Civil Arrest Until Enforcers from the Civil Temporal Defense League Can Arrive. Aunt Doreen’s Boyfriend Ray Will Catch a TIME TRAVELER In His Garage Next Christmas Eve and after Christmas Dinner We All Will Enjoy The Execution in Our Picturesque Town Square. Thank You In Advance to Ray for The Exemplary Civil Service and to Our Very Own Earl Hynes for Providing the Bullets.

Don’t Go Looking For Answers in Dusty City Records, in Dusty Books on Dusty Library Shelves, or in Dusty Archives in Civil Temporal Defense League Closets.

Dust Never Leads to Clarity.

Trust Us.

After All, Dust Is Barely Sentient. It Is Mostly Tiny Bits of Debris From Everyone and Everything That Has Ever Existed or Will Exist, or Maybe Existed in a Corrupted Timeline Where Eisenhower Was Elected or Corporal Elvis Presley Reported to Duty in a U.S. Army Secret Temporal Laboratory in West Germany Instead of the Our Correct and Absolutely Perfect Timeline, where Tommy Hardy Reported Instead And No Don’t Ask Us More Unless You Want a Visit from the Enforcers.

Speaking of the Enforcers, Mary-Ann, Mrs. Earl Hynes Happened To Be Driving Down The Street in Her Cadillac and Saw What Might Be a TIME TRAVELER Walking up Your Driveway. Fearful for Your Safety, She Has Alerted The Civil Temporal Defense League.

Don’t Jump on Your Bicycle and Race After the Stranger with Tommy’s Eyes.

Don’t Catch Up to Him in the Alley by The Squeeze-In Diner and Grab His Sleeve and Beg Him to Take You Where He’s Going in Order to Save Tommy, Your One True Love.

Don’t Watch Your Alternate-Timeline Son Take a Time Traveling Device from His Pocket and Deftly Activate It. Time Travel Devices Might Take a Variety of Appearances:

A Metallic Orb with a Steampunk Vibe that Emits a Mysterious Light;

A Doorway, Glowing or Darkened, that Clearly Was Not There a Moment Ago;

A Phone Booth Of Dubious Origin;

A Futuristic Automobile Unlike Any You Have Ever Seen Before, But Certainly Not as Affordable as Those Sold by our Own Earl Hynes at His New Dealership near Route Seventeen.

DON’T BE SELFISH, Mary-Ann. Yes, Tommy Has a Good Soul and You Love Him Dearly. Still, How Important Is One Life Weighed Against the Correct and Absolutely Perfect Timeline? You Can’t Just Go Mucking Around Time Propelled by Grief and Your Heart’s Desire. Where Will the Madness End? Would You Keep Stevenson from the White House to Keep the Secret Temporal Laboratory in West Germany from Being Built? Would You Save Elvis so that He Reports to West Germany Instead of Your Tommy?

Would You Save Your Mother? Remember, She Always Wanted You to Date Betty Newell’s Grandson Instead.

Who’s to Say The World Will Be Better off When You’re Done with Your Meddling?

True, Your Tommy Accidentally Triggered the Explosion in The Secret Temporal Laboratory that Threw the World into the Chaos We Face Today. Preventing That Would Save a Universe of Grief.

For Some Of Us.

Yet as Earl Hynes Likes To Say in Our Meetings, “Time’s a Mess But It’s OUR Mess.”

The Civil Temporal Defense League Will Protect You All. Whether You Want Us to or Not.

Besides, We’ve Seen Elvis Perform. It Was Shameful.

Long Live Time Travel.

©2022 by Sandra McDonald.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Four of Sandra McDonald’s stories have been noted on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and her collection Diana Comet and Other Impossible Stories was a Booklist Editor’s Choice and ALA Over the Rainbow book. She is the author of The Outback Stars series of SF adventures, the Fisher Key mysteries for LGBTQ young adults, and stories that have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Beyond Binary and War and Space: Recent Combat as well other magazines and anthologies. Once upon a time she was Hollywood assistant who worked at CBS Television and Disney Studios.  Visit her at sandramcdonald.com.

The Day It All Ended

Charlie Jane Anders | 3760 words

Bruce Grinnord parked aslant in his usual spot and ran inside the DiZi Corp. headquarters. Bruce didn’t check in with his team or even pause to glare at the beautiful young people having their toes stretched by robots while they sipped macrobiotic goji-berry shakes and tried to imagine ways to make the next generation of gadgets cooler looking and less useful. Instead, he sprinted for the executive suite. He took the stairs two or three at a time, until he was so breathless he feared he’d have a heart attack before he even finished throwing his career away.

DiZi’s founder, Jethro Gruber—Barrons’ Young Visionary of the Year five years running—had his office atop the central spire of the funhouse castle of DiZi’s offices, in a round glass turret. Looking down on the employee oxygen bar and the dozen gourmet cafeterias. If you didn’t have the key to the private elevator, the only way up was this spiral staircase, which climbed past a dozen Executive Playspaces, and any one of those people could cockblock you before you got to Jethro’s pad. But nobody seemed to notice Bruce charging up the stairs, fury twisting his round face, even when he nearly put his foot between the steps and fell into the Moroccan Spice Café.

Bruce wanted to storm into Jethro’s office and shout his resignation in Jethro’s trendy schoolmaster glasses. He wanted to enter the room already denouncing the waste, the stupidity, of it all—but when he reached the top of the staircase, he was so out of breath, he could only wheeze, his guts wrung and cramped. He’d only been in Jethro’s office once before: an elegant goldfish bowl with one desk that changed shape (thanks to modular pieces that came out of the floor), a few chairs, and one dot of maroon rug at its center. Bruce stood there, massaging his dumb stomach and taking in the oppressive simplicity.

So Jethro spoke first, the creamy purr Bruce knew from a million company videos. “Hi, Bruce. You’re late.”

“I’m . . . I’m what?”

“You’re late,” Jethro said. “You were supposed to have your crisis of conscience three months ago.” He pulled out his Robo-Bop and displayed a personal calendar, which included one entry: “Bruce Has a Crisis of Conscience.” It was dated a few months earlier. “What kept you, man?”

• • • •

It started when Bruce took a wrong turn on the way to work. Actually, he drove to the wrong office—the driving equivalent of a Freudian slip.

He was on the interstate at seven thirty, listening to a banjo solo that he hadn’t yet learned to play. Out his right window, every suburban courtyard had its own giant ThunderNet tower, just like the silver statue in Bruce’s own cul-de-sac—the sleek concave lines and jetstreamed base like a 1950s googie space fantasy. To his left, almost every passing car had a Car-Dingo bolted to its hood, with its trademark sloping fins and whirling lights. And half the drivers were listening to music, or making Intimate Confessions on their Robo-Bops. Once on the freeway, Bruce could see much larger versions of the ThunderNet tower dotting the landscape, from shopping-mall roofs as well as empty fields. Plus everywhere he saw giant billboards for DiZi’s newest product, the Crado—empty-faced, multicultural babies splayed out in a milk-white, egg-shaped chair that monitored the baby’s air supply and temperature in some way that Bruce still couldn’t explain.

Bruce was a VP of marketing at DiZi—shouldn’t he be able to find something good to say about even one of the company’s products?

So this one morning, Bruce got off the freeway a few exits too soon. Instead of driving to the DiZi offices, he went down a feeder road to a dingy strip mall that had offices instead of dry cleaners. This was the route Bruce had taken for years before he joined DiZi, and he felt as though he’d taken the wrong commute by mistake.

Bruce’s old parking spot was open, and he could almost pretend time had rolled back, except that he’d lost some hair and gained some weight. He found himself pushing past the white balsawood-and-metal door with the cheap sign saying Eco Gnomic and into the offices, and then he stopped. A roomful of total strangers perched on beanbags and folding chairs turned and stared, and Bruce had no explanation for who he was or why he was there. “Uh,” Bruce said.

The Eco Gnomic offices looked like crap compared to DiZi’s majesty, but also compared to the last time he’d seen them. Take the giant Intervention Board that covered the main wall: when Bruce had worked there, it’d been covered with millions of multicolored tacks, attached to scraps of incidents. This company is planning a major polluting project, so we mobilize culture-jammer flashmobs here and organize protesters at the public hearing there. Like a giant multidimensional chess game covering one wall, deploying patience and playfulness against the massive corporate engine. Now, though, the Intervention Board contained nothing but bad news, without much in the way of strategies. Arctic Shelf disintegrating, floods, superstorms, droughts, the Gulf Stream stuttering, extinctions like dominos falling. The office furniture teetered on broken legs, and the same computers from five years ago whined and stammered. The young woman nearest Bruce couldn’t even afford a proper Mohawk—her hair grew back in patches on the sides of her head, and the stripe on top was wilting. None of these people seemed energized about saving the planet.

Bruce was about to flee when his old boss, Gerry Donkins, showed up and said, “Bruce! Welcome back to the nonprofit sector, man.” Bruce and Gerry wound up spending an hour sitting on crates, drinking expired YooHoo. “Yeah, Eco Gnomic is dying,” said Gerry, giant mustache twirling, “but so is the planet.”

“I feel like I made a terrible mistake,” Bruce said. He looked at the board and couldn’t see any pattern to the arrangement of ill omens.

“You did,” Gerry replied. “But it doesn’t make any difference, and you’ve been happy. You’ve been happy, right? We all thought you were happy. How is Marie, by the way?”

“Marie left me two years ago,” Bruce said.

“Oh,” Gerry said.

“But on the plus side, I’ve been taking up the banjo.”

“Anyway, no offense, but you wouldn’t have made a difference if you’d stayed with us. We probably passed the point of no return a while back.”

Point of no return. It sounded sexual, or like letting go of a trapeze at the apex of its arc.

“You did the smart thing,” said Gerry, “going to work for the flashiest consumer products company and enjoying the last little bit of the ride.”

Bruce got back in his Prius and drove the rest of the way to work, past the rows of ThunderNet towers and the smoke from far-off forest fires. This felt like the last day of the human race, even though it was just another day on the steep slope. As Bruce reached the lavender glass citadel of DiZi’s offices, he started to go numb inside, like always. But instead, this time, a fury took him, and that’s when he charged inside and up the stairs to Jethro’s office, ready to shove his resignation down the CEO’s throat.

• • • •

“What do you mean?” Bruce said to Jethro, as his breath came back. “You were expecting me to come in here and resign?”

“Something like that.” Jethro gestured for Bruce to sit in one of the plain white, absurdly comfortable teacup-chairs. He sat cross-legged in the other one, like a yogi in his wide-sleeved linen shirt and camper pants. In person, he looked slightly chubbier and less classically handsome than all his iconic images, but the perfect hipster bowl haircut and sideburns, and those famous glasses, were instantly recognizable. “But like I said: late. The point is, you got here in the end.”

“You didn’t engineer this. I’m not one of your gadgets. This is real. I really am fed up with making pointless toys when the world is about to choke on our filth. I’m done.”

“It wouldn’t be worth anything if it wasn’t real, bro.” Jethro gave Bruce one of his conspiratorial/mischievous smiles that made Bruce want to smile back in spite of his soul-deep anger. “That’s why we hired you in the first place. You’re the canary in the coal mine. Here, look at the org chart.”

Jethro made some hand motions, and one glass surface became a screen, which projected an org chart with a thousand names and job descriptions. And there, halfway down on the left, was Bruce’s name, with “CANARY IN THE COAL MINE.” And a picture of Bruce’s head on a cartoon bird’s body.

“I thought my job title was junior executive VP for product management,” Bruce said, staring at his openmouthed face and those unfurled wings.

Jethro shrugged. “Well, you just resigned, right? So you don’t have a title anymore.” He made another gesture, and a bright-eyed young thing wheeled a minibar out of the elevator and offered Bruce beer, whiskey, hot sake, coffee, and Mexican Coke. Bruce felt rebellious, choosing a single-malt whiskey, until he realized he was doing what Jethro wanted. He took a swig and burned his throat and eyes.

“So you’re quitting; you should go ahead and tell me what you think of my company.” Jethro spread his hands and smiled.

“Well.” Bruce drank more whiskey and then sputtered. “If you really want to know . . . Your products are pure evil. You build these sleek little pieces of shit that are designed with all this excess capacity and redundant systems. Have you ever looked at the schematics of the ThunderNet towers? It’s like you were trying to build something overly complex. And it’s the ultimate glorification of form over function—you’ve been able to convince everybody with disposable income to buy your crap, because people love anything that’s ostentatiously pointless. I’ve had a Robo-Bop for years, and I still don’t understand what half the widgets and menu options are for. I don’t think anybody does. You use glamour and marketing to convince people they need to fill their lives with empty crap instead of paying attention to the world and realizing how fragile and beautiful it really is. You’re the devil.”

The drinks fairy had started gawking halfway through this rant, then she seemed to decide it was against her pay grade to hear this. She retreated into the elevator and vanished around the time Bruce said he didn’t understand half the stuff his Robo-Bop did.

Bruce had fantasized about telling Jethro off for years, and he enjoyed it so much he had tears in his eyes by the end. Even knowing that Jethro had put this moment on his Robo-Bop calendar couldn’t spoil it.

Jethro was nodding, as if Bruce had just about covered the bases. Then he made another esoteric gesture, and the glass wall became a screen again. It displayed a PowerPoint slide:

DIZI CORP. PRODUCT STRATEGY

+ Beautiful Objects That Are Functionally Useless

+ Spare Capacity

+ Redundant Systems

+ Overproliferation of Identical But Superficially Different Products

+ Form Over Function

+ Mystifying Options and Confusing User Interface

“You missed one, I think,” Jethro said. “The one about overproliferation. That’s where we convince people to buy three different products that are almost exactly the same, but not quite.”

“Wow.” Bruce looked at the slide, which had gold stars on it. “You really are completely evil.”

“That’s what it looks like, huh?” Jethro actually laughed, as he tapped on his Robo-Bop. “Tell you what. We’re having a strategy meeting at three, and we need our canary there. Come and tell the whole team what you told me.”

“What’s the point?” Bruce felt whatever the next level below despair was. Everything was a joke, and he’d been deprived of the satisfaction of being the one to unveil the truth.

“Just show up, man. I promise it’ll be entertaining, if nothing else. What else are you going to do with the rest of your day, drive out to the beach and watch the seagulls dying?”

That was exactly what Bruce had planned to do after leaving DiZi. He shrugged. “Sure. I guess I’ll go get my toes stretched for a while.”

“You do that, Bruce. See you at three.”

• • • •

The drinks fairy must have gossiped about Bruce, because people were looking at him when he walked down to the main promenade. If there’d been a food court in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it would have looked like DiZi’s employee promenade. Bruce didn’t have his toes stretched. Instead, he ate two organic calzones to settle his stomach after the morning whiskey. The calzones made Bruce more nauseated. The people on Bruce’s marketing team waved at him in the cafeteria but didn’t approach the radioactive man.

Bruce was five minutes early for the strategy meeting, but he was still the last one to arrive, and everyone was staring at him. Bruce had never visited the Executive Meditation Hole, which also doubled as Jethro’s private movie theater. It was a big bunker under the DiZi main building with wall carpets and aromatherapy.

“Hey, Bruce.” Jethro was lotus-positioning on the dais at the front, where the movie screen would be. “Everybody, Bruce had a Crisis of Conscience today. Big props for Bruce, everybody.”

Everyone clapped. Bruce’s stomach started turning again, so he put his face in front of one of the aromatherapy nozzles and huffed calming scents. “So Bruce has convinced me that it’s time for us to change our product strategy to focus on saving the planet.”

“You what?” Bruce pulled away from the soothing jasmine puff. “Are you completely delusional? Have you been surrounded by yes-men and media sycophants for so long that you’ve lost all sense of reality? It’s way, way too late to save the planet, man.” Everybody stared at Bruce, until Jethro clapped again. Then everyone else clapped too.

“Bruce brings up a good point,” Jethro said. “The timetable is daunting, and we’re late. Partly because your Crisis of Conscience was months behind schedule, I feel constrained to point out. In any case, how would we go about making this audacious goal? Enterprise audacity being one of our corporate buzzsaws, of course. And for that, I’m going to turn it over to Zoe. Zoe?”

Jethro went and sat in the front row, and a big screen appeared up front. A skinny woman in a charcoal-gray suit got up and used her Robo-Bop to control a presentation.

“Thanks, Jethro,” the stick-figure woman, Zoe, said. She had perfect Amanda Seyfried hair. “It really comes down to what we call product versatility.” She clicked onto a picture of a nice midrange car with a swooshy device bolted to its roof. “Take the Car-Dingo, for example. What does it do?”

Various people raised their hands and offered slogans like, “It makes a Prius feel like a muscle car,” or “It awesomeizes your ride.”

“Exactly!” Zoe smiled. She clicked the next slide over, and proprietary specs for the Car-Dingo came up. They were so proprietary, Bruce had never seen them. Bruce struggled to make sense of all those extra connections and loops, going right into the engine. She pulled up similar specs for the ThunderNet tower, full of secret logic. Another screen showed all those nonsensical Robo-Bop menus, suddenly unlocking and making sense.

“Wait a minute.” Bruce was the only one standing up, besides Zoe. “So you’re saying all these devices were dual-function all this time? And in all the hundreds of hellish product meetings I’ve sat through, you never once mentioned this fact?”

“Bruce,” Jethro said from the front row, “we’ve got a little thing at DiZi called the Culture of Listening. That means no interrupting the presentation until it’s finished, or no artisanal cookies for you.”

Bruce sighed and climbed over someone to find a seat and listened to another hour of corporate “buzzsaws.” At one point, he could have sworn Zoe said something about “end-user velocitization.” One thing Bruce did understand, in the gathering haze: even though DiZi officially frowned on the cheap knockoffs of its products littering the Third World, the company had gone to great lengths to make sure those illicit copies used the exact same specs as the real items.

Just as Bruce was passing out from boredom, Jethro thanked Zoe and said, “Now let’s give Bruce the floor. Bruce, come on down.” Bruce had to thump his own legs to wake them up, and when he reached the front, he’d forgotten all the things he was dying to say an hour earlier. The top echelons of DiZi management stared, waiting for him to say something.

“Uh.” Bruce’s head hurt. “What do you want me to say?”

Jethro stood up next to Bruce and put an arm around him. “This is where your Crisis of Conscience comes in, Bruce dude. Let’s just say, as a thought embellishment, that we could fix it.” (“Thought embellishment” was one of Jethro’s buzzsaws.)

“Fix . . . it?”

Jethro handed Bruce a Robo-Bop with a pulsing Yes/No screen. “It’s all on you, buddy. You push yes, we can make a difference here. There’ll be some disruptions, people might be a mite inconvenienced, but we can ameliorate some of the problems. Push no, and things go on as they are. But bear in mind—if you push yes, you’re the one who has to explain to the people.”

Bruce still didn’t understand what he was saying yes to, but he hardly cared. He jabbed the yes button with his right thumb. Jethro whooped and led him to the executive elevator, so they could watch the fun from the roof.

“It should be almost instantaneous,” Jethro said over his shoulder as he hustled into the lift. “Thanks to our patented ‘snaggletooth’ technology that makes all our products talk to each other. It’ll travel around the world like a wave. It’s part of our enterprise philosophy of Why-Not-Now.”

The elevator lurched upward, and in moments they had reached the roof. “It’s starting,” Jethro said. He pointed to the nearest ThunderNet tower. The sleek lid was opening up like petals, until the top resembled a solar dish. And a strange haze was gathering over the top of it.

“This technology has been around for years, but everybody said it was too expensive to deploy on a widespread basis,” Jethro said with a wink. “In a nutshell, the tops of the towers contain a photocatalyst material, which turns the CO₂ and water in the atmosphere into methane and oxygen. The methane gets stored and used as an extra power source. The tower is also spraying an amine solution into the air that captures more CO₂ via a proprietary chemical reaction. That’s why the ThunderNets had to be so pricey.”

Just then, Bruce felt a vibration from his own Robo-Bop. He looked down and was startled to see a detailed audit of Bruce’s personal carbon footprint—including everything he’d done to waste energy in the past five years.

“And hey, look at the parking lot,” Jethro said. All the Car-Dingos were reconfiguring themselves, snaking new connections into the car engines. “We’re getting most of those vehicles as close to zero emissions as possible, using amines that capture the cars’ CO₂. You can use the waste heat from the engine to regenerate the amines.” But the real gain would come from the car’s GPS, which would start nudging people to carpool whenever another Car-Dingo user was going to the same destination, using a “packet-switching” model to optimize everyone’s commute for greenness. Refuse to carpool, and your car might start developing engine trouble—and the Car-Dingos, Bruce knew, were almost impossible to remove.

As for the Crados? Jethro explained how they were already hacking into every appliance in people’s homes, to make them energy-efficient whether people wanted them to be or not.

Zoe was standing at Bruce’s elbow. “It’s too late to stop the trend, or even reverse all the effects,” she said over the din of the ThunderNet towers. “But we can slow it drastically, and our most optimistic projections show major improvements in the medium term.”

“So all this time—all this hellish time—you had the means to make a difference, and you just . . . sat on it?” Bruce said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“We wanted to wait until we had full product penetration.” Jethro had to raise his voice now; the ThunderNet towers were actually thundering for the first time ever. “And we needed people to be ready. If we had just come out and told the truth about what our products actually did, people would rather die than buy them. Even after Manhattan and Florida. We couldn’t give them away. But if we claimed to be making overpriced, wasteful pieces of crap that destroy the environment? Then everybody would need to own two of them.”

“So my crisis of conscience—” Bruce could only finish that sentence by wheeling his arms.

“We figured the day when you no longer gave a shit about your own future would be the day when people might accept this,” Jethro said, patting Bruce on the back like a father, even though he was younger.

“Well, thanks for the mind games.” Bruce had to shout now. “I’m going to go explore something I call my culture of drunkenness.”

“You can’t leave, Bruce,” Jethro yelled in his ear. “This is going to be a major disruption, everyone’s gadgets going nuts at once. There will be violence and wholesale destruction of public property. There will be chainsaw rampages. There may even be Twitter snark. We need you to be out in front on this, explaining it to the people.”

Bruce looked out at the dusk, red-and-black clouds churning as millions of ThunderNet towers blasted them with scrubber beams. Even over that racket, the chorus of car horns and shouts as people’s Car-Dingos suddenly had minds of their own started to ring from the highway. Bruce turned and looked into the gleam of his boss’s schoolmaster specs. “Fuck you, man,” he said. Followed a moment later by, “I’ll do it.”

“We knew we could count on you,” Jethro turned to the half-dozen or so executives cluttering the roof deck behind him. “Big hand for Bruce, everybody.” Bruce waited until they were done clapping, then leaned over the railing and puked his guts out.

©2014 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in Hieroglyph, edited by Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater than Death and its sequel, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak (out April 2022). Her previous books include All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of a short story collection called Even Greater Mistakes, and a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times called Never Say You Can’t Survive. She co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

Everything the Sea Takes, It Returns

Izzy Wasserstein | 2704 words

Everything the sea takes, it gives back in its own way and its own time. That was what Jess’s grandmother believed, what she’d told Jess as they stood in the shadow of the giant red cedar that had washed ashore, its severed roots thicker than Jess’s body. It must have drifted for a thousand years or more to return to them in that moment.

So, when the virus takes Jess’s grandmother, Jess steers her little solar-powered boat out past the Channel Islands and gives the body to the sea. She is sixteen, old enough to know the sea’s ways, that if her grandmother returned, it would be through the cycles of life. She’d be part of the food chain, better at least than plastic and algal blooms. Sixteen, and old enough to know the truth, but young enough to fantasize that the beloved woman would come striding up the beach, her skin kelp-green, her hair flowing along unseen currents.

• • • •

At twenty, Jess finds the waterlogged duffle bag, its nylon handles tangled in a cluster of driftwood. The plastic bags inside are sealed, and the powder they protected is untouched. She feels her stomach turn, wonders in what manner the sea took this, and why it has returned it here, returned it to her and Lana.

“What if someone comes looking for it?” she asks, though it had clearly been in the water for a long time, because she can’t name her true fear.

“The sea gave it to us,” Lana says, and Jess can’t deny this. “It means for us to have it.”

Jess thinks the sea’s reasons are more opaque, that gods act in their own ways and for their own reasons. But the shelter they’re living in is run by a fundamentalist group, and they can’t even share a bed. So they do what Lana says they must, and for the first time in years, things are truly good. For a while.

• • • •

Militias from the other side of the mountains push towards the coast, and soon it might not be safe for two girls to be together. Worse, the militias are eliminating the competition. Lana, cunning, tough, fearless, insists these are solvable problems, though Jess wants only to run.

“What makes you think it’s safer anywhere else?” Lana asks.

Since Jess couldn’t abide the thought of leaving the sea, of abandoning Lana, she stays.

They last longer than anyone would have expected. But they can’t fix the world.

• • • •

For years after she loses Lana, every time Jess wanders the beach she dreads what the sea might return to her: Lana’s heavily-Sharpied sneakers, a rotting foot still inside; great clots of plastic waste, death given form; the necklace Jess had saved for and proudly given Lana when they were young and couldn’t have imagined that anyone could hate them enough to give Lana to the sea.

Her dreams are sea-haunted, thick with briny toxins and the dead with eyes like dark candles. After each dream, she swears she’s done with the sea, meaning to turn inland at last, stop her aimless migration up and down the coastline, trying to stay ahead of the militia, but not trying as hard as she should have. It was Lana they’d wanted most of all, but they’ll kill Jess too, if they get the chance. She half wishes for that, her body weary, her face battered by sun and saltwind, by grief. She never does make it far from the sea.

• • • •

Just as no coastline is impervious, just as the sea claims what it will, grief can hollow a heart. Who can say what will fill it?

The woman walks along the surf. Jess watches her, wary. The stranger kneels, scoops water into a vial, caps it, and moves on. At times she stops to gather refuse from the beach and stuff it into a bag at her hip. Jess does not understand, but sees a pattern, evidence of a purpose, and that’s enough.

Eventually the woman stops, sits on a rock above the high tide line. Jess approaches. The woman looks up with neither surprise nor malice.

“I wondered if you were going to keep following me forever,” she says. Jess imagines what it would be like to be so unafraid.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Collecting samples,” the woman says, and gestures for Jess to sit. She does, and the woman shares her bread. Not rations, or even grain packed with wood fibers, but real bread. They eat in silence, and Jess feels the dull ache in her gut flare to a fire, the hunger becoming more intense by being partially sated.

They gather every last crumb. “That’s all the food I have,” the woman tells Jess. “But if you’d keep me company, I’ll show you what I’m doing.”

Jess has nothing better to do, and there might be more food, no matter what the woman says. They tread the beach, taking samples at regular intervals. To heal the ocean, the woman explains, to make it again fit for life.

“There’s no fixing it,” Jess says, her voice frail and bitter in the cold wind. “We’re less than plankton to it. How could you even hope to fix something so massive?” She hates herself for the question, for the desperation she hears in it.

“Healing, not fixing,” the woman insists. “And I can’t. Not on my own. This is the work of thousands of people, on many shores. We’re gathering data, and computers are using it to run simulations—”

“There aren’t any computers left.”

“There are.” The woman stoops to gather a sample, holds the vial up to Jess, who seals it in the way she’s been shown. “Powered by solar farms or the heat beneath the earth. And there are still radios to call in data, even over oceans.”

They walk in silence.

“Everything is shattered,” Jess says. “The ocean most of all.” Farther down, the waves bloom green with algae, the only life that could thrive in its heat-scorched, plastic-swamped depths.

The woman looks at her sadly, a look so near to pity that Jess bristles. “Maybe,” the woman concedes. “But it still feels good to do the work.”

• • • •

The woman’s name is Cyn. Not short for Cynthia, she tells Jess. Nor short for anything. She camps near the beach, and they share body heat. Jess stays with her, heating rations, digging latrines, recording data, anything to earn her keep, though Cyn hasn’t asked her to. Jess does not want to be indebted. They speak little. Days turn to weeks.

“It’s good that you’re learning this,” Cyn says one night after they’ve run their simple tests, radioed in their results.

“Why good?” Jess asks, fearing a trap, a complication.

“If something happens to me, you’ll know how to carry on. How to report from these shores.”

Who says I’ll carry on without you? Jess almost says, but stops herself. It is better to wander with a task than without.

“Nothing will happen to you,” her voice is flat, the lie thick on her lips.

Cyn holds her gaze for a long moment, then turns back to the sea. “We both know no one can be sure of that.” Though they never speak of their griefs, the world is full of them, the shoreline a catalog of all that has been lost.

“Then why go on?” Jess asks, minutes later. “Why fight against it?” She didn’t know what she meant by “it.”

Cyn shrugs. “Why do you go on?” A scar a half-inch thick runs along her neck. During the day she wears high collars, but in the tent at night Jess has seen it circling her neck, angry, puckered white-pink.

Jess has no answer.

• • • •

Their pace is deliberate, but every coast yields to time. The years lap like waves. They work for food and supplies when they must, take gifts when they’re offered, which happens with a frequency that never ceases to surprise Jess.

“People want to help each other,” Cyn says. “Most people. More than you give them credit for.”

They’re sometimes threatened, cursed, attacked. One man, blank-eyed and wire-strong, shares a meal with them, then attacks Cyn. Jess is prepared and does what’s necessary.

“I wish you weren’t so trusting,” Jess says after they give his body to the sea.

“I’ve spent too much time being afraid,” Cyn says. “I’m done with it.”

• • • •

Their silences grow more comfortable, then begin to crack. Jess tells Cyn of her grandmother, about the homeless shelters, about what the sea smelled like when she was young. She never speaks of Lana.

She keeps an inventory of things she has learned about Cyn: when she was born, people called her a boy, and kept saying that until she told them no, she wasn’t, and then even after that; the scar on her neck was given to her, but the ones on her wrists, bone-white and fine as needles, she gave to herself; she had a brother, once; she can imitate the sounds of seabirds that Jess has not heard in many years, but cannot carry a tune; she is often in pain, though she never speaks of it; her eyes are blue, but when she has been crying they look green, flecked with glints of gold shine.

Which is to say that Jess is in love with Cyn, even though she tried not to be, even though love is a kind of debt. Nothing physical is between them, nothing besides the sharing of body heat on cold nights, but Jess believes Cyn loves her too, though she doubts Cyn is in love with her.

And one more fact: Cyn is dying. The realization comes slowly but Jess can’t deny it. Cyn’s body slowly consumes itself, her hands cold, her steps slower. One day Jess will give her to the sea, and then—

She doesn’t know. Her own personal extinction event is coming, and she cannot imagine anything after it.

• • • •

Jess’s grandmother returns to her dreams, her skull like bleached coral; her limbs a tangle of seaweed, her mouth lolling open. Jess wakes with a scream stillborn on her lips.

• • • •

They sit on a rocky outcropping. There was a pier here, once. Its remaining pillars slice like canines from the waves. The sea is golden in the late afternoon sun. Far out, visible only as a dark line on the horizon, is a living mat. Ruslav and Iona, speaking to them over the radio, have told them of the biological lattice on which the mat grows. Musa described the bacteria that consume plastic, the great vines of seaweed snaking down into the depths, which may someday play a small role in food-chain restoration efforts. Jess and Cyn understand only a small portion of this project, as do all the others. Perhaps the AIs that coordinate understand more, but there is no one in charge, no one vantage from which all becomes clear. A million interlocking labors, an ecosystem of harm mitigation.

“It’s beautiful,” Jess says. “I never really thought I’d see it.”

“So many ways it can go wrong,” Cyn replies. Alarm surges through Jess. This sounds like despair, something she’d never expected from Cyn. She doesn’t look at her friend, chooses her words with care.

“Yes,” she says. “Many ways. But still worth trying.”

The sun arcs towards night. Each wave is a light-tipped flash over dark water.

“I thought that would be enough,” Cyn’s voice sounds far away. “But one comes to the end and wonders . . . what I mean is, I’m wondering what it was all for.”

Jess has wondered this many times, but had never thought to hear it from Cyn’s lips. She doesn’t have an answer, only a story. So she tells her of Lana, that name breaking through a dam of silence, and how they were clever and in love and thought they could do anything. And how it had ended in the only way it could.

“Oh, Jess, I’m so sorry,” Cyn says, and Jess doesn’t know how to make herself understood, how to say what’s held her together in the years since they took Lana from her.

Night creeps over the beach. The stars blossom like they never did in Jess’s childhood, not even far out from the city. A dead satellite streaks overhead.

“I’d hoped I’d see results in my lifetime,” Cyn says. “For a happier ending.”

“This is my happier ending,” Jess says, and knows it is true, even though Lana deserved to share it with her, even though it may be a kind of betrayal to admit it.

“Is this all life is? Is our destiny to try and build something and watch it all wash away?” Cyn leans on her shoulder, one arm around her. She has faded away of late, is becoming insubstantial. But for now she is here.

“I don’t believe in destiny.” Jess wipes at her eyes. “Maybe we just didn’t understand the systems that we were caught in. Like tourists—when I was young, there were still tourists, and if they didn’t respect the currents, they’d disappear just like that. They thought because they could swim . . .”

“I’m sorry,” Cyn says. “None of it is fair.”

“We thought we were alone.” Jess pulls Cyn tighter to her, sharing warmth, because soon they will need to retreat to the tent, and there aren’t many days left for them. “I wish Lana and I had known something like this project . . . I wish we’d found . . .”

“Community,” Cyn says.

“Yes. I wish . . . oh, Cyn, I wish I could tell you it will all work. That the ocean will thrive again. Oh, I wish you’d let me lie . . . but this isn’t just about the project. I don’t think we’re growing rafts. I think we’re growing a model for a different kind of world.”

“I like that,” Cyn says, and Jess can hear the smile on her lips.

“I’d hope so.” Jess squeezes her shoulder. “You’re the one who taught it to me.”

The cold soon chases them into the tent, and they share what they have: food, body heat, tenderness.

• • • •

There comes a morning where Cyn doesn’t wake up. Jess washes her body, gives it to the sea. She takes the day’s samples, cries until she’s empty of tears. When the sun sets, she takes up the radio, and shares the news. None of them are anything but voices to her, just as she and Cyn are—were—voices to them. But they share their grief, their data, their knowledge, their mingled hopes.

• • • •

Jess feels three presences with her as she walks the tideline day after day. Or perhaps three absences, like the places the sea has swallowed, now remembered only by rusted road-signs pointing the way to nowhere. The three women in her life, each beloved in different ways. Each given to the sea, each returning only in dreams.

The work sustains Jess, gives her a reason to keep walking. Alone with her ghosts, she sometimes fantasizes about joining them in the depths. But there is Cyn’s task to carry on, and the voices sharing themselves across the night, and so she continues her pilgrimage.

One day, she senses she is being followed. A figure not much larger than a child, wary but fascinated. She keeps at her work.

On the third day, as she eats her lunch, the figure approaches. They’re young and malnourished, a familiar void in their eyes. Jess shares her small meal with them.

“I don’t have anything else to offer,” she says, “but if you’d like to help me, I could use the company.”

A few days later, she bends to pick up a clump of garbage, but her companion is faster. They hand it to her, but it isn’t garbage at all: it’s a tangle of hair. No, it’s a clump of seaweed, dark green and smelling of her childhood.

Everything we give to the sea comes back to us, Jess knows, though rarely in the ways we expect, the ways we dream.

©2022 by Izzy Wasserstein.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Izzy Wasserstein is a queer and trans woman who teaches writing and literature at a university on the American Great Plains and writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and elsewhere. She shares a home with her spouse Nora E. Derrington and their animal companions. She’s an enthusiastic member of the 2017 class of Clarion West. Her debut short story collection, All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock Press in summer 2022.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

A Sword Has One Purpose

Phoebe Barton | 6395 words

I had enough time to light a fresh cigarette before my office door told the client to come in. Smoke in the air didn’t make it any easier to oil a cutlass, but it made me look badass. Same with my leather jacket, tailored to fit comfortably over my smartsuit. I projected confidence so brightly that every once in a while I forgot what I hid beneath it.

My client entered wearing fine high heels and the calm stability that came from long years in habitat gravity. My most interesting cases were from habbers, because habbers didn’t come my way until they figured out their problem was beyond them.

That’s why being a badass is important. Badasses like Siderosa Lee, consulting swashbuckler, win contracts.

“You must be Rana Khayat.” Tall, dark-skinned, bright-looking enough to hold my attention. Lifelong Theta resident, glowing reviews from the life-support volunteers, and a little office in Sector Three. It wasn’t often that an agricultural librarian needed my services. “Have a seat.”

“Believe me, Ms. Lee, you’ve already impressed me,” Khayat said as she sat. Her eyes were polished armour, cool and gray. “With your sword, I mean. It’s clearly very fine.”

“It’s all maintenance,” I said. Ordinary, time-consuming, and vital to survival in Theta. Whether it was my turn for an inspection shift or time for sword sharpening, my partner never let me forget. “The real fine stuff is what we do together.”

“Yes, well, that’s what I’m hoping.” Khayat folded her hands in her lap and shuddered. “It’s about my brother, you see. Iskander. He’s not fine. He’s in trouble. From Callisto.”

That was enough for me to pause mid-wipe. Theta was farther away from Callisto than Callisto was from Jupiter, but I knew the Titanese lesson: distance was no protection. It was why I wore a smartsuit under my jacket, so that I could keep breathing if they ever aimed their guns Theta’s way.

“You have to understand, he’s . . . idealistic.” Khayat clasped her hands together. “Closer to pure of heart and block of head, really. After Rovaniemi, he said he couldn’t stay quiet any more.”

I bit through my cigarette. Domed Rovaniemi, the Queen City of Valhalla, had been the last holdout against the fascist Pan-Jovian tide on Callisto. Emphasis on had. A few refugees made it to Theta. I’d never seen eyes that haunted.

She took me through the whole show, because that was the problem. Iskander had started a radio show to “liberate Callisto’s downtrodden,” and the Panjos had no sense of humour. So they’d reached out and grabbed him. The Titanese lesson, but with fewer explosions. So far.

“I tracked him to their ship,” Khayat leaned forward now, and the enchanted steel in her eyes sparked with every word. “I’ve done the math. Their departure window shouldn’t open for another three days. Plenty of time for a rescue. All I need is a rescuer. What do you say?”

I’d done my own math while she was talking. Multiplying the dream of standing up to the fascists by the reality of their cold brutality. Callistonians weren’t disorganized troublemakers. They solved their problems with blood and steel.

“Hmm,” I said. To fill the air, really. One swashbuckler against a moon? What did Khayat expect? That all on my own I could shout “no pasarán” and make the Panjos blink?

I was still running the numbers when my office filled with the sharp notes of David Bowie singing about heroes. It figured. My partner knew exactly where to cut. Appropriate, really.

“Nice,” Khayat said, swaying in her chair with an appreciative look. “Not enough people still appreciate the classics.”

“All right.” Now that the music had started, I’d have to solve the whole equation. I’d never hear the end of it, from my partner or myself. “Let me do some research, and I’ll get back to you. Sound good?”

“Research?” From her tone, you’d think I suggested to start planning Iskander’s funeral. “We’ve only got three days! If we wait for them to leave, I’ll lose him forever!”

“There’s more to what I do than waving a sword around.” I tried to penetrate her armour with a hard, sharp look, but she didn’t shy away. “I’ll investigate. Give me a day, and I’ll have an answer for you.”

Khayat sighed and stood. There wasn’t a hint of instability in her. When I’d moved from Netherhope to Theta, with its just-slightly-lower gravity, it had taken months to find my spin legs.

“It’s a fine place you’ve got here,” she said. High praise for a former storage compartment. “You’ve taken care of it. Too many people forget that it only matters if we take care of each other, too.”

She nodded at me and left. Bowie went silent as soon as the door closed.

“I double-checked her data,” my partner said. “She’s good.”

“Don’t you even start.” I peered at my reflection, stark in the blade, and shook my head. “Heroes.”

“It’s better than your plan.” My partner, Cutty Jane, made herself heard with miniature speakers hidden deep in my ears. It’s a necessary arrangement. Most swords don’t have mouths, let alone synthetic intelligence. “Waiting for everything to fall apart. Again.”

“They’d melt you down, you know.” I wiped her down with a clean cloth and finished with a quick kiss, and she gave a contented sigh. “They don’t care for people like us.”

“As long as I get a nice, warm bath in some fascist’s blood, I’m fine with what happens,” Jane said. “You and me, queens of the resistance. Better to make Callisto the tomb of fascism than sit here waiting for the hab to collapse, don’t you think?”

I sighed and lit a fresh cigarette. Honestly, I’d never planned to live that long.

• • • •

Life was easy in Theta once. That’s what I hear, anyway. By the time I showed up, not much was left besides too much stubbornness to die. Most days that’s enough, but it’s hardly a picture of utopia, either. Three kilometres of spinning metal drilled into a moon’s flank isn’t where a lot of people dream of raising their kids.

Exhaustion, stubbornness, the struggle against entropy. That was life in Theta, and it was clearest in Cheapside. In a five-minute walk you might pass an emergency shelter with duct-taped signs, a rusted-up restaurant that had the best chai orbiting Jupiter, and a tailor who hand-made factory-quality spacesuit patches. It was harsh, but I’d chosen it, and it fit me like ratty shoes full of holes: garbage, but comfortable garbage.

“Fourth day in a row the air’s been sub-green,” Jane said. “If this isn’t fixed tomorrow, I’m calling our councillor. This can’t last.”

“No, but it’s what we’ve got.” Cheapside’s air had never tasted right to me, but I’d adapted. I’d had to. People have always had to. “Better than dying quick.”

“Nobody’s ever dying quick,” Jane said. “Until all of a sudden they are.”

She would know, and so did I. I took a drag of my cigarette and ducked into the Sector Seven Smoke Shop. Nothing in the décor hinted that I wasn’t the only one looking to die slow, of course. Lisette made sure the walls stayed perfectly clean.

“There you are, Sid.” Lisette cracked her knuckles from behind a beat-up bar and unfurled her draconic wings like flags. They were perfect and smooth, since Theta wasn’t a great place for a girl to fly, but in bed they made all the difference. “Was hoping you’d come by today. I’d have messaged, but it felt forward, you know?”

“Not really.” Theta ran on mind-your-own-beeswax guidelines that never stopped clashing with my Netherhope upbringing. “But I’m here now, so what’s up?”

“Your order.” Lisette set a thick package of Nemesis Lights on the counter. Best of the asteroid belt, and ruthlessly interdicted by Callistonian tribute patrols. “Savour ‘em, because it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any more in. MFK’s writing off Ganymede, and it’ll be a leak-free day before they come here direct.”

“Seriously?” I’d made the trip from Saturn on an MFK ship, and even then it hadn’t been easy to arrange. One big reason people stayed in Theta was that it was hard to leave, and without MFK it’d be even harder. “Damn. These are my favourite.”

“You and Ryder both,” Lisette said. Conrad Ryder was another of Theta’s independent investigators, reliant on fists and feats of strength, and a Rovaniemi survivor. I’d worked with him once. A bit full of himself, but hardly an asshole. “He burned through five. Pod’s still cleaning itself out. There’s not something going down with you troubleshooters, is there?”

“No more than usual. Tired people, scared people, desperate people. I’m starting to think there’s no other sort of person.”

“Not in this hab.” Lisette gave me a sharp look. “Tired?”

“Desperate.” I wondered if she could see the lie. A desperate woman wouldn’t have been a breath away from turning down a client, but a swashbuckler like me couldn’t show fear and be taken seriously. “I’ll see what I can find.”

Once I was a few minutes’ walk away, I let myself shudder. That’s the thing about living. Sometimes life hits you with a big, proper wallop, sometimes it breaks your nose, and sometimes it makes sure you see it finish off someone else. Cheapside echoed with the sound of distant fights and scuffles, as omnipresent as the machinery, but it wasn’t until I heard Ryder shout “HEY” somewhere up ahead that I started running. He was overconfident, sure, but he’d come by it from never having to raise his voice. Him yelling was something new.

I found him in the wrecked patio of a bean-and-bacon joint, its plastic chairs scattered and tables overturned. He was still on his feet, but swaying with every step. He was surrounded by three light-graviteers, white skin stark against their black-and-red support exos, and a fourth with habitat bones. A few Thetans stood back from the melee, ready to jump if things turned worse.

“Callistonians.” Jane said. “The ones who grabbed Iskander, maybe?”

I narrowed my eyes and sighed. All I’d wanted was some smokes, a walk, and a chance to think. Not to kick off the Third Battle of Cheapside. That scar I’d got from some fascist’s knife at the Second Battle hadn’t even finished fading yet.

“Last chance,” Ryder wheezed. “Iskander Khayat.”

That figured. Rana Khayat must have got impatient—understandable, really—and Ryder was the type to challenge war machines to fisticuffs. She’d hired him on, and he’d taken the direct approach.

None of the Callistonians said a word. They didn’t need to. The way they stood, tense and ready and daring Ryder to take another swing, said “don’t fuck with us.” It was an invitation Ryder couldn’t resist.

It unfolded so fast that Jane had to tell me what happened afterward. All I remember are impressions: the solid crack of knuckles against metal, the wet, muted thumps of a body getting worked over, and the tang of blood. All that in seconds. Then I was there with Jane at the ready and gave them a blazing, toothy smile.

“This isn’t any of your concern,” the habitat-boned one said, and for a moment I froze. Marcus? No way. Back in Netherhope, when domination had paid the bills, he’d been my most troublesome client. Had that bastard come all the way to Jupiter to get fitted for a Callistonian jackboot? “Walk away.”

I growled at him. Whether it really was Marcus or only someone with the extreme misfortune to resemble him so closely didn’t matter. He’d invaded my home.

“Not gonna happen, fash.” The lights of Cheapside dimmed around me, the way it always happens when I steel myself for a fight. I could taste their salt, their grit, their rusted bones. “Fuck off or find out.”

The Callistonians traded a look and, instead of fighting me, cleared out. Their job was done, as evidenced by the mean-looking knife driven into Ryder’s heart. I did what I could, which wasn’t much. I didn’t dare touch the knife, which gave one of the gawkers the chance to unsheathe it instead. It came out of Ryder sullenly, scratching against dead bone.

It’s always a good idea to carry a knife in Theta, so the saying went, because death is always right behind you.

• • • •

“It wasn’t your fault,” Jane told me for the fifth time. I’d counted. When you’re stuck in the middle of a transit tube, there’s not much else to do. “He chose his way, and what a way. This isn’t like what happened with Hespeler.”

“Please don’t.” I elbowed the tram’s thin metal wall, hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to be punishment. Nobody else in the car gave me a second look. Frustration’s the only thing Theta has in abundance. “Hespeler was my fault, and so was this. If I’d said yes, she wouldn’t even have gone to him.”

“You don’t know that.” Jane spoke with unwavering clarity of purpose, which made sense, really. Swords only have one purpose. “Remember Amanda? If people keep backups romantically, they’ll do it for this, too.”

“Please stop trying to make me feel better.” I groaned and buried my face in my hands. Getting told you’re not a good enough lesbian is one thing, but this? Ryder was dead because of my indecisiveness.

Before Jane could throw another rope down into the pit I’d dug for myself, the tram shuddered and hummed and started to move. That was better. That was progress. I rode it all the way to Sector Three, where Rana Khayat had crammed her office and agricultural library into a converted personal shelter. There was enough room for the two of us in there, but I couldn’t have unsheathed Jane without drawing blood. Probably mine.

“Sorry, I know it’s not much,” Khayat said. She reached out her arms, touched both walls, and shrugged. “It was all they could spare.”

“It’s cozy,” I said. With the room so small, there wasn’t much to focus on except Khayat. She smelled like fresh flowers in bloom, fragrant and soft—how had I missed that before? “I’ll help you.”

Khayat peered at me for a moment like a gardener surveying an unexpected bloom. What did she see in my petals?

“He died, you know.” It was barely a whisper, but in the compartment’s confines it was a breeze on Venus, heavy and blazing. “The guy I went to when you didn’t say yes right then. I needed someone.”

“I know.” I sat down on the floor. I didn’t deserve a chair. “I was there. That’s why I’m here. If you want your brother back, you’ll need the right person. Ryder, rest him, wasn’t.”

“I don’t know if it matters anymore anyway.” Khayat slumped into her chair and bowed in mourning. “I’ve got a friend in traffic control . . . they’ve moved up their departure. Four hours, and Iskander’ll be off to Callisto. That’s it. I’m afraid you’re too late, Ms. Lee.”

I exhaled the way I would if the compartment was about to decompress, driving every molecule of air out of my lungs. I could still have walked away. I could have nodded, apologized, and gone back to my office to burn through the last of my favourite cigarettes and waited for Theta to collapse around me. It would have been easy.

I’d never be able to listen to Bowie again.

“You can always change a trajectory.” My hand found Jane’s hilt, familiar and inviting. “All you need is the right kind of thrust.”

• • • •

Nobody owned space. How could they? There was nothing to plant a flag in. Out there, I had options that didn’t exist in Theta’s confines. Swinging a sword, for example, was a lot easier when there wasn’t any pesky air to get in the way.

“I still don’t know if this is the best idea,” Khayat said as the tram sped along. She’d squeezed herself into a smartsuit, and a bright pink messenger bag hung from her shoulder. It made me feel warm, like Brutus, my pink teddy bear. “I never would’ve considered this.”

“Because it isn’t the best idea.” I had my helmet under my arm, Jane in her scabbard, and my battle-singed revolver in its holster. I hoped not to have to use the gun, but hope isn’t worth much in the Jovian system. “It’s just the best one that’s left.”

“Pardon me, but this is definitely the best idea,” Jane said. “I’d say that even if you’d come up with it.”

It wasn’t easy to leave Theta, so I’d hedged my bets. Apex Echo was a utility shuttle I’d won in a high-stakes wargame. It wasn’t much, but it flew. I settled into the pilot’s rig and smiled. The control centre was smaller than Khayat’s office, but in that chair I had wings.

“Nice.” Khayat gazed around the control centre like it was a gallery exhibit. “Very industrial aesthetic. Big fan of the ‘held together by duct tape’ look.”

“It does the job.” Not ideally—Khayat probably thought she was joking about the duct tape—but I expected it to last longer than Theta. Under ordinary circumstances, at least. Chasing after a ship full of fascists meant all bets were off. “Better strap in. I’ve gotta double-time the pre-flight if we’re going to make our launch window.”

At least Apex Echo was simple. Back in Netherhope I’d dated a woman who flew Titan transatmospherics, and she’d sworn her screen got heavier when she loaded the departure checklist. I had enough spare time to snatch quick drone camera glimpses of the rest of the docking bay. The Callistonians’ vessel, Charles A. Lindbergh, was a bunglesome-looking formation of parts that might have been flying for the better part of a century. There was a big Phoenix Halo flag painted on the outside, as if that would convince anyone it wasn’t a ship of fascists.

“Can’t believe we have to sit here and watch them go,” Khayat said. “There’s no justice in the world.”

“Believe me, I tried to turn it around.” I’d hit up all my contacts after the meeting in Khayat’s office, but none of them were willing to put Lindbergh in clamps. I could understand why—Theta’s independence was a carefully-balanced thing—but there’s a difference between understanding and forgiving.

We were most of the way through our checks when Lindbergh’s thrusters spat cold gas. A constellation of debris shuddered and fell away from Lindbergh as it went: strapped-on containers, service hatch covers, and clouds of general refuse. The jetsam wasn’t fast enough to be bullets, but it filled the docking bay with hazards. That didn’t happen accidentally. They hadn’t counted on me, but they’d considered the possibility.

Fuck them. A bunch of garbage wasn’t going to stop Siderosa Lee. The checklist was green, and I had buckles to swash.

“Theta Control, Apex Echo, stand one-seven,” I said. Clear, unhurried, professional. I had to put on a good show. “Request clearance to exit.”

“Apex Echo, Theta Control, negative on clearance, hold position.” Exactly what I’d expected. Traffic Control was the one part of Theta where everything was still done by the book. “Flight operations are currently suspended.”

It would’ve been easy to go along with it. Safe, too. I’d done what I could and had been outmaneuvered. Who could say they’d never had that happen? I could turn off Apex Echo, unstrap, and go home. Where I’d never be able to look Rana Khayat in the eye or listen to David Bowie.

I could knuckle under to Rovaniemi’s murderers and be safe for today, or I could try to be a hero.

“Fine, Jane, you were right after all,” I subvocalized, so Khayat wouldn’t hear me talking to emptiness. “Keep them out of our systems, okay?”

“No sweat.” Her voice was sharp with eagerness. Traffic Control would try to seize remote access as soon as we lit off unauthorized, but if there was anything a sword had experience with, it was hacking. “Told you this was the best idea.”

“Apex Echo, stand one-seven, request startup,” I said, as if nothing was wrong at all. Traffic Control’s response was nothing but negative. Like I said, by the book. I even read back what they’d never said.

I didn’t bother listening to Traffic Control after that. They weren’t saying anything interesting anyway. I felt Apex Echo’s heartbeat course through me, and I lifted us up from the stand and away, into the cloud of debris.

“Okay, they’re definitely pissed off,” Jane said. There was a hollow clang as something whacked against Apex Echo’s flank. “Three takeover attempts already. It’s going to be fun coming back.”

I dodged an empty nitrogen canister and lined up for the exit. Lindbergh had long since cleared it, so there was nothing but junk in our way. Another blunt impact resounded through Apex Echo, but it wasn’t garbage this time. It was a fishing line, and its hook was in us.

“No, no, no, no!” Khayat broke her silence with a roar. “You bastards are not going to keep me from my brother, no!”

One of Apex Echo’s manipulator arms snapped to life and vaulted across the hull to where Traffic Control had a line in us. Khayat poured her strength, her courage, and her fury into that arm, and after a few mechanical punches the line snapped away from its hook like an overstressed bowstring.

“Punch it!” Khayat shouted.

Apex Echo jumped ahead with all the oomph it could muster. Scraps of debris rained against the hull, but it’d be okay. If this was the old shuttle’s last mission, it’d make a hell of a closing act.

“Damn,” I said. A discarded container slammed into us, and an entire hull panel tore itself off. “Never seen someone arm-wrestle like that.”

“Come on, what’d you expect?” I could hear the smirk in her voice. “I’m a librarian.”

We blasted out into open space and left Traffic Control screaming at the void.

• • • •

Fascists loved big things: big guns, big self-congratulatory monuments, big crimes against humanity. Lindbergh wasn’t any of those, which made it useful for snatch-and-grabs. It was long, narrow, and spidery where an aluminum scaffold linked the habitat module with its drive section, and now that it had jettisoned its garbage it looked gaunt. That gave it more acceleration than I’d have liked, and Apex Echo was uncomfortably low on delta-V once we closed to knife-fight range.

Not that we were combat-equipped. Neither was Lindbergh, lucky for us. I hadn’t found any weapon emplacements, and now that we were well away from Theta, they’d have peppered us to ashes if they could. So it’d be a knife fight after all, or close enough to one.

“Close enough to hear the trumpets.” Khayat clung to the back of my chair, peering at my screen, her hand on my shoulder. Even through both our suits I felt her warmth. “Now what?”

“Now we give them one last chance to stand down.” It would have been so much easier if people recognized fascists for what they were: enemies of all humanity, to be dealt with accordingly. Until then, there were rules. “Which they’re absolutely not going to take. But it’ll make me feel better later.”

“Whatever you need to sleep at night,” Khayat said. “Far as I’m concerned, if they’re between me and Iskander, they’re all out of chances.”

I spared a moment for the life I’d be leaving behind. Violating departure procedure was one thing, but this was the real point of no return. Fascists didn’t look kindly on people that crossed them, and I was about to make a personal declaration of war against Callisto. All my fingertips buzzed with pins and needles, even the synthetic ones.

“Vessel Charles A. Lindbergh, attention.” I made my voice hard as titanium and sharp as whetted steel. “This is Siderosa Lee aboard Apex Echo, pursuing in response to the state-sanctioned kidnapping of Iskander Khayat and the murder of Conrad Ryder. Cease acceleration and prepare to be boarded.”

I let the moment drift, caught in midflight, buffeted by the wind, and never finding rest. I had a feeling my own life would be uncomfortably similar to that, now that I’d laid down the law.

“You have no authority, Lee.” The Callistonian accent was as cold and harsh as their world. The sound of it was like needles. “Board us and you’ll face the consequences.”

Like Ryder had, no doubt. I couldn’t tell if they were blowing smoke or really did think I’d knuckle under.

“Watch me, Panjo scum,” I said, and cut the channel. There was nothing more to say.

“Nice,” Jane whispered in my ear. “Unyielding. I like it.”

Khayat dragged her fingers along my shoulder, and if not for my belts I’d have leapt. I’d been so focused on the Callistonians, I’d forgotten she was right there.

“I know you’re one for dramatics,” she said, “but don’t tell me you’re planning to jump.”

“No way.” One course correction, and anyone untethered would become a new Jovian satellite. That wasn’t on my bucket list. “We’ll throw some lines over.”

We didn’t have ship-to-ship weapons, but that didn’t mean we were totally unarmed. I shot a pair of thickly braided cables, tipped with grasping claws, at Lindbergh’s spidery form. They grabbed on, went taut, and winched us in. I secured the controls and made for the airlock while the fascists dragged us along.

“It’s going to be all right,” Jane said. “We’re here. All we have to do is see it through.”

“I’d be happier if I knew I’d see tomorrow.” It was a foolish wish at the best of times. Nobody had that assurance, least of all me. “But today is good.”

When Khayat followed me through the airlock, it was with a knife strapped to her shoulder and an array of utility pouches on her belt. She attached a tether with experience and without hesitation.

“Hey, I told you,” she said with a smile. “Librarian.”

We sailed across like pirates swinging from the rigging, which in a way we were. It was too bad that I couldn’t grip Jane between my teeth while we made the crossing. It’d be a great look for about ten seconds. At least there was no one out there waiting for us. I hooked onto a hullside anchor and climbed until I found an airlock, sealed tight against the vacuum.

“All right, ship this old, this should be easy.” Jane’s confidence wasn’t distracting, really, but a reminder that she had a lot less at stake than me and Khayat. “I’ll make it think we’re opening every airlock. I’ve already scrambled their cameras, they won’t know which way we’re coming from.”

“Great.” Through the radio, Khayat sounded as close as Jane. It made me shiver, pleasantly. “Pretty sure they know how we got here, though.”

She pointed to the cables that tied Apex Echo and Lindbergh together. A manipulator arm was inchworm-walking its way toward them with cold, mechanical determination.

“I can handle the door.” Khayat patted her belt. “That looks like your purview.”

This time, I didn’t hesitate. I couldn’t kill the manipulator arm, but I would give its operator a fight to remember. I made it to the cables’ grip site with enough time to anchor myself and draw Jane. I’m not sure whether I looked confident or foolhardy.

The arm was multi-elbowed, and moved far faster than I liked. There was no intricate dance here, no play of steel against steel. It swung at me with a batter’s single-mindedness. I pushed up, away from Lindbergh’s hull, and felt the jerks and strains as the arm caught my tether and pulled me to the side, close enough for me to grab on to the arm.

It was like riding a mechanical snake doing its best to buck me. Hacking at it was right out; people used blades in Theta specifically because they had trouble damaging metal. Good thing for me that mechanical or not, an arm was still an arm, with all the same old weaknesses I could exploit.

So I went for its elbows. The arm swung and snapped and tangled itself in my tether, but that didn’t stop Jane from biting through sheathing, wires, and synthetic ligaments with all the grace of a surgeon who no longer gave a damn. I lost myself in the fight, in all its perfect fury and brutal simplicity.

Strike. Strike. Strike. Destruction for destruction’s sake. Just like Ryder and Rovaniemi.

“—rosa!” Khayat and Jane were both shouting, their voices melding into a chorus sharp and beautiful. Khayat was next to me. When had that happened? “Siderosa, it’s finished. Let it lie.”

I took in my handiwork and slumped. The arm hadn’t been built for battle, and I was lucky for that. I’d nearly drowned in my own viciousness. In true battles, viciousness lost to calm efficiency. I’d learned that at Cheapside.

Khayat took me by my tether. It was too tangled in the arm’s wreckage to be straightened out easily, so instead she tied the two of us together. I arched my back as she clipped a short tether to one of my spare anchors and discarded my tangled line. In that moment, as she shepherded me to the airlock, the two of us were one.

• • • •

All the alarms were alive inside Lindbergh, howling and blood-bright. Beneath my suit my arms shuddered with goosebumps, and if not for Khayat and adrenaline I would have buckled. I knew that one day alarms like them would scream throughout Theta, electronic banshees wailing in anticipation of the dead. Instead I pulled myself through the keening ship, handhold to handhold, my revolver at the ready.

It wasn’t a big ship once distilled down to its habitable volume, but it was still a lot of unfriendly territory for two bodies to search.

“There’s nothing about Iskander in the network,” Jane said. “I’ve got most of the crew locked down, but at least they’ve got a little proper security. I was starting to get embarrassed for them.”

The hatch to the next compartment was shut. Jane’s camera scrambling meant I couldn’t be certain what was on the other side. Was it still an ambush when you expected one? I crouched next to the hatch, told it to open, and waited for the storm of bullets.

I didn’t expect a storm of words.

“Siderosa Lee.” I’d heard my name used like a curse before, but rarely so familiar. Netherhope accents weren’t common this far from Saturn. “Very impressive. But then, you always demanded that, didn’t you?”

“Marcus.” God damn, it really had been him in Cheapside. I tightened my grip on my revolver. “I see you cut to the chase and went for the worst.”

“You were the one who showed me how life works.” Marcus drifted into the compartment, suited but with a clear faceplate. He carried a revolving shotgun, polished black as space, that looked like it could blow holes in Jupiter. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d have never seen Callisto. It’s everything a person could dream of.”

My faceplate was all that kept me from spitting on him; he’d always hated that. Callisto’s people hadn’t chosen fascist conquest, jackboot worship, pain without pleasure. It had been forced on them by people like Marcus, who thought they knew better.

“I thought fascists like you didn’t care about dreams,” I said while Khayat growled over our private channel. “Just power.”

“If that’s what you’re into.” Marcus shrugged. “Power, domination, security. Everything you taught me. Everything Theta will never have. It doesn’t have to be this way, Sid. Let them go. Sign up with the future.”

Khayat answered before I could, with a shout and a knife. Marcus had been so focused on me, so enraptured by my presence, that he’d forgotten we weren’t alone. He shot at Khayat, a throaty roar that would’ve broken naked eardrums, and missed. So did Khayat. She sailed past him and crashed into the far bulkhead, and while he was distracted, I wrestled the shotgun from his grip and grappled him into submission.

“Wow,” Marcus panted. “You were never this good before. You’re wasting yourself, spinning around with all those degenerates.”

I grabbed my revolver from where I’d left it to drift and jammed it against his flank. I’d loaded it with shotgun shells, and at point-blank they’d punch clear through him.

“You don’t even care why I’m here, do you?” I growled at him, let him marinate in it. “Is this all just a game for you? Score-settling?”

“Power for power’s sake.” He fixed me with a crooked leer. “You get that, don’t you? Isn’t that why you did what you did?”

“Kill him, Siderosa!” Khayat had swept up his shotgun. She pointed it at him—at us. “He’s a fucking Panjo! He’s not worth life!”

It would’ve been easy. He was at my mercy, the way he’d been so many times before, but neither of us were playing. All it would take was a simple squeeze, and his blood would paint the bulkheads. Viciousness bubbled deep inside me, and I took a heady whiff of the power of life and death. It would be even easier than play.

“Siderosa,” Jane whispered in my ear. “It won’t last.”

“I thought you were the one who was all about bathing in fascist blood,” I said. “This must be killing you.”

“Only when there aren’t better options,” Jane said. “A sword has one purpose, but I don’t have to be a weapon if I don’t want to be.”

I gritted my teeth as Marcus half-heartedly struggled. A real pirate would’ve ended him right there. I only watched him and felt empty.

“You’d better not be thinking of charging me for this,” Marcus said. “I don’t remember asking for delivery.”

He wasn’t worth murder. I was too exhausted for that. Instead I checked his suit’s air supply. Still high in the green, good for eight hours at least. More than enough.

“He’s not worth a bullet, either.” I looked at Khayat with a soft, understanding expression. I knew she ached to pay that price. “Can you do me a favour, and open the airlock? I’ll be right back.”

I dragged him to the airlock, pushed him in, and sealed the inner door behind me. I was close enough that I could feel the suggestion of his heartbeat, his ragged breath, his building worry. How had he planned for it to go? Had he expected I’d worship his feet for a change? Did he think he could dominate a professional?

The outer door slid open, and space unfolded before me. Jupiter was a painted marble and Callisto a sickly crescent.

“Hey, hey, what the hell is this?” Real fear tinged his voice, something I’d never managed back in Netherhope. “Showing me how small I am? How worthless?”

He was righter than he knew. Marcus wasn’t worth a bullet, but only because everyone deserved the chance to see death coming.

“Something like that.” I hooked a distress beacon to his suit and gave him a smile. “I’d give you a chance to beg, but you’ve had it and then some. Better hope you’re not too worthless for your friends to pick you up.”

I gave him a swift kick in the ass and waved as he sailed away.

• • • •

We found Iskander shoved into a spacesuit locker. Not entirely surprising; space was always at a premium aboard ships. His cuts and bruises told me everything I needed to know about how well Lindbergh’s crew had treated him. They must have wanted to get their hits in before they handed him over to the secret police. Khayat cried in her helmet.

I didn’t feel anything yet. Not even amazement at how quickly Khayat had picked the lock. Until I was back in my office, all of this was provisional.

“You have no idea how uncomfortable that was,” Iskander said once we pulled him out. His voice was smooth, calming, and melodic—no wonder he’d gone into broadcasting. “You’re Siderosa Lee, right?”

“That’s me.” I unfolded and pressurized the rescue ball I’d brought over. It’d be enough to get him back safe to Apex Echo. “Your sister needed a bit of help to bust you out of here.”

“I figured it’d be you.” Iskander beamed at me with the intensity of unfiltered sunlight. “Rana’s fancied you for ages.”

Khayat gasped and polarized her faceplate. Not before I had a chance to see her blush.

“So that’s what you meant about being impressed,” I said with a smile. “I was starting to wonder.”

Khayat didn’t say anything while she sealed her brother up in the rescue ball. I tethered the two of them together and covered our exit. Not with the gun, but with Jane. I figured I owed Jane that much.

“Rana’s pretty fine, isn’t she?” She’d have grinned ear-to-ear if only she’d had a face. “You’re not going to swallow your tongue and let her go by, are you?”

“Just a client, Jane.” A client who had found me. Who had reached me. Who ached to awaken me. “Just a job.”

“Could be,” Jane clicked her nonexistent tongue. “Could be that Rana’s got a different idea. Might be worth looking into.”

I backed into the airlock and sealed it shut. There wasn’t much space with all of us in there. The two of us in suits ended up squeezing into each other.

“Getting pretty tight in here,” Khayat—no, Rana—said. “Intimate.”

“Could be. Assuming you need a consulting swashbuckler for that.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” She smiled in return. “You’ve got me this far.”

The outer airlock door cycled and swung open to reveal the vast and endless starfield. All that complexity, all those possibilities, connected into constellations representing heroism, romance, and love. That Bowie song was about love, too, wasn’t it?

“I didn’t know you were so good at unlocking things.” I tilted my palm at her and gave her a smile.

“Come on.” She gave me a playful grin. “Librarian.”

Rana took my hand. I squeezed it tightly as we pushed out and away.

©2022 by Phoebe Barton.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer who first visited Earth on an unseasonably warm day in the winter of 1982 and decided to stay. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Analog, On Spec, and Kaleidotrope, anthologies from Bundoran Press and Alliteration Ink, and she is currently deep in the weeds writing interactive fiction with Choice of Games. She serves as an Associate Editor at Escape Pod, and is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She lives with a robot in the sky above Toronto. You can connect with her on Twitter at @aphoebebarton or her website phoebebartonsf.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

A History of Snakes, Part I

Ashok K. Banker | 10565 words

Many years ago, in the Age of the Gods, there lived the Seed-Giver Drakka. He had two beautiful daughters, Kadrush and Vina’at. Drakka married both daughters to the Sage Kushir. One day, feeling generously disposed to his wives, Kushir told each of them that they could avail of any boon they desired. Both sisters were overjoyed. Kadrush was the first to ask for her boon and she demanded one thousand serpents as her sons, each fiercer than the other and equally splendid. Goaded by her sister’s demand, Vina’at also asked for serpents as sons, but demanded only two, specifying that they must both be greater than Kadrush’s sons in strength, form, energy, and courage. Kushir gladly granted his wives their requests and sired upon them the sons they desired. “Care well for your sons to be!” he cautioned them, then left to the forest on a task.

A great length of time passed.

Finally, Kadrush gave birth to one thousand eggs and Vina’at birthed two eggs. Their maids kept the eggs separately in steaming vessels as instructed and waited for the eggs to hatch.

Five hundred years passed.

After five hundred years, Kadrush’s eggs hatched and as promised, one thousand sons emerged. But Vina’at’s two eggs remained unhatched.

Unable to tolerate her sister having gained her promised sons without she being similarly blessed, the impatient Vina’at broke upon one of her eggs. She saw that the upper half of his body was fully grown but the lower half was as yet unformed. Enraged, the unborn son opened his eyes and glared at his mother in anger: “Mother, by cracking open my shell before my time, you have doomed me to be thus deformed forever. As punishment for your rash act, I curse you to be the slave of the woman you sought to rival for five hundred years! Only your other son may set you free from that enslavement, but only if you wait another five hundred years until he is fully developed and breaks open his shell of his own accord.”

Having issued this curse, the unformed son of Vina’at rose into the sky and became the phenomenon we now call Arrook, the red sky of dawn, who is also the charioteer of the sun-god and heralds his imminent arrival.

A further five hundred years passed.

And then the second egg cracked open and Vina’at’s second son was born, fully formed and resplendent, a being of incomparable power. This was Grrud, king of birds. As soon as he was birthed, he took flight into the sky to search for the food that had been pre-ordained for him by the Creator, abandoning his mother.

• • • •

Shortly after Grrud’s departure, the two wives of Kushir saw a great horse approaching the sage’s ashram. This was no ordinary horse. A great stallion, this was the jewel of the species, the best of all horsekind, so radiant that even the gods cheered when he arose from the great churning of the ocean which we know as amrit-manthan. This was Cchais himself, supreme among all horses, greatest of his kind, possessed of unsurpassed strength, radiant with divine splendour, and born with all the auspicious marks. He was one of many magnificent things that emerged from the Great Churning. He was king of horses.

The history of the Great Churning begins on the flanks of the Mount Ermun. The great mountain blazes with energy, turning resplendent beneath the rays of the sun when they fall upon its glowing golden peaks. Arrayed with ornaments of burnished gold, frequented by gods and their companions, the peak is unattainable and its base unfathomable to anyone who has committed sins against Auma. Terrible predators roam its slopes; divine herbs illuminate it. This great peak rises to cover even the vaults of swargaloka, the highest heaven. To most beings it is unreachable even in their wildest imaginings. Boundless rivers and scented groves resound with the sweet song of every kind of bird. It has stood aloft through the eons. It was to this same mountain’s bejewelled peak that the most venerable gods once ascended. These great divinities, austere and faithful of oath, assembled and began deliberations on how best to obtain the sacred ambrosia named Trima, elixir of immortality. For once they obtained and consumed the Trima, they would become immortals and therefore immune to the assaults of their enemies, the Urrkh.

It was our great Stone God Vish who advised them on the best method, addressing his words to his fellow member of the holy Trine, the Stone God Bruma: “This is not a task for us gods alone. We must enlist the aid of the Urrkh as well. Together, we must churn the pot of curdled milk until the best of herbs and precious treasures are released, and finally the Trima itself will emerge. This is the only way to obtain the sacred ambrosia.” The “pot” he spoke of was of course the great Sarrga, the vast ocean.

Acting on Bruma’s instructions, the gods went to Mount Mandran. Their goal was to uproot the great mountain and use it as a churning pestle to work the ocean, for it was the only thing that could suffice for the task. Now, Mount Mandran is a great peak among mountains. It rises up 11,000 yojas, which is a length equivalent to 44,000 kruishas, or 99,000 miles! This is only the height of the mountain—its foundation descends many more thousands of yojas into the earth. Moreover the mountain is gargantuan in weight and proportion, with innumerable nets of creepers covering its vast jungles filled with many fierce-fanged beasts of prey. Even the best attempts of the gods failed to uproot it. In desperation, they returned to stand before Vish and Brum with joined palms. “Aid us in uprooting Mount Mandran, great ones. You have but to will it and it will be done.”

“So be it,” said Vish. And on his word, the great Lord of Serpents Tha’nanth unwound his epic coils and rewound himself around the vast bulk and length of Mount Mandran. Exerting a mighty effort, the king of snakes uprooted the mountain with a deafening crash of sound and dragged it behind the congregation of the gods and Urrkh, all the way to the ocean. There they called upon the lord of the ocean, Sarrga, and requested, “We wish to churn your waters, great one. Grant us leave to do so that we may produce Treema.”

Sarrga agreed, saying, “You may do so, but only on condition that I too shall receive a share of the ambrosia.”

Then the gods and Urrkh together went to fetch Arkkun, the great turtle upon whose shell rests the world entire. “Lord Arkkun, none except you can bear the mountain on your back for the purposes of the churning. Pray act as the base.” The king of turtles agreed and using elaborate tools and ingenuity, Stone God Inadran undertook the task of fixing Mount Mandran to the back of the great turtle at the bottom of the ocean. Finally, all was in readiness for the churning to begin.

To extract the elixir of immortality, the gods and Urrkh all joined hands to share in the epic task. With Mandran as the churning rod, Visshki the rope, and Arkkun as the base, they began to churn Sarrga, the pot of curdled milk. The Urrkh and dannivs grasped the head of Visshki, while the gods took hold of his tail. Visshki’s brother Anantha stayed by his lord Vish, and repeatedly raised his brother Visshki’s head as it emerged from the great waters, then hurled it down again with force, to aid the churning. Visshki’s enormous length wound up and down, up and down, until sparks, then flames, then puffs of fire and black smoke began to belch forth from his maw. From this black smoke were created clouds with lightning in their belly and thundershowers raged down upon the gods, refreshing them and washing them clean of their fatigue from time to time. From the top of the spinning mountain, great quantities of flowers were set free by the force of the churning, and these blossoms rained down as well, also refreshing both gods and Urrkh. The churning increased in frenzy. A terrible roar began to issue from the depths of the ocean, like the loudest thunder ever heard. Untold hordes of oceanic creatures and submarine life forms were crushed by the mountain and their habitats destroyed forever. From the whirling mountain Mandran, great trees were snapped loose by the force and fell off, killing the birds that nested in them. The wood of the trees began to catch fire from the friction produced by the churning motion. Wildfires blazed unchecked, adding to the chaos and peril. The animals and predators that dwelled on the mountain were driven out, some scorched by the fires, others flung loose by the churning, and died with terrible screams. All manner of creatures perished. Mount Mandran began to resemble a black thundercloud within which lightning flashed and fires raged. The fires spread everywhere, endangering all living beings on earth.

Inadran saw the danger and used his power as lord of storms to quench the fires with a thunderous downpour. The rain, lightning, fire, and the force of the churning began to squeeze out the juices of countless herbs and the resins of trees caught in the maelstrom, producing a juice with no less potency than the elixir itself. Drinking of this juice, the gods attained immortality. The rest of the juice ran into the ocean and mingled with its milky depths, and from the continued churning, this milky mixture turned into the purest of ghee, which in turn floated up to the surface, redolent of the finest essences.

The gods called out to Brum who was seated and watching the Great Churning. “Great Brum, we are weary with effort. As are the Urrkh and dannivs, daits and both the Nagarajas Anantha and Visshki. Yet the Treema itself has not yet appeared, even after eons of churning. We cannot continue thus forever. We beseech you, entreat Lord Vish to aid us and give us strength to complete the task.”

Brum spoke to Vish: “Vish, only you can help them complete this task. Lend them a portion of your divine strength.”

Vish replied: “They shall have the strength they desire. I grant this energy to all those who have devoted themselves to this task. Now there is only one last phase left to complete: Insert Mandran into the ocean once more and turn it around the other way!”

At Vish’s words, all those participating in the Churning felt themselves rejuvenated and invigorated. They did as Vish said, bending their backs to one mighty effort as they inserted the mountain down into the oceanic depths once more, then turning it around the other way. Now they churned with a new frenzy, and the noise of their effort filled all the three worlds. Once more the maelstrom spun.

And from the depths of the maelstrom there arose the following things of power:

First came the Sun, radiating a hundred thousand rays.

Then came the Moon, whose bright cool light was as tranquil as the sun’s was fierce.

Next came goddess Laksh, clad in pale white.

Following her came the goddess of wine and the white horse, Cchais.

Then came the celestial gem Krusbh which eternally adorns Vish’s chest.

The radiant Sun, Adyata, swift as thought itself, blazed a trail and was followed by Laksh, wine, the moon and Cchais, to land before the gods.

Then from the manthan there rose the resplendent god Dvantri, bearing a white gourd pot in his hand, in which was contained the Treema itself, elixir of immortality, divine ambrosia.

At this extraordinary sight, the dannivs produced a great outcry, saying: “It is ours!” and surged forward to claim Treema for themselves.

But Lord Vish used his power to assume the shape of a beautiful and seductive woman Moniha who bewitched the dannivs with her beauty into giving her the gourd full of Treema. He then gave Treema to the gods. Enraged at this betrayal of their pact, the Urrkh swore a war oath against the gods and prepared for battle.

• • • •

Upon the same shores of the vast body of salty water where they had so recently worked together in perfect coordination to churn the ocean and produce Treema, the daits and dannivs assembled, clad in their strongest armour and armed with their fiercest weapons and shields. Great was their number and terrible their rage. Outnumbered and outmatched, the gods had no hope of victory by ordinary means. But thanks to the duplicity of Vish, they now had possession of the elixir of immortality, the sacred ambrosia, Treema. Even as the Urrkh battered their swords against their shields and worked themselves up into a fury for battle, Vish, still in his beguiling form as Moniha, handed the gourd of Treema to Shaeva who passed it to each of the gods in turn so each one might drink from it and become immortal.

But the Urrkh did not lack for craftiness either. Unnoticed by the gods, a danniv named Raah assumed the form of the god named Bru’ud, who is the celestial body closest to the sun. Disguised as Bru’ud, Raah took the gourd of Treema and began to drink it. But the sun and moon, being celestial bodies themselves and therefore better able to recognize their colleague, saw through Raah’s disguise and knew that this was not their companion planet Bru’ud. They set off a hue and cry, alerting the other gods. Acting with the speed of thought, the great god Vish flung his deadly weapon, the celestial disc, and the discus sliced off the head of Raah before the ambrosia could pass down his throat. However, his head had consumed Treema and therefore became immortal. Severed from its body, that jewel-decorated head gave out thunderous roars of outrage and ever since that day, a perpetual enmity began between Raah and his betrayers, the Sun and Moon. Even today, when his rage becomes too great to control, he swallows one or other, even though they soon reappear as they slip through his severed throat.

When all the gods had drunk of Treema, they turned immortal. And it was not a moment too soon, for the Urrkh were worked up to a frenzy and rushed at the gods with an enormous earth-shaking roar and thundering of feet, hell-bent on revenge.

Then Vish shed his beguiling Moniha avatar and transformed back into his awe-inspiring true form as Vish god. He returned the Urrkh’ roars of rage with a great bellow of his own, drowning out their cries and proclaiming his supremacy. The hearts of the Urrkh quailed at the great war cry of Vish and the sky and ocean blackened on that great field of battle by the shores of the vast ocean which still frothed and seethed from the recent churning. Then upon those ploughed shores there commenced the greatest battle ever waged between the gods and the Urrkh.

The raging of the ocean, the thunder of the skies, the howling of the Urrkh hordes, the battle cry of Vish, the roaring of the gods, all blurred and melded to form one deafening sound. The blackness of the sky dimmed all sight, until the only things visible were the white froth raging on the surface of the wild seas, and on the shore, the gleaming of thousands of raised weapons—swords, axes, tridents, spears, javelins, lances, metal clubs, discs. In the gloamy dimness the armies clashed. Javelins flew through the air, punching through breastplates, penetrating heart and lungs and gristle, severing the spine to emerge with an explosion of blood and gore. Spears pierced flesh and shattered bone to splinters. Swords laid open torsos, severed limbs. Chakras spun through the air, gleaming malevolently as they found their targets, decapitating, maiming. Clubs pounded down, smashing skulls like ripe fruit. Blood spewed from open mouths, through shattered teeth and smashed jaws. Bodies were trampled underfoot, eyes crunched to pulp beneath boot heels. Jewelled earrings, silver nose rings, engraved armour plates, filigreed shields, gold crowns, ruby signets, precious ornaments worth a world’s fortune lay trampled and marred in the muck of the battlefield. Urrkh fell in great numbers, their corpses piled high in red streaked mounds that resembled copper-veined mountains. The cacophony of blood lust rang out, cries of “Slice!” “Kill!” “Chase!” “Throw!” “Cut!” “Attack!” ringing out like an insane battle chant.

Last to enter the field were the great ones Vish and Shadow Vish.

In those ancient days, weapons were celestial devices summoned by the utterance of a mantra. Vish summoned his divine bow which appeared at once, gleaming darkly in his fist. Shadow Vish thought of his danniv-destroying disc, Sradarsh. No sooner had he summoned it than the dark skies, veiled by jet black stormclouds, blazed with a blinding bright light, causing all those engaged in combat to pause and gaze up in surprise and awe. From the peak of the sky, through the crow dark clouds, descended the Sradarsh, radiant as the sun itself, impossible to look at directly, rock steady in its path. Like a device fixed to a rigid pole, it descended, unwavering and blinding in intensity, to hover above Vish the immitigable. A golden discus of a mysterious metal unknown to mortal science, it spun with a speed impossible to measure, its bladed tips spinning rapidly enough to form the semblance of a continuous edge, producing a keening sound like a living being. Axyur, the Imperishable One, received it with an upraised forefinger around whose tip its center spun, empowered by his mighty consciousness. Blazing with his own divine fire, Vish was indistinguishable from the sun-bright Sradarsh. With the strength of a thousand elephants, he unleashed the Sradarsh disc and with a shrill screeching cry of unmistakable delight, the god weapon descended upon the field of battle.

In thousands died the progeny of Deet and Darnu then, unable to counter the power of Vish’s disc. At times it blazed like fire, its celestial energy exploding to send flying outwards the shredded scraps of hundreds of Urrkh bodies. At other times it descended to ground level, spinning underfoot as it travelled along the field, scything enemy bodies and reducing them to mangled pulp. It drank the spilled blood like a vampirical beast, screaming with terrible delight. Everywhere it went, it caused havoc and slaughtered the enemies of the gods in great numbers.

But the Urrkh were powerful as well. Undaunted, a thousand Urrkh rose up, bearing mountains on the palms of their hands which they flung down upon the lines of the gods, crushing them with booming explosions on impact. The world was filled with the crashing of thousands upon thousands of mountains as the Urrkh retaliated with fearsome rage. The earth herself, great and tolerant Artha, began to tremble beneath the force of the impact and waver in her course. And still the Urrkh continued to shower down mountains upon the overwhelmed gods.

Then great Vish plunged deep into the ranks of the Urrkh hordes, mingling with them unnoticed at first. Using his divine bow, he loosed a hail of powerful arrows with tips of unknown golden-hued metal and feathered shafts, like a rainstorm rising up from the ground to the skies. The sky grew dark with the profusion of arrows, released at such blinding speed by the magnificent bow of Vish that they appeared to be issued from an army of archers rather than a single bowman. The arrows struck the mountains still in the hands of the flying Urrkh as well as those peaks still plummeting earthwards, and shattered them with terrible force, reducing each one to fine powdered dust. The dust fell like a benediction upon the laughing gods who applauded their fellow.

Then did the tide turn against the Urrkh. Vish and Shadow Vish in the field used their divine bow and magnificent discus to wreak a terrible toll upon the enemy. The rest of the god forces attacked from high and low, flank and van, until the Urrkh, harried and disordered, knew not where to turn to make a stand. Frustrated and despairing, some burrowed their way into the earth, eating through the soil and stone and roots to bury themselves deep within the body of the planet. Those closer to the shores of the ocean plunged into the salty waters, seeking refuge in the darkest depths. Soon the field was clear of all except the victorious gods.

Producing a mighty cheer of triumph, the gods celebrated their undisputed victory.

Afterwards, they restored things to their natural places. Mount Mandran was hauled back to its original site and set firmly in place. Akupara was released from his task to go back to bearing the universe upon his shelled back. Inadran led the gods in a great celebration that lasted for an untold time and filled the heavens with their gaiety and jubilation. When all was done, the slayer of Bra’al, acting for the gods, handed over the gourd pot containing Treema to Krees, the Crowned One.

• • • •

At the ashram of Kushir, the sisters Kadrush and Vina’at saw the great steed Cchais approach. The celestial stallion had only just then emerged from the Great Churning and its route took it past that site where the wives of Kushir lived. But the great horse’s aura glowed so radiantly, it was not visible in the manner of an ordinary horse. Observing its supernatural brilliance, Kadrush asked her sister, “Sister dearest, what colour is the horse Cchais? Tell me at once!” Vina’at replied graciously, “Blessed sister, there is no question about it. The celestial horse is white from nose tip to tail tip, of course. Why? Do you believe it is another color? Come then, my pretty one, let’s have a wager!” Kadrush said with exaggerated politeness, “My sweet-smiling sister, you are quite wrong. I say the horse has a black tail. But you are the prettiest one, are you not? Don’t spoil your beauty with a sour look. If it’s a wager you wish, I am game for it. I bet you that the one who is mistaken about the horse’s colour will become the other one’s slave. What say?” To which her sibling Vina’at replied at once, “Agreed!” Then as it was late in the day and the light insufficient, both sisters agreed to return the next day to examine the horse by the clear light of day.

Back home, Kadrush was determined to win the wager by any means necessary. She commanded her one thousand sons: “Turn yourself into horse hairs as black as kohl and cover the celestial horse’s tail completely.” When they refused, she urged them again, saying, “If you do not do as I say, I shall lose the bet and become her slave!” But still they would not agree to deceive their aunt. Finally, frustrated with their non-compliance, she cursed her own sons: “You shall all perish in the serpent satra of the Krushan, King Majaya!” This terrible curse resounded as far away as Brahmaloka, where the great Father heard Kadrush’s words and mused on the cruel utterance. But after consultation with the other gods, he agreed to let the curse stand, for the sons of Kadrush had multiplied manifold and were increasing in numbers at an unprecedented rate, and were moreover virulently poisonous in their venom, fearsome creatures, and rapidly exceeding all bounds of his control. They bit anyone they chose, intimidating with their lethal venom and running rampant where they pleased. But, out of his love for all living creatures, he countered the curse by bestowing upon Kadrush’s own husband and the father of these same snakes the knowledge of how to neutralize their venom.

The next morning, driven by their mutual jealousy and each eager to better her sibling, the sisters rose with the rising sun, and set out to view the horse Cchais who had taken shelter in a certain grove. Their route took them first to the ocean. Arriving at the shore, they gazed out upon that vast watery expanse. They saw thousands of species of the waterworld coexisting. There were untold varieties of fish. There were enormous timi, also known as whales. And there were timingila, those creatures that devoured whales. There were sharks, crocodiles, turtles, and also the mythical Mraak. Land creatures hesitated to approach it because of the presence of these awe-inspiring predators. Yet it was also a treasure trove of precious stones, the abode of Vrrun, the beautiful home of the Sea Serpents, mother of all rivers, home to the submarine fire, and hiding place of the Urrkh. Eternal and immeasurable, filled with unimaginable wonders and fearsome reverberations, source of terrible calamities and awash with maelstroms spinning above bottomless abysses. It was also a source of great succour and rich treasures, trove of Treema, producer of quakes and storms, at once both sacred and supreme. Its shoreline changed constantly, altered by its turbulent moods, slapping the land with waves like raised hands, buffeting the earth with powerful forces and washes. Its tides waxing and waning with the shifting moon, it was the resting place of the Praanch, that great Conch belonging to Lord Vish, and an endless supply of pearls. In ancient times, Lord Vish in his avatar as Vra’ah, the boar incarnation, plunged into the depths of the endless ocean and churned up the waters with his furious quest for land, finding it at the very bottom of the waters. However, the seer-mage Attur, despite seeking the same earth for one hundred years, failed to find it. At the beginning of each Yurg, or the Eon which is one part of the Day of Brum, the lotus-naveled Vish falls into meditative sleep, this same milky ocean becomes his bed. Its waters then resemble the tongues of Agnar in the sacrificial ceremony, holy, boundless, immeasurable, and eternal.

The sisters looked upon this great ocean, saw the thousands of rivers that rushed toward it as eagerly as lovers into each other’s embrace. They heard the cries of the untold species that lived and preyed and died within its unplumbed depths. And they flew over the great world of Vrrun and Sarrga and passed to the other side.

Arriving at the grove where Cchais loitered, the sisters Kadrush and Vina’at looked at it in clear daylight. To Vina’at’s dismay there were indeed many black hairs on the white tail of the horse, thus proving Kadrush’s observation to be true. Vina’at grieved even as her sister gloated. Having lost the wager, Vina’at then became her sister’s slave.

• • • •

Meanwhile, Grrud, the second son of Vina’at who broke open his own shell and emerged without his mother’s interference or help, flew through the sky, greatly expanded in size and strength from the fledgling that had come out of the shell. Resplendent as a mass of blazing flame and possessed of fearsome aspect, he appeared as the pure energy of fire itself, striking awe and fear into the hearts of even the powerful gods. Awed at this inexplicable sight, the gods all cried out in alarm and sought out Bhavisu, he of many hues. “O Agnar, a part of thy energy flies through the sky threatening to set ablaze all the worlds. It is enormous in size and too brilliant to behold. Do you seek to destroy us all with this weapon of flame?” Agnar replied reassuringly, “Stone Gods, it is not what you think. That is the mighty Grrud. His brilliance equals my own but he is not of my making.” Awed by the power and appearance of Grrud, the gods and all the great sages then followed Grrud and sang his praises from a distance. “Lord of birds. You are a great force unto yourself. Your aspect is no less fierce than that of Agnar, host of the sacrificial flame. You are no less than a god. Be our supreme protector. You are an ocean of might, you are purity incarnate. Your qualities are beyond number. You possess great ferocity and can perform impossible deeds. You are unconquerable, possessed of full knowledge of all that has been and all that will be. Your heat surpasses that of the sun, you engender all things permanent and transient. Even the sun pales in comparison with your splendour. If you choose to rage, you can destroy all things as the sun does in his outbursts. You fly through the sky unbounded, you soar above the clouds themselves. Surely you can grant all boons and achieve the mightiest feats. You are no less powerful than the great fire of entropy which consumes all matter at the end of each Yurg. O king of birds. We approach you as friends and allies. Be not harsh with us. Do not scorch us with your power, we entreat you.”

Preening with pleasure at this exultation from the gods, Srapun, the beautiful feathered one, controlled his heat and radiance out of consideration for them and continued on his way.

After a great flight across the vast ocean, Grrud came to his mother’s house. Having lost the wager over the horse, Vina’at was enslaved by her sister. She served Kadrush daily, living a life of constant humiliation and despair. Kadrush, proud in her newfound role as mistress and commander, summoned Vina’at imperiously. Vina’at appeared and bowed before her, asking her orders. Kadrush ordered her sister to transport her to the legendary abode of the Sea Serpents at the bottom of the ocean, Ryamkir. Compelled to obey, Vina’at lifted her on her back and carried her to the ocean. At his mother’s request, Grrud carried the sons of Kadrush. Now, Grrud was wont to fly very high and as he rose up into the sky, the snakes upon his back began to suffer the fearsome heat of the sun. Scorched and tormented by the heat, the snakes suffered great pain and fell unconscious.

Seeing the state of her sons, Kadrush cried out to Inadran by his various names. “O Shruk, husband of Shashch, king of the gods, slayer of Bra’al, destroyer of Nra’am. I bow before you. My sons are being burned to death by the heat of the sun. You can save them. Prrundi, you are a destroyer of cities, you can produce a deluge and save them. You are lord of wind, clouds, fire, and lightning. You are thunder and monsoon, the sun and the fire, you are all things wonderful and magnificent. You are Vish, you are the thousand-eyed, you are the last resort of all who hope. You are elixir, drink of the gods. You are muhurata, the crucial instant of auspicious action. You are the tihits, the lunar days. You are sha’arn, the time it takes for a twinkling of an eye, four-fifths of a second, and you are lumsh as well, one-sixth of a sha’arn. You are arkanpa, the brighter half of the moon month, and you are dusk-arkan, the shadow or darker half of the lunar cycle. You are wa’rqt, the daily waxing of the moon, and a fractional measure of time. You are ka’ashth, one-thirtieth of a lumsh. You are trunsim, half of a lumsh. You are time in all its aspects, from the greatest to the most minute. You are the solar year, the changing seasons, the months of the calendar, the nights, and days themselves. You are the earth sublime, its mountains and forests. You are the clear sky with brilliant sun. You are the vast ocean and its billowing energies, the timi whales as well as the timingalas that devour the whales, Marrk. You are justly famous. You are worshipped by the greatest seers, the enlightened seer-mages. You are the drinker of elixir offered at sacrifices. You are He whom Brum-seers worship when they desire anything. Your fame extends to the sacred Scriptures, where you are praised extensively. It is to ensure their pleas reach your ears that the twice-born study the Scriptures diligently.”

At this passionate entreaty by Kadrush, Lord Inadran rode his bay horses across the sky, veiling the sun with a dense blanket of stormclouds. Crackling with lightning, the clouds unleashed a deluge of epic proportions. Thunder crashed and waves upon waves of torrential rain washed across the earth, submerging it in water across its length and breadth. Overwhelmed with delight, the Serpent sons of Kadrush revived and were refreshed by the water and praised the great Vasava for his aid.

Soon after, the beautiful feathered Grrud arrived at an island. This was the place known as Marlay, for its sandalwood trees, surrounded on all sides by endless ocean and filled with the cries and songs of numerous birds. There were rows of wooded groves rich with fruits and blossoms, where well-constructed houses stood by beautiful lotus lakes. Celestials and earthbound frolicked in the flower strewn groves. The island was refreshed by cool scented breezes. Blossoms and petals showered down from the high Marlay trees, and the Serpent sons of Kadrush were charmed by the beauty of the place. They lived there awhile and took great pleasure in its natural beauty. After some time had passed, the pannagas called to Srapun who flew down and folded his great wings, bending his mighty beak low that he might hear their words. “Take us to another beautiful island as charming as this one, Grrud. You must know many such places from your travels across the sky.” Irritated at their abrupt orders, Grrud asked his mother: “Must I obey their every whim?” Vina’at sighed and replied, “Yes, my son. For under the terms of the wager I lost, I am enslaved by my sister, your aunt. And as my son, you are therefore enslaved as well.” Curious, Grrud enquired further and learned for the first time all the details of the lost wager. After he heard the full story, he was unhappy. Appealing to the sons of Kadrush, he asked them, “Tell me one act that I may perform that will appease you forever. No matter how great a deed, I shall perform it, if only you will agree to release my mother and I from this state of slavery.” At this, the sons of Kadrush hissed sibillantly and answered, “Bring us Treema! And you shall be freed from your bond!”

• • • •

Grrud went to his mother and asked for her blessings. “I shall go and fetch Treema and end our enslavement.” Upon which his mother urged him to eat something before he went that he might gain strength for his mission. “What shall I eat, mother?” he asked her dutifully. Vina’at thought awhile, then said, “Far from here, in a remote bay, you shall find the Nishdas, hunters of creatures who dwell in the ocean. Their diet makes them strong and their flesh shall give you strength as well. Eat as many of them as you can, consume them by the thousands, and you will be well nourished for your task. But remember, you must never eat a Brum-seer or kill one. Among all living creatures, a Brum-seer is like fire itself and can never be eaten or killed. Just like fire, a Brum-seer angered can blaze like the sun and destroy you by the tapas heat of his austerities. A Brum-seer is the first to eat at a sacrifice for he is supreme among the varnas, a father and a preceptor.”

Grrud bowed to his mother. “In that case, Maatr, tell me, how do I recognize a Brum-seer from other persons? By what signs is he distinguished?”

Vina’at answered, “My son, a Brum-seer may appear similar to any other mortal being, but if you eat one by accident, when he passes down your throat, it will feel as if you have swallowed a live coal. If you try to swallow him, he will stick like a fish hook. And you will know at once that you have tried to eat a Brum-seer!”

Eager that her son not make any error, Vina’at again repeated her instructions carefully. Grrud listened with attentiveness. When it was time for him to leave, Vina’at pronounced a blessing over him, out of her maternal love: “May the Mrruts, those gods of wind, protect your wings. May Chandra, the moon, protect your back. May Agnar, the lord of fire, protect your head. May Surya, the sun god, protect your entire body. Go now, my son. I shall perform a ceremony to pray for your well-being until the time your return.” Grrud bid goodbye to his mother and spread his wings, soaring up into the sky.

In time, he found the bay where the Nishdas resided and fell upon them like great Kaal itself, the almighty Lord of Death Yarm in the form of Time. His mighty wings beat up a great dust storm that covered the sky, dried up the ocean, and caused even the adjoining mountain ranges to shake. Then, moving stealthily through the twilight of the dust storm, he opened his beak wide. Stampeding in panic from these unusual phenomena, the Nishdas unwittingly ran right into the open beak of Grrud. Just as birds rise from a jungle in thousands when startled and fly up into the sky, thus did the Nishdas run along their only escape route—directly into the maw of the great bird. Grrud scooped them up by the thousands and consumed them, eating their flesh, strengthened by their diet of fish. The slaughter of the Nishdas was relentless.

Then, as was inevitable, a Brum-seer and his wife happened to be among those that fell into Grrud’s beak. Even as they fell, screaming, into his throat, Grrud felt himself scorched as if he had swallowed a live coal. Remembering his mother’s instructions, at once he opened his beak and released the Brum-seer, saying, “O great Brum-seer. You are free to go. I have sworn an oath never to eat a Brum-seer, even if he lives among those who are wrongdoers.”

Relieved, the Brum-seer scurried out of the beak, then paused to look up. “Mighty one, the woman with me is my wife. She is a Nishda but I pray you, spare her as well.”

Grrud said, “Take her then, and go. Hurry before you are both consumed by the energy in my belly for once it touches you, there is no escape.”

Without wasting a moment, the Brum-seer took his Nishda wife by the hand and both escaped from Grrud’s beak.

Grrud spread his wings and took flight once more. Flying to his father’s ashram, he came before Sage Kushir and greeted him with appropriate plaudits. When his father gave him leave to speak, he said, “I am on a mission to steal the Elixir of immortality, Treema. Once I hand it over to the Serpents, my mother shall be freed from her enslavement. Requiring energy for the task, she advised me to eat the Nishdas. I did so, but even after consuming thousands of the fisherfolk, I am still not sated. Great father of mine, pray advise me on what else I can eat that I may grow strong enough to steal the ambrosia.”

Kushir pondered the matter then said, “My son, in ancient times there was a Mraash-seer named Bhavisu. He was prone to losing his temper easily. Bhavisu had a younger brother named Prusap who was also a great ascetic. Both brothers jointly owned certain possessions and properties of value. Prusap wished to have his share of these things to possess independently. He constantly urged his brother to divide their possessions. One day, angered by his brother’s constant demands, Bhavisu told him, ‘Many people foolishly believe that dividing property is the best way. But once it is divided, these same deluded fools are then driven apart. The more they think about wealth and possessions, the more they wish to ensure that they have received their fair share, and obsess over dividing their properties and possessions, while retaining a semblance of friendship. In time, this leads to enmity and selfish greed and eventually, utter ruin. Knowledgeable persons like us should be wiser than to pursue such selfish and deluded goals. Partition can only cause unhappiness and ruin. Prusap, your constant demands have exceeded my patience. Despite all my advice, you are obsessed with acquiring your share of the property. Your bull-headedness is intolerable. On this account, I curse you to become an elephant who constantly pushes his head against a tree, determined to bring it to the ground!’

In retaliation, Prusap said, ‘If that is so, then I curse you to become a turtle that lives in the water and is unable to take any action, no matter how vital!’

Thus, each of them turned into an elephant and a turtle. And until this very day, they continue to maintain their enmity towards one another, feuding and brawling constantly. Look upon this great lake before us. Do you see the large majestic elephant that comes toward us, trumpeting its anger? That is Prusap, transformed by his brother’s curse. And there, responding to the elephant’s challenge, Bhavisu the turtle rises from the bed of the lake to the surface. Watch how the elephant curls his tusk in fury and plunges into the lake to do battle with the turtle, attacking it with his trunks, tusks, tail, and feet. The turtle is no less indignant and agitates the water mightily as it retaliates. These are no ordinary turtle and elephant: Bhavisu the turtle is three yojas tall and ten yojas in girth! While Prusap the elephant is six yojas high and twice that in length! They are both joining together in a battle royale as we speak. Scoop them up and eat them whole and you shall gain all the strength you desire to accomplish your chosen task!”

At his father’s words, Grrud eagerly leaped into the sky, turned in a wheeling flight, and swooped down to grasp hold of the elephant with one enormous claw and the turtle with the other claw. Gaining height again with powerful flaps of his great wings, he flew to the earthly place named Ma’alamb where a grove of celestial trees flourished. These were divine trees, hung with gold and silver fruits and branches of lapis lazuli. Being a bird, he sought only to perch upon a tree branch that he might eat his meal of turtle and elephant. But, buffetted by the gale-intensity of his wings, the magical trees trembled in fear, afraid that Grrud’s immense weight would crack their golden boughs. Grrud was able to understand the concern felt by the divine trees and he had no desire to shake free their magical fruit which were capable of granting any wish by those who ate them. So he went in search of a more suitable perch.

He found a great and ancient fig tree with immense branches, its roots spread far and wide over the course of its historic life. The tree saw and understood Grrud’s need and called out to him: “Great bird, I bid you welcome. Come perch upon my mighty branches which extend for one hundred yojas and eat your meal in peace!” Grrud, enormous as any mountain, descended with a momentous flapping of his wings, bearing his great prey, and perched upon the giant branches that had housed a thousand birds for as many years. But the instant his claws touched the branch, it broke with a loud crack and the entire tree shook.

Instinctively, moving as quickly as thought, Grrud snatched up the bough he had broken and held it in his beak before it could fall to the ground. He saw that the bough had a large number of tiny humanoid creatures hanging from its underside, their heads facing downwards. On closer inspection he realized these were the khilavyas, the austere rishis who had been generated from the body of Brum himself in a great age past. Each of them were the size of a man’s thumb and they preceded the sun’s chariot on his daily journey. Unwilling to let the bough drop and crush the khilavyas to death, Grrud held that great bough in his mighty beak and flew up to the sky again. Unable to find a suitable perch, he flew on for a great distance, often circling for ages in search of a suitable landing spot without finding any. Across countless nations he flew thus, carrying the giant elephant in one claw, the turtle in his other claw, and the giant bough in his beak. But nowhere on earth could he find a place strong enough to bear the combined weight of himself and his burdens.

At last he came to the great mountain Marghax atop whose peak his father Kushir was standing on one leg in a yogic asana. Sage Kushir saw his son and understood his plight at once. He called out to Grrud: “My son! Be careful what you do! The khilavyas drink the energy of the sun to sustain themselves. If angered, they will turn their solar power upon you and burn you instantly!” Having cautioned his son, Kushir then turned his attention to the khilavyas themselves. “Great ascetics, my son Grrud has embarked on a great, noble mission. Pray, grant him your permission to proceed.”

Acknowledging their fellow sage, the khilavyas acceded to Kushir’s well-phrased request and relinquished their hold on the giant branch. Descending on the ground, they travelled on to the Himalayas to seek out another place to complete their austerities.

But Grrud still had a problem. “Father,” he said to Kushir, “advise me where I can drop this branch without harming any Brum-seers. For my mother Vina’at cautioned me never to harm a Brum-seer. Is there a country where no Brum-seers reside where I can go to discard it?”

“Shamulf Grrud,” said his father, using an affectionate epithet for his son, “In a distant land there is a mountain uninhabited by humans. It is remote, inaccessible, and in a place where no man can reach, with caves buried in snowdrifts. Mortal men do not know of its existence even in their imagination. I will communicate its location to you with the power of my mind.”

Thus instructed, Grrud rose up again, carrying the giant branch, giant elephant and giant turtle and using the power of his mind alone, instantly entered the base of the mountain. Thus, he covered a distance of one hundred thousand yojas in the wink of an eye. Seeing the mountain, he let go of the branch with great relief. With a terrible sound, the branch crashed and fell, setting the entire mountain and the surrounding countryside for many hundreds of yojas around to shuddering. Trees shed their fruit, leaves and flowers showered down, and the snowdrifts and glacial ice clinging to the peak and slopes of that mighty mountain were shaken loose and crashed down in a great avalanche. Alighting atop the summit of that same mountain, Grrud finally rested his weary body and feasted on both the elephant and the turtle, eating both with great relish. As soon as he finished, he was filled with immense energy, and was ready to undertake his ambitious mission.

Once again travelling with the speed of thought, he flashed from that mountain peak to the land of the gods to steal the ambrosia of immortality.

But the gods are gods and they saw portents and signs of the impending threat. Inadran’s lightning bolt, that divine thunderbolt, released itself with an ominous sound even without his bidding. Meteors blazed trails across the sky. The various clans of the gods—Sa’avs, Drasus, Arrkas, Dhyasas, Mrruts and their kith and kin—all began attacking one another and fighting for no apparent reason. Things occurred that had never taken place before, even during the war of the gods and Urrkh. Tumultuous winds roared, cloudless skies produced thundering sounds, and even the God of the gods, he who has ever been and shall ever be, rained showers of blood. The flower garlands around the necks of the gods withered and wilted. Swirling dust and grime darkened the glamour of their crowns. The light of the stars was extinguished.

Inadran, who was also the performer of a hundred sacrifices and therefore known as Shatkratu, was disturbed and bewildered, as were his fellow gods. He appealed to the preceptor of the gods, the great sage Brish. “Great Guru, what is the cause of these phenomena? Such portents can only serve to forewarn us of a great enemy’s approach. But I see no one who threatens our well-being.”

Brish replied, “King of the gods, it is through your own negligence that this has occurred. The khilavyas, through the power of their austerities, have created an extraordinary creature. This giant bird, son of Kushir and Vina’at, is powerful and possessed of maya, the power of illusion. He comes here now to steal your precious Treema. Do not underestimate him. This feat is well within his ability. He is capable of doing the impossible.”

Disturbed by his guru’s words, Inadran in his form as Shruk spoke to the other gods, fellow guardians of the sacred elixir. “These portents are signs of the approach of a great and powerful bird. He comes now to steal our Treema. We must prevent him from doing so.”

On Inadran’s instructions, they took up pre-arranged positions around the gourd pot of Treema, weapons in hand. Inadran armed himself with his lightning bolt. Each of the gods was clad in their best armour and armed with their fiercest weapons—discs, balas, tridents, parasus, and every other weapon imaginable. Armed and armoured thus, the army of gods stood there waiting, determined to protect the nectar of immortality at any cost. What army would dare challenge such a divine host, armed as if for a great war, capable of facing even the largest gathering of enemies ever assembled!

The gods were prepared to repulse any foe, however powerful. Undaunted, Grrud arrived at the site where they were protecting the sacred elixir. At the sight of Grrud, the gods began to quail. Some of them sought to surrender their arms as they believed Grrud to be indomitable, and their fellow gods grew furious at them and fights broke out among the gods themselves. In this chaos, Grrud began his assault. The first to bar his way was Warqash, that famous architect of the gods. Determined to guard the elixir with his life, he prepared to fight valiantly. But with a single flick of his claw, Grrud ripped him to shreds, then tore out his innards with his beak and flicked them aside with a beat of his wings. Then Grrud flapped his wings faster and faster, stirring the very earth itself into rising in a maelstrom. So great a quantity of dust churned through the air that nobody could see anything. Moving through this turmoil like an avenging force, Grrud slashed, bit, jabbed, pierced, and tore apart the gods as a raven tears worms from the ground.

Inadran rallied the Mrruk named Vyu, Lord of Wind. “Clear this dust away instantly!” he commanded. Shaken by the great bird’s attack, the god of wind heard Inadran’s command and obeyed. In moments, the dust cleared and all could see one another and Grrud again.

Then Inadran led the gods in an assault on Grrud. Stung and nicked by their weapons and blows, he roared, filling the three worlds with his vehement cry. Beating his great wings, he rose up into the sky above the heads of the gods. The gods attacked him on every side, with every weapon at their disposal, flinging spears, javelins, lances, arrows, cutting with swords, axes, discs, jabbing tridents, striking powerful blows with hammers, iron maces, clubs and weapons of every kind and description. Grrud withstood all their blows without coming to harm. On and on the battle raged, but Vina’at’s son fought on relentlessly, showing no signs of weariness or pain. Even though he was but one, and they were many and immortal, yet it was the gods who grew the worse for wear. For he tore into them with savage ferocity, mangling bodies with his deadly beak and talons, sending entire scores of them scattering with a single flutter of his wings. Immortal though they were, they were not immune to pain or suffering and began to suffer grievous injuries and wounds. Then, unable to bear the assault of the king of birds, the defense line of the gods disintegrated. They began a phased retreat to save their own lives. The saddhyas and earthbound retreated eastwards, the vasus and rudras to the south, the adityas to the west, and the ashwins, who are also called the nasatyas, went north. They did not simply flee but fought every step of the way, rallying any number of times. But it was to no avail. As the field cleared, individual champions began to try their best to hold off the invader so that their fellows might retreat safely. The great Grrud fought in single combat with the brave Kra’and, killing and rending him apart. He battled the bird Nukard and reduced her to feathers, bones, and blood. The valiant Kra’ath was ripped to shreds. The bird Prant fared the same. Lu’uku, Savush, Shimen—also a bird, Rupaj, and Lipula all died fighting valiantly but hopelessly. Like Shaiva at the End of each Yurg, in his final form as Nikpi, wielding his celestial bow, Grrud wreaked havoc in the ranks of the once omnipotent gods.

Finally, the gods routed thoroughly, the battlefield his and his alone, the best of birds went to claim his prize. There lay the gourd pot, only a short distance away, unguarded now and his for the taking. He screeched with joy and flew towards it. To his surprise, as he approached, a great wall of fire sprang up. It covered the world from ground to sky, and raged with violent winds, buffeting the flames in every direction. The entire world seemed to be ablaze and the intensity of the fire was equivalent to the heat and brightness of the sun itself at its prime.

But Grrud was not about to admit defeat. Able to change his form at will, he assumed ninety times ninety mouths and flew down to earth. There, he scooped up the water from countless rivers, filling every one of his beaks, then flew back to the heavenly realm with the speed of thought. Driving the raging firestorm before him by beating his wings to form a perpetual set of bellows, he sprayed the water from his eight thousand one hundred giant beaks at the flames with unimaginable force. That jet of water quenched the fire wall long enough to create a small gap. Instantly, Grrud reduced himself to the size of a fly, and flew through the gap, passing through the wall of fire.

Jetting through the gap in the wall of fire with lightning speed, Grrud approached the gourd pot containing the ambrosia. He saw a disc near the gourd, edged with sharp blades and spinning at frantic speed, blazing with an emanation of terrible heat and blinding light. Any creature attempting to subvert it would be instantly chopped to fine bits. Grrud reduced his body further, to the size of a pin point, and slipped through the spokes in the disc.

Past the disc, he saw two enormous Serpents, standing guard over the Treema. They were not ordinary snakes, for their jewelled scales glittered brightly and their tongues shot lightning bolts as they flicked out of their fanged mouths. Their eyes glinted malevolently and shot out firebolts that would sear anyone that approached. Grrud threw dirt into their eyes, blinding them as well as rendering their firebolts useless. They shot fire and lightning at him but as they were unable to see, he was able to avoid every blast. Then, enraged at being blinded, they began to spit venom like acid and lunged repeatedly. A single strike of those venomous fangs could render him senseless, perhaps even kill him, but Grrud was able to evade those attacks as well. Then, creeping in beneath their hoods, he attacked them viciously. With the eternal enmity of birds towards snakes, he tore into them and shredded their scaled bodies to strips of bloodied meat. Finally, nothing lay between him and the Treema.

Vina’at’s son seized his prize with his beak and flashed up into the sky at the speed of light. So swift was his passage that the gourd pot containing the sacred elixir shattered instantly. But he caught every last drop of ambrosia in his beak, without drinking any of it. He carried it thus to his destination, still as strong and radiant as when he had first set out on his mission.

A shadow came between him and the sun, taking him by surprise.

He looked up and saw Vish hovering before him. Vish joined his palms in the gesture of respectful greeting and said, “I am not here to do battle with you. Rather, I admire your sacrifice. You could have consumed the Treema yourself just now. Instead, you only held it in your beak to carry back home to your cousins, the Serpents. This is a commendable act of self-denial. In return for this great sacrifice, I wish to offer you a boon. Name your desire.”

Grrud replied, “I wish to always be above you. Immortal, free from the decay of age, yet without drinking a single drop of Treema.”

Vish laughed at this and granted Grrud’s wishes. Then Grrud surprised the great Vish by announcing that he wished to confer a boon upon him!

The Dark One, Kru’upsha, smiled mischievously, and asked that Grrud should always be his vaahan, or carrier. Grrud agreed. Vish then emblazoned the effigy of Grrud upon his war flag and showed the bird the banner, saying, “Thus shall you always be above me!” Grrud smiled in response and nodded, acknowledging the greatness of Vish, the infinite one.

But Inadran was not willing to accept his defeat. As Grrud flew on, still carrying the Treema in his beak, Prrundi attacked him with his lightning bolt. Struck by the lightning bolts time and time again, Grrud said to Inadran in an ironic tone: “I feel no pain at your attack nor have I suffered any harm. But because I respect the seer from whose bones your weapon was originally constructed, therefore I shall shed a single feather. You will never be able to find its ends.” Thereupon, Grrud cast off a solitary feather, more beautiful than anything else on earth. Seeing the beauty of that feather, the gods exclaimed and renamed the bird Srapun, One With Beautiful Feathers. Even arrogant Inadran was humbled by this magnanimous gesture. Acknowledging the greatness of Grrud, the Lord of Storms joined his palms in acquiescence and asked Grrud to make him his friend and ally, as he desired to know the limits of Grrud’s strength and abilities. Grrud agreed graciously. “We shall be friends henceforth, Prrundi,” Grrud said, “but as for knowing the limits of my strength, it is not right of me to boast of my own prowess or praise my own qualities. Still, Shatakratu, since you are now my friend and you have asked me this question in friendship, I shall attempt to answer. Hear me, Shruk. On any single feather on my body I can bear the entire world, with all its mountains, forests, oceans, all things that move and those that do not move—you can even add your own weight to it, and I shall bear it all easily, upon that single feather. Therefore judge for yourself the extent of my strength.”

Inadran was grateful to the king of birds. “Thank you for sharing this confidence with me. Now that we are friends I wish to say something to you. If you give this elixir to those who asked for it, they will become immortal and wage war against us gods. As king of the gods, it is my Auma to prevent that from happening. Therefore I request you as a friend now, kindly return Treema to me.”

Grrud was amused by Inadran’s request. “God of a thousand eyes, I cannot return this Treema to you now for it is my sworn mission to fetch it. Yet I resent my cousins the Serpents who demanded this task of me, for they enslaved my mother and caused her to suffer many humiliations. There is still something we can do to prevent their drinking it and benefitting from its magical properties. I shall set down the elixir before them and fulfill my mission. But you may accompany me and pick it up at that exact moment and bring it back! That way, both our purposes will be fulfilled.”

Inadran was pleased at this plan and agreed at once. In return for Grrud’s aid in returning the Treema to the gods, he granted the bird king any boon he desired. Grrud dipped his beak and answered, “Great Shruk, I possess power enough to do anything I please. Yet grant me this one boon: Make the Serpent, the mightiest snakes of the world, my natural food.” Both sealed their pact and Srapun proceeded to his destination, where the Serpents eagerly awaited his return, Inadran following discreetly.

At the sight of Grrud descending from the sky, the Serpents sent up a great hissing in jubilation. Landing with a flourish of his mighty wings, Grrud placed the Treema upon a pallet of kusa grass. At once the Serpents sought to pounce upon and drink thirstily of the elixir of immortality. But Grrud cautioned them, “Surely you must first bathe and purify yourself before partaking of this divine nectar, that it may be most efficacious in its results.” The Serpents paused, realizing the truth in Grrud’s words. Srapun went on, “As you can see, I have accomplished the impossible task you set me. Now fulfill your part of our bargain. Set my mother free this instant.” Happily, the Serpents agreed and freed Vina’at of her enslavement, then went to cleanse and purify themselves before partaking of the ambrosia. The instant their backs were turned, Inadran descended like the lightning bolt that was his trademark, took the Treema, and returned to the heavenly realm. After they had bathed and performed their purification rites, the snakes returned but saw they had been deceived. Out of desperation, they began to lick the elephant grass on which the nectar had been placed, in the hope that there might still be some traces left. But Inadran had used his power to carry away every last droplet and the snakes only succeeded in cutting their tongues on the razor sharp elephant grass. Thus did snakes get their forked tongues and elephant grass become sacred thereafter.

Returning home with his mother, Grrud and Vina’at lived happily in the forest. As decreed by Inadran, snakes became his natural food thereafter and he devoured them in great quantities, sharing them with his fellow birds as well and enjoying great fame. This is his story and all who know it will be eternally graced by the great-souled lord of birds.

©2022 by Ashok K. Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the author of more than eighty books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. Their works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. Ashok made their picture book debut with the multiple award-winning I am Brown. Upcoming in May is The Blind King’s Wrath, the final book of the Burnt Empire trilogy. And in June comes their debut thriller, A Kiss After Dying. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, they now live in Southern California.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

A History of Snakes, Part II

Ashok K. Banker | 9252 words

Visshki, now the eldest and most senior of the Serpents, had heard of the curse pronounced by his own mother. He called a meeting with Airavata and all their other siblings. “Brothers, as you know our own mother has cursed us. Anyone who is cursed by his own mother has no hope of remedy. What is more, Brum himself was witness to this curse, which makes it immutable. Now, we are all doomed to die in the serpent satra of King Majaya which is but the same curse of our mother Kadrush brought to fruition. Still, I know that we are wise beyond measure and by combining our wisdom, we may yet find a loophole in Auma which enables us to survive the ill effects of this curse. I invite your suggestions.”

Some snakes suggested that they turn themselves into Brum-seers and exhort Majaya to call off the sacrifice. Others expounded on this stratagem: “We shall travel back in time to insinuate ourselves as mortal Brum-seers among his advisors. Over time, we shall gain his confidence and respect. When the time comes to start the sacrifice, we shall advise him against initiating it in the first place. Thereby, the sacrifice shall never begin therefore it can never succeed in destroying our species!” The suggestions continued: “If all else fails and the serpent ceremony still goes forward, we can go to the chief preceptor and bite him with venom, killing him before he initiates the sacrifice. We shall kill all priests who dare to officiate at the sacrifice!” But some of their brothers objected saying, “This is the very reason why we are facing this calamity today! We cannot resolve our problem through further violence. Killing Brum-seers will only compound our sins thousandfold. The only way to resolve the situation is through peaceful means. At all times, we must adhere to Auma. Adharma will only lead to death and destruction.” After further thought, a suggestion was offered: “Let us become rainclouds and shower torrential rain to extinguish the ceremony fire.” Yet another was made: “Let us sneak into the site of the ceremony under cover of night and steal the ladles for the sacrifice.” The more violent Serpents shouted again: “Let us go in great numbers and kill everyone present!” Other angry ones suggested, “Let us defile the ceremony offerings of food with our dung and urine, rendering the ceremony itself worthless!” Someone proffered: “Let us become officiating Brum-seers at the satra and demand an impossible guru-offering in order to proceed with the sacrifice!” Someone cried out, “Yes, and let the offering be that King Majaya does not perform the ceremony at all!” Another group suggested: “Without violence, let us kidnap the king and hold him ransom until the ceremony is cancelled!” Still others said, “The only way to be certain is through violence—let us bite Majaya as we bit his father before him. With the Krushan king dead, there can be no serpent satra!”

Visshki heard the clamour of suggestions and considered them all carefully. Finally, after much thought and consultation he said, “Brother snakes, I am sorry but none of our ideas seem practicable. I am not satisfied with any of our plans. We must still think further. I take full responsibility and blame if we fail in this endeavour but I cannot go ahead with any of these suggestions.”

In the gloomy silence that followed Visshki’s announcement, Elapatra raised his hood and hissed, “This talk of preventing the serpent satra from beginning is pointless, as is the idea of kidnapping or killing King Majaya. Let us first accept these two facts: One, King Majaya is determined to host this ceremony, and Two, the ceremony will take place as scheduled. But there is something I heard once that may be of use to us now. Soon after our mother pronounced our curse, I overheard the gods speaking to Lord Brum. They were amazed that a mother could curse her own children so harshly and not be reprimanded by the great Creator. This is how he answered them: ‘The snakes have become too numerous, too venomous, and too violent. They threaten the existence of all life on earth. For their sake, I permitted Kadrush to pronounce her curse and the curse to take effect. But it is not as cruel as it sounds. Only the most venomous and vicious snakes shall actually perish in the serpent satra of King Majaya. Once they are dead, the other snakes who are peaceful and observe Auma diligently may still escape. A great seer will rise in the line of the yayavaras named Jaratkaru. He shall marry a woman bearing the same name as his own, and their son will be named Staki. Rishi Staki will be the one to halt the sacrifice and ensure the survival of those snakes who are virtuous, peace-abiding and follow Auma.” Elapatra then pointed out, among their gathering, their sister named Jaratkaru. “Since Jaratkaru’s wife is to bear the same name as himself, and there sits our sister of that name, let us offer her as wife to the seer, that he may cohabit with her and produce a son named Staki. Thus shall one of our own kith and kin become our salvation.”

The snakes were delighted to hear this excellent plan. Visshki undertook the task of taking their sister Jaratkaru, who gladly volunteered, to the seer when the time came. Soon after this congregation of the snakes, the Great Churning began and Visshki was used as the rope for the churning. In the course of that momentous event, he learned that almighty Brum was in fact well aware of the plan suggested by his brother Elapatra and had in fact been the one to plant the seed of the idea in Elapatra’s head—that was how Elapatra came to overhear Brum’s conversation with the other gods. Brum exhorted Visshki to delegate his snake brethren to always keep watch over Jaratkaru so that when the time came, they would be ready to fulfill his desire for a wife by offering their sister to him in marriage. Wherever Jaratkaru travelled, he was watched by snakes.

• • • •

Once there was a king named Prishp. Born in the Krushan line, he was son of Abhimanyu and the great-grandson of Pandu. Like his great-grandfather, he was a dedicated hunter, devoted to the thrill and joy of the hunt. Strong of eye and keen of eye, he was an excellent archer and if he set his heart on hunting any creature, it never escaped his sights. Wild boar, deer, hyena, buffalo, every manner of creature that was fit to be hunted was pursued and brought down by his eagle eye and steady hand. One day, engaged in his favourite pursuit in the deep jungle, he shot a deer with a distinctive tuft of fur. Pierced by the arrow, the deer ran screaming into the deep woods. Like Lord Rudra seeking the sacrificial deer in swargaloka, King Prishp pursued the deer relentlessly, bow ready to snap off a second fatal shot the instant he laid eyes on his prey. “I have never failed to bring a deer down once I set my sights on it,” he thought, “and I shall not fail today.” His pride drew him ever deeper into that jungle as the deer, even though wounded and in pain, tested his stamina to the limit. Tired and thirsty, King Prishp chanced upon a humble hovel, barely a shelter beneath which stood a milch cow with calves suckling. There sat a seer engaged in deep meditation. His name was Shamika, although Prishp did not know it. Relieved to see another human being in that desolate place, King Prishp stopped before him. “Brum-seer, I am King Prishp, son of Abhimanyu. I shot a deer and it ran this way, pierced by my arrow. Did you see which way it went?” The seer opened his eyes and looked at the king but because he had undertaken a maun-vrata, a sacred vow of silence, he could not answer. Prishp was a king and accustomed to being answered instantly. When the seer continued to stare at him without answering, he was offended. But he tried to ask the question again, keeping his voice level and his manner respectful, because he had been brought up to always show respect to Brum-seers and elders. Still the seer refused to answer. Prishp was certain the deer had passed this way only moments earlier. Soon he would lose its trail and fail for the first time in his life. He was tired, hungry, thirsty, and eager to end the chase quickly. When the seer continued to ignore his queries and closed his eyes to resume his meditation, Prishp took this as a sign of a personal affront. He lost his temper. A dead snake happened to be lying nearby. Picking it up with the end of his bow, he draped it around the seer’s neck, intending to provoke him into speaking. But the seer adhered to his vow and remained silent. He only opened his eyes and glared at Prishp again, this time showing his own anger and displeasure. As Prishp stared at the absurd sight of a seer meditating with a dead creature draped around his throat, the Krushan king realized what he had done and felt ashamed. In his desperation to get his quarry, he had committed a grave transgression against a Brum-seer. Not wishing to compound his error of judgement, he quickly left that place and returned to his city, the hunt abandoned. Now, unknown to Prishp, a neighbour of the meditating seer had observed the whole incident. His name was Krisha and he was a friend of Shring, the son of the seer around whose neck Prishp had placed the dead snake.

Some time later, the seer’s son Shring returned home. On the way home, he met Krisha who smirked and said, “Shring, you are always so proud and superior. But I just saw your father, wearing a carcass around his neck like a necklace. Is that any way for a Brum-seer to act, meditating with a corpse on his body?” Shring was a self-righteous young Brum-seer, austere in his views and his vows, and given to great fits of rage. He was a devotee of Brum and it was on Brum’s urging that he had cut short his trip to come home. He was offended by Krisha’s tone and manner of speaking. He refused to believe his friend. “What nonsense is this? Why would my father wear a corpse around his neck?” Krisha laughed. “The only mistake was made by King Prishp. The Krushan king was hunting a deer which had passed this way. He asked your father to point out the direction the deer had gone, but your father refused to answer him.” Krisha blinked, trying to take in this information and replied crossly, “My father has taken a vow of silence. He cannot speak to anyone for any reason until his vow has ended.” Krisha shrugged, still grinning. “King Prishp must not have known that. He lost his temper at your father’s silence, picked up a dead snake, and wrapped it around your father’s throat. Now look at your father, still sitting there with the carcass!” Shring caught hold of Krisha, who took one look at Shring’s furious expression and stopped laughing at once. “Where is this King Prishp now?” asked Shring. Krisha gestured with a nod of his head. “He left some time back. Probably went back to Hastinaga.”

Shring pushed Krisha aside and ran the rest of the way to his humble hermitage. He saw his father seated in the cowshed, the dead snake around his neck. Shring’s anger swelled until his eyes turned red and his face glowed red with rage. He could not bear the sight of his father, so devoted to his austerities that he survived by only drinking the froth discarded by the calves after they had suckled at their mother cow’s teats, and who spend his days in utter silence under the force of the maun vrata. His father opened his eyes and saw his son standing before him, staring at the dead snake and Shring saw his father’s eyes turn away in humiliation. Tears sprang from Shring’s eyes. His father still did not speak but in his mind, Shring could hear his father’s voice saying, “Son, we are men of Auma. We possess nothing of value except the virtue gained by our austerities. Always remember that. Poor though we are in wealth and belongings, we are rich in austerities and can always hold our heads high with pride, for few even among Brum-seers can claim to be as devoted to their vocation as we are.” It was this same approach to life that made Shring equally proud and self-righteous and his heart could not bear to see his virtuous father who had suffered and surrendered everything else humiliated in this fashion by a wealthy royal warrior from such a great dynasty.

Taking up water with his fingertips, Shring vented his anger in a terrible curse against Prishp. “I curse this evil king, defiler of Brum-seers, disgrace to the Krushan race, for his sin of abusing my old, feeble father. Seven nights from today, the great Taaksh, king of snakes, shall hunt down and find King Prishp no matter where he hides, and shall bite him with his fangs, using his lethal venom to send the vile kshatriya to the abode of Yarm.”

Shring’s father Rishi Shamika heard the curse and stirred, breaking his vow of silence. “My son, what have you done? This is not what I have taught you. This is an act against Auma!”

Shring could not believe his father. “But look at how he treated you? I could not let him commit such an insult and walk away without consequence! I stand by my curse: Within the next seven days, King Prishp will be bitten by Taaksh and sent to Vaivasvata’s realm.”

Shamika shook his head. “What he did was wrong. But what you do is wrong as well! He is a king and a kshtriya. It is the duty of such persons to protect Brum-seers like us. If they act rashly as he did, then we must somehow find the strength in our hearts to forgive him.”

“But he acted against Auma too!” Shring cried. “He insulted a Brum-seer whom he ought to respect and protect!”

“True. But one cannot wipe out one transgression with another. If a kshatriya fails in his Auma and does not protect a Brum-seer, if he insults one instead, then we must show ourselves greater than he, and forgive him his lapse. By violating our own Auma and seeking violence against him, we commit a greater crime!” Shamika shook his head, upset with his son’s outburst. “You do not understand the full story. Prishp was exhausted, near collapse, he had not eaten or drunk a drop of water, nor rested for who knows how long. His determination to finish off the deer and succeed at the hunt was his undoing. He had no idea I was under a maun vrata. He thought I was the one being rude and insolent by not answering him. He thought it was my Auma to answer, to offer him food and water and shelter, as our king. Even if he acted wrongly, he did so out of exhaustion and while in an improper state of mind. You had no cause to issue such a terrible curse against him!”

Shring saw the point of his father’s argument at last. But he spread his hands in despair. “But father, there is nothing to be done now. Because I only speak the truth, my curse will be effective. I cannot stop it now, once spoken.”

Shamika sat beside his son and pondered the matter with some gravity. “Very well then. I shall do what I can to try to mitigate it somehow. But my son, I have some advice for you. There is a lesson to be learned from this incident and your reaction. Even though you are a grown man and are dedicated to your given varna, devoting your life to austerities and the gaining of knowledge, yet you have still much to learn. In this instance, you behaved not like a man but like an impetuous child! You must give up this anger, or it will destroy you one day. There is no use pursuing austerities and controlling your urges and desires for decades, if in a single moment you allow anger to overcome you. Anger is an emotional motivation, just like lust, greed, hunger, thirst. If you can control those others so perfectly, then you must learn to control your anger as well. A man who cannot control his anger is no different from a man who cannot control his lust, greed, or other instincts. The only way to gain true maturity and progress as an ascetic is through peace and non-violence. Any action or word that causes, or permits to be caused, harm to other living creatures, is against Auma. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

Shring listened to his father’s words and asked, “But what does one do when someone commits such a transgression, insulting or humiliating oneself or one’s loved one?”

Shamika put a hand gently on his son’s shoulder. “One forgives.”

While Shring considered what he had done and what his father had said, Shamika sent his disciple Gauramukha to Hastinaga. Obediently, Gauramukha travelled straight to the Krushan capital and requested an audience with the king. King Prishp received him with full respect and honour. Enquiring after the king’s welfare as his guru had instructed, he then came to the real purpose of his visit. Acting on his guru’s orders, Gauramukha told the king, in the presence of his advisors, the history of the incident in the forest, ending with the curse spoken by Shring son of Shamika and his guru’s instructions to himself.

Listening to the disciple’s story, King Prishp was overcome with remorse. Mortified at what he had done, he regretted how he had behaved with poor Shamika. Hearing that the old, feeble seer had been under a vow of silence, he was overwhelmed with self-recrimination. He barely heard the disciple repeat the curse. To King Prishp, all that mattered was that he had behaved unforgivably toward an innocent old, impoverished, and frail Brum-seer who had only been constrained by his own vow of silence. He thanked Gauramukha for his message and asked him to beseech his guru Shamika for his forgiveness, for he was deeply ashamed at his actions. Gauramukha informed the king that the guru had already forgiven him his error, and that was why he had sent his disciple here to warn Prishp.

After the disciple left, Prishp sat in counsel with his ministers. Still focussed more on his own mistake than on the curse, he nevertheless understood that as king, he had a responsibility to his people and dependents. Acting on the advice of his counsellors, he had a palace be built overnight, standing on pillars to make it impossible for any snake to climb, with every entrance heavily guarded day and night. They also advised to place Brum-seers, vaids, and men of science around the palace to use warding mantras, herbs, and potions to dissuade any serpents from approaching. The moment the palace was constructed, Prishp took up residence within it, surrounded by his protectors and continued with his royal duties.

The next six days passed uneventfully.

On the seventh and last day, Sage Kushir was on his way to meet the king. As a Brum-seer possessed of great knowledge of various sciences, he had been summoned. His special knowledge lay in the preparation of antidotes to snake venom. It was his given mission to ensure that in the event that King Prishp was bitten by a snake, he would be on hand to administer an antidote to counter the venom at once. Aware of this, Taaksh king of snakes, assumed the form of a Brum-seer and appeared before Kushir on the road. “Where do you go in such a great rush? What task is so urgent to make you travel so quickly?” asked the old Brum-seer. Kushir replied politely, “Good Brum-seer, today is the last day of King Prishp’s curse. If Taaksh king of snakes does succeed in biting the king, then I will administer an antidote to his venom. It took me these many days to prepare the perfect venom. Now that it is ready, I must rush to the king’s palace to be present in case the serpent lord succeeds in his endeavour.”

Taaksh then laughed and revealed his true form. “Kushir, look upon me now! I am that same Taaksh you speak of. Turn back now. Once I bite someone, he can never be saved. Your mission is useless.”

Kushir did not flinch or blanch before the king of snakes, not even when Taaksh enlarged himself to his full size and towered menacingly over him, swaying proudly. “You may believe that to be true, Serpent. But I have faith in my own scientific knowledge as well. I am certain I can cure the king of your bite—if you are able to bite him at all.”

Infuriated by Kushir’s response, Taaksh hissed and dripped venom, showing his long fangs. He indicated a very large and old fig tree nearby. “Do you see this fig tree, Brum-seer? It has existed here for hundreds of years. Yet I can wither it in moments with the toxin from my venom, destroying it as swiftly as fire itself would consume the wood! Even your great knowledge cannot save it then!”

Kushir shrugged. “If you want to bite the tree, then bite it. Then let us see whether or not it withers.”

Provoked further by the Brum-seer’s challenge, Taaksh lunged at the tree, twisting his hooded head sideways to sink his fangs deep into the ancient wood. At once the sap of the tree began to sizzle and dry up as the powerful venom from the snake lord’s pouches entered the veins of the tree. The trunk began to turn grey, the leaves lost their colour, the fruit blackened and the whole tree withered before Kushir’s eyes just as if it had been set ablaze by an invisible fire. In moments, it was reduced to an ashen withered state. Even the ground for miles around began to wither and die. Taaksh had injected enough venom into the tree to slay a thousand trees.

Taaksh withdrew his fangs and hovered above Sage Kushir. His ruby eyes glinted in his hooded face. “You see, Brum-seer? That tree is destroyed! Nobody can save it now!”

But still Kushir stepped forward, approaching the skeletal ruin of the once-proud lord of the forest. He knelt down and laid a hand on the base of the trunk. “So you say, king of snakes. You have shown what you can do with your destructive poison. Now see what I can do through the power of science and knowledge!”

And Kushir set to work, chanting mantras and using herbs and unguent mixtures of his own making. Soon, a green shoot emerged from the derelict tree’s ruin. The shoot grew into a sapling, then the sapling sprouted leaves, then twigs, then branches . . . before the astonished eyes of the snake king, the entire tree rose up again from the earth, every inch as it had been before, glowing with health and vigour. Kushir picked a fruit from a low-hanging branch and bit into it, smiling to show that it was delicious.

Taaksh hissed long and hard at the Brum-seer, flashed his fangs in anger, shook his tail about, raised and dipped his hood. Finally, his anger spent, he subsided sulkily. “Very well, Brum-seer. I concede that you possess a great ability. Never before have I seen anyone contravene the effect of my venom in this manner. Truly you must be blessed with great knowledge and power. Tell me, what is your real purpose in going to the palace of King Prishp? What do you seek to gain by saving his life?”

Kushir answered honestly, “I seek to enrich myself. He is a king of the great Krushan line. If I save his life, he will certainly reward me richly.”

Taaksh’s ruby eyes gleamed brightly within the shadows of his hood. He lowered his great hood so his face was on the same level as that of the sage. “Brum-seer, you know that the king is under a powerful curse, a terrible shraap. There is no power that can countermand such a shraap, once uttered. Nor has anyone mitigated or circumvented the effect of the curse as yet. It is King Prishp’s fate to die today. No matter how great your knowledge or skill, your success is uncertain. If you perchance fail, instead of gaining riches, you will suffer a great loss of your reputation. Whatever earnings you presently gain will also cease and you will be penniless.”

Kushir considered Taaksh’s words and found merit in them. “Let us assume you are right in your assumption. What do you propose?”

Taaksh hissed sibillantly with pleasure. “Best of Brum-seers, if it is riches you seek, I can give you more than you can ever hope to get from King Prishp. Moreover, your gain will be assured as I will give it to you right now. All you need do is turn back and retrace your steps homewards, a rich man!”

Kushir meditated on the proposal and saw that Taaksh was right. No matter what he did, Prishp was doomed to die. It could not be any other way. There was therefore no reason why he should not profit from this proposal.

“So be it,” he answered at last.

Taaksh then produced a great store of riches which he gave to Kushir. Burdened with his newly gained wealth, the sage returned home.

Taaksh continued on his way to Nagasahnya. He disliked referring to the capital city of the Krushans as Hastinaga, for the name meant City of Elephants, and elephants often trampled snakes underfoot and crushed them to death. He preferred the name Nagasahnya: Nest of Snakes!

Reaching the city, he quickly learned from his snake spasas that King Prishp had taken elaborate precautions to ensure his survival. While it would not be impossible to gain access to the king, Taaksh had no desire to be seen until the very last instant. Because he could only kill the king through a bite, he must get close enough to Prishp to commit the deed without anyone being aware of his presence. He first dispatched several of his snake spasas to the king, using Maya—the power of illusion—to disguise them as ascetics. They carried with them leaves, water and fruit, allegedly for a rite they were to perform. There were any number of holy men performing similar rites in and around the king’s palace that day. Even so, the king’s guards searched the ascetics and the things they carried carefully. Not a blade of elephant grass or single fruit did they leave unexamined. Only when they found nothing suspicious did they let the party pass into the palace.

The ascetics performed the rites with due ceremony. When they had finished, they gave the king the fruit that had been consecrated by the ritual. After examining each fruit carefully, the king’s advisors pronounced the fruits safe to eat. King Prishp asked his advisors to share the fruit with him for it was late in the day and in moments the sun would set and the time of the curse end.

Lit by the rays of the setting sun that shone in through a window of the raised palace, King Prishp selected a fruit at random from the platter placed before him but did not pick it up. It was a succulent ripe fruit, perfect in every way, the skin unbroken and unblemished. He took it up for a moment then returned it to the platter. Everyone was on edge, waiting eagerly for the sun to pass below the horizon and the curse to end. As the moments passed by and the rays dipped lower, the mood turned from one of great anxiety to one of controlled jubilation for it was obvious by now that Taaksh had failed to complete the curse and the king would be free of the threat.

At that moment, the sun fell below the horizon and the time of the curse was at an end. Cheers began to ring out across the palace—and farther across the city, as the citizenry celebrated the survival of their beloved king. For too many Krushans had already perished in the great Great Krushan war not long ago, and nobody wished to see yet another of that great dynasty die before his time.

Smiling, King Prishp picked up the fruit and was about to bite into it. But as he raised the fruit to his mouth, the skin broke and the tiniest of black worms emerged from the succulent ripe flesh. Prishp laughed and held up the fruit, showing it to all his well-wishers.

“Look! The hour of the curse has come and gone and I am still alive and well! The sun has set on the seventh day! Now, Taaksh cannot bite me and kill me with his poison. I have no fear of assassination from him! But because the Brum-seer cursed me with Taaksh’s name, I do not wish to see the words spoken by a Brum-seer to be untrue. Therefore, I pronounce this little worm to be Taaksh! Let him bite me, if he can, and let the Brum-seer’s words therefore be true to the letter, if not to the deed.”

And so saying, he placed the tiny worm upon his own neck, still laughing at his own wit. Filled with the euphoria of having escaped a certain death, he was obnoxious and arrogant. His advisors too, exulting in their success at keeping the king alive despite all odds, were filled with pride at their achievement, and laughed loud and long as well.

“Come now, Taaksh,” King Prishp said mockingly, clicking his tongue as if addressing a pet, “Will you not bite me now?”

In a flash, Taaksh assumed his true form. Gigantic, jewel-scaled, powerful, he coiled around the king. As the horrified advisors and guards watched, King Prishp was wrapped from head to foot in the mammoth coils of the king of snakes. At once their laughter turned to tears and cries of dismay. Taaksh opened his great maw and showed them his giant fangs, dripping with venom. As they stared, hypnotized like prey before the fascinating gaze of a cobra, he roared at them in fury, demonstrating his power. Droplets of venom sprayed the entire palace, drenching it, bathing everyone present. The stench of the snake king’s maw filled the room, turning the stomachs of the advisors and guards.

The roar reverberated throughout the city. Everywhere, people celebrating and dancing stopped still and listened, their hearts chilled by that terrible sound.

The advisors and guards picked themselves up off the floor, staring in dismay at the white speckles that dotted their clothes and skin. They could feel the toxin from the venom poisoning their bodies already. Screaming, they ran, tearing off their own clothes, falling out of the palace windows in their haste to get out. Some fell to their death or injury, others succeeded in tumbling out the doors and down the steps, scouring off the venom with mud, leaves, anything they could find. From within the palace, another terrible roar exploded, this one louder and more terrible than the first. They ran in every direction, screaming and tearing at their own skin.

Taaksh roared again and again, spewing his venom across the palace that had been built to keep him out. In moments, the palace lay ruined, its walls, pillars, floor, ceiling, furnishings, all smoking and smouldering as the toxic venom worked its poisonous magic, seeping into the very cracks and crevices, corrupting the very foundations. As the walls began to shake and the pillars cracked, Taaksh rose up and lunged skywards. Bursting out the roof of the palace, he flew up into the sky, hapless King Prishp clutched in his coils. Below, the palace crumbled and collapsed inwards, leaving only a cloud of dust. Taaksh bellowed loud and long enough to cause riots and panic across Hastinaga, terrorizing everyone. People looked up in the dusky twilight and pointed in horror as they saw the king of Serpents holding their king in his coils. As they watched, Taaksh sank his fangs into Prishp’s body, impaling him as a man fallen upon swords. When Prishp was dead, Taaksh released his body, letting it fall to the ground before his ruined palace and slaughtered advisors. Then Taaksh flew through the sky and disappeared from sight, his goal accomplished.

• • • •

Around the time that the Krushan king Majaya learned for the first time the full story of his father’s demise, a young man named Staki was born. His mother Jaratkaru was the sister of Visshki. She named him Staki after his father’s last word, “asti” which meant literally “it is there”. He grew up in the house of the king of snakes and studied the Scriptures under the tutelage of Vyacha, son of Hrugib. Even as a child, he was disciplined and exact in his actions and words, gifted with great intelligence, spiritual strength, and numerous other fine qualities.

After listening to the entire tale, and hearing the awful, needless death that befell his father, Majaya was overcome by grief. A young boy when his father died, he had possessed little understanding of the event at the time and the ministers had deemed him too innocent to know the full story. Now he finally knew everything, he resolved not to rest until every last snake in the world was destroyed. But most of all, he sought to kill Taaksh himself, along with his closest brethren and kin. Thus the serpent satra of Majaya was undertaken with great vehemence and intensity.

As the serpent satra gained momentum, the time approached for the ceremony’s accumulated power to draw in the beings targeted for extinction.

As the energies of the ritual increased in potency, snakes began to be drawn from all corners of the earth. From far and wide they were sucked into the vortex of Auma energy created by the sacred ritual. On and on the priests chanted their mantras and poured great quantities of ghee into the sacrificial fire, resolute in their vows and intent in their purpose. One by one the snakes were summoned against their will, compelled to come flying through the air, up into the sky, thence to fall directly into the sacrificial fire. As the chanting increased in intensity, and the oblations were poured in greater quantity, the fire roared higher and louder, filling the air with Agnar’s bellow. The heat was tremendous as was the intensity of the flames. The tongues of Agnar reached up as if they would scald the bellies of the clouds themselves. And down came the snakes in a never-ending torrent, until they appeared to descend like a waterfall that melted instantly in the heat of the ceremony fire. The great square tank of the ceremony began to fill with the fat and marrow of the snakes, crackling and spitting and hissing like a nest of serpents. It was impossible to tell if the sounds that emerged were from snakes that suffered as they were burned to death or merely from the fluids they turned into after they were dead. Either way, the sounds were horrible to hear. The stench would have been too great to tolerate but for the oblations the priests poured into the fire in copious quantities.

Down fell the torrent of snakes, never-ending and relentless, to be consumed instantly by the ravenous mouth of Agnar.

Never before or since that time have so many snakes been seen by human eyes. There were snakes of every hue, length, thickness, and description. There were two-headed snakes, five-headed snakes, and seven-headed snakes. There were snakes a full yojana in length, and there were snakes twice as long. Of Visshki’s lineage, many great snakes, their bodies red, white, and blue and filled with virulent venom died.

Thousands upon thousands perished. Then hundreds of thousands. Then millions. Then tens of millions. And still the torrent of snakes continued unabated, pouring from the sky into the heart of the fire, where each snake died at once, scorched to ashes by the supernatural power of the ceremony fire.

Afraid now for his own well-being, King Taaksh of the Serpents rushed to Indraloka, the heavenly abode of Lord Inadran, king of the gods. Standing before Prrundi, he tearfully confessed all his transgressions and begged the great one for protection. Inadran smiled at the unexpected sight of Taaksh begging for mercy, and assured the snake king that his fate had already been decided. Both Brum and Inadran had conferred on the matter and it was clear that Taaksh was not going to perish in the ceremony of Majaya. Taaksh was greatly relieved but asked for sanctuary until the ceremony was ended. Inadran granted him leave to stay in his own palace so that he might not be drawn into the fire.

Meanwhile, Visshki was experiencing the effects of the serpent satra. Yet, unlike his brother Taaksh, Visshki was less concerned about his own survival than about the millions of snakes that were being slain by the ceremony. “At this rate,” he thought, distressed, “our entire species will be extinguished.” Appealing to his sister Jaratkaru who yet lived in Visshki’s house with her son, he pleaded, “Now is the time of which we were warned. That terrible day of doom has arrived at last. Now that it is here, I have lost all strength to resist. I, myself, feel the powerful pull of the mantras chanted by Majaya’s priests. It requires all my strength to keep from being pulled to the fire myself! I can barely stand erect, my senses are in turmoil, my vision blurs, my heart pounds as if about to burst, and I cannot control the direction of my movements. Soon, I fear, I too will be drawn to my destruction. If I, a king of snakes, cannot resist, then imagine the plight of my fellow Serpents. Surely they will all be destroyed in no time at all now. We have only one chance of survival. This is the very reason why we gave you to the yayavara in marriage. Sister mine, you alone can ensure the survival of our species now. Brum himself has prophesied that your son Staki will halt this sacrifice and save us all. Now is the time to put his words into action. Go seek out your son and send him to undertake this task for the sake of the survival of his own kind.”

Jaratkaru left her brother in this state of anxiety and hurried to find her son. She took him aside and told him the story of his birth in full detail and the purpose for which he had been created. Staki listened solemnly to the extraordinary history of his family and when his mother was done, he bowed before her and took her blessings before undertaking his given task. Visshki came out and was relieved to see his nephew prepare to depart on his journey. Staki addressed his uncle, although his words were intended for his own mother as well. “I shall ensure the survival of our species. I shall go to the site of King Majaya’s serpent satra at once and stop it. This I promise.”

Saying this, Staki left his uncle’s house and set out for Samantapanchaka.

• • • •

Staki arrived at the site of the sacrifice and was awed by the scale of the event. A vast area of the plain had been taken over for the ceremony, with literally hundreds of priests officiating and thousands of ritvijas assisting in the numerous tasks, all clad in sombre black as befitted the nature of the sacrifice. And in the center of that vast theatre of activity was the enormous square where the sacred fire burned. He could hear its roar all the way here, where he stood, hundreds of yards away, and also feel its heat. And from the sky, descending out of apparently nowhere, the torrent of snakes rushing down to be consumed by the fire, the most extraordinary sight he had ever witnessed in his brief youthful life. He watched in morbid fascination as the morass of writhing, screaming snakes poured down continuously like water from a pipe, dissolving instantly in the tremendous supernatural and physical heat of the sacred flames. Resolved to do as he was meant, he moved towards the fire, knowing that the king would surely be close to the sacrificial Agnar. By dint of his being a Brum-seer, he managed to come within hearing distance of the king himself. Several burly guards barred his way, preventing him from going further. Seeing Majaya just ahead, he immediately began singing the praises of Prishp’s son.

“I come to praise Majaya, son of Prishp, best of the mortals!”

When Staki continued to praise Majaya and the other priests officiating at the ceremony with such passionate eloquence, they were charmed and pleased.

Deferring to the Brum-seers, Majaya said, “This is but a child yet he speaks as eloquently as a wise old sage. I am impressed by his eloquence. Grant me permission to have him brought before me that I may reward him for his talent.”

The sadasyas replied, “Certainly, for any learned one deserves the praise of kings, though he be but a child. But you must wait until we have accomplished the chief goal of this sacrifice. Once your father’s assassin, Taaksh, is summoned here to die in this sacrificial fire, then you may do as you please. Until then, all our energies must be focussed on bringing the lord of snakes down.”

Through all this, Staki continued his chant of praises without pause. For hours on end, he stood reciting beautiful shlokas praising Majaya, the Brum-seers, the sacrificial fire, the line of the Krushans, the mortal race . . . his eloquence and innocence were irresistible. Time and again, Majaya’s heart went out to the boy, and he was eager to thank the boy and bid him join him in the sacrifice. But each time he tried to summon the boy, the Brum-seers surrounding him objected. Finally, he tried to catch the boy’s attention and summon him directly. Seeing this, hrota Krandish said severely, “King? Have you forgotten what we discussed? Until Taaksh is destroyed, all our attention and energies must be focussed solely on this sacrifice. This is an immense task that demands every ounce of our ability.” Majaya, distracted by the continual chanting of the Brum-seer boy, replied, “In that case, let us bring Taaksh here now and destroy him at once. Why delay?” At that time, the hrota was compelled to continue his ritual chanting and did so, glaring disapprovingly at Majaya. The ritvijas spoke up then: “O King, we have done all that we could to summon Taaksh to the fire but he has taken refuge in Inadran’s palace. Even our best efforts are unable to pry him loose from that sanctuary.” The bard Kshalot was present and he confirmed what the Brum-seers said: “It is so. The weapons confirm this fact. Inadran has granted Taaksh sanctuary in his own house. This fire can no longer burn that king of snakes.” Hearing this, Majaya forgot about the Brum-seer boy and his chanting and grew angry at Taaksh once again. Determined to avenge his father’s cruel death, he resumed his own part in the satra and dedicated himself to chanting along with the Brum-seers and pouring oblations into the fire to add his own soul’s strength to the effort. Then the intensity of the fire grew even greater and the torrent of snakes increased to a blurring downpour. The earth grew depleted of every crawling snake and serpent and even the depths of the ocean yielded up their kin, all to perish in the inexorable fire of the great ceremony of Majaya.

Meanwhile, in Inadran’s palace, Taaksh was unable to resist the pull of the ceremony’s power. He cried out in agony as the sacred mantras compelled him to fly to his doom and fainted dead away, helpless. Seeing his plight, Inadran realized he could no longer protect Taaksh simply by keeping him here. He picked up the snake king, intending to keep his promise of sanctuary. As soon as he did so, he too felt the pull of the mantras drawing him downwards to earth.

Moved by the power of the ceremony, Inadran himself was forced to descend from his heavenly abode of Inadran. Concealing Taaksh upon his person, hidden with the folds of his robes, he emerged from boiling clouds, accompanied by a great congregation of vidyadharas and apsaras. This heavenly host descended and landed upon the plain of Krushan’s Stand, approaching the site of the ceremony.

“Look, King!” cried the Brum-seers of the ceremony to Majaya. “Taaksh has been summoned by the power of our ritual. He can no longer resist or escape. Mighty Inadran himself is compelled to bring him here, concealed in his garments. Soon you will accomplish the goal of this sacrifice and slay your father’s assassin!”

At this, Staki sent up a great shout of praise and broke into a song praising Majaya even more lavishly. So moving was his eloquence, and so pleased and relieved was Majaya at the success of his enterprise, that the king of the Krushans resolved to invite the young Brum-seer to join the ceremony in time to participate in the slaying of Taaksh. In a sense, it was his presence that had provoked and motivated Majaya to put in the extra effort that had resulted in Taaksh’s summoning.

Staki was permitted at last to enter the last square and brought into the presence of the king. As he greeted the great liege, Majaya said, “Young one, the beauty and perfection of your singing has inspired me. I am greatly impressed by such talent in one so young. See for yourself. Taaksh, king of snakes has been forced to come to the fire through the power of our mantras, carried by Lord Inadran himself. In another moment, the Serpent who killed my father will be dead at last. Will you participate in his demise? Come, sit beside me, and join the rite! Your singing has earned you the right to share in this great moment of my triumph!”

Staki joined his palms together, thanking Majaya for such a great honour. “Hastinaga-naresh, king of the Krushans, son of Prishp, as you are pleased with my recitations and wish to thank me, and as I am a Brum-seer and you a kshatriya, I ask you for a gift. Do not refuse me.”

Majaya was in a magnanimous mood and answered, smiling, “Ask me anything and you shall have it.”

Staki bowed his head. “Then grant me only this boon. Halt this sacrifice this instant. Kill no more snakes.”

Majaya reacted as if struck by a sword. “Brum-seer! What are you saying? I meant to thank you for your praises and talent. This is not what I had in mind! Ask me for anything—gold, silver, kine, anything you desire. But I cannot stop this sacrifice at this crucial juncture! We are about to fulfill our chief purpose! Soon Taaksh will be dead and the last of his kind will be exterminated!”

But Staki was firm. “You offered me a gift and you cannot refuse me now. Stop the sacrifice instantly. I will accept nothing less.”

Agitated and stricken by anxiety, Majaya begged and pleaded but to no avail. Staki remained resolute. Finally, the sadasyas present rose and came to Majaya, speaking to him sympathetically. “You have no choice now. You must concede to the young Brum-seer’s wish. We are stopping the sacrifice.”

• • • •

At this point, an extraordinary thing occurred. Rendered unconscious and senseless by the power of the mantras, Taaksh was drawn forth from the folds of Inadran’s garments. Pulled by an invisible force, the snake king’s inert body flew through the air, destined for the sacrificial fire where he would perish on contact with the flame. Inadran reached out his hand to grasp the tail of the snake, but it slipped from his grasp. Majaya, harried by the Brum-seer boy’s demand and his own priests’ pronouncement, stared at the assassin of his father, flying through the air, an instant from his death. In another moment, Taaksh would fall into the flames and perish and his goal would be accomplished. All Majaya need do was delay his answer by another heartbeat and he would succeed, despite the turn of events.

But Staki held out one small hand and spoke with a power belying his youth and innocence: “STAY!” he cried.

The passage of the unconscious snake slowed visibly. Taaksh’s sleeping form continued to float but at a much slower pace, still moving toward the ceremony fire.

“STAY!” Staki cried a second time.

Taaksh’s body slowed almost to a halt but still it crept toward the fire, as if even in his unconscious state, the king of snakes was compelled by the mantras and the tapas heat of the fire to proceed towards his own destruction.

“STAY!” Staki cried a third time.

And this time even the sky reverberated with his command. The vast plain of Samantapanchaka echoed with the single word, so powerfully uttered. For an instant, everything on that plain, man, beast, insect, wind, even the birds of the sky, paused motionless before continuing on their way.

But Taaksh hung rock still in mid-air, only yards away from the pit of fire which had been designed chiefly to draw him and slay him. The senseless snake neither moved nor budged, but merely hung there.

Then Majaya, like all others present there, including the great Vyasa and Inadran, turned to look at this young Brum-seer boy who possessed such spiritual power that he could stop the snake in mid-air, defying both the law of gravity as well as the combined spiritual power of all the thousands of Brum-seers present. He remembered the warning issued by the bard Kshalot who had studied the vaastu of the sacrificial site and cautioned him that the sacrifice was destined to be thwarted by a Brum-seer. The king of the Krushans knew then that this was what was meant to be. Regardless of what had gone before, of how righteous his own desire for vengeance, how powerful his ceremony, he was meant to spare Taaksh and yield to the demand of a young Brum-seer boy.

He raised his hand and declared, “You have your wish, boy. Stop the ceremony!”

As the chanting of the hrota and other officiating Brum-seers died away, a deafening silence fell across the site of the serpent satra. The torrent of snakes stopped in mid-air, just as Taaksh had stopped. Then with a great roar of exultation, the snakes broke free of the tractor beam of Auma that controlled them. The sky exploded with colours as hundreds of thousands of snakes flew back to their respective abodes and habitats across the earth. Taaksh revived, opened his ruby bright eyes, his hood rising, expanding himself to his fullest. Hissing with renewed vigour, the snake king shepherded his people away from the place where they had been brought to perish. Fleeing as rapidly as possible, in moments, all the snakes vanished from sight. The air was clear, the sky bright blue and cloudless and only the crackle and hiss of the ceremony fire remained; even that slowly faded as the priests no longer poured oblations and the sadasyas ceased their activities.

Majaya was a righteous king who always obeyed Auma. Despite the abrupt cessation of the ceremony and his failure to avenge his father’s assassination by killing Taaksh, he upheld his duties and responsibilities. Richly rewarding and compensating every single sadasya, purohit, hrota, and ritvija Brum-seer attendant at the satra, he sent them home enriched and smiling. He gave a special reward to the bard and builder Kshalot for his prediction had indeed come true. And then, in accordance with the steps prescribed by the weapons, he concluded the ritual formally. The sacred fire was banked, the site cleared. At last, after everyone had left, the king turned to the young Brum-seer boy who had single-handedly saved the line of snakes from extinction. Other kings might have been wroth at the boy for bringing the ceremony to a halt before its chief aim was achieved. But Majaya had accepted the turn of events with magnanimous grace. Rather than be upset with Staki, he praised him for his boldness and spiritual strength. If he could achieve such a feat at this tender age, what might he not achieve when he had attained his full maturity? “I shall perform the rajasuya someday,” Majaya told Staki, “for as king of the Krushan, I must reassert my dynasty’s dominion when the time is right. It would honour me if you consent to be a sadasya in that horse sacrifice.” Staki smiled and agreed at once. Brum-seer boy and Warrior king, neither bore ill will towards each other. Then both went their separate ways.

Returning home, Staki touched his mother’s and uncle’s feet and was warmly embraced by both in turn. Visshki took him out of the house to show him the grassy slopes of the mountain on which their house rested. The mountainside was covered with snakes of every description, hue, and size. At the sight of their savior, the snakes set up a tumultuous clamour. “These are some of the snakes you saved today,” Visshki told his nephew proudly. “You have saved our entire species from extinction. They wish to grant you a boon. Name anything you desire and you shall have it.” Staki smiled and bowed with joined palms, greeting his kith and kin. “From this moment on, let no Brum-seer or mortal man, woman, or child who reads this history of our species and the triumphant conclusion ever have any reason to fear one of us. This account should be read with a calm disposition either in the morning or the evening for maximum benefit. The reader shall never have reason to fear being bitten by one of us, no matter the cause or provocation.” As one, the Serpents replied, “It shall be so, exactly as you say, Staki son of Krushan and Krushanyin! All those who invoke your name, Staki, will be protected from our bites. In addition, those who remember the great sages Ashta, Ramtin, and Nisthun at any time, day or night, shall also be safe from our venom always.”

Staki went on to become a great sage, magnificent in austerities, perfect in Auma, and engendered many children and grandchildren of his own, furthering his line prodigiously. In due course, after a long illustrious life, when his time was ended, he found a peaceful death.

©2022 by Ashok K. Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the author of more than eighty books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. Their works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. Ashok made their picture book debut with the multiple award-winning I am Brown. Upcoming in May is The Blind King’s Wrath, the final book of the Burnt Empire trilogy. And in June comes their debut thriller, A Kiss After Dying. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, they now live in Southern California.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Dance of Bones

Maurice Broaddus | 5742 words

By the time Bose Roberds spied the lone, empty wagon, he got the nagging suspicion that he was meant to follow the stranger’s trail easily. The noon sun beat on him like a whip in a heavy hand. He’d followed the tracks across the plains for quite some time. Whoever he tracked could’ve traveled through thickets so dense that neither man nor horse could see for more than a few yards at a time. More than once, Bose feared that the man might lurk in the brush, hiding in the draws and canyons.

The other cowhands lingered a few lengths behind him, more than a mite cranky—fueled by their rumbling stomachs—but Bose couldn’t be both cook and tracker at the same time. He ignored their grumblings until he found the wagon they were meant to find. It slumped to one side, wheels busted, like a hobbled steer. The covering still appeared new, but there were no signs of any of their horses.

“The Ninth marched out with splendid cheer,” Bose sang to himself, a bit of a nervous habit. “The Bad Lands to explore.”

“What’s that?” Dirk Ramey loosed a stream of tobacco juice. A big man with cruel, thin lips stained with brown spittle, an unshaven face and hard eyes, Dirk proved a difficult man to like.

“A ditty I used to know from when I marched with the 9th.” Bose never referred to the 9th as Buffalo Soldiers. He had joined the 9th Cavalry at his first opportunity. The Cheyenne nicknamed the 9th and 10th Cavalry the Buffalo Soldiers after the noble, sacred animals they respected. If only the Army held the soldiers in similar regard. Instead, they were given old and worn saddles, blankets, and tents. Their horses often went lame. To his shame, he won a Congressional Medal of Honor for leading an attack on the Cheyenne despite he and his men being severely outnumbered. Protecting whites from Indians, forcing the Indians to move because the government found some new resource of theirs to exploit, filled him with disgust. Rather than huddle close to stoves during another winter, he deserted the Army.

Bose adjusted the gun in his holster, loosening the leather thongs for easy draw. These Circle T boys were one step above useless, carrying only one Colt, usually wrapped in their bedrolls. Mighty handy if they had intentions on dying in their sleep. Bose swung off his horse, studying the wagon for any clue to what happened. The legs of the driver remained in his seat, the rest of his body hidden by the wagon’s canopy. Bose pulled back the tarp. Sprawled out on the seat, a man still clutched his pistol. His wife rotted behind him. Both were dressed in their best Sunday-gone-to-meeting clothes. Too dried out to be done recent. Their empty skulls screamed wordlessly at the noon sky, their dreams of a new life for themselves cut brutally short in the harshness of the West. The presentation of the bodies, so carefully staged, tickled something in the recesses of his memory.

Bose’s mother feared such a fate for him when he first told her that he planned to venture to Los Angeles, where the laws against holding blacks as slaves were strongly enforced.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I’ve got to find my own way.”

Funny how memories had a way of sneaking up on a feller at the oddest times. Bose knelt beside the wagon and picked up an arrow. Scattered here and there, too carefully staged, he thought.

“Could be Utes,” Dirk said. “This here’s Ute country.”

“They been killing a lot of folks,” another hand echoed. He scanned their surroundings nervously as if Utes might jump out from the shadows.

“Pile their graves high with rocks. We don’t want the coyotes to get them.” Bose turned his back to them.

“Why?” Dirk challenged him for their benefit. They bristled at being ordered about by a Negro.

This scene played out on occasion as if they needed reminding. Over six feet tall, with bulging muscles like thick metal cords and skin like smoked leather, no man ever struck fear into Bose. If there was an attack, he led the charge. When in doubt, he spoiled for a good fight just for its own sake. He turned to let them see the seriousness in his eyes before returning to his study of the trail. In the end, Bose Roberds was not a man to be trifled with.

“Because I said to. Then we can get back to camp.”

Bose returned his attentions to the ground. The tracks disconcerted him. The other hands thought cattle rustlers worked the trail. If that were the case, the cold thing stirring in his stomach wouldn’t bother him so. No, what disturbed him was that they had been led so far astray from the Goodnight-Loving Trail and whether or not they admitted it, no one knew much about what lay in the wilderness.

“What’ll we say about him?” Dirk gestured at the waiting trail of the stranger for Bose’s benefit.

“Don’t worry about him.” Bose stared at the puff of dust that rose in the distance. “We’ll catch him sooner or later. He ain’t trying to cover his trail none.”

Things hadn’t been right since they left Abaddon three days earlier.

• • • •

Taking one gander at the string of makeshift buildings that dared call itself a town, Bose had decided against going in. Abaddon was still as a corpse’s whisper. He’d been in this kind of place before: a town deceptively dead, yet the wrong word to the wrong person could cause the place to explode. A cemetery set the boundary on the west. Cow custom made the more respectable north side of town off limits to cattle herders. The seven buildings on the south side included a general store and a bank that begrudgingly catered to them. The saloon and gambling house that thrived on them. The building at the end of the row—the one that all the decent folk seemed to take special pains to avoid—housed girls who waited for the trail herds.

That night, preparing to go off gal hooting, the Circle T boys cleaned their guns, washed their necks, and dusted their hats. All duded up, they hollered and carried on like young bucks in need of wrangling. When they returned, though, they avoided Bose’s eyes. He didn’t press them. Whiskey-loosened tongues allowed him to piece together a general picture of what had happened. A mean argument had erupted at the brothel, ending with the Circle T boys hightailing it out of Abaddon.

Soon after, Bose noticed that they were being followed. Hunted.

• • • •

The Circle T bunch was a simple contingent who took Bose on without much complaint or question. Theirs was a pretty salty outfit, reduced to a sullen, hard-bitten crew. Bose rose earliest to prepare coffee and biscuits. Years of privation at the Army’s hands trained him to go without much sleep. Most nights he stretched out on an old horse blanket when he wasn’t off stalking about in the night. Bose preferred the honesty of the range. Cow custom, the common law of the range, defined people. The trail crew needed a marksman, a handy trait in the cook. He liked the work so he settled into it first thing. It was hard, hard work, but Bose could settle into the illusion that competence, not skin color, mattered on a drive. It paid a solid $125 per month, second only to the trail boss. He didn’t mind the work, but every job had its bosses and its problem children.

Henry McCormick, the first to arrive for chow, handled their herd of horses. Other than that, the wrangler spent too much time in a bottle, always ailing when there was work to be done. He was good with the men, though. Like a gruff mother hen.

The relief hands ate next before relieving the night guard. Not a spine among the lot of them. A pack of wild dogs ready to piss all over everything, always in search of someone to follow.

The son of the cattle owner, Will Grimes fancied himself the trail boss, but was more of an arrogant windbag who couldn’t stomach men who wouldn’t kowtow to him. Under the tutelage of his father, Will insured that the trail was passable for the wagon and the herd, acting as a buffer between theirs and other cattle drives. His deep-set coal eyes often peered right at Bose. He believed that the men turned to Bose when trouble arose and resented it. Bose didn’t cotton to him right away. He wasn’t much by way of good judgment. Rash the way the young and privileged could be.

“Hand me the coffee,” Will said. Bose didn’t move or acknowledge him. “What?”

“If you want me to do something for you, you say ‘please.’”

“My ‘please’ is implicit,” Will said, self-impressed with what book learning he had.

“I’m an explicit sort of cuss.” Used to all manner of gun trouble, Bose didn’t bat an eye.

“You got a lot of sand in you, boy.”

“Sand has a way of toughening you up.” Bose handed him a cup of strong, black, cowpuncher coffee. He waited for the boy to take a swig. Will gagged and spat, throwing the rest of the cup on to the fire. He stormed off in a snit, his back to the snorts at his expense.

“Seems he right can’t handle the coffee,” Henry said between sobs of laughter. He tipped the contents of his metal flask into his coffee mug.

“You tell him that you mix chili juice in it?” Dirk asked.

“He didn’t ask.” Bose tucked away a wry smile.

“Don’t mind my boy.” Wiry, with rust-colored hair and eyes like steel, Bradford Grimes ambled toward the camp in his wide-brimmed planter’s hat and his black, broadcloth suit.

“I don’t.” Bose beat the dust from his chaps.

“He means well, just comes on a little strong trying to earn the men’s respect,” Mr. Grimes said.

“Respect comes to a man if he does his job well.” Collecting the cups and plates, Bose washed and stored away dishes.

“Well, he can check the herd. I heard tell that one or two might’ve taken sick. Let’s see how he handles that before anyone thinks too harsh on him.”

Mr. Grimes spoiled his boy, Bose guessed, not having anything to measure it against since he had no children of his own. Mr. Grimes gave Bose a measure of latitude since Bose saved the man’s life once. The hands were cutting cattle when a steer charged after Mr. Grimes. Without hesitation, Bose tossed the bridle over his horse’s head, and jumped in the saddle. When the steer tucked its head to hook himself a white man, Bose roped it, bringing it down with the flourish of a holler. Mr. Grimes promoted him on the spot, on the condition that he never talk about it. After all, it “didn’t look good to owe your life to a nigger.”

A mood settled over the men. They gathered in clusters. They whispered but kept a nervous eye on each other, like watchmen waiting for a crack in a dam. By nine a.m. the Circle T boys coaxed the cattle into a moving column about a mile long. The elder and junior Grimes rode point with four others at swing and flank. The cattle moved, bawling and frisking, making the occasional stop to crop with disinterest at some grass. Skittish and more jumpy than usual, Dirk and Henry lingered at the drag to prod the sluggish, footsore, or weak cattle. Riding ahead of the herd in the chuck wagon, Bose followed the tracks of the lone rider who dogged their trail, but stayed just out of reach.

Henry rode to catch up to him, stale whisky heavy on his breath. “Y’ don’t strike me as much of a talkin’ man.”

“Reckon not, lessen I got something to say,” Bose said.

“Y’ don’t take much guff, even from Mr. Grimes. Or his no-good son.”

Bose recognized a man fishing for information when he smelled one and, right then, Henry stank of the Mississippi at low flow. He kept silent, his eyes fixed on the horizon. Like men, terrain had to be seen in more than one light. Shadows distorted the silhouette of the land and the early morning or late evening showed things sun-blurred by day.

“Don’t mind Will,” Henry continued, “he’s still fumin’ cause he had to ask his pappy to make him trail boss. He couldn’t stand starting at the lowest cow ranch job: cuttin’ wood for the cook.”

“Not just any cook, but a drifting Negro cowhand riding the grub line,” Bose said with deliberate caution. He didn’t want his tongue wagging too much.

“Probably got used t’ his pappy bein’ the sole power ‘round these parts. Used t’ be that . . .” Henry coughed like a hound baying at a possum. At first Bose took it as a holdover from his time as a miner, but there was something else. A nervousness, the weight of no sleep, crept about his eyes. He had the look of a man haunted by a secret, a burden he wished to share. Henry reached into his vest for his metal flask.

“Henry!” Mr. Grimes barked.

Henry cursed under his breath.

“Come back here. A couple of these steer look sick.”

• • • •

The men made camp in the lee of the cliff while Bose studied the terrain searching for any sign of the rider. Maybe that was what troubled him so much. After he informed Mr. Grimes that someone had been hounding their trail since Abaddon, he’d been ordered to track the stranger. Fear of rustlers was one thing, but it struck Bose that only men with secrets or guilty consciences feared a single man following them.

The rider’s path hadn’t crossed his back trail. The route became dusty. Like a man on the dodge, Bose held to the grassy side to raise no dust. Watching Will ride up reminded him of his theory about horses and partners. Both had to have staying power such that they could ride all day and all night and still be with him at sun up. Both needed to be scrappy, savvy, and, most of all, loyal. Showy was a distraction, a trap to cover a poor horse. Will Grimes was showy.

“We got a problem with the steers,” Will said.

“That’s too bad, but them animals are your business.”

“The men ain’t feeling none too good either.”

“You blaming me?” Bose sat up straighter in his saddle.

“We’d all just feel more comfortable if you stayed in camp with us from now on.” Will smiled, a painful and pitiful thing, not disguising the insinuation that the situation was somehow Bose’s fault. The tacit implication that Bose must’ve purposely sought out a sick steer to serve for dinner.

The pall of a funeral settled on the camp. Mr. Grimes stalked the corral a pale ghost of himself. By the best counts, some four hundred head of whiteface cattle had been struck with disease. Out of a nearly three thousand count herd, the cattle run was closing in on becoming a bust. The disease had the flesh rotting from their bones. The cows lumbered about, languidly chewing cud with half of the flesh from their mouths falling off in gangrenous chunks. The herd smelled of rancid meat. The men decided to camp upwind. Henry and Dirk stood at the edge of camp as if on guard duty. Dirk slipped a clump of chaw into his mouth.

“Drift over here a minute,” Henry waved Bose over. “How’s it going?”

Bose walked with the easy step of a woodsman. “Mostly quiet night. Except . . .”

“‘Ceptin’ what?” Henry perked up with renewed interest.

“Except for the rider,” Bose said. “I can’t tell if we’re following him or if he’s following us.”

“I ain’t even convinced there’s even a rider out there.” Dirk spat a yellow stream at Bose’s feet. “Just a rumor some folks started to spook the boys.”

“Seems like all our trouble started after leaving Abaddon,” Bose said to Henry, not bothering to acknowledge Dirk.

“You buttin’ your nose into things that don’t concern you none,” Dirk said.

“And you sound like a man who needs to clear his conscience.” The men seemed ready to bolt, distrust made them turn on one another. On him. Bose leveled his steady gaze on Henry. “Now I’m not a holy man or nothing, but I’m the best you got if you need to confess something.”

“You having the dreams?” Henry asked Dirk.

“I got t’ thinkin’ it was only me.” Dirk’s tobacco juice sizzled in the campfire.

“What dreams?” Bose asked. Neither of them met his eyes. “What dreams?”

“It . . .” Henry’s voice trailed. He wasn’t going to be able to tell it, perhaps too embarrassed at the telling, at least not under Bose’s steady gaze. Understanding this, Bose moved closer toward the fire, stoking its gentle flames, and giving him a measure of privacy. “Nightmares not fit for a man t’ rightly have. She comes t’ me every night, naked as a sunrise. We start t’ know each other, in the Biblical sense, then, while we’re still . . .”

“Knowing?” Bose offered. Henry turned away, but nodded.

“She starts t’ rot underneath me. Her skin just slides off like she was wearing a costume of flesh, becomin’ little more than a skeleton. Worms winding their way through the fleshy bits of what remained of her ribs and such. When I wake up, I can still smell her perfume. An’ I have a few additions to my collection.”

Before Bose could ask, Henry turned around and raised his shirt. Scratches crisscrossed his back, many scars not quite healed over.

“Damn,” Bose said.

Dirk trembled in the reflected amber light of the campfire, tugging his shirt tighter as if afraid the wind might catch it just right and reveal his own nail-scarred back.

Henry seemed to weigh his options for a minute. He coughed up a wad of blood onto the ground. Sweat beaded along his forehead, making him look even more pale and haggard. “You ever hear of a soiled dove?”

“A prostitute that gets . . . hurt in the line of duty,” Bose said.

“Henry . . .” Dirk cautioned.

“It’s all right, Dirk, he might as well know. We were heading into Abaddon, t’ have a few to cut the dust. Well, soon as we got there, we knew something was right peculiar. All eyes were on us, the people not saying a word. When we approached the end building, people made themselves scarce, steppin’ inside or shutterin’ their windows. Made us no nevermind. Didn’t want a bunch of pryin’ noses in our business no way. The bartender lined up a few without meetin’ our eyes, but the women . . . the women were angels. The most fetchin’ collection o’ gals I ever did see.”

“Been my experience that the prettier the gal, the bigger the passel of trouble that follows,” Bose said.

“You ain’t lyin’. It was all we could do t’ keep our tongues from fallin’ out o’ our fool mouths. Each o’ the women picked a man an’ made a bee line right for him. This gal saunters up t’ me askin’ what brings us to town.

“‘Jest an old cowhand, ma’am. Lookin’ t’ take a break from the trail,’ I tell her.

“‘You must be very good at your job,’ she said.” Henry affected a female voice. He wasn’t very convincing.

“‘Ain’t much on which t’ court a woman.’

“‘You are very handsome.’ Now I’m used t’ women lyin’ about such things when business was at hand. Heck, that’s what I paid ‘em for. Still, to hear her say it, I near got t’ believin’ it myself. What did I know? I was no hand with women. Never could read their signs.

“She led me t’ one o’ the upstairs rooms. She put her hands on me, wantin’ me to draw her near. Something in the way her hands reached along my back made me uneasy, but . . .”

“But what?” Bose asked.

“But she was so pretty. An’ it had been so long. I ignored that little voice in the back o’ my head, the one that says y’ oughten not be doin’ something. I kissed her, hard an’ long. She was as soft an’ as pretty smellin’ as any woman I’ve been with.”

“Then what happened?” Bose wanted him to skip ahead before Henry got too caught up in details he didn’t want to picture.

“We kept kissin’. I started feeling along her back t’ try an’ get her out o’ her outfit when I ketched a glimpse o’ her mirror. I thought something was out o’ place about the room. I may not know much about women, but I know that their mirrors are the center o’ their rooms. This one was in the corner, out o’ the way. I reckon it would have been too odd t’ not have one in the room at all. Maybe I was meant t’ see her, jest not right away. Anyway, I ketched her reflection in the mirror an’ what I saw didn’t match what I was holdin’. She looked like she stepped right from a grave, all rotted an’ foul.”

“Like the cattle?” Bose studied Dirk to see if he was being put on, but Dirk turned from him and spit into the fire.

“Kinda. ‘Ceptin’ worse, cause her skin was black as pitch, an’ her flesh peeled back straight t’ the bone in spots. I ain’t ashamed to tell y’ that I screamed an’ pushed her away from me. I reckon whatever it was that kept her lookin’ pretty may have tricked my eyes, but mirrors couldn’t hold illusions.

“‘What’s the matter?’ she had the nerve t’ ask. I would’ve chalked it up t’ bein’ in the sun too long, iffen she hadn’t smiled at me. Smiled. A knowin’ grin, even as a maggot crawled out o’ her arm in the reflection. Like it was some grand joke. That was when I heard the gun shot.”

“Will,” Bose said with the certainty of him having been there.

“I reckon it didn’t take too much figurin’ on who had the itchy trigger finger. He was never one for jokes.”

“I didn’t think anyone took their guns into town.”

“He carried a derringer with him. Blew a hole clean through her face, breakin’ whatever spell kept them all pretty. Or leastways not looking like a grave spit them out. A howl came from downstairs. All the men had the same thought, skedaddlin’ out the windows an’ out o’ that God-forsaken place.”

“You thinking that it might be the . . . proprietor that’s trailing us?” Bose asked.

“Reckon so. Makes sense anyway, what sense there is t’ be had.”

Bose studied the sickly face of the men. He found himself prejudiced in favor of Henry, realizing the dilemma of not wanting to go against the man who paid his salary. Dirk stared at the fire, caught up in his own shame. Lips set in a grim line, Bose stood, ready to quit. He wanted no part of the vendetta, or whatever was after them. And he damn sure wasn’t gearing up to defend Will Grimes. He needed some time to get his thoughts together.

During his time as a soldier, he’d been in some horrible places and seen some awful things, and heard tales of a strange brand of magicians. The stories sounded too much like something he’d hear at his mother’s knee to scare him into good behavior, never believing them because he knew how tales got exaggerated around a campfire.

A desert judge.

The cold feeling coiled in his belly again.

• • • •

With the creeping of night, talk died down. Still putting the pieces into place, the first shift of night duty allowed him the peace to gather his wandering thoughts. The second shift was the least desirable since the cattle often stretched and were prone to wandering. Bose watched the desert. A coyote yipped in the distance, complaining about the sudden cool. Dirk and another of the Circle T boys relieved him.

“Don’t stray too far from camp. The moon will be full and things happen out here that no white people have seen.”

“Since when does a nigger talk so uppity to whites?” Dirk turned back to his fellow hand, wanting to save face.

Slow and deliberate, Bose turned to him, allowing the drape of his shirt to reveal his undulating muscles with each movement. “Since your lives depend on it.”

Dirk took a step backward like a small dog determined to bark louder in retreat. “We’ll do as we please, without any say from you.”

“Makes me no nevermind. I’m paid to bring in cattle, not men determined to die.”

“Go to the devil. I worry more about Indians scalping us in our sleep than I do any bedtime monsters.”

Bose wasn’t too worried about Indians. No, something else was definitely at work here. Rumor had it that desert judges sold their souls to become well versed in dark rituals. Some of the rituals supposedly involved eating human flesh, the younger the better, to be granted great power. The evil they communed with had a way of changing a body, transforming a person.

Bose pressed his head into his bedroll for the fitful thing that he called sleep.

• • • •

Though he didn’t remember drawing it, Bose snapped awake with his gun in hand. His trouble reflex stirred him to wakefulness. A horseshoe clicked against stone. Soft-footing it toward the source of the sound, he had to catch himself from humming.

A frail, gaunt figure leaned over the body of a dead coyote. With quick, fluid movements, his body obscured his actions. When the figure stood up, he held a tin cup overflowing with a dark liquid. He turned toward Bose with the truculent stare of hollowed eyes that had stared too long into the sun. Or the darkness of men’s souls. Yellow, broken teeth spread in full reveal approximating a smile. His roan, a black beast that snorted in a fit as the man approached, had the wild bearing of a horse used to long miles of hard riding. His hand patted a small sack which hung from about his neck.

“Only the guilty.” He raised his cup in toast.

Bose took aim, not taking his eyes off the man for an instant, but the man and his horse disappeared, swallowed whole by the night.

“Damn it!” Dirk yelled.

The whole camp scrambled.

“What’s the matter?” Bradford Grimes stormed from his tent, Winchester in hand. Will ran up to settle in at his father’s side.

“The cattle. I went down to check the herd.” Dirk held his hands up like he didn’t want to be splashed with blame. “They all dead. Some look like they’ve been rotting for some weeks even though they were fresh this morning.”

“There nothing for us here.” Bose spoke not from cowardice, but from his pragmatic self. “We should cut our losses and get as far from this country as possible. Skins intact. Because he’ll be back.”

“Who?” Mr. Grimes demanded.

“Go ahead and tell him,” Dirk chided. “Your boy here’s been going on about a fairy tale.”

“A desert judge,” Bose said. The light of recognition flickered in Mr. Grimes’s eyes. “You’ve heard of them, too.”

“Don’t rightly know what you mean,” Mr. Grimes said.

“Your lies will soon find their end,” a voice of an open grave rang out. The men turned to see the gaunt figure step into their midst. If the man had ever been one of those everyday, weather-worn faces Bose had come to expect in frontier life, those days were long behind him. His face a skein of dark scars. He flexed long, gnarled fingers in anticipation.

“Who are you? What do you want?” His Winchester held at his side, Mr. Grimes took a tentative step toward the man. Bose wondered if the rifle might be more useful trained on the man’s heart.

“Revenge. You took my daughter, my life from me at Abaddon. Now I’ve come for yours. You will know the measure of a father’s grief,” the man said. “Bit by bit, I will take away everything you hold dear. Your livelihood. Your men. Your son. Until all you have left is grief enough to turn a man’s soul. And only then might I trouble myself to take what remains of you.”

“She was already dead,” Will protested. All eyes turned to him.

“Not to me. None of them were. We all make our homes in our corners of hell. Abaddon was ours. We had dreams once, of settling the West, until an Apache raid cut them short. Only my power saved me. I couldn’t let the dream die.”

“So you what? Raised them from the dead?” Bose slowly pieced the story together. The man glanced at him with only a fraction of his intense scorn. Hatred emanated from him like waves of heat from desert sands. The death of a child could drive any man insane, twisting him so that any straw to stem the pain was grasped.

“Her death broke my spell that held us together. No matter where they were. All my friends, my family, returned to the grave.” The desert judge spoke softly, with an almost defeated tone.

“You’ll know my torment.” Almost unconsciously, the wizened creature touched the small pouch dangling from his neck. “You’ll watch all you love die.”

Mr. Grimes aimed his Winchester at the man, but before he could fire, the man let loose a soul-piercing scream. The men covered their ears, not that it helped. Bose caught sight of movement from the corner of his eye.

The steers.

The stink of flesh rotting from their bones rose to a near physical pitch. Most of the bodies huddled near one another, as if knowing that death approached, seeking the comfort of one another in their last moments. The corpses of the fallen steers formed a burial mound of sorts, yet something stirred in the pile. Bones drew to one another like magnetized bits, not caring how they lined up. Flesh knitted together, bits stitched from each steer melting into one another, forming a patchwork quilt of rotted skin over the skeletal creature. A looming longhorn head, larger than the skull of any single steer, topped the monstrosity. It opened its maw, echoing the ear-bleeding shriek of its master.

Moving with terrifying speed, it attacked the Circle T boys. Mr. Grimes stepped between the creature and Will, leaving his men to fend for themselves. It tore into them, trampling some, scattering the rest with its thunderous hooves. Lowering its head, the beast looked on to Henry, who stood his ground. Henry fumbled with his metal flask, downing a quick swig before welcoming the steer’s gouging horns with a grimace of near relief. The horns pierced him in his belly and with a sharp upthrust, ripped him to the top of his ribcage. His insides spilled out while he still stood.

“Dear God,” Mr. Grimes muttered, watching the scene.

“There is no God. Not for you. Not for me.” Fine lines radiated from the desert judge’s dark eyes, a filigree of sun, wind, and hard living. Hate convoluted his brain so deep, his eyes seemed to withdraw in shame. Cruelty etched around his mouth when he turned toward Will Grimes. “Your boy. Such enormous vitality he possesses. It will be a pleasure to drain him.”

“Pa?” Will suddenly looked every bit of his teenage years.

Bradford Grimes stared at his son, the word “no” formed on his lips.

“You’ve had your fill of blood.” Bose loosened the thong holding his gun in place. “Why not leave them with what they’ve seen. They’ve paid enough.”

The desert judge turned to him. “True, this won’t relieve my soul. The burdens that scar it aren’t so easily erased, but it will make them, make her, rest a mite easier.”

“Can’t say that what either of them did was right,” Bose said. “But Mr. Grimes here still owes me for a few days.”

The man waved his broken-nailed hands, summoning the creature. The monster turned, chewing the broken body of Dirk with languid disinterest. Dirk’s shirt exploded in red, slickening the creatures flank. It spat him out with a snort and charged toward Bose. Like a boxer, he moved easy on his feet and let his hand swing to the gun butt, cocking the gun as he grasped it. The tip of his finger squeezed the trigger, a tuneless hum on his lips. Bullets snarled and snapped, chipping rocks like jagged teeth.

The bullets met something solid in the swirling shadows that formed the chest of the desert judge. The man dropped to his knees and collapsed forward. Bose moved in to examine him. The man’s legs spasmed. His arms jerked, regaining life by inches. Beginning to push himself up, the tiny sack dangled by leather thongs from his neck. On instinct, Bose snatched the bag. The desert judge wailed as Bose poured out its contents. Bits of burnt bone, far too small to be an adult, fell to the earth. A glint of metal landed in the ash. A locket fell open, revealing the picture of a young girl. Not quite on his knees, the judge reached toward the locket. All strength fled him and he collapsed.

“Looks like I owe you my life again.” Mr. Grimes nudged the body with the tip of his boots.

“You’re many things, but you’re no welsher.” Bose turned to Mr. Grimes and held out his hand. Without any words, Mr. Grimes counted out Bose’s owed pay. Bose envied the heroes of dime novels, how their exaggerated exploits tickled the fancy of the public. Knowing that no one would tell his tale, his restless heart grew ready to hit the trail. He’d heard that some Exodusters traveled toward Cascade, Kansas. That sounded like it might be a fine town to spend some money.

So he rode.

©2017 by Maurice Broaddus. Originally published in Straight Outta Tombstone, edited by David Boop. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A community organizer and teacher, his work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court; the steampunk works, Buffalo Soldier and Pimp My Airship; and the middle grade detective novels, The Usual Suspects and Unfadeable. His project, Sorcerers, is being adapted as a television show for AMC. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Fireside Magazine, and Apex Magazine. Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.

The Fairy Godmother Advice Column

Leah Cypess | 1479 words

Dear Fairy Godmother,

I work as the housekeeper for a collective of seven men. It’s a non-normative living situation, but it works for me. (I am estranged from my family, due to my stepmother being crazy.)

Lately, however, I’ve been harassed by a woman trying to sell me apples. She is constantly offering me free samples and acting hurt when I don’t buy.

My employers have forbidden me from letting anyone into their home, and I value their trust. But I also know there are a lot of prejudices about old women who wander around forests selling apples, and I don’t want to play into that. It seems like this woman is disadvantaged and has no societal support. Plus, those apples look delicious. Would it be so wrong to buy just one?

—A Single Apple

Dear ASA,

No, it would not be wrong. Just to get that out of the way.

I want to focus, however, on your living situation. I have to wonder who decided that your stepmother was “crazy” and that therefore you had to take a position as an unpaid housekeeper who doesn’t even get to invite her friends over or to eat enough.

I encourage you to get a neutral third party to examine your life choices.

It’s even possible the apple-seller could be that person. It’s been my experience that many old women—including those who have done things traditionally thought of as “evil”—have a lot of wisdom to offer.

If you are able to gain quick access to an affordable therapist, that would be your best option. If not, maybe next time the apple-seller comes knocking, consider letting her in and listening to what she has to say.

—Your Fairy Godmother

Dear Fairy Godmother,

I was astounded by your answer last week to “Tired of Fireplace Duty.” Are you really encouraging young women to believe that fancy dresses and grandiose parties will solve their problems? “Tired” had good reasons for wanting to change her life—and I commend you for calling out her family’s emotional abuse—but wouldn’t it be better for her to focus on establishing appropriate boundaries with her stepsisters, rather than getting dolled up in the hope of catching a prince?

—Disappointed

Dear Disappointed,

A number of readers have written about that column, most far less politely than you. However, I saw no indication in “Tired’s” letter that she was thinking long-term. She simply wanted to go to the ball. I maintain that, based on her new and unexpected resources, she has a right to pursue that goal.

I myself am disappointed in those readers who have suggested that my identity as a fairy godmother has predisposed me to think “true love” is the solution to every problem. I do believe in the power of love, and I won’t apologize for that. But I make sure to balance my impulses by seeking frequent advice from a consultant who is very anti-love (and, in fact, tends to jump to “place an evil spell on them” as the solution to every problem). She often walks me back from my initial knee-jerk response.

Long-term, I agree that “Tired” must find a way to extricate herself from her family. As soon as she gets back from the ball, she should look into finding a support group.

—Your Fairy Godmother

Dear Fairy Godmother,

I made some poor decisions in my youth, for which I take full responsibility. I’m now in therapy. But during those difficult times, I made a bargain with an imp, and he insists that I keep my part of the deal. His pressure is negatively impacting my mental health.

I understand that the obvious answer is to give him what he wants so he’ll leave me alone. But what he wants is my firstborn child.

He says that if I guess his true name, he’ll consider the bargain fulfilled. I don’t know where to start. Do you have any suggestions for me?

—Goldie

Dear Goldie,

I come to this from a place of sympathy and compassion. A long time ago, I made a bargain with a witch. What I found was that after a lot of open communication, which included looking at our history from her point of view, we were able to compromise. She is now a valued consultant on this column and it would look very different without her input. So I’m going to suggest that you sit down with the imp for a frank and open discussion.

I’m very concerned about you and your child. Please follow up if you can.

—Your Fairy Godmother

Dear Fairy Godmother,

I’m a prince who lives next door to an enchanted castle surrounded by a thorny forest. Recently I found my way in.

There’s this gorgeous girl inside. I truly believe she is my soul mate. The problem is, she’s asleep, and apparently I have to kiss her to wake her up.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing that. I don’t want to start off our relationship with something that feels vaguely nonconsensual. That’s just not the kind of story I want to tell our grandchildren!

On the other hand, if I don’t kiss her she may sleep forever. Maybe I should kiss her and let her decide if she feels like forgiving me for it. If I don’t, I’m sure some other jerk will come along who doesn’t have my scruples, and then she’ll fall for him and be worse off. Or am I just rationalizing here?

—Woke Princes Don’t Wake Princesses

Dear WPDWP,

It’s not vaguely nonconsensual. It’s sexual assault, and your excuses for considering it are, in fact, rationalizations—and rather weak ones at that.

I’m struggling to understand how you’ve “fallen in love” with a woman you’ve never spoken to. Have you ever imagined having grandchildren with women who have real opinions and attitudes that you have to deal with, rather than with a fantasy version of a woman who is conveniently too unconscious to challenge you?

I think if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find the answer to that question quite illuminating.

My consultant, who is more of a co-writer at this point, believes you should throw yourself into the thorny woods and let them rip you to pieces. I’m not inclined to go that far. But I do think you need to seek therapy.

In the meantime, leave your “soul mate” alone.

—Your Fairy Godmother

Dear Fairy Godmother,

I’m disappointed by the direction your column has taken in recent months. You used to offer people real help—magic slippers, enchanted roses, concrete advice about how to braid and climb hair. Now it’s all “examine your feelings” and “enforce boundaries” and, the coppiest of all cop-outs, “go to therapy.” (Honestly, do you want to put yourself out of a job? Do you think therapists tell their clients to go write to advice columnists?)

Last week, that poor girl was clearly asking for the imp’s name, and you ignored her question so you could go on some tangent about your own marginally-similar experience.

What happened? Have your powers been stolen from you? Or is this “consultant” of yours the reason for the decline in quality?

You have a sincere and devoted following, and many of us have access to sorcerers, witches, and royal treasuries. Maybe it’s time for you to open up to your readers so we can help you.

—Rescuer If You Need One

Dear RIYNO,

I appreciate your concern, but I am fine. My magic powers are intact—in fact, just before writing this response, I re-heated my cup of tea with a tap of my wand.

What has changed is my understanding of the best way to use my powers. When I used to swoop in to save the day, who was I really doing it for? Shouldn’t princesses (and princes, but let’s be honest, most of my summoners identify as female royalty), have their own agency? Even if they’re trapped in an impregnable tower or deep in an enchanted sleep, surely there’s a way they could rescue themselves. All they need is the inner strength to do it.

That is what I have been trying to provide.

However, I’ve realized that encouraging independence is not my strength. For this reason, among others, I have decided that it is time for me to pursue other opportunities. This will be my last column.

I am sad to leave behind this chapter of my life, but I have the joy of knowing that my faithful readers are in good hands. My former consultant, who helped me find the strength to move on, will be taking over my role. Please grant her the same trust you have given me. Her advice has changed my life, and if you give her a chance, she will change yours too.

—Your Former Fairy Godmother

©2022 by Leah Cypess.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leah Cypess is the author of the middle grade series Sisters Ever After. The first book in the series, Thornwood, retells Sleeping Beauty from the POV of Sleeping Beauty’s little sister. The second book, Glass Slippers, tells the story of Cinderella’s third stepsister, and will be released in April 2022. Leah has also written four young adult novels and numerous works of short fiction. She is a two-time Nebula finalist and a World Fantasy Award finalist. You can learn more about her and her books at www.leahcypess.com.

EXCERPT: Kalyna the Soothsayer (Erewhon Books)

Elijah Kinch Spector | 5868 words

From debut novelist Elijah Kinch Spector comes Kalyna the Soothsayer, a thrilling tale in the vein of Spinning Silver and The Traitor Baru Cormorant following a young, brash “clairvoyant” con artist who must prophesize her way out of peril.

Every member of Kalyna’s family has the Gift: the ability to see the future. For generations, they traveled the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia selling their services as soothsayers. Every child of their family is born with this Gift—everyone except Kalyna.

For years, Kalyna has supported her father—whose grip on reality is straining under the weight of his confused visions of the future—and her cruel grandmother on the strength of her wits, using informants and trickery to falsify prophecies for coin, and scrounge together a living for them all. But it’s getting harder every year. And poverty turns to danger when, on the strength of her reputation for prophecy, Kalyna is pressed into service by Lenz, the spymaster to the prince of Rotfelsen.

Lenz orders Kalyna to use her “Gift,” to uncover threats against Rotfelsen’s king, and holds her family hostage against her good behavior. But Rotfelsenisch politics are devious, the king’s enemies abound, and Kalyna’s skills for investigation and deception are tested to the limit. Worse, the conspiracy she does begin to uncover points to a larger threat, not only to the King of Rotfelsen but to all four monarchs at their annual governing council—which falls on precisely the same day that Kalyna’s father has prophesied the catastrophic collapse of the whole Tetrarchia.

Kalyna is determined to protect her family and her newfound friends—and to save the Tetrarchia, too. But as she is drawn deeper into palace intrigue, she can no longer tell if her manipulations are helping prevent the Tetrarchia’s destruction—or if her lies will bring about its prophesized downfall.

Coming July 26, 2022 from Erewhon Books.

Two Nights from Now

A few days later, Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way came trudging up our hill. I had been practicing a stance from my sickle treatise, with the blade by the left side of my face, ready to strike down or across, as needed, while Grandmother screamed that I was handling Papa’s freezerot all wrong. She preferred to believe that old illnesses still lingered on inside him, rather than accepting that his mind was troubled.

When Gustaw got to the top of our hill, Grandmother swallowed her next insult and was quiet. Gustaw rubbed his bald head, and then shook my hand enthusiastically with his great, callused mitt.

“Kalyna Aljosanovna,” he smiled down at me, “you have gotten big. Did I tell you this last time I stopped by?”

“So have you. And you did not.”

Gustaw laughed. His breath smelled of beer: but a faint whiff of dark stout to get him through a cold day, not the reek of watery summer ale from his youth. I ushered him into the large tent in front, with its pointed top that dripped lace and fringe, holding up the curtain of shimmering glass beads for him.

“Thank you,” he grunted.

“Of course. You are now in the presence of a prophet.” I said as though we were joking together: Gustaw had heard such greetings many times.

The large tent was not for sleeping: it was too nice. At its center was our small dais, made of various and variously shaped cheap woods that had been stuck together, and painted to look, in dim light, like mahogany. A heavy Quru rug crushed the grass, and atop it were large pillows: the most comfortable things we owned. I sat on one pillow and Gustaw fell into the other, across the dais from me.

Inside the dais were cards, crystals, chicken feathers, and everything else I used to stall and distract. But today I only used my bright purple dress—advertisement and distraction in one—and lit the swan-shaped incense holder. I breathed in the smoke and felt a rare moment of ease. Gustaw needed a real prophecy from me, and I suppose I had one. If it didn’t come true, I would not live to see his disappointment.

Ramunas had gotten his hands on the couriers’ schedules, which he did charge me for, and so I had formed a plan. The plan was not good, or smart, or likely, but it was all I had. With great, impossible, Godly luck, and money, we would escape the Tetrarchia right away, before the snows stopped us, before its collapse, spending everything and ruining ourselves in the process, while poor Gustaw would barely get a chance to spend his new fortune. There was something to look forward to.

“I have been thinking, Madame,” began Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way, “about when you said I would ride in a carriage someday?”

“And you will,” I said, leaning forward, chin on my hands and elbows on the dais. I prayed for the pasted wood to hold.

“When?”

“Gustaw,” I smiled, “if I knew everything, I would tell you everything, but that is not how it works.” I tapped my temple. “You know how it is: the demigods rule the future, and nothing else, so they are jealous of it. If I take too much of it. . .” I reached out in a grabbing motion and trailed off, letting him take this only as literally as he wished to.

“You only rent, eh?” he asked, smiling.

I nodded. “Just so.”

He nodded back and grinned. He believed me, but also wanted to feel savvy to the game we were playing.

“We have known each other forever, so I will not spout a lot of nonsense,” I lied. “A great change is coming in your life.”

“Good change, I hope.”

I straightened, went from chummy to mysterious. He had leaned in to meet my low gaze, and so I was now looking down at him.

“Yes, very,” I said.

“Are. . . are you sure?”

“Has my family ever steered you wrong?” Imperious, now.

“No.”

I smiled and nodded.

“Two nights from now,” I moaned from somewhere deep in my abdomen, eyes closed, lips trembling, “when your animals show great unrest in the darkest time, if you begin to make ten circuits ‘round your home, your fortune will come on horseback.”

“My fortune?” Gustaw replied.

“Yes.”

“A monetary fortune?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Enough that I hope you will not forget a lowly beggar prophet.”

“Oh! Of course not!”

Then there was a long pause as Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way considered my prophecy. Eventually, I shifted forward on my pillow and opened one eye to see what he was doing.

Gustaw’s massive hand stroked his massive chin, and he looked at me intently with large brown eyes. He reached down and scratched his left ankle, probably because he couldn’t reach through the boot to his truncated foot.

“‘Ten circuits ‘round my home,’ you say?”

I nodded slowly.

“Now what exactly is a home, according to the knowledge of the Ancients and demigods? Am I to go ten times ‘round my shack, Madame? Or the gates of my farm? Or the farthest borders of my lands?”

I opened my eyes the rest of the way and lit a new pyre of incense, more for the smoke than the smell. Better he not see me clearly. Even through my worries I felt a tingle of the thrill that comes with successful trickery.

“Your farm, Gustaw. Circle your farm.”

Circuits around the farm would, I hoped, take him long enough for me to enact my prophecy. The unrest of the animals was a way to make him wait a good while. At some point in the night, either the courier or the fighting would rouse them, or he would simply convince himself he heard his animals squealing.

Gustaw sighed and nodded and checked again, just to be sure, that if he followed these instructions his fortune would be made. I reminded him that the fates are fickle, but it would not be the first time my family accurately beheld his future. I then felt a jabbing pang of guilt because, from Papa’s prophecy, I almost certainly knew what Gustaw’s short future held.

If I succeeded and he got his money, I thought to myself, then perhaps I could tell him about what was coming, and we could escape together. Being piled into a carriage with Gustaw and his family did not seem like the worst way to leave the Tetrarchia. At least we would have company, and money, in our desolation.

Gustaw sucked his lip and nodded, glanced at his foot, grunted up off the ground, assured me he would go ‘round ten times, and limped off. I slumped against the side of the tent, exhaling loudly at the effort of being charming and aloof, conspiratorial and unknowable, all at once. The tent shook slightly.

I felt bad asking him to do so much walking: he did, after all, have only eight toes. But, even where fate is concerned, a human must feel they are doing something.

Free Will

Now, you might think that Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way would wonder why it was he had to do anything in order to make the future arrive. After all, is the future not inevitable? Well, you would be very wrong.

After all, if a drunken man had listened to my father fourteen years earlier, he would be called Stupid Drunk Gustaw from Down Valley Way. A prophecy that comes through the Gift is not immutable, but it is the most likely outcome, although the how and the why are not always clear.

For example, imagine a man coming to my father back when he was at the peak of his powers, in prime of life, with a brown beard and a booming voice, our large tent perfectly outfitted. Imagine, as I say, that a man comes to him with general inquiries: no particular aim or hope, just curious about the future. My father smiles, closes his eyes, and sees that on the following day this man will fall and crack open his skull, dying. He tells the man this, but does not see where, when, or exactly how.

This unlucky man may spend the next day walking carefully, eyes on the ground, searching every pothole and pebble, and through doing so not see the cart that barrels into him, knocking him over and killing him exactly as foretold. How ironic, you may think. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible he’ll spend the next day walking carefully, always watching where he is going, and in so doing avoid what my father saw, going on to live for thirty more years of fulfillment and happiness.

And yet, my father had often seen thirty or forty years into happy futures spent in the Tetrarchia: spent right where we now knew there would be war, slaughter, and possibly natural disasters, depending on how literal my father had been. Deluge or no, something in our country had changed recently, some new wrinkle to old problems, most like, that made disaster the most likely future by an impossibly high margin.

If everything my forebears saw in their visions was ironclad, they would never have made enough to live on. Giving someone exactly what they wanted was the domain of those sorcerers who enacted spells through complex ritual and elaborate set design, while still managing to fail most of the time. Our customers simply wanted to know how to find fortune and avoid catastrophe, or they wanted to be reassured that the future was exactly what they wanted.

Knowing a possible future gave one, at least, the chance to act. This was why it was good to give Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way some extra work.

This was also why we had to escape. There was no way I knew of to make the entire Tetrarchia avoid its end in three months. I could mourn it later, with the other refugees.

Saving Gustaw’s Money

A small dirt road, barely wide enough for two horses abreast, wound down through impossibly thick Masovskan forest into a little valley, toward the farm of Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way. I was not walking on it.

Instead, I was stumbling through the underbrush on the right side of the road, leaving at least one layer of trees between myself and anyone who came down in the open air. It was late at night and I hadn’t seen a single worthless soul since leaving the Great Field, but I was best hidden nonetheless. The moon was just bright enough to illuminate the road, while only penetrating the forest enough to show what was directly in front of me.

I drummed the handle of my sickle idly. Stuck in my belt, the point rasped quietly against my plain, rough leather trousers. I became bored, and so began to reflect on whether moving and fighting was actually easier to do in so-called “men’s” clothes, like trousers, or whether growing up in the Tetrarchia had simply convinced me that it was so. Though the rules changed (maddeningly) from kingdom to kingdom and town to town, violence in my home country was generally considered to be masculine, and so if a woman involved herself in it, she was expected to look the part. It was all rather silly, when I thought about it too much: especially considering how differently this sort of thing could be viewed outside of the Tetrarchia’s kingdoms.

It was about then that a twig snapped under my boot and I cursed myself for a fool, because I had not been paying attention. I hoped it hadn’t mattered this time, as there were owls, crickets, and creatures I preferred not to think about making noise all about me. I had heard nothing of a human being, but even so I went slower and quieter downhill through the rocks and bushes.

A courier was on the way to Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way tonight, and I was sure that Klemens Gustavus had planned an ambush. One could pay the court’s required fees and afford mercenaries to lie in wait while hardly denting fifty grivnas.

I assumed that Klemens and his siblings had similar ambushes ready wherever their distant relatives stood to gain fifty grivnas. No matter how convenient it might be for every single courier to have his or her throat slit on the road, there would be, Ramunas told me, no real evidence that could be brought against rich, important defendants who ran a major bank. It was a shame I couldn’t help these other unfortunate cousins, but I had to harden myself to that sort of feeling. War, disaster, or whatever was coming would swallow them all up soon enough.

I crested a small ridge, and through the trees saw the bottom of the little valley far below. It was all a dark mass, with no individual tree and no piece of road making itself known, all surrounding one little lit up spot in the center. Gustaw’s farmhouse was no larger than my thumb from this distance, but there were lanterns lit outside, showing me its round-topped, squat little shape.

Seeing a warm, safe home nestled in the middle of that forested valley made me realize how cold I was, and I pulled my shawl tighter around my shoulders. I wondered if a tiny Gustaw was trudging around his farm in circles yet.

I heard a lone horse clopping somewhere far away uphill, behind me. I arced toward the road to avoid a particularly thick clump of trees and allowed myself a deep sigh: if it was only one horse then it was probably the courier bringing Gustaw news of his payday. Perhaps, I thought, the Gustavus brat was going to leave the poor wretch alone after all. Then I nearly tripped over the first mercenary.

He had been crouched by the road, looking intently up it toward the far-off sound, and had never thought to glance into the trees. He was in a bush, bracing himself against the ground with one hand, and I honestly didn’t see him until I had crushed the fingers of that hand beneath my heel. He did not cry out.

I, idiot that I am, mumbled, “Pardon!” before I could stop myself.

Instead of a pardon, I received a dagger in my left arm.

I reeled back and fought very hard to use my right hand for drawing my sickle, rather than for pressing the wound on my left arm. I lifted the sickle to the left side of my head. I knew the mercenary didn’t need to yell for his cronies to hear us, and sure enough I heard shuffling through the underbrush come toward us.

The mercenary was still crouching, dagger out, with the moon behind him. I saw the outline of a carefully curled mustache. He was certainly not some starving forest-dweller. Others were crashing closer through the bushes, and I saw one more run across the road from the other side. They said nothing, but did not hide their footsteps. I had to finish with the man in front of me quickly, and I hoped he was distracted enough by his pain to fall for something simple.

I feinted and pivoted back when he stabbed up at me. Then I cut his knife hand clean off. It flew away into the forest, blade glistening with it. He made a gulping noise and bent over forward. I kicked him in the face to keep him out of my way.

At least two were almost upon me from behind, and there was another who had crossed the road somewhere in front of me. I dashed deeper into the forest, away from the road, slipping behind two huge trees grown together. I dropped to the ground and bit my lip. One mercenary tromped toward me, but I couldn’t see him in that thick forest until his boot landed a hand-span from my face. I whipped the sickle blade around and sliced open his boot, as well as his tendon.

I never saw this one’s face, but he was not as stoic as his comrade. He fell close enough to lie screaming in my ear. The horse was coming closer now, and it seemed to have sped up.

Now that no one was surprised, and the others knew where I was, I needed to get out of the forest and onto the road. I didn’t want the courier to see me, but I very much did want to see whoever was coming for me next.

You don’t realize how instrumental your arms are in keeping balance until you have to leap to your feet with a weapon in one hand and a wound bleeding down into the other. I flopped up awkwardly, inadvertently kicking the screaming man in the process, and sprinted out toward the road.

I dashed through the trees as well as I could. Somewhere in that dark forest I actually bumped right into another man, the same way one would in a crowded marketplace. He grunted and reeled and I heard a blade cut air behind me. If my hair had not been tied up tight, I would have lost some.

I burst out of the bushes into the road, which the moon was turning a brilliant silver just below the ridge. The horse could not have been far now; its hooves drummed down toward us.

Two men came out of the forest after me. They were absolutely not desperate highwaymen: freshly shaved, with pristine fur caps and gold chains that clanked against their cloaks. They also both had sabres out. I felt myself hyperventilate. I put the sickle up by my head, and lifted my aching left arm to grab hold of my shawl.

One was a half-step in front of the other. I dashed right of him, putting him between myself and his comrade, and threw my shawl into his face. I stepped in and cut him down, across the head and neck. I felt him yield, and the cream-colored shawl stippled with red as he fell.

The remaining mercenary leaped over the fallen body toward me and I backed away. He was all that was left of the Gustavus’ thugs, and I began to feel truly confident. I thought I could really do this; perhaps there were things in this world I was good at.

He disappeared as I fell over backward. I yelled, “Cock!” as my head hit the packed earth. The mercenaries had stretched a tripwire across the road for the courier’s horse, and I stumbled right over it.

My ears were ringing as this remaining mercenary appeared above me. I don’t know if he was a large man or just looked that way when I was on my back. He raised his sword, and suddenly disappeared.

I blinked and shook the noise out of my head as I sat up. The mercenary was sprawled on the ground in a puddle of blood, unmoving. As my ears began to work again, I made out the last echoes of a gunshot I hadn’t initially heard.

I looked around for the source of the shot before realizing the courier’s horse was nearly upon me, galloping down. I fumbled to the tripwire and hacked at it with my sickle.

I saw the heads of horse and rider bob up above the ridge. Even in the middle of the night I could see the horse was wide-eyed and frothing. My bloody left hand joined my right on the sickle’s handle. My left arm felt like it would wither and fall off.

The horse’s full body appeared. The tripwire severed and snapped away from me. I fell over backward and rolled clumsily into the bushes as the horse tore past and headed down the road towards Gustaw’s farm. I lay there and watched it, deciding that, when Gustaw came to pay me, I would tell him everything Papa had seen. That we would escape this doomed country together, northward into Loasht itself.

I never saw if the courier was tall or short, scared or composed. They never knew I had been the guardian of that night’s journey. The horse turned that last mercenary’s skull to jelly.

Killers

There were two dead mercenaries in the road, one of whom I had killed. At that point in my life, when I defended myself I gave out flesh wounds or cut pieces off of people. I had only ended a human life once before, when I was still mostly a child. That first time, I had felt nothing but relief at my safety.

This time, I lay in the forest and waited for the knowledge that this had been a human being, born of human parents, to draw a reaction from me. Nothing came. It felt no different than wounding someone. I decided I did not have the room in my life to agonize over men who had been trying to kill me.

But who had killed the second mercenary?

There were still two injured, but alive, mercenaries somewhere in the forest. How injured were they? I could not remember. Were they near me now? Would they come for me soon?

For one unreasoning moment, I intended to get up, traipse into the road, and take my shawl back from the man I’d killed, looting his pockets in the process. I shook that out of my head: whatever hidden harquebus had killed the other one could surely have been reloaded by now. There was no reason to think this shooter wanted to be my savior. The Gustavuses must have had many enemies.

I heard shifting and cracking move through the forest, louder and more deliberate than the mercenaries had been earlier. I sat up quietly as I could, wincing in pain when I pushed myself up with my hurt arm—I had entirely forgotten about it. At least two pairs of boots crunched uncaringly through the underbrush. I sat awkwardly and gripped my sickle. Could it have been the first two mercenaries coming for revenge? I hoped they would be too badly injured to bother. But then, I was injured too.

“Wait—!” croaked a voice in Masovskan. Then there was another shot, so close it deafened me. I turned toward it and saw, between the trees, a dark yellow smudge.

I caught another such smudge in my peripheral vision, moving in time with the sound of boots in the forest. I turned to look and heard another sound, like an animal scrambling through the dirt. The yellow smudge lifted an arm and a lantern shined out ahead of it, illuminating a man who was desperately trying to crawl away on his elbows. One hand was broken, the other a stump.

A final shot, and this time I saw the report light up its section of the forest even brighter, for just a moment. I almost fell over backward.

I sat perfectly still. Scrambling on injured limbs clearly did not arouse the sympathy of these mysterious yellow smudges. I heard them speak to each other in guttural, halting Rotfelsenisch, too quiet for me to make it out. My heart seized up so wildly in that moment that I still wonder if I died then, and the rest of the story I will tell you has simply been a terrible afterlife.

The lantern went out and I was in pitch blackness. I heard more boots, more crunching branches, more Rotfelsenisch, and I prayed that it was as dark where I was as it looked to me.

Something nudged my back. I turned, and it was a man in a yellow soldier’s uniform, holding a long-barreled harquebus. Another was walking up behind him.

“Kalyna Aljosanovna?” said the first one.

I nodded numbly.

“Come with us, please and thank you,” he said, in Rotfelsenisch.

Conscription

I was relatively sure I had seen a soldier in yellow before, the last time I was in the suspicious little kingdom of Rotfelsen, but what that meant escaped me. That kingdom of our Tetrarchia was a confusing mess of particolored armies: as though someone had covered it in confetti, and then given that confetti swords. The last time I had been there, I remembered seeing Rotfelsenisch soldiers in green, mostly, and some in yellow. There had been other colored uniforms, but I could not place them in that moment, and I certainly didn’t know what they meant.

These three yellow soldiers, all men and all harquebusiers, led me back up the road for a good mile. They surrounded me but, surprisingly enough, did not jab me with weapons or tell me I was scum. This did not convince me I wasn’t on my way to death. They were almost chatty, but told me little useful. The moonlit road was a very different experience on the way back.

“We had to come awfully far out here to find you,” chirped one. “Were you trying to escape those brigands?”

I grunted.

At about a mile, we came across a great road that sprouted off from ours, and it was indicated, politely, that I should sit on a large stone at its entrance.

“You must be tired,” said the lead, who had done most of the talking.

I almost pointed out that of course I was, I only did all the fighting, while they came in afterward to execute the survivors. But thought better of it and sat.

One of them ran off down this other road, which, despite its large width, twisted off into the forest, and another knelt next to me, to poultice and bandage my bleeding arm. He told me that I could see a flesh-alchemist tomorrow, and then it would be just fine. I did not thank him. In some “civilized” places, the condemned must be healthy before execution, for some reason I do not fathom.

I wondered idly if I should have let the arm gangrene and fall off. Then I would have a soothsayer gimmick. If only I didn’t also need it to cook, clean, chop wood, guide our cart, tuck in Papa, defend myself, unpack tents, pack tents, and someday get up the nerve to slap the bile out of Grandmother. If I survived the winter. If I survived this night.

I sighed. I had been terrified for hours, and was simply too exhausted to work up any more terror. If they killed me, they killed me.

I wondered if the courier had made it to Gustaw yet. Was he cavorting through his home, hugging his wife, crying? I hoped so. He deserved that, at least, even if he wouldn’t have time to spend it. Even if there were ants in this forest that would probably outlive the very society that made his money viable.

I was tired and, I admit, a little loopy, so when I heard a rumbling I assumed, first, that it was in my head. Then I wondered if Papa had been off by three months, and the armies were coming now.

“Fine,” I said, “let them come.”

The soldier finished his bandaging and gave me a perplexed look. I shrugged it off. He could think what he wanted, but the rumbling was getting louder.

I looked down the road, over the soldier’s head. The rumbling got even harder to ignore, and a bright light shone out from between the trees. Then I saw, rolling around a bend in the road, the largest carriage I had ever seen.

It was the size of a small hut, had eight wheels in total, and was dragged by ten horses, each much larger than our dearly departed, rock-kneed old horse. Its body was wood like any other carriage, but its sides were reinforced with iron layered in sheets like an old suit of armor, complete with overly intricate swirls and spikes. The top formed into a silver and red turret that I soon realized was not an ornament. The carriage actually had a small, pointed second story. I could see all of this thanks to great lanterns that hung from its corners: it seemed to travel in a halo. I wondered if it was here to take me to join my ancestors.

Two soldiers, also in yellow, sat in front, one guiding the horses while the other hoisted a harquebus on his shoulder. I would soon learn that the three who walked me here had their own perches, at a small railing on the carriage’s roof, and atop an outcropping at the back, respectively.

The carriage ground to a halt just in front of me. I stood up, bewildered, as a door on its side creaked open, revealing an interior of dark green velvet with deep purple trimmings.

A man who was not wearing a uniform stepped out with a slight limp.

“Kalyna Aljosanovna, the Soothsayer,” he said, “for the good of the Greater Eastern Tetrarchia, and its Divine Four Kings, in the name of His Most Serene Majesty One-of-Four Gerhold VIII,” he winked, as though it were a joke between us that he was using such formal language, “I hereby requisition the use of your Gift.”

This man’s clothing, pinkish skin, and the stop-and-start rhythm of his language made it clear enough to anyone that he was from Rotfelsen, the kingdom in the southeastern corner of our Tetrarchia. At his side he wore a long, thin rapier with an ornate, enclosed hilt, unlike the Masovskan cross-guarded sabre. He also wore a yellow silk doublet with leather riding trousers and only a blue half-cape on top, with no robe to keep warm. He knew he would not have to stand outside in the chilling local winds for long.

My pain and exhaustion disappeared in the face of pure, numb confusion.

“I. . . I’m sorry?” I managed to say.

He walked up to me, favoring his left leg, and stopped at the perfect distance to be in control of the space I occupied without being invasive. The lantern light flickered on the right side of his face. His jaw was set, but not too hard, his face angular and serious without being stern, neither enjoying nor abhorring his duty. His dark brown hair was gray-streaked and worn long, but messy and nearly vertical, as though he had just woken up from his carriage bench, and his mustache was heavy without support from a goatee, which went against Rotfelsen noble style. He was dressed well, I gathered, because he was some sort of officer or official, but it was also clear that he came from peasant origins.

He pulled a parchment from his belt, its rustling louder to me than the harquebus shots.

“My name is Lenz Felsknecht, and I have here an order signed by the hand of His Most Serene Majesty’s younger brother, Dutiful Prince Friedhelm, Landgrave of the Two Great Caves and the Spire, that calls for the requisition of—”

“You can’t ‘requisition’ my Gift,” I said. I felt I had taken a bit of his measure, and the melting of pain and exhaustion had allowed me to return to myself. “It’s part of me, do you understand? Attached. In here.” I pointed to my temple, perhaps condescendingly.

“Just so. But as I doubt bringing only your head will do, you must come with me.”

He opened the parchment and showed it to me. I had seen a royal seal once or twice before, although never on orders concerning me. It certainly looked legitimate. So did the harquebusiers. He laid his other hand, in a thick glove, on my shoulder.

“Step into the carriage, Kalyna Aljosanovna,” he said. “We’ve kept a close eye on you, and we know the great prophetic strength of your Gift, of which. . .”

Was this sarcasm? Did he know?

“. . . the Prince has need. Think of him as a customer. One who will pay well, but whom you cannot turn down.”

In that moment, I think I could have gutted him with my sickle and run off through the dark woods before the harquebusiers took decent aim. It occurred to me, but did not seem worth the immediate effort. Had I a better idea of what was coming, I would have tried.

Copyright © 2022 by Elijah Kinch Spector. Excerpted from Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector. Published by permission of Erewhon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elijah Kinch Spector lives in Brooklyn. Kalyna the Soothsayer is his first novel.

Book Review: Siren Queen, by Nghi Vo

Aigner Loren Wilson | 528 words

Siren Queen
Nghi Vo
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250788832
Tordotcom, May 2022, 288 pgs

Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen traces the rise to fame of Luli Wei, a Chinese American actor in a darkly fantastical and magical pre-Code Hollywood. Here demons, gods, and monsters lurk under the skin, names have power, and becoming a star comes with a price sometimes paid in blood and life. Blending themes of racism, erasure, and LGBTQ+ discrimination in 1920s Hollywood, Vo crafts a smart, sexy, and engaging tale of fame.

From the beginning of the book, Vo describes the movie scenes as if they were regular scenes of the story. One moment, the reader is on a set or in a theater with the book’s characters, and the next, they are in the action, but more importantly, the movie’s emotions. This structure added an interesting, quickened pace, and an unreal sense that worked wonders alongside the already fantastical world of Siren Queen.

And just like the movie scenes, the magic and fantasy elements weave in smoothly with the rest of the story’s world and logic: the actors don’t just get their stars as plaques in the sidewalk but ascend to become something even greater, ghosts of imprisoned and Chinese railroad workers shuffle along beside us and sleep beneath our mountains. Vo’s world is one of vivid description and a mystical realism so well-written it all falls into place like facts.

Themes of racism, privilege, and Chinese labor exist on every level of Siren Queen. Vo captures both the pain and struggle of being a person of color. There’s the constant drive to be perfect, and unlike every other person who looks a little like you, tangled with the weight of constantly not wanting to make a fuss or stand out. Luli doesn’t so much as balance between these two extremes but dances back and forth between them.

The theme that speaks the loudest to me throughout most of the book is of finding queer community and living in a way that aligns with who you want. Luli finds her people quickly, but community comes at a price. Vo does an excellent job at depicting both physically and emotionally what it’s like being in queer spaces with other queer people and identifying it as a safe place—well, safe for some.

All the conflict and tension throughout the book builds and releases to such a soft and complex ending that I was floating for hours before I realized some questions hadn’t been answered. But thinking back on where Luli started and where she ended, the heartaches, sexual encounters, and deals she made, none of the unanswered questions mattered.

And a part of me believes that’s the point. Whether or not some of the smaller bits and pieces mentioned were tied up didn’t stop the ending from being an absolute joy and triumphant.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, Anathema, Arsenika, and other publications. When she’s not writing or editing for others, she’s learning, hiking, or loving on her fur babies—both human and animal. To check out her books, games, bread bakes, and other writings visit her website (aignerlwilson.com).

Book Review: Unlimited Futures, edited by Ismail and van Neerven

Arley Sorg | 1786 words

Unlimited Futures: Speculative, Visionary Blak and Black Fiction
Rafeif Ismail & Ellen van Neerven, editors
Paperback
ISBN: 9781760990701
Fremantle in association with Djed, March 2022/US June 2022, 296 pgs

Identity is complicated. To discuss it properly, you have to be flexible. You have to be able to change definitions as you go, to shift perspectives, and to embrace different understandings. With each discussion (if things are discussed in an open and honest way), we inevitably realize that the way we discussed something before actually missed a few points.

Increased visibility of individuals who were largely overlooked by mainstream publishing means that the cultural discussions at hand become more enriched across a larger audience. But this isn’t the same thing as saying that the discussions are new. Often the discussions are only new to some people, while other people have been talking about them for years and years.

As an example, the recent Black Lives Matter protests brought discussions around race and police brutality to many kinds of folks in the US. While a large number of white people saw these events as new, and had never really entered into these discussions before, most Black folks in the US had been discussing these things all along¹. Many white people conceived of police violence as isolated incidents scattered throughout history. Meanwhile, many Black families have, for decades, coached their kids on dealing with the police in such a way as to decrease the chances of getting shot; it’s not about “isolated incidents” so much as it is about a consistent throughline. White people and “mainstream” culture may not have been cognizant of these discussions, and in at least some cases, have been willfully ignorant, but that doesn’t mean the discussions weren’t happening.

So—where am I going with all of this?

In 2012 University of Arizona Press published Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, the “first-ever anthology of Indigenous science fiction.” Tor.com recently posted a discussion of “Science Fiction’s Very First ‘Year’s Best,’” a book published in 1949. Science fiction is often described as a conversation. As we celebrate old books which are stuffed to the gills with white authors, we ignore the other side of this situation: sixty years is a really long time to largely ignore groups of people who might have something to add.

Sure, there were a few exceptions here and there. But you can pick up nearly any random genre anthology published within a span of several decades, flip through its pages, and find that many people were being left out of those conversations².

Walking the Clouds received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, but it seems to have been somewhat ignored by genre folks, including all the various awards people.

Even today, as people go to conventions, they still argue over Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, or George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan. I suspect that few of those people bring Dillon’s work into the discussion. Or, for that matter, the 2016 anthology Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time by Hope Nicholson. Or Joshua Whitehead’s 2020 anthology Love after the End. I’ve met people who could tell you which years Heinlein won awards, but they probably couldn’t name five Indigenous genre authors. It might not be such a big deal, except for those decades where genre publishers have been largely disinterested in hearing what so many people might have to say.

Well, it’s our lucky day: Here’s another anthology bursting at the seams with brilliant things to say. Editors Rafeif Ismail and Ellen van Neerven have put together Unlimited Futures—and it is absolutely fantastic. “Unlimited Futures is an anthology of speculative, visionary fiction from First Nations writers and Black writers, reflecting visionary pasts, hopeful futures and the invisible ties between First Nations people and People of Colour.” That’s the blurb, but my blurb would be: “This is a book stuffed to the gills with great writing.” I’ll discuss a handful of pieces, but really, you’re in good hands whether you’re the “pick stuff at random” type of anthology reader or the “go from cover to cover” type of anthology reader.

The book opens with “The River” by Tuesday Atzinger, and this piece is a great way to open a book. Well-structured, evocative, visceral; frankly, it’s just . . . wonderful. The story follows a warrior chief who tries to court a woman named Thandeka, who already has a lover, Amandla—and they are quite happy where they are, thank you very much. But the chief isn’t happy with that. Tension ratchets up as the chief’s overtures are deflected, because he is not one to be dissuaded. The situation escalates to violence, but the consequences are much larger than the chief would imagine. The piece is beautifully told, while also intellectually engaging. Atzinger plays with dichotomies to superb effect, exploring human nature while delivering a gripping tale. Really well done.

“The Breakup” by Jasmin McGaughey finds protagonist Zillah breaking up with boyfriend Artie, who has superpowers. The story is gently frank, and this frankness immediately grounds the piece in a sense of realness; but it’s also kind of tender, limned with a light innocence. Combined, these sensibilities create a terrific, readable voice. The story itself seems fairly straightforward, but it’s lined with keen observations seamlessly sewn into the narrative.

Flora Chol’s “Tea” is a gorgeous poem about memory and family and loss; and the way these things all tie together to something as simple as tea. It’s also a larger discussion of the meaning of touchstones. As observers, we are faced with realizations around our own assumptions, made clear while looking through this window into the deeply personal.

“Guyugga,” by Laniyuk, is near-future SF depicting the moments just after a successful Māori revolution. While the frame is post-revolution, the effect is a thoughtful meditation on colonization and its consequences. Careless readers will miss the complexity at play. “I don’t know softness, I don’t know healing. I know building myself up after they tore me down.” These sentences exemplify powerful introspection, revealing the generational damage of colonization. At heart this story is about freedom, and the assertion that living by the dictates of another group of people is not freedom at all, even if you might think it is.

Jasper Wyld approaches “Thylacine” at first like a personal essay, explaining the extinction of the carnivorous marsupial sometimes called the Tasmanian tiger or the Tasmanian wolf. I even stopped for a moment to see if Unlimited Futures includes nonfiction. Gradually the writing slips into a more narrative vibe, and somewhere along the way, becomes an utterly engrossing story. The narrator initially contemplates the fact that people—especially white people—seem to want to bring the Thylacine back from extinction; or claim to have seen a Thylacine. The atmosphere of the piece changes when scientists implant Thylacine eggs into an artificial womb—to less than ideal results. In the course of these shifts, an examination of the impact of colonialism gives way to startling and powerful metaphor. Wyld is skilled with sharp observations and comparisons; but more surprising is the deft way Wyld leads the reader to a place of wonder. There is an undercurrent through the piece, about the meaning of connection, and the importance of connection to survival.

“Today, We Will Rise” by Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi is another story about resistance and revolution, but this one is farther in the future, in a domed city. Quick, effective strokes subtly capture the feeling of chaos, matching the moment of the story. In the midst of violent uprising, themes center on the way oppressed peoples cling to each other, to family, and to culture, in a desperate, proud bid to survive. There are layers of world building which echo our own realities: “Dying from old age is a privilege not afforded to those outside the dome.” It’s a blunt, incredible commentary on inequality, but it’s also about the power of freedom, and of new beginnings, even if won at great cost.

The last piece I’ll discuss here is the poem “I have no country” by Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes. Presented with the original Amharic on the left page and English on the right, it’s an absolutely breathtaking work, an act of resistance against the limitations and exclusions which result from interactions which are all too common. This poem is an act of healing, standing against the damage caused by casual racism, and creating instead power, as well as an inspiring freedom. It’s a meditation on belonging and identity which is supremely clever, truly thought provoking, and deeply beautiful.

This book is urgent. It’s filled to the gills with powerful voices. Whatever conversations you are having, they will be improved by visiting these works.

¹. You don’t have to take my word for this (even though you should). Black literature and music provides ample evidence of these continuous discussions. Here’s an example for you: “A policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens / stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood”—from Audre Lorde’s 1978 poem “Power,” about police brutality and systemic injustice.

². There have been many important notable authors of color, and specifically Black or Indigenous authors, including First Nations authors. Louise Erdrich was winning literary awards in the ’70s and ’80s, while being somewhat ignored by genre. Eden Robinson recently won a $50,000 fellowship, but has been largely overlooked by the genre community. Stephen Graham Jones and Rebecca Roanhorse are among the most recognizable names, but there are many, many others writing excellent work, and more not being given a shot at all.

There are also a number of important anthologies by BIPOC editors such as Sheree Renée Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Zoraida Córdova, Dhonielle Clayton, and so on. Looking at tables of contents over the past few decades, there are far, far more anthologies with very few to no authors of color, a trend which continues even today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Book Review: The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe

Chris Kluwe | 857 words

The Memory Librarian
Janelle Monáe
Hardcover / Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780063070875
Harper Voyager, April 2022, 336 pages

Greetings everyone, it’s time for another review! For this month we’ll be looking at a book I was quite excited to read when I first heard of it, and it did not disappoint—The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe.

Now, a lot of people probably know Monáe through her singing or acting careers, but I am quite pleased to say that she is just as talented, if not more so, as a science fiction writer (along with the other contributors to the book, who she collaborated with on all but one of the stories, and includes an impressively diverse cast). The Memory Librarian is no vanity project put out by someone riding their fame in another field; instead, it is a triumphant collection of five short stories that confidently weave complex themes and layers into an immersive whole. Set in the world of Monáe’s concept album Dirty Computer, The Memory Librarian further explores the album’s examinations of sexuality, gender identity, racism, and the end-stage capitalist panopticon police state, just to name a few. (I told you this thing has layers.)

The first thing that struck me about The Memory Librarian is how splendidly and unapologetically subversive it is in its central motif, which is the question, “Why am I wrong for wanting to be free and happy?,” a question always pertinent to ask when fascism seeks to regain its iron fist. In the Dirty Computer universe, people who don’t comply with the rigid boxes and clean lines society (white, male, hetero-normative) demands of them are labeled “dirty,” “bugged,” or “dangerous,” and are seen as things to be forced back in line regardless of the damage doing so causes. Whether it be the Memory Librarian herself, subject of the first story and vulnerable to the power of the state despite how much of it she personally wields; a non-binary addition to a feminist collective struggling with the advent of exclusionism within their own; or a group of children growing up in the shadow of acceptable social violence, the heart of each piece deals with the struggle to be accepted and known for who a person really is, rather than what others think they ought to be.

Naturally, this struggle involves dealing with trauma, both on the personal level as well as the pervasive political level, but despite how dystopic the world of The Memory Librarian can get at times, there is always a shining undercurrent of hope (perhaps best exemplified by the final short story in which a group of children realize that they have to imagine a better future in order to build it, no matter how bad the present). This is not a book that wallows in oppression voyeurism. Instead, it shines a spotlight on the bleeding edges and raw wounds of what oppression delivers, and then looks to patch them up with courage, wonder, and the belief that things can change for the better if a community can but take the necessary steps. That freedom is worth the fight to get there, and that the fight isn’t necessarily always with guns and fists.

In fact, that leads me to another thing I greatly enjoyed about The Memory Librarian, which was its constant usage of art in the stories as means of both self-expression and as a weapon to fight back against oppression (also delightfully meta-contextual as well, considering not just Monáe’s album that the universe was initially created in, but also the music videos that accompanied it). It’s clear that Monáe understands art is about creating your own box, no matter how weird its color or shape, not being crammed into someone else’s, and if art is in the soul, then expressing that soul cannot be a one-size-fits-all affair. There is a reason that systems of control throughout history go after the arts first, and more than a few tyrants have been toppled by the painter’s brush or a poet’s words.

Ultimately, The Memory Librarian is an inspired collection of stories that acknowledge the myriad flaws of our imperfect present while keeping focus on a brighter future—one where there is no such thing as “bad code” or “dirty programming” in a person’s skin color or sexuality, simply people living their best lives in a society that values them for it. I highly encourage everyone to check this one out, and I can’t wait to see what fantastic art Monáe creates next.

Read if: you don’t mind some bugs in your bytes; you recognize the violence inherent in the system; you like that no one is ever just one thing, both in fiction and reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Author Spotlight: Ashok K. Banker

Laurel Amberdine | 548 words

How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

Like all the other Legends of the Burnt Empire published exclusively here on Lightspeed, “A History of Snakes” is drawn from the original Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. I adapted it and revised it slightly to fit into the world of the Burnt Empire but it’s essentially the same core story from one of the many nesting tales-within-tales serpentine structure of the original.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

Apart from being a (hopefully) fascinating immersion into the mythology behind both the original Mahabharata and my own Burnt Empire series, this is also the origin story of the family of the being known as Jarsun. While he doesn’t appear in the story—Jarsun himself is born much later in the timeline—this is the tale of his ancestors.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

As my social media feeds—especially Instagram, Twitter and Facebook—will show, I began teaching myself to draw and paint just over a year ago. You can see my progress from the earliest doodles and sketches on those accounts. I’m now working on my debut middle grade graphic novel, “Neela Amber Cancels the World,” as well as an as-yet untitled nonfiction picture book, which will mark my debut as a picture book author-illustrator. Beyond these book projects, art is probably the best stress-buster and creative outlet and I enjoy it thoroughly!

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

There have been so many wonderful diverse authors and books in the past few years, but here’s to many more! I’d also love to see marginalised Indian voices represented, especially lower caste/class authors like myself. US publishing in general, and especially SF/F fiction publishers, seem to follow a brahmanical editorial policy, centring upper caste/class Indian authors and letting them speak even for marginalised, oppressed and underrepresented Indian voices. I’ve lost count of how many brahmin authors write in minority characters in their SF/F short fiction and novels. We’re in an age where India’s marginalised are being brutally persecuted, attacked, oppressed and silenced. To publish mainly authors from the upper caste/class makes US SF/F editors appear complicit with this pogrom of silencing. They need to do better. Educate themselves about casteism and minority persecution in India. Curate submissions keeping this imbalance and persecution in mind. I’m one of the lucky exceptions, an outcaste/low caste/lower class minority Indian author who found success in publishing, but there are so many more wonderful talents waiting to be discovered here in the US. Here’s wishing them all the love and luck in the world!

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

The Blind King’s Wrath, the third and final book in the Burnt Empire trilogy, comes out in May in the US. My debut thriller A Kiss After Dying releases in June in the UK and the rest of the world (except the US).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Izzy Wasserstein

Laurel Amberdine | 537 words

How did “Everything the Sea Takes, It Returns” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story began with a writing prompt from Alexandra Manglis, who is the Undisputed Prompt Champion of the World. It was an image of a giant redwood washed up on a beach. From there, I pulled in other elements I’m obsessed with—queer relationships, non-hierarchical social structures, environmental collapse—and worked at weaving together those threads.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I did get stuck. I’m a teacher at a public university, and I tend to do my writing in chunks on less-busy weeks or in the breaks between semesters. While writing this, I got perhaps three-fourths of the way through the original draft, got busy, and had to set it aside. When I came back to it I was flummoxed about how to get to the original ending I’d envisioned, which involved Jess alone at a tide pool. In the time away, I’d lost track of exactly how I planned to get to that ending, and it no longer felt right to me. Thankfully, the time away also let me see the possibility of the current conclusion. Those delays don’t always work out for me. I’m glad this one did.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I grew up with genre fiction, but college left me with little time to read for fun, and I lost touch with SF/F. In 2015, I attended what was then called the Campbell Conference at the University of Kansas. Sarah Pinsker was in attendance—she was named the Sturgeon Award winner that weekend—and her work affected me deeply. It made me realize just how vibrant and relevant speculative fiction could be. So I dove back into genre, both in my reading and writing. I’m blessed to have found a wonderful community of genre writers and readers, and to have received so much wisdom, encouragement, and support from so many people.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I play tabletop role-playing games: Dungeons & Dragons, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and whatever else I can make time for. I don’t know TTRPGS are relaxing, exactly—when you’re a single roll of the dice away from a total party kill, it sure doesn’t feel relaxing—but it gives me an outlet for my creativity when my brain needs a break from a story that just won’t come together.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’ve got a cyberpunk short story in the works that’s thinking through issues of identity and “fake news.” My debut short story collection, All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, is coming out this summer from Neon Hemlock Press. In addition to previously-published work, it has two all-new stories, one a supernatural mystery and one that’s perfect for those who’d like more lesbian sword-and-sorcery in their lives.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Phoebe Barton

Laurel Amberdine | 495 words

How did “A Sword Has One Purpose” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I wrote it to submit to Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology, so the foundational inspirations came from that call for submissions. While it was eventually rejected, that gave me opportunities to revise it further and make it even better. As for a “consulting swashbuckler” in a space habitat, I was going more “noir detective with a sword,” and considering that it’s very easy to damage sensitive life support systems with bullets, I think there’s a place for swords in space.

Also, potentially interesting fact: this was the last story I wrote in the Before Times, specifically February 2020.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

The biggest sticking point was in pre-production, since I have a habit of thinking through stories extensively before writing and this was no different. While the original call for submissions went out in November 2019, it took months to come together and I ended up finishing it about three hours before the deadline. It exists mostly because I had committed myself to submitting something to the anthology, and I was not going to go back on my word.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

There’s a reason the Jovian fascists in the story named their ship after Charles Lindbergh. While he’s more remembered for his transatlantic flight and is memorialized by multiple airports, he was also a Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist. We have to be vigilant when it comes to people that societies champion and honour, because too often they represent the worst of us.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

Given how everyone is dealing with so much pain and suffering and dread right now, I’d love to see more hopeful work coming out in the future. Not that there isn’t plenty already, but from my perspective, these days looking for hope feels like swimming upstream. More explicitly anticapitalist works would also be great for the genre, and of course, queer stories to the rafters.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

Right now I’m editing my novel Siegebreaker, a portal fantasy about a queer lady abducted from Earth to be made into a giant weapon and her trans girlfriend who crosses worlds to find her. Beyond that, I’m making my first foray into IP writing and trying to keep the fires of my short story furnace going. I spend a lot of time on Twitter at @aphoebebarton, and my website phoebebartonsf.com has plenty of information about my other work.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 227 words

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Grace Chan (“Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu”) and Tobias S. Buckell (“The Plastic People”). We also have a flash piece (“It Came Gently”) from Aigner Loren Wilson, along with an SF reprint by Peter Watts (“Test 4 Echo”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Andi C. Buchanan (“If We Do Not Fly at Sunset”) and Lina Rather (“The Cheesemaker and the Undying King”). We also have a flash piece (“Magical Girl Burnout Bingo”) from Lauren Ring. Our fantasy reprint is by Jonathan Maberry (“The Hammer of God”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Susan Palwick, P H Lee, Isabel Cañas, Micah Dean Hicks, and Adam-Troy Castro.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (recently revived, other) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor (Emeritus)

Rich Horton

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.