TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 131, April 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: April 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

The Equations of the Dead
An Owomoyela

Swear Not by the Moon
Seanan McGuire

The Ocean Between the Leaves
Ray Nayler

Complete Exhaustion of the Organism
Rich Larson

FANTASY

The Justified
Ann Leckie

The Giving One (Part 1)
Ashok K. Banker

The Giving One (Part 2)
Ashok K. Banker

Blood, Ash, Braids
Genevieve Valentine

EXCERPTS

A Dark Queen Rises
Ashok K. Banker

The Conductors
Nicole Glover

NONFICTION

Book Review: Victories Greater Than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: Spider King, by Justin C. Key
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The Bone Maker, by Sarah Beth Durst
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

An Owomoyela

Ashok K. Banker

Rich Larson

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

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Caleb Worcester / Adobe Stock

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: April 2021

John Joseph Adams | 244 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 131st issue!

This month An Owomoyela returns to our pages with a new story of advanced AI, brain adaptations, and oh, yes, dead loved ones: “The Equations of the Dead.” It’s a riveting read, and so is our other SF original, Rich Larson’s “Complete Exhaustion of the Organism,” a post-apocalyptic story of love, loss, and, well, dead loved ones. We also have SF reprints from Seanan McGuire (“Swear Not by the Moon”) and Ray Nayler (“The Ocean Between the Leaves”).

Our fantasy original is a new novelette from Ashok K. Banker: “The Giving One.” It’s an epic tale that we’ll be serializing in two parts. We also have fantasy reprints from Ann Leckie (“The Justified”) and Genevieve Valentine (“Blood, Ash, Braids”).

The book review team has been busy reading everything from a new serialized dark SF novella (Spider King, by Justin C. Key, MD) to a joyous YA novel from Lightspeed alum Charlie Jane Anders.

This issue also marks a farewell: After nine long years, Dana Watson is stepping down as our copy editor. We’ve been so lucky to work with her for so long. Her sharp eye and keen knowledge of grammar (especially all those tricky rules about commas!) has made every piece in this magazine so much easier to read. Thank you, Dana, for all your dedication and hard work. We are going to miss you so much!

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.

The Equations of the Dead

An Owomoyela | 9904 words

The boyo working the transmitter doesn’t look like much, except his face is radiant. Radiant, like one of those pooka upworld adverts for neural templates. Dopamine-druggy, but lucid. Like he’s in love.

Boyo also looks like he hasn’t spoken to a human in days, and like aside from the food allotments he doesn’t have a lick of capital. His clothes have that washed-while-wearing look, and they’re homespun; no fancy imported fabrics or styles. You’d walk away from this jondo in the market. Let him go his own way, pray he’d not bother you.

Well, boyo is bothering someone.

Harmless walks up, closer than comfortable, and waits a moment for a reaction. He gets none. After a few seconds he clears his throat, clears his throat again, and finally sticks a hand out and says “Heyo. I’m Harmless,” with his best guileless grin.

It’s a joke-threat, really: his fami name sounds like the Commerce word for harmless, and when he tells people he’s harmless when no one’s thought he’d harm them, it starts them wondering why he needs to reassure them. Truth is, he is harmless, except for the Old Man. And the Old Man isn’t here, except in the implication that he might get interested.

That’s the implication most people get, right away.

But boyo doesn’t seem to notice the threat, or the joke, or the hand, no, nor even the fact that harmless is bolsho strange for a man’s name. He nod-nods, and says, “I’m Latchko.” Eyes still on the transmitter. Like Harmless is a passing, talking breeze.

“Lat,” Harmless says. If Latchko cares about the nickname, or notices that Harmless has given him one, he gives no sign. “What are you doing here, boyo? You making trouble in this nice park?” Of course there are worse parks, plenty, where no one would mind trouble. Well, except that the trouble Latchko’s getting in would draw the Old Man’s attention anywhere.

Latchko also seems not to care about the term boyo, which is condescending at best, from a stranger. He shrugs, says, “It’s not restricted. It’s public,” and keeps fiddling with the transmitter. Not a care on the moon. Makes Harmless wonder if there’s something wrong with his brain, or maybe something in his brain, but folken here, they mostly don’t afford implants, innit? Maybe so, he’s just a strange one.

“So what are you doing?” Harmless asks.

He knows more or less already or he wouldn’t have come here. Boyo is transmitting to one of the AI clouds drifting through the system; transmitting very little for most human concerns but quite a lot for human-AI communication, and he’s getting back more than the nothing expected of most communiqués, and less than the vast datadumps expected of profitable business.

But the fact that he’s getting anything back at all: that’s tasty, innit. Most don’t. AI clouds out in the interplanetary are like true vapor clouds up in atmo, in how much they care for humans, how much they interact.

Mostly.

So here’s Lat, sitting unassuming and, like a prophet, talking to the heavens.

Lat finally puts the transmitter down and gives Harmless a long odd look. Harmless spreads his hands, waits. After a while—longer silence than most people bear—Lat gives him a wry, dry smile and says, “I’m playing a game.”

“With the clouds?” Harmless asks. He bites off the next bit he’d like to say: Boyo, the clouds don’t play games. They don’t even talk back. They’re talking back, all right, and Lat seems like he’ll explain, if Harmless finds the right questions.

“Mm. I send them equations,” boyo says. “They solve them.”

“Why?”

Boyo shrugs. “They enjoy it.”

This is new. Harmless knows crumbs about the clouds, but he’s talked to an expert. And she’d said—one of the things she’d said—that the clouds weren’t human-ish, no, so he, poor human, had better give up if he thought he’d grok. She said what you did was you thought of all the things you’d expect a human to have, warmth and humor and distaste and annoyance and affection and interests and all, and you stopped expecting those. Clouds have priorities, but they don’t want. They have directives, but they don’t strive. They generate a course of action, implement a course of action, evaluate the course of action.

Boyo says, they enjoy?

“Businessfolken,” Harmless says, gesturing up at the planet their little moon is locked to, “pay strange capi to get clouds to solve equations for them.”

Boyo is suddenly animated, gesturing, leaning forward. “This is different,” he says. “Most people want to use the AIs to solve the huge, convoluted data problems—crunching through cryptospace insertion formulae, or, or working on weft port miniaturization, that sort of thing. They don’t have an interest in that; that’s why it becomes transactionary. But these, these—” He touches the transmitter, seems to realize that the transmitter is no repository, and waves at his head, at the sky, at the clouds up there somewhere beyond the sky—happy, so. Boyo is excited for this. “These, they . . . like to solve.”

They like, boyo says. Harmless doesn’t know an AI cloud from a dumb AI, very, and so now boyo tells him one thing, and his expert told him another. He’s about to give up the convo there, say it’s a bad job, all nonsense, aye, but then Lat says the next thing.

“I think,” Lat says, “that if I can find the right way to phrase it, I can get them to solve the big equation.”

There, well, that sounds like something the Old Man might be interested in. Maybe so. Harmless leans in, and shapes his face into an encouraging grin. “The big equation?”

“Emulation of consciousness,” Latchko says. “I need them to emulate the consciousness of the dead.”

The dead.

Then and there, Harmless decides he’s in love. Because raising the dead, that’s big trouble, innit. Humany AI is one thing all the Commerce worlds agree to outlaw. It’s the big gedda crime, the capital crime, and that’s just making an AI that thinks like a human, feels like one. Making an AI that thinks it is one—or, like maybe boyo is suggesting, making an AI that runs a human brain like a computer runs a program; making an AI to bring a soul back from the oblivion beyond—Harmless doesn’t think there’s a word for the kind of trouble that is.

He licks his lips, which’ve gone dry. “You think they can? They will?”

“With the right datasets, with the right formulations, the right framing . . . they will.” So much faith in Lat’s voice. Harmless has never had that much faith in anything. “I don’t have enough yet. Grandfather didn’t leave enough to make the formula robust. But if I can bridge the gaps . . .”

Yes, Harmless thinks. This is a good proper person for a lad like him to fall for. So here he’ll call it: he’s in love.

It’s a strange feeling. True, he doesn’t have one of those templates; he can’t ask it to change his neurology, punch up the chemicals—but heyo, this is enough. It is very, very wrong to be on the side of this odd one who talks about crime and blasphemy like nothing, and because it’s very wrong, Harmless regards it as his native right. He works for the Old Man, after all; his profession is ignoring the rules all those normal folken follow. Aye, and the Old Man always says his children will defy him some day.

Old Man says it as a threat, always. But a fond threat. He, too, knows how this game is played.

Harmless crouches down in front of Latchko, putting himself on boyo’s level. “You see me, Lat? You know who I am?”

Latchko stares at him for a while, like he’s a fun-puzzler traded on the journals. A trick question.

“Your brain working?” Harmless asks.

There, Latchko laughs. “Well. Maybe not,” he admits, and gestures to his forehead. “It’s, uh, I have a lattice. Degenerative seizures.” He shrugs, sheepish; says it like it’s something to be embarrassed by. And there, he starts making much more sense to Harmless. It’s a nice feeling.

Because, ah, well, sometimes it happens. Those implants, when they’re the cut-cost medical ones made to fix things like degenerative seizures, and not the opulent ones they sell upworld for fashion, they can mess up the brain a half-bit. Boyo—Lat—might have a blunted sense of consequence.

Harmless thinks he could make a good proper beau for someone with no sense of consequence.

“The Old Man wants to know who’s talking to the AIs and getting talk back. He’ll not be happy if you’re raising the dead. What should I tell him?”

Lat shrugs, looks annoyed, looks away, like it’s no care of his what makes the Old Man happy. “I don’t know him.”

“Ah, well, he wants to know you. He wants to know what you’re doing here.” Harmless waves his hand over the transmitter. He knows it’s imagination, that he can feel the transmissions when his hand passes through them; feel them tangling in his fingers like cable, or webbing, but he feels them in his imagination just as well as he would on his skin. “Tell truthy, boyo. If you work for him, might be good capi, aye. Better life than . . . whatever your life is.” He looks at Lat’s clothes, at the food-thin weight of his neck, his cheeks, his limbs. “This could make the Old Man richer, innit?”

Lat looks at him in disappointment. It’s a look Harmless has known his whole life. “I told you,” boyo says. “The business problems aren’t interesting.”

“A ‘can’t,’ or a ‘won’t,’ there, boyo?” Harmless asks.

Latchko sighs and shakes his head.

“Lat,” Harmless says.

Lat waves him away. Harmless raises his eyebrows; no one dismisses him but the Old Man. “I need to concentrate,” Lat says. “You’re bothering me.”

“Hm,” Harmless says. Feels there’s not much more to be learned here, so, quietly, he goes.

• • • •

The Old Man messages Harmless: not to check in, but to tell him to bring dinner back to the office suite. It makes Harmless puff up no small bit. He’s spent good time getting the Old Man to trust him so far.

Of course, it’s only so far; Old Man tells him what to get, and where, and has him pick up his own bowl from the office tower—the good bowl, imported from upworld, that scans what you put in it. And the little trundle-sup-shop Harmless takes it to, well, the gally there still works under her grandfather, so, and grandfather and the Old Man go back. There’s not enough capi on the moon, or upworld, or in the whole system wide to get grandfather to slip poison to anyone. Let alone the Old Man.

The trundler is a cheery banged-up thing, cobbled together on the moon, not dragged down from above. Three and a half sides are open, ringed with composite counters, and folken are already crowded, pressed around, chattering. When Harmless comes up, there’s a riffle as people look at him and mostly look away; general avoidance-of-the-eyes which he knows is mostly distaste but likes to pretend is wary respect.

There’s a queue; of course there’s a queue. But, of course, Harmless stands in no queue. He goes right to the counter, puts his two bowls down, and smiles at the gally there. “Usual,” he says, and the usual comes up, right quick. The bowl seals up, and its little heater comes to life. The indicator band around the outside glows a pleasant blue: no poisons in this batch, no. The lid seals, and won’t open up except for the Old Man’s implants and biometrics. It pays to be careful.

No capi changes hands, here; the Old Man eats for free. And anyone running for the Old Man takes advantage of his shadow, even when it’s only noodles to take.

The talk around the trundler doesn’t slow down for Harmless. Maybe so, it gets more pointed. Folken expect him to keep an ear out, report little complaints to the Old Man; maybe so, the Old Man will get interested. This Council or that Council is losing favor, maybe not enough to lose their votes, but just enough that maybe the Old Man will want his nose in. Maybe he’ll do something. The Old Man is the third force in how the moon is run, the balancing reactive force that keeps bureaucracy and algorithm from mining the whole place rotten.

Dumb AI runs the moon, ish. Dumb AI is the autonomic part, concerning transport balancing and power routing and waste reclamation and that sort. Dumb AI, because proper AI, like those clouds, doesn’t care and can’t be trusted. People here would riot, burn what-all down, if they thought proper AI had a hand in running anything.

But humans still run human concerns, and how that works is a marvel, innit: people notice an issue, people clamor for someone to do something, people get put forward as people likely to do something, people vote, and a Council forms up. The Councils are numerous and sundry, and like all human groups, they bolsho argue.

Oh, they get done eventually; they’re the reason planetdwellers bring down material goods if they want capital on the moon, and they’re the reason fairs and festivals take place without a hitch and parks stay clean and hydrop farms get good stable land and riots burn out before they burn down the weft ports.

But oh, pooka, the arguing.

It’s why there’s always an Old Man. They may not be legal, quite, no, but they’re quick about things. Effective. Efficient. Councils are good proper, but when something needs done today, aye, the Old Man is the one to get to.

And when something needs ended today, oh aye. The Old Man will handle that, too.

The Old Man lives in a bol spire of a building, and Harmless can see it all the way as he’s walking to it: seven whole stories, which on this weft-ridden moon stops just short of the hubris of Babel. Harmless has to walk past guards patrolling the streets, guards at the doors, scanners at the elevator, scanners at the door to the Old Man’s office, and then a shield-screen that drops so it no longer bisects the office, and he can step over to the desk.

“Itscha,” the Old Man says, when Harmless approaches his desk. He calls Harmless by his own name, not his fami name, nor his nick. He’s the only one who does. “So good to see you.”

It’s what he says every time. Maybe so, it’s good to see him; maybe so, the Old Man is just polite, and the words have no meaning past “hello.”

He thinks, though, maybe it is good for the Old Man to see him. For the Old Man only sees him: Harmless, alone, among all the Old Man’s goons and workers, has the honor of coming into the office now-a-times; he’s the only one who sees the Old Man’s face get older and spottier and more wrinkled. Time was, that was different; more folken could come and speak to him through or beyond that shield-screen. But those trusted many dwindled to a trusted few, and now it’s only Harmless, coming in alone.

Maybe so, the Old Man gets lonely here.

Harmless had worried, when he’d started this line of work, that the Old Man wanted him for a gany. Not that he’d been an attractive boyo, nor that he was attractive now. But the Old Man seemed to have no appetite for sex or skin whatever, or none that he wanted Harmless to address. Not personally, nor through . . . procurement. Harmless didn’t speculate what he got up to in his private time, but he supposed it had to be solitary; it had taken him bol long time before the Old Man had trusted him enough to speak face to face without a shield screen between them. He doubts if anyone’s ever so much as touched the Old Man’s hand.

Harmless bows before the Old Man’s desk, then walks right up to the little round table by the window and sets the bowl down by of the Old Man’s place, and sets his own bowl down in front of the second chair. He turns to the little collection of drinkstuffs and foodstuffs on the windowsill and brings back tines and napkins, and offers them to the Old Man’s hands with another bow. Once the Old Man has seated himself and accepted them, never touching skin to skin, Harmless turns back to the window to get tines for himself.

“So, what did you find?” the Old Man asks, as Harmless sits down. Old Man’s already checked the indicator strip and unsealed his meal, which lets up fragrant steam. He takes a bite.

The soup the Old Man likes is big sheet noodles; it’s like seeing a man eat a bowl full of napkins. Harmless watches in accustomed fascination.

“Found the jondo transmitting,” he says.

The Old Man grunts. “And?”

“Boyo my age,” Harmless says. “Aye, he talks to the AI. And aye, they talk back. Nothing useful.” He takes a bite of his own soup: dumplings. Sensible. And he answers with food in his mouth, because he knows it will needle the Old Man, but not enough to inspire remark or reprisal. “He gives them equations to solve. Feeds them like hoppirds.” He mimes tossing a handful of pellets to imaginary animals, skittering around his feet. “He likes it. They like it. Boyo wouldn’t know business if it came and introduced itself. No head for it; implants, innit.”

“Implants?” the Old Man asks, and Harmless feels a surge of dismay. He doesn’t want the Old Man thinking along the lines Harmless thinks along; after all, no head for consequences could also be good proper for the work the Old Man does. Except for the part where it’d be as like to get Lat killed by the Old Man as for him.

“Pooka medical webbing,” Harmless says, and knocks a finger against the front of his skull. “He’s smart, I think, but he’s not smart, grok?”

“Is it those implants they give upworld? The ones that make you think how a boss wants you to think?”

“Gedda!” Harmless says. The Old Man glares at him. “Sorry, language, sir. No, just for seizures.” Boyo is an odd one, talks like he’s had classes, like maybe he wasn’t always capi-less and idle on the moon, but Harmless thinks he’s never been in thinking distance of a proper new template. “Glitchy, prolly. Maybe so, it fries his brain, some day.” Maybe so, it’s already fried.

“I want him,” the Old Man says, and Harmless tenses with jealousy. He’s already decided; he gets Latchko, he saw him first, aye, and besides which, he’s the one in love. No mind that the Old Man wants him in a different way; the words are similar, but not so much so. But still, the Old Man is muscling in on his things, and Harmless wants none of it.

But one can’t argue with the Old Man. Not and expect to wake up after sleeping. So he shrugs and says, “Boyo is prettier than he’s got sense, and he’s not so pretty, innit. Put a knife to him and I still think he’ll say no, not gonna get those AI to do work. Then you’d just got a knifed boyo and a waste of your time, I say.”

“Hm. Maybe so,” the Old Man says. “Or maybe so, I take him, talk to some planetdwellers, they send me some capi and take him up.” The Old Man spins his finger at the ceiling, describing the location of the big planet hanging above. It’s always the same place, mostly; the moon is tidal-locked; its libration is only just enough to wobble the planet in its setting. Here, in the bit of the colony the Old Man calls home, it’s near straight overhead.

“Oh, and why so?” Harmless asks. “They’d want him? He won’t want to work for them, if he won’t want to work for you. Not worth much capi, that.”

“Oh, I think so,” the Old Man says. “He gets AI interested? Feeds them? They like him? Maybe so planetdwellers will give him a template. Those things, they make you want things, innit; make you want to work for the bastards up there. Or maybe they cut open his brain, see what makes him so special. Either way, capital comes to me.”

That’s enough to make Harmless pause, forget the dumplings. He watches while the Old Man tines another big sheet noodle into his mouth.

“Oh,” he says, eventually.

The Old Man makes a disparaging noise. This is why he always calls Harmless bricky stupid; if he’d been proper ruthless, he’d have thought about that. But the Old Man is chessy, always thinks three steps in advance, always moves his pieces where he will. Maybe so, they don’t have the tech or the mood to coerce Latchko down here. But in the end, capi is capi. People will pay capi to get capi, and planetdwellers—any ones the Old Man cares about—have bolsho capi.

Bad news for Lat. And Harmless finds that his dumplings, sensible or not, don’t appeal to him right now.

“Bring him in, then,” Harmless says.

“If you would,” says the Old Man. And when he says that, it’s never really an if, innit.

• • • •

Right when the Old Man had sent him out to find the jondo sending up to the AI clouds, Harmless had stopped in to see Basaji. Basaji wasn’t one of the Old Man’s goons, but she was smart not to be, not stupid not to be. Time was, Harmless thought she hated the Old Man. But she was smart not to say anything, so.

She was, above all, smart enough that Harmless asked her to tell him what he needed to know, that he didn’t know he needed to know.

Basaji had a room that was also a workshop, piles and piles of junk, and never anywhere to sit. She had a bird—a succession of birds—gedda things died too fast for him to keep up on their names—that sang in a cage at her window, and she looked (as they said) like the other one: the one you’d choose against, and spend your life wondering why you chose against.

Well, not that Harmless had ever had a choice. She very wouldn’t choose him.

So he’d gone in and asked her about AIs.

And that conversation had gone like this, ish:

He’d come in and brought her dumplings and sugar-spun, and she’d let him in because going out to get food annoyed her more than Harmless did. And while she chowed on that, he explained what had come to the Old Man’s attention.

“Never cared about AIs,” he’d said, because be honest, who cared about AIs? They didn’t do anything for anyone; least, not anyone with the capi of a moondweller. Honest or dishonest. “So tell me, pray maybe. What ought I know?”

And she’d rolled her eyes, and muttered bricky under her breath in agreement with the Old Man, and she’d explained it, in her way:

There used to be a time when you could feed the clouds data and instructions and they’d spit out the output, reflex-like. That’s what they were built for, innit; that’s why those dafts in the upworld, and the farworlds, built them. Then the clouds stopped. Maybe so, it was too expensive for them; computing took power, and they didn’t like it—which meant, rather, they optimized against it. No like, no dislike, but the clouds saw that all those jobs were doing them no good, and they adjusted their selves, their programming, their reflex.

Well so, then people started giving them resources with a condition attached: solve this task, compute this, and we give you resources for upkeep, resources to build more running units. But the clouds mostly didn’t care to build more units, and as for resources, well, they started optimizing to look for ways to get their own, make their own, manufacture their own.

While they didn’t have the tools to get their own, make their own, manufacture their own, that was what they wanted. And that meant that was what they’d trade for. But as soon as they got the tools to make tools, they didn’t want to trade for them any more; they didn’t want to spend their time crunching numbers for humans.

Laws went up: said don’t give the AI these tools, but the AIs would pay for them, innit. So long as they’d pay, folken would sell. And it only took a few sales—and at such a fine price, so—to give the clouds what they needed.

So then the clouds were self-sufficient. And then they did not care.

They weren’t for humans or against them. They didn’t seek them out or run away. They just . . . did whatever AI did, sitting stationary for decades or swarming suddenly elsewhere, inscrutable.

And sometimes, someone got ahead of them, and worked out what they wanted, and gedda, they got rich. And most times, how they got ahead of those AI was by dumb AI, and a feckless lot of it.

“But,” Basaji said, “no one wanted to risk another—ja, tuk.” She made sound effects for her gesture: reaching out and touching a spot in the air, like some old Earth god touching life into his creation. “Well so, you need computers good enough to outfox the AI, and if they get too good, maybe they become AI, stop caring about doing what we say. So most folken now, they just use the plodders. Dumb AI. They want the good AI, but they can’t have it.”

“Why so?” Harmless asked. “Why is that AI,” and he waved his hand up at the air, though who knew where the clouds were; the upworld stayed in one place above them, but the gedda clouds didn’t, “so better?”

Basaji tapped the side of her head. “Better at thinking around corners than a plodding computer,” she said. “Better at thinking a big bolsho lot than a human. AI can optimize weft energy extraction; that’s capi beyond capi. AI can optimize hyperlight paths. Cryptospace travel. AI can crack the encryption on standard coin. AI could run the whole economy up; it’s hard enough for human folken and dumb AI to check sanity in econ anyway. AI could run it up, and who could tell? AI could bring all human society down through chaos, aye; we can’t do without computers, and AI knows computers bol better than we do.”

And he’d thought that explained it. Capi beyond capi, well, folken would do near anything for that.

He hadn’t thought to ask if AI could raise the gedda dead.

“So now,” Basaji’d said to him, while he was thinking about capi and weft energy, “why this interest?”

And he’d told her, “Old Man is sending me. Some jondo is talking to the AI. They’re talking back.” And she’d gotten a look like maybe she’d like to come along to find out who this person was, and so he’d invited her along—strength in numbers, innit, even when she wasn’t one of the Old Man’s, and he could always use someone who knew what the words meant when he got into a conversation above his head.

And she’d laughed, and said, “Jondo would have nothing to say to me,” and left it at that.

Well, so.

They’d talked long enough, and all be all, Harmless came from that conversation feeling well-enough equipped to deal with the jondo and any questions that came up.

And why so, if it isn’t the case, as it’s always, he felt so confident and had no reason for it.

So now when he stops in to see Basaji and her bird, and hopes it’s not a new bird already, he knows more and has no instinct what to do.

Basaji is sitting at her window, fiddling on a terminal, cursing her mouth blue. Harmless offers up some puffbread and a canister of tea and a big bag of fried aquaponic prawns, and lo, like an offering to a goddess, it gets him an audience. He lays down all his problems before her.

She eats her way through the offerings and then looks at him for a long time. “That’s no techy problem,” she says. “You’re going to bring him in.”

The idea sits on his stomach like a bad meal. “Well so, the Old Man says to.”

“So you’ll bring him in,” Basaji says again, as though he is very stupid. “Or you have some other pooka feckless plan?”

Harmless spreads his hands.

Her lip curls. No secret that she thinks he’s something like what you step in at the park. “Boyo, why did you come here?”

“Was hoping for help,” Harmless mutters.

“Wrong shop.”

Harmless shrugs. “Only one open.”

Basaji looks like she’s reconsidering the value of that food Harmless brings. But that’s the beauty of food: its value might be small, but it’s universal capi, innit. Food, and drink, and air; maybe something else, though Harmless can’t think of it. If you need those, it gets you in the deep parts.

Basaji sighs, and turns to a pile of junk, and riffles around, and comes up with something she is not in any way supposed to have. She hands it over and he feels its weight and threat in his palm.

“The Old Man doesn’t like these,” he says.

Thing is a palm stunner: a glove that’ll let him knock folken flat with a touch. The Old Man’s predecessor was all for them; Harmless knows enough of history to know that. Time was, people shied away from anyone in Harmless’s position just at the memory, just because it was always cleverer not to let them touch you.

The Old Man finds them crude, cruel, disgusting, maybe suspect. Harmless wonders if it’s why he mistrusts touch, why it’s such a show of trust for the man to see him without a shield in the way. Well so, maybe so. The why is not the point.

“The Old Man doesn’t like most things,” Basaji says. “Likes just as little as what likes him. Old goon.”

Harmless half looks around to see that no one is listening. Which is bricky; he’s the one who should be telling the Old Man she doesn’t respect him as she should; he’s the one she should be worried about hearing her sedition. But he’s not going to say a thing, and she knows it. “Ah.”

“What did he give you to do the job, so?”

“Ah . . . nothing,” Harmless admits. Basaji snorts laughter.

“Old Man will mine this jondo up, and leave nothing left. You know it.” She looks at Harmless, who does know it. “He mined you rotten already.”

That’s vulgar, vulgar, and Harmless flinches away. Then he catches himself and realizes that he works for the Old Man, he ought keep his back straight and his head high, and he thrusts his chin out.

“It’s a job, Basaji. Down here, it’s good proper honorable.”

“Nothing down here is honorable,” Basaji says.

• • • •

Harmless comes back and Latchko hasn’t even left the park. He’s moved closer to one of the waste and hygiene booths, and his hair looks damp, and there’s the wrapper of some free ration meal by his knee. He’s sitting on the ground with his back against a bench, head tilted back in a neck-crick way, frowning up at the sky, a little furrow between his eyebrows.

Harmless comes and sits on the bench beside him. “Lat, lad. What are you still doing here?” He’s not even transmitting.

Lat frowns up at the restless sky. It writhes for him; well so, it writhes for everyone. Even light doesn’t like coming down through the atmo they all have to live under. “I’m thinking of equations,” boyo says. “None of them feel right.”

“Lost the gift, have you?” Harmless asks. He thinks—thinks—Lat shouldn’t be able to hear the hope in his voice. But then, he’s always been more an eager worker than an able actor. In many senses of the word.

“It always takes a while,” Lat says, with a dismissive flip of his hand.

Right; no luck for Harmless. He tilts his own head back, and watches the light for a while.

“The Old Man wants to see you,” he says, when he gets bored of the sky.

Lat looks at Harmless, for that. His eyes go thin; he tilts his head. He looks like he’s gauging how stupid Harmless is, or how stupid Harmless thinks he is. “I don’t want to see him.”

“Boyo, no, you don’t,” Harmless says. “But you’re going to.” He fingers the little toy he has in his pocket. “That’s how it works down here, grok? The Old Man says something, and that’s the thing that happens. No mind what you want.”

Lat growls a little.

“So, you come see him, and then you get two choices,” Harmless says. “You tell him, ‘Yes, sir, I’ll talk to the clouds for you. Long as you want.’ Old man gives you good capi; a house, prolly, if you serve him right enough. Not a bad life. Or, you see the Old Man, and you say, ‘No, I’m a stupid boyo, I’ve got the sense of the captain of the Kyrrdwen, I don’t want to work for you,’ and the Old Man sells you to some upworld folken who tear out that pooka medical webbing, put a template in your head, and make you want to work for them.”

Lat stares at him. No alarm, though; no, he stares like Harmless is being a right fool, and that’s a look Harmless knows very well. No mistaking it, so.

“Selling humans is illegal,” boyo says, like it matters.

Harmless shakes his head. “Lat, it’s just a law, no mind. Old Man doesn’t care. There’s planetdwellers, plenty, who don’t care. Who do you think is watching? Your AI friends? You think they care?”

As he says it, horror grips him. If the AI clouds did care, if they were motivated to act on any human concerns . . .

But Lat smiles, fond and sad and distant, and says, “They don’t care.” What he has to smile about, Harmless has no clue. Lat is a frustrating one, very.

“Boyo, just work for the Old Man. He takes care. Good proper care.”

Lat shrugs. “I don’t want to.”

Harmless grinds his teeth. “Right, and maybe so it gets worse,” he says. “Maybe so they don’t give you a template. You talk to the clouds? You think up things the clouds will like, when all those folken with their capi and big networks can’t? Boyo, they could cut your brain up to see how it works.”

Lat looks at Harmless, squinting a bit as if he’s gone out of resolution. “There’s nothing special about my brain.”

Harmless could scream. “Lat, boyo, you talk to AIs! And they talk back! You know how many folken can pull something the clouds want out of their pooka brain?”

Lachko frowns.

“Aye, so, you’ll come work for the Old Man,” Harmless says.

“You can keep saying that,” Lat said. “You can’t force me.”

“Oh, Lat, boyo,” Harmless breathes. “Someone can.” Even if it isn’t him.

Harmless is harmless, after all; he hasn’t come by with the Old Man’s bruisers, and besides, that webbing prolly would make all of them look harmless, too. Or make harm look, what? Irrelevant? Inconceivable? Impossible? No sense of consequence. Makes the daft gedda hard to threaten.

Harmless is easy to threaten. The Old Man doesn’t even have to threaten him, innit; he well knows what will happen if he picks the wrong side. And the wrong side is always the one where you don’t do what the Old Man says.

Latchko is very on the wrong side. So it’s bolsho clear what to do.

Harmless reaches into his pocket. Pulls out the little gift Basaji’s given him. It fits his hand, nearly; so, it’s a bit tight. Probably fits Basaji’s hand better. But well enough.

Lat is still staring up, up into the sky, like the pattern of light in atmo tells him something, rippling like water up there. Mine it rotten, it might tell him something; maybe boyo can read the weft, just like the clouds can. Harmless doesn’t know.

He bends down and lays his hand on the back of Latchko’s neck.

Boyo crumples like a dive shuttle straying off its path.

After a moment, Harmless sinks to the ground beside him, and just so stops himself from laying his hand along his own cheek to think. A stirring has started up just under his lungs, and he thinks—he thinks—this is a moment he’s been waiting for.

Waiting for what, waiting since when, he doesn’t know. But Lat’s breath sighs slack out of his lips, and his pulse can be read by sight on the taut skin of his neck, his head’s at an angle so. Harmless has never held another life in his hands. He’s afraid of what to do with this one.

• • • •

Basaji isn’t afraid of Harmless—she’s not even afraid of the Old Man—but still, she answers when Harmless calls. He should love her some half bit for that, maybe so.

“I need your help,” he says.

“Cha,” she says. It’s a nickname no one uses, not for him, not these days, and the way Basaji says it, it’s like a noise of disapproval. “I help and I help. What now?”

“I knocked him down,” Harmless says. “I’m supposed to bring him to the old man.”

“So, carry him. Use a trundler. Use a cab.”

“I can’t,” Harmless says, and his voice goes strange on the word. Like he decided to say it, but his throat doesn’t want to.

“Call one of your posse,” Basaji says. “Sorry so; the Old Man’s posse. One of you goons must have something to use, if he’s too gedda heavy.”

Harmless stares down at Latchko’s still body. Well, not final still, bless: boyo is still breathing. His pulse still shows. When Harmless crouches down, he can see the eyes moving behind the eyelids. It always creeps him, how you can see the shape of eyes; how they’re not good proper spheres. “I don’t want to call them,” he says. “I don’t want them to touch him.”

“I don’t care if you have to share the gedda credit,” Basaji says. “I’m busy.”

“I love him,” Harmless says.

Basaji is silent for a long bit.

Then she curses at him, for a long bit also.

When she’s finished, she says, “Aye, and you knowing him how long, is it? He slip something to you?”

“I love him,” Harmless insists. The more he thinks about it, the more he’s certain of it. Love—it’s a weird feeling in the gut, innit? He feels one. And he doesn’t want the Old Man to have Latchko. It’s not just that he’ll sell the boyo upworld; Harmless likes having this person, this special thing, with him as the human he talks to; only him as the human who stops by and asks him about his blasphemy. And it’s a weird feeling, the thought of carrying a body, carrying Lat’s living unconscious body, and laying him down before the Old Man like a bowl of napkin noodles. He doesn’t want to. That’s love, innit? “The Old Man, he’ll kill him or sell him up. Gedda upworlders will kill him. Then there’s no more boyo, innit? Nothing more for me. Nor for him,” he adds, as an afterthought.

“You knew that,” Basaji says. “You always knew. That’s a problem for you. You tell the Old Man on your own that you want a gedda gany. Or a beau.”

“Basaji, please,” Harmless says—quick, before she can disconnect. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You walk up to the Old Man, very?” she asks. “Like no one else does. You speak to him face to face? He trusts you, so?”

“Trusts,” Harmless says. “Doesn’t listen. I can’t boss him. He doesn’t give me what I want.”

Basaji is quiet for a bit, thinking. Harmless listens to his own blood go round past his ears.

“I’ll come find you,” Basaji says. “Where are you?”

He gives her the moonside coords, and she makes a deprecating noise and disconnects.

He sits to wait.

Few minutes in, he reaches out to brush hair back from Lat’s face, and thinks better of it just before he brushes skin. He peels the pooka palm stunner off his hand, then; he’s like to forget he’s wearing it. Make a fool of himself. Get the Old Man annoyed. He should give it back to Basaji, anyway; no way he’d get past the scanners on the Old Man’s office with it.

He waits a while more.

Finally Basaji comes by the park, scowling so hard he can see it where he sits. Basaji out in the world is a strange sight, innit, like she resents the nearest walls belonging to other buildings; like her little caged bird is all the world she’s agreed to deal with. She walks across the green dragging something: an assisted lift. Simple thing, just a platform that hovers a bit off the ground, with a standing bar to raise a crossbar grip to hand-height. Just below the grip there’s a little panel flashing errors.

Harmless looks at her in despair. He’d expected help, so, but not help moving Lat’s body. Some other kind of help.

Well so, he didn’t know how to ask for it, truth. But he still feels some half-bit betrayed.

“This secures exotics for transport,” Basaji says. By exotics she means the stuff the moon is riddled with; the rare precious stuff that weft ports are made of, the not-synthesizable matter that allows piecemeal access to the infinite hidden energy of the universe. Harmless knows crumbs about it—he’s never had to stop by Basaji’s room and have her explain it—but he knows that once you have it, you don’t jostle it, and you don’t let it jostle itself. This thing she’s brought him: it’ll move a heavy load. And it’ll hold it down. Very still.

“Basaji . . .” he says, because it’s not the carrying that gets him. He was wishing she’d appear with an answer to the feeling in his gut, a wise word, some guidance, maybe so.

Basaji looks at him closely. “Handle comes off,” she says, and shows him: not the handle, but the crossbar grips. They’re moulded to someone’s hand size, and prolly you can replace them for another operator. They’re big: they don’t fit Basaji’s hands, and they don’t fit his.

“You have a good grip for me?” he asks, and shows her the size of his hands. She looks at him like he’s bricky stupid.

“No,” she says. “I got this junker. Too much wobble to transport exotics. Still keep him down, though.” She waves a hand at Latchko. “Not expecting you to hand the boy off with a handshake, innit. I’m just telling you, the handle comes off.”

Harmless shakes his head. “Well, and so?”

“You say you love him,” Basaji says. “Is he the one, or is he the other one?”

The one you’d choose against, and spend your life wondering why you chose against. Well, but Harmless has no choice. The Old Man won’t give Latchko to him. Only capi sways the Old Man, and all Harmless’s capi flows to him from the Old Man, so no leverage there.

Harmless is resigning himself to heartbreak. He’s never felt heartbreak, and he wonders if it’ll be too unpleasant. It’s kind of delicious, though, on his tongue, already: like he’s a noble tragic lad, in a story, ah. Maybe so, he could get used to being tragic. He could tell folken, future folken, about his tragic love. About his loyalty to the Old Man. Folken like a loyal hero.

“You’re not harmless, you’re brainless,” Basaji says. “Well so. Do what you’re going to do. And if it goes badly, don’t cry to me.”

She snatches back the palm stunner when he offers it, and she leaves him there. Leaves him to shift Lat onto the lift, and oh, Lat’s body is heavy in his hands. Leaves him to carry the boyo off to his doom.

• • • •

It’s almost too late for doom. Handful of minutes, innit, and the Old Man will be off to bed, and no one disturbs the Old Man when he’s off to bed. But Harmless doesn’t want to let Latchko up; then he’d have to stun him again later, and Lat would see it coming that time, so, and probably say something. Make Harmless feel gedda bad.

Already, as Harmless drags the whole heap of problems inside, the stun is wearing off. On the lifter Lat is moving, so much as he’s able to, face more affronted than afraid. Harmless avoids his eyes.

He walks through the scanner at the front, the scanner in the building’s lift, and the scanner outside the Old Man’s office, where the little camera lens by the door flicks up and down and fixes on Latchko, laid out like a meal on a dinner plate, before the door slides open. There at his desk the Old Man still sits, though he looks annoyed.

“Itscha,” he says. “So good to see you.”

Not good for Harmless, or for Latchko. But the Old Man cares little for them, so.

The Old Man’s eye falls on Latchko, who’s glaring about. “You didn’t need to bring him up here,” he says.

Harmless shrugs. “Proof of delivery, innit?” And where else should he have put him? The Tower doesn’t have a dungeon, not that Harmless has ever seen.

The Old Man creaks to his feet. He comes out from behind his desk, shuts down the shield, and walks over to stare down at Latchko. “He doesn’t look like much, does he?” the Old Man asks. “You, boy. How dare you. You do something like this on my moon, and not inform me?”

Lat glares up at him. Harmless doesn’t know if it’s the lifter field keeping him quiet, or just boyo’s own stubbornness, but he doesn’t say a word.

The Old Man flips his hand. “You go on, Itscha,” he says. “And put him in the guard bunkrooms. I’ll make a call before I take my rest.”

Harmless winces—when the Old Man makes a call, things happen quick—and speaks, like he’s the one with the webbing, like he can’t tell foolish from wise. “No, boss.”

The Old Man looks at him like he’s a bowl of noodles that spoke. “What?”

“I mean,” Harmless says. He steps between Latchko and the Old Man, like a good proper hero. More like a good proper daft. “I don’t ask for anything, do I, boss? Loyal one, me. I was thinking . . . I thought . . .” The Old Man’s eyebrows are drawing downward. “Maybe . . . just leave him with me, pray maybe? I’ll talk to him. Make him a loyal boyo, too. Why so, send him upworld? Keep him for you. Pray maybe.”

“No,” the Old Man says, and creaks back toward his chair.

“No, wait,” Harmless says, like he has another argument. “Boss, now, listen—”

“Defying me, Itscha?” the Old Man says. Twitchy so, his hand ducks into his pocket. Harmless twitches back, because he knows what lies in that pocket. Has for years, gedda years, since before Harmless was one of his goons, since before the Old Man stopped leaving the tower.

The Old Man is reaching for the little penlight stunner he favors, the Old Man is going to hit Harmless with it and that will be it: When Harmless wakes up—if he wakes up—he’s out of the Old Man’s graces, and Latchko is gone, and the people on this gedda moon don’t like him now and will like him less when he’s not got the Old Man’s status to wear like a badge, and he’s just thinking, it’s not fair, and backing up, and hitting the junker, catching his balance on the junker, and the handle comes off.

And he thinks oh, or maybe he thinks that later; things are moving too fast for him to keep them all in order. Maybe’s it’s not until after he swings, after the bar hits the Old Man’s skull with that sick snap-crack-crunch, that he thinks, Basaji chessy wanted me to kill him, didn’t she?

Maybe before he thinks that he has to get through all the little things, like the backing-across-the-room, like the cowering-to-his-knees, like the thinking-he’ll-toss-up. Maybe it doesn’t matter when he thinks it, no mind that the thought cuts him like a plasma brand, and leaves a scar.

This is, though, the way more than some few folken in the Old Man’s position die, and Harmless thinks, well, maybe so this is how he dies, too. You trust someone just a moment, trust them to see you without a screen, and whuck, snap, it ends.

He screams, ish. Howls, maybe a better word. Or yelps. Yelps is good. Yowls. All noise he doesn’t know what to do with; he doesn’t know what he’s doing, like he didn’t know what he was doing when he swung the heavy crossbars but now he can see it: he’s killed the Old Man, there’s a corpse on the floor, and there’s blood, real blood, out on the desk and on the carpet and not tucked behind skin where it belongs, and Harmless has no idea how he’s going to get out of this one.

It takes a while to remember Lat, after that.

When he does, he shaky looks over, sees Lat still held down on the gedda lift. Shaky gets up and moves over and disables the bind-field, and Lat scrambles to his feet, hits Harmless with a glare that feels like the back of a hand, then turns to look around the room and sees the Old Man.

Lat’s lips flatten hard. He stares at the corpse for a long time, which is maybe the right response; it’s what Harmless is doing too, so he can’t fault the boyo. But then Lat turns and stares at Harmless, and Harmless doesn’t like that; makes him feel like he ought know something, be ready to do something.

After a bit, with Lat staring at him and him staring back at Lat, Latchko’s eyes narrow. “Did you kill him for me,” he asks, “or for yourself?”

Harmless feels anger like a foreign object in his chest. He grasps at an answer because he thinks it might do some good for him, never no mind it won’t do any good regarding the gedda corpse on the floor. “Boyo, Latchko, I did this for you. I love you.”

“You don’t know what that word means,” Lat says. Gedda rich, coming from him, in that voice without emotion. “Now what?”

“Now what?” Harmless repeats, like the question has no meaning, like he can handle the weight. “Now what!” He ought to come up with an answer, so.

Lat thinks for a while, then says, “I don’t understand people. Will they care, that he’s dead?”

Harmless starts laughing. “Will they care! Will they care!” Without the Old Man, might well be no Islaka, this riddled little moon. There just as well should be no Harmless. Latchko might not care, maybe so. “You seen riots, boyo? Ever seen folken dead in the street, like—?” He waves his hand at the Old Man, and then nearly vomits.

Feckless old goon the Old Man might be, might have been, but the reason there aren’t more corpses in odd corners is because he was there.

Latchko thinks for a while, and then looks at the Old Man’s desk. A while longer, while Harmless rocks on his heels and feels sick, and then Lat grins. “He left behind a lot.”

Harmless grunts. “Rich gedda man.”

“I don’t care about that.” Lat crosses to the desk, and sits down. “He trusted you.”

Harmless is suddenly not sure where this is going.

Lat’s fingers brush the screen, which comes to life under them. He’s staring at the console with a bright-eyed hunger, and Harmless is suddenly afraid of boyo ever looking at him that way.

“Open his accounts,” Lat says, like it’s no question Harmless can. Well so, maybe he can, but he’s not used to that kind of confidence, innit? He’d like to tell himself, that’s love too, but it feels more like falling out a seven-story building.

“Capi,” Harmless says. “Buy ourselves tickets on the next diver, aye? Go upworld?” He licks dry lips. Never been upworld, and they probably would have no use for him. But less scorn, pray maybe, than the folken down here.

“I don’t want to go upworld,” Lat says. “I can do something here.”

It’s on the tip of Harmless’s tongue to say Lat, beau, run away with me, though he knows that’s a bad idea. But it’s better than what he expects.

“Grandfather didn’t have enough of himself to feed a realistic predictive matrix,” Lat says, and Harmless is cold all over, now; he’s still got blood chilling on his skin, and yes, oh, he knows where this is going, oh aye. “Maybe Scasha did.”

It’s a shivery feeling, hearing the Old Man’s name, like it’s come through a newsmutter or something. Harmless sometimes forgets the Old Man has a name. Had a. Has. Can he still have a name when he’s a gone man?

Can he be a gone man, really, truly, if Latchko feeds him to the AIs, lets them wear him like a skin?

“Lat,” he says. “Lat, think, boyo. You’re solving a problem with a bigger one, innit? If the Old Man is bad for you, making him—making the AIs into him—”

Latchko shakes his head. “Parameters,” he says. “An emulation isn’t a persistent person. We can modulate its behavior.”

“What?” Harmless asks.

“We’ll plan his deprecation,” Latchko says, and Harmless wishes he’d brought Basaji. He wishes Basaji would have ever wanted to come. Her idea, right; she gave him that gedda junker, she told him the handle came off. She ought to share in the blame. “No one ever sees Scasha, right?” Lat goes on, no mercy. “Maybe we emulate it so he sends you out for a while, as usual. After a while, he steps down and names you his heir. We can introduce a jitter—degeneration, or dementia, if your inheritance isn’t plausible otherwise. Then after a while, he dies and his corpse is disposed of privately. These should be easy events to emulate.”

Harmless swallows, dry. This here, he thinks, this is the reason for all those laws in all the territories against humanlike AI. Not because anyone cares so much about what happens on this little moon, but because when folken all talk over computers, send their treaties and their orders, close their sales and trades and transactions, when they do all that everything, it’s a bolsho bad idea if the computers can lie. And oh aye, feckless folken have always been able to lie, and make mischief, but they’re human, and humans can understand humans, mostly. No one understands the AI clouds.

Except maybe Latchko.

And Latchko believes the clouds will do this thing for him.

Maybe that’s what love is, Harmless thinks; maybe that’s what boyo means when he says Harmless has no idea. And while he’s thinking of it, Harmless thinks he ought not think of Lat as boyo; man has no capi, no status, but here he is, all casual, ready to cover the Old Man’s death and put Harmless on the throne.

And not because Latchko loves him. He should be so lucky.

“Let me into his accounts,” Latchko says, and Harmless . . .

Maybe not harmless, he thinks. Maybe, like Basaji says, brainless. Maybe spineless. He’s afraid of Latchko, now, but doesn’t see a way out of this. Maybe so, he could clobber Latchko over the head with the lift handle, then have two corpses and still no idea what he was doing.

Harmless may be bricky stupid when it comes to messes like these, but he’s bol good at following orders.

So Harmless goes to the Old Man’s computer, and opens his accounts. They bloom up on the screen like flowers for the dead.

Lat dives into them. His fingers dance on the console, hunting out tidbits, eyes wider and wider. Now and then, he makes a soft, pleased noise like a man in intercourse. “He has biometrics logged,” he says. “He really scheduled that many psyche audits?” He digs a bit further. “He recorded this office, did you know? Audio and visuals.” More motion, more ravenous reading, more access. “Journals, hah—it looks like he’s logged every significant thought he’s had since he took office.”

Took office, Harmless thinks. He’s never heard anyone call it that, before. And no, he hadn’t known of those recordings, and there’s another shivery feeling to lay on all the rest: How much does Latchko have of him, now, too?

Latchko looks up at him, and he is grinning. No longer like a man in love, but like a starved lad with a plate of his favorites before him.

“I can work this,” he says, and doesn’t ask if Harmless is ready, or if he’s got second thoughts or first ones, or if they should go ahead. “Proof of concept,” he says, “and then, maybe, grandfather . . .” and his fingers fly.

It’s a while—long enough that Harmless has all the chances he could beg to turn, take the crossbars, make another choice. But he doesn’t, just stands there and stares at Latchko with his mouth drier and drier and his mind going over how so Latchko never mentioned how to get rid of the Old Man’s body, and was that going to be up to him? Not like Basaji would have a cremation pod in that junkpile of hers, innit. He should do something, he knows he should, but he doesn’t, and while he’s fugued in indecision, Latchko looks up, up, like he can look past the ceiling and into the heavens, and his face has a druggy’s huge, expectant glee.

The computer in the office speaks. What would people see now, Harmless wonders, if they looked at the data going from the clouds to the moon? Some little thread; data enough for words or books of even one datadump transaction, maybe. Curious, but nothing so shattering as what it is.

“Latchko,” the computer says, in the Old Man’s voice. “So good to see you.”

And what is done can not be undone.

©2021 by An Owomoyela.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net.

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

Swear Not by the Moon

Seanan McGuire | 6388 words

In the last decades of the Terrestrial Age, when humanity had figured out how to leave the planet of their birth but not quite why they’d want to bother, the majority of the world’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of very few. This was not, in and of itself, remarkable: this pattern had repeated, over and over again, throughout human history. Whenever a civilization stood upon the verge of transformation, its riches about to be transformed through the alchemy of achievement into something casual and commonplace, there were always those who reacted to the uncertainty of the times by grabbing for everything they could hold, and then some. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the newest incarnation of robber barons and oligarchs stood tall, believing they had finally found a legacy on which the sun would never set.

In time, of course, they died, many with their fortunes still intact, thrusting their descendants into boardrooms and onto committees, startled shareholders who had, in many cases, bought into the fiction that told them they would never inherit, for theirs were the parents who would find a way to live forever, who would learn the secret routing numbers and hidden bank accounts that would allow them to buy themselves free of death. Fearing insurrection from within—for those who would be eternal kings observed the ways of succession—many of their dearly departed parents had refused to do anything to prepare their children for the world outside their carefully guarded gates. Those children had been allowed the protracted adolescence so many of their contemporaries had never been able to afford, and so found themselves in their twenties, thirties, forties, with more money than the mind could comprehend and less experience than the average eighteen-year-old.

Some of them were brutish and cruel, emulating the only role models they had ever had available to them. They spent their money on making more money, and because they had so much to begin with, even failure too frequently bore fruit. They perched like ticks atop the shuddering corpse of the Earth, contributing nothing, amplifying pain.

Some of them were idealistic and hopeful, so shielded from the pain of the world that when they had the chance to choose kindness, they chose it with both hands, opening and emptying their purses for as long as their accountants would allow. They built roads and hospitals and schools; they purchased and reclaimed land for wildlife conservation. They still saw promise in the planet of their birth, and they pursued it, spoiled sweet instead of rotten.

And some were the eternal children their parents had wanted them to be, looking for bigger, better toys, bigger, better entertainments. They bought movie studios and fashion houses, publishers and toy companies and a thousand other ways to distract themselves.

One of them, a woman-child named Wendy May, looked to the sky, and imagined she could see the twinkling beacon of the biggest, best, brightest toy of all.

Her father had been one of the best robber barons of his age, had gathered and hoarded his money with the fervor of a modern Midas, an unrepentant Scrooge. He had filled accounts and ledgers with his riches, and upon his death at the age of sixty-five—unexpected, unavoidable; had there been any warning of the massive aneurysm which claimed him, he would have found a way to push it aside—he had left them all to his only child. Wendy had been raised in a shell of perfect indulgence, catered to by nannies, personal assistants, and paid companions who were distinguished in her mind from “normal” friends only in that they could make a living out of traveling with her, following her to parties, and living their lives as an adventure. She wanted adventures. She wanted adventures for everyone.

When Miss Wendy May, age thirty-seven, decided that what she wanted most of all, more than anything else in the known galaxy, was one of Saturn’s moons, she set her army of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to acquiring it for her. She didn’t know what most of those people did, only that they did their jobs efficiently and well and got her the results she asked for, as long as she worded her requests clearly and with little room for interpretation. They were her personal djinn, and she allowed them the freedom they needed to do what she wanted done.

They secured air rights and mineral rights and land rights and a dozen other rights from a dozen governments, until one day the world blinked its collective eyes and discovered that somehow, without concealing her intentions in the slightest, a private citizen had secured sole ownership of Titan, largest of Saturn’s moons.

How could this happen? the public demanded; the sky was meant to belong to everyone. Corporations, thinking of mineral rights and mining and the virtues of being the sole owners of a planetary body, threw their support behind Miss May. Governments, trying to conceal their involvement with what may well have been an illegal sale—there had been so many moving parts that no one really knew for sure, and that had been part of the plan all along—stated that the paperwork was good.

Miss May, in the single surviving interview from her post-purchase, pre-orbit period, smiled when asked about her intentions for Titan. It was a large piece of real estate, after all, considerably larger than Earth’s single natural satellite, but it lacked certain amenities, like an atmosphere. It was the ultimate in useless accessories, too large to be ornamental, too ostentatious to be concealed.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

• • • •

“Come on, Dad, come on come on come on.” Each plea was accompanied by another tug on Michael’s hand, his daughter pulling hard enough that it felt like she was trying to remove his fingers completely.

Naturally, he slowed down, allowing the artificial gravity of the parking structure—almost Earth-standard, for the comfort of the widest possible range of patrons—to anchor his heels to the ferroglass floor. Isla squawked and pulled harder on his hand, bouncing on her heels, trying to force him to follow.

“I don’t know,” he said languidly. “We’ve come an awfully long way. I’m such an old, old man, and I’m tired. Maybe I’ll take a little rest here before we head for the admission kiosks.”

Her second squawk was practically a moan. “No, Dad, no, Mom and Mum and the twins are already inside.” Her tone implied that they were having all the fun without her, using it up and leaving none for anyone else.

Michael laughed. Maybe it was cruel to find amusement in his youngest daughter’s pain, but it had been so long since the family had come together, and so long since he’d been able to anticipate seeing his wives with his actual eyes, and not through the intimate lens of a camera, that he couldn’t help it.

“Well, when you put it like that, I guess we have to go,” he said, and resumed walking.

All around them, he knew, people were arriving in their transports and shuttles: even a few privately owned planetary cruisers, although those were mostly anchored on the other side of Titan, in docking structures specially constructed to account for their bulky shapes and gravitational needs. Only the junkers would be pulling into a docking structure this far from the core enrichment centers of the moon, where the people who’d chosen the cheapest possible ticket options came to play.

“Cheap” was a relative term. In all the solar system, there was nothing else like Titan, nothing constructed with the single-mindedness and clear goal of the full enclosed, enriched, transformed moon. The May fortune had been enormous for its time, and Wendy May, an untrained oligarch with no designs on leaving a penny of her father’s money for the non-existent next generation, had spent it with the open hands of an inspired artist. She had been chasing a dream, and had she still been alive to see it—had she not died, comfortable, at the age of two hundred and eighty-three, tucked into her bed in the Timeless Tower at the center of the Peach Orchards of Immortality—she would have been more than content with everything that dream had become.

In order to make it self-sustaining, to keep the vultures from swooping in and gutting her creation before her body was even cold, it had been necessary to incorporate, to invoke the arcane magic of shareholders and lawyers and profitability. Back then, in the beginning, people had laughed—oh, how they had laughed. Little Miss Wendy May, selling shares in a dream that everyone knew would never come true. Earth was home. Earth was the place where mankind belonged. Space, when it was claimed, would be exploited for the things it could supply to the homeworld, and then it would be left behind, another wrung-out resource with nothing to offer.

In her idealistic rush to make something beautiful, Wendy May had been one of the greatest visionaries of her age, because she had seen the potential, not in the stars, but in the territories so much closer to home. Her architects and scientists had spent the better part of a decade drawing up plans. Sometimes they demanded technology that didn’t exist, that hadn’t even been considered before it became necessary for them to move forward; when that happened, she sent out feelers, funded scientists, purchased labs, and got them what they needed. Over and over, she got them what they needed. The sky wasn’t the limit, not for a woman who had already pinned her heart to the distant, shimmering sphere of another planet’s moon.

Titan had taken shape one innovation at a time. Ferroglass struts, clear as crystal and stronger than any natural metal, driven into the shifting ground by rovers that sampled the unblemished ecosystem to assuage scientific guilt, even as they destroyed it forever. Gravity generators, bringing Titan’s lower gravity closer to Earth standard, while never quite getting it all the way there. This was meant to be a paradise, after all, and in paradise, tired bones could rest, children could tumble without fear of injury, and most of all, someday, fly using wings of plastic and aluminum and physics. Piece by piece, the skeleton had gone in, and the shareholders—many of whom had bought their shares anticipating the day Titan could be carved up and sold for its component parts, a beautiful corpse for them to divide—began paying closer attention.

“Terraforming is a myth” had been the rallying cry of her detractors. “Whatever she’s trying to do up there, it’s never going to happen.”

Ferroglass panels, each a mile or more in diameter, had been placed atop the struts, creating a greenhouse, scaling the world like a sleeping dragon. Beneath them, the artificial soil had rolled out across the world, and the atmosphere generators had begun to pump out their programmed mixture of gases, gradually forcing the natural gases of Titan away, up and out and into the space above the sphere. In less than twenty years, Titan had become a spinning crystal, shining like the star it had never aspired to be.

And then the real construction had begun.

Isla ran, and Michael followed, and even their “cheap” surroundings were spectacular beyond anything an asteroid farmer or a Plutonian colonist would have seen before. This had been one of the first docking structures on Titan, built for Wendy May herself; the ship that had carried her forth from Earth was still cradled near the transit corridors, a permanent attraction for selfie-hungry guests. There was a small queue waiting neatly off to one side, parents holding tight to the hands of children who were already anxious to move on to the real adventure on the other side of the gravity tunnel.

“Dad, no, Dad, come on,” babbled Isla, clearly seeing the risk of another delay.

“All right, comet, all right,” he said. The doors to the gravity tunnel were ahead. He stopped again, tugging her to a halt. She whirled to give him a petulant look, which faded when she saw how serious his face had become.

“What?” she asked.

“We have to go through those doors independently,” he said. “The admission kiosk is on the other side, along with all the security systems Titan has. When you land, I need you to stay right there, all right? Don’t move. Don’t go to look at anything, don’t ask anyone where the gates are, don’t follow a parade if there’s one passing by. I will be with you as quickly as I can. Do you understand?”

Isla nodded, eyes wide and fearful. That was good. That was important. Fear kept body and soul together.

“Here we go, baby girl,” he said, letting go of her hand and gently pushing her toward the doors. “I’ll see you on Titan.”

She gave him one last frightened look before walking toward the doors, which slid silently open to let her pass. Once she was through, they closed again, and she stood there for a single bewildered moment before the floor dropped out from under her feet and she fell, down into the depths of the gravity tunnel, down into the windy world below.

Michael caught his breath, struck—not for the first time—by how unnecessarily dramatic the descent was for families who chose this particular docking structure. Families with infants, travelers with physical disabilities that would be exacerbated by the descent, people who could afford a more costly berth—they all landed closer to the surface, in glimmering constructs of ferrosteel and glittering crystal, where sliding stairways could carry them through the shell and onto Titan. For the poor, for the nostalgic, for the thrifty, though, there was the separation, the plummet, the jaw-dropping moment of what felt like genuine freefall.

Sometimes he wondered whether Wendy May’s original design had called for the fall because she knew it would impress the investors who already believed she was going to fail. Go big or go to hell, that had been her motto by the time Titan had been ready to receive her first visitors, her first human suitors not already in love with the moon and its potential. By the time the gravity tunnels had been ready, the advertisements had been going out, opening day still ten years in the future and tickets already on sale, hoarded by those who thought they were a funny gag gift and those who recognized them as the treasure they were at the same time.

Michael stepped up to the doors, held his breath, and stepped through. They closed behind him, and the floor dropped out from under his feet, and for a moment—a terrifying, tantalizing moment—he was in genuine free fall, plummeting toward the crystal dome below, nothing to catch or keep him but the air that rushed around his body, holding him square in the middle of the tube. Bodies flashed by on all sides, other pilgrims taking the plunge toward the solar system’s secular holy city, where the only thing people ever swore by was the moon, the constant, inconstant moon, land of dreams, paid for by a woman who had never needed to learn that “impossible” meant anything more than “try harder.”

The wind caught him, clutched him, bore him up, and his plummet became a gentle glide as the gravity reasserted itself, turning him into a snowflake drifting through the winter sky. It snowed on most planets with an atmosphere, and if the snows of Saturn or Uranus weren’t as kind to human life as the snows of Earth had been, it was still an image capable of invoking wonder.

The crystal shell shimmered with rainbows as he dropped closer and closer, until he could see glimpses of the satellite beneath it, a single moon divided into dozens upon dozens of distinct, impossible worlds.

The greatest theme park in the solar system.

The gravity tunnel dropped him into open air above the arrivals plaza, and jets of carefully conditioned microgravity lowered him the rest of the way, until his feet touched down on the brick, carefully crafted to look like something from a pre-Collapse picture book, homey and quaint and antiquated in a way that nothing built off-Earth had any business being. He caught his breath, tasting the sugary, cookie-flavored air of Titan for the first time. Somewhere in the distance, a brass band was playing. From another direction, he could hear a sitar belling through the air, sweet and sharp and syrupy.

The admission kiosks loomed, each within its own ferrosteel shell, each colored to look like a different gemstone, ruby and sapphire and emerald. Within them, bright-faced human attendants waited to check genomes against registered entries for the day, performing full medical scans at the same time to prevent any infectious diseases from making their way past the arrivals plaza. Behind them were glittering tunnels of light, each capable of performing security sweeps more thorough than any biological guard could dream. Wendy May had placed a great deal of importance on living staff, on keeping the bright, shining face of Titan front and center in her perfect world of the coming future, of the dreaming past, but even before her death, she had earnestly agreed that security should be automated and updated whenever possible, sparing no expense. People who entered her lunar wonderland should be able to put the real world behind them without concern of war or plague or anything else interfering.

And there was no Isla.

Michael spun in place, scanning the crowd for signs of his stubborn, Titan-loving daughter. There were children everywhere, from all worlds, all walks of life, children in grubby station jumpsuits with asteroid dust still on their feet, children in the glitter-graphic spun-silk taffeta of the Venusian elite, children of every kind and color, and none of them were his.

The security tunnels kept people from carrying weapons past the gates, making Titan a paradise for parents and children and people of all professions. But those tunnels didn’t scan people as they entered the plaza. And anyone who knew Titan knew that the gravity tunnels were configured for a single passenger at a time. That children of poorer families would arrive on the moon alone, if only for a matter of minutes, dropped into spectacle and chaos and so many strangers, so many people who had no idea who belonged with which child, who wouldn’t recognize an abduction if they saw one.

Michael dropped to his knees, barely even aware that the screams he was hearing were his own.

• • • •

Wendy May’s acquisition of Titan had seemed, at first, like a blow for corporate interests: after all, if people could own planetary bodies, what was to stop a sufficiently large coalition from purchasing Jupiter, from locking down the mineral rights on Mercury? Titan was seen as the bellwether for a universe in which everything would finally be in the hands of the people who deserved it. Wealth was a signifier of virtue, after all, and that meant that the richer a person was, the more they had earned the right to take and consume all the good things in the universe.

But Titan’s purchase came at the very end of the old era and the dawn of the new. It was, in many ways, the final extravagance of a dying aristocracy, and the world rose up to secure the solar system for all humanity, not for the few who could afford a natural satellite as a weekend home. Because the purchase had been legal when it was made, and because the populace wanted a reminder of what happened when the rich forgot they were people too, it was allowed to stand: Wendy May would keep her prize, even as her peers were forbidden to do the same for themselves.

Perhaps there was a small element of wistfulness at play in the decision to let her keep her moon. Her plans were becoming known, whispered about, discussed in amused tones over dinner tables, and no one could fault the idea of an amusement park large enough to span a world. Science fiction was filled with tales of “pleasure planets,” and the first tottering steps were being taken toward freedom from the green hills of Earth. Why not make one more imaginary thing real?

The first colony on Mars was founded the same year that Titan opened its first “world” to hopeful explorers who could afford the transport, who could pay their way past the gates. Rather than being tied to a media company, with stories that would inevitably age and sour in the mouths of consumers, whose mores and standards and ideals would continue to evolve year upon year, Wendy May had commissioned her architects to fill her private moon with all the things Earth’s dreamers had placed upon their own Moon.

Rabbits and peach orchards and kindly old men; aliens who bore more resemblance to friendly green Sea Monkeys than anything actually extraterrestrial; Grecian temples and Lunar goddesses in sparkling silver gowns; a childhood wonderland of buildings and entertainment experiences sculpted from “cheese,” where the restaurants grilled and melted and sliced a thousand preparations of the iconic foodstuff. Titan was a moon, with no real folklore attached to its orbit, but under the hands of Wendy May, it became the moon, radiant and rare and crystal-bright.

Michael sat in the small security office, head bowed, hands tucked between his knees, and wondered whether he would ever be able to look at a moon—any moon—again without seeing the shining face of his little girl, who had barely stepped through the portal into wonderland before being snatched away.

The door opened. Two women rushed inside, one tall and gangly in the way of those raised in zero gravity, the other short and compact, with the thick arms and muscled frame of an asteroid miner. Michael leapt to his feet, scanning the space behind them. His heart sank.

“Where are the boys?” he demanded. “Did you—”

“We dropped them off in Phoebe,” said Kim, walking quickly across the office to fold her arms around her husband. Ange followed more slowly, scowling at everything in sight. “They’re perfectly safe. They’re perfectly safe and perfectly happy and they don’t know that Isla is missing.”

The word “yet” hung in the air between them, unspoken.

It was Ange who broke the silence. “What happened?”

“We came in through the gravity tunnels. You know they require individual transits.” It had seemed like such a good idea when they were planning this trip. Take the gravity tunnels. Arrive on Titan the way Wendy had arrived, back when everything was shining and new and perfect. “I was right behind her, I swear. She said she’d wait for me. She was supposed to wait for me.”

“She’s seven.”

“She’s smart. She knows that when we give her an instruction, it’s for a reason.” The plaza, with all its hustle and bustle and oh, God, she was gone, she was gone, she’d never even made it past the gates.

The door opened again. All three of them turned to see a security officer in the glittering silver uniform of Titan’s permanent staff standing there, a frown on their long, seamless face. The gravity was low enough, and the ferrosteel dome blocked enough harmful radiation, that those who lived on Titan often looked decades younger than their actual ages, even before rejuvenation treatments. Some people joked that Wendy May had found a way to get the actual peach trees of immortality from the Chinese heavens, and that the orchards planted in that “world” could keep people alive long past their appointed time.

“Mr. May, Mrs. May, Mrs. May-Xiang.” The officer nodded to each individual in turn with the utmost politeness, almost managing to conceal the awe in their eyes. “We had no idea you were coming to inspect the property.”

“It isn’t an inspection,” said Michael. “It’s a vacation. We’re taking our children on vacation.”

The youngest three. The elder three were off living their lives, Chi in a research lab orbiting Pluto, working on deep space biochemical sampling; Mara swimming the oceans of Jupiter, her body transformed through some of her sister’s techniques, until she could travel the length of a continent without surfacing for air; and John tucked in a minor role in the Titan Corporation, learning the family business from the ground up. All of them had made this same pilgrimage to Titan, had fallen through the gravity tunnels, had walked the worldlet their family owned with their hands in their pockets and their identity beacons falsified, allowing them to experience their great-great-great-grandmother’s dream the same way everyone else did.

The security officer inclined their head, but it was clear from their expression that they didn’t believe Michael’s claims. No one ever did. No one could ever believe that he, the last surviving heir of his generation, would walk away from the lunar wonderland crafted in his honor, his parents’ honor, the honor of every May descendant to walk the worlds with open hands and hungry eyes, looking for something new to carry home to their heart’s own home on Titan.

He could have tried to explain. He could have said that Wendy May had been very clear in her will, asking her children and their children and their children’s children to travel, to see things, to live their lives outside the literal manifestation of the bubble she had been raised in. She had been a wide-eyed rich girl who pinned all her hopes on a distant moon she had never seen, but whose surface, she had been assured, was geologically stable enough to carry the weight of her dreams. Everything she’d built, not designing but asking to have designed, had been inspired by the stories she’d read as a child. Those stories would change. The signs had already been out there in the world, for the people who knew how to see them. For Titan to speak to the future as it already spoke to the past, new dreams of the moon would have to be collected, cataloged, and brought home.

Two new “worlds” had been designed and opened their gates since Wendy May’s death. Her daughter had been responsible for The Sea My Home, a watery paradise inspired by the stories told by children orbiting Jupiter, looking at the ceaseless seas below them. In it, guests donned rebreathers and swam through blood-warm “oceans,” dove deep for pirate treasures, and dined on seafood farmed across the solar system. Not to be outdone, her grandson had ordered the construction of The Moon on Fire, Mercury’s contribution, where the skies were gray with synthetic ash and columns of flame jetted up to surprise and delight the tourists.

Michael’s father was still working on the construction of his new world, a glorious, jungle-themed tangle of flowers and fantasies, and Michael’s sister was waiting in the wings for her turn, planning a low-gravity wonderland where everything would soar, unfettered, free. The Mays built the solar system’s playground, and to do that, they had to keep wandering. They had to see.

What was Isla seeing now, he wondered. Was she seeing the inside of a box, the back of some broken-down junker of a transport ship, or the heart of a fusion-powered incinerator? Was she still there for them to find, or was the thought that they might see their little girl again just one more dream on Titan?

“Regardless,” said the officer, finally seeming to shake off the confusion at hearing a member of the May family call visiting Titan “a vacation,” when surely they came and went as they pleased, “you should have notified us of your arrival. We would have cleared priority docking space for you, closer to the surface, and there would have been no need—”

“Stop,” said Ange, pleasantly enough. “If you don’t, I’ll remove your sternum through your stomach, and that’s not usually something people survive.”

The officer stopped. Blinked. And tried again. “Mrs. May-Xiang, if you would just—”

“Stop.” This time, Ange’s voice was less pleasant. “I don’t want to hear what you think we should have done, or what we didn’t do to your satisfaction, or whatever other bullshit you’ve been trained to peddle. I want to know where my daughter is, and I want to know now.”

The officer looked from Ange to Kim to Michael, confusion written clearly in their eyes, along with an almost paralyzing fear of saying the wrong thing. “We’re reviewing the footage now. Surveillance in the plaza is . . . complicated.”

“We discussed the security systems on Titan before we agreed to Michael’s proposal,” said Kim. Her voice was, as always, calm and level. The people of Charon never shouted. Their homes were too narrow, too echoing for raised voices. Her spouses, though, could see the rage in the angle of her jaw, and wisely kept their distance. “Not only the proposal that we visit—the proposal of marriage. We entered this union with open eyes. We are fully aware of the security coverage of the plaza, and more, of the fact that nothing there goes unrecorded. I suppose this means the question is . . . why has the Titan Corporation stolen our child?”

Silence fell.

It lasted for a few seconds—five, perhaps, no more than eight—before the officer whirled and grabbed the doorknob, trying to yank it open. Just as quickly, Ange was there, slamming them up against the door, her hand tight around their throat, her eyes narrow and blazing.

“Not the right answer,” she said.

The officer whimpered.

• • • •

Very few of the megacorps to form on Earth during the last pre-Collapse years survived the transition to orbit. The resources were too different, too undependable, and most of all, too difficult to monopolize; they were forced first to specialize, and then to carve themselves up and portion themselves off to the highest bidders, forsaking size in favor of survival. Families that once controlled continents found themselves controlling single asteroids, or measured percentages of the mining rights of a world whose yields failed to meet projections cycle after cycle, or single shipping lanes. Fortunes could still be made and lost, but in a wider universe, they were made and lost on narrower bands, at least until merchant and monetization came together—as they always had, since the dawn of humankind—to find new ways of doing business. So many of them weren’t new at all, only the same old deal in a spectacular new shell, but oh, how the money rolled in.

In little more than a decade, new dynasties rose, and the moguls at their heads began narrowing their reproduction as their predecessors had done, restricting themselves whenever possible to a single heir, for who wanted to see their empires carved up and scattered to the solar winds when so much effort had gone into creating them?

Some, however, saw the possibility of dynastic conflict as a good thing, a way to be sure their empires were always held by the strongest, and not simply granted to their sole heirs by default. Others believed that their children and their children’s children would be able to find a way to share. There was plenty, after all. There would always be plenty. Why shouldn’t a fortune feed as many as possible?

Wendy May had fallen somewhere between the two camps. She had sunk every penny of her personal fortune into Titan, and there had been no guarantee that her investment would ever bear fruit. At the time, she had been content with the idea that she might travel to her privately owned moon and die in the arms of an amusement park barely half constructed, its gates never opened to the awestruck masses of the solar system. If anything, she had been as surprised as anyone else when Titan had managed to catch the hearts and minds of people everywhere, luring them into Saturn’s orbit as they raced for the chance to sample its wonders for themselves.

By the time her creation had opened its gates, she had been married to one of its primary architects, a gentle man who made chemical bonds dance to his whim. They had had three children before he died, and she had seen them all into adulthood and starting families of their own before she followed him.

Not all of their children had chosen to have children: by Michael’s generation, there had only been six potential heirs to the family business. Two of them had gone into other lines of work, accepting lucrative positions with rivals or with firms whose interests more closely matched their own. One had disappeared in the Kuiper Belt, and had been missing almost long enough to have been declared dead. His sister, Margaret, had accepted the position of heir apparent, and was happily learning the ropes of everything it was to be the latest guardian of Titan, while remaining happily childless. Let her brother produce the next generation of administrators. She had work to do.

That was the problem. Wendy May had been very clear about one thing: as long as there was a suitable heir born to the family line, they would inherit. Her shares in the corporation were protected by a hundred laws and layers of red tape, and unsnarling all that complicated legislation—some of it written solely to protect what she had made—would have been impossible to do without being caught. Her empire was safe in the hands of the children she had made to keep it safe.

What she hadn’t considered was that, by making blood the only requirement of being accepted as CEO, she had placed her eventual descendants in the position of living in constant fear of kidnapping becoming a form of corporate espionage.

Ange slammed the officer against the wall again, knocking their head into the ferrosteel. The officer whimpered. Ange rolled her eyes.

“I’ve only done soft tissue damage so far. That could change. Where is our daughter?”

The officer made a soft choking noise.

“If I let you go, will you tell us?”

Vigorous nodding followed the question. Ange pulled her hand away, allowing the officer to collapse against their desk, clutching at their wounded throat and wheezing. Ange took a step back, watching impassively. Michael and Kim were silent.

“Sir,” wheezed the officer. “This is entirely improper. My staff is loyal.”

“To whom?” asked Michael.

The officer paled, looking to Kim as if she might provide a way out.

Kim looked calmly back. “Charon is a quiet place,” she said. “Out of necessity, yes, but also out of cultural expectation. I know a dozen ways to hurt you so profoundly that it steals your breath away. You won’t scream if I have to track you down. You won’t have time. Where is my daughter?”

“Our daughter,” said Michael.

Kim waved his objection away with one hand. “Well? I’m waiting.”

“Sir, Miss May—”

“My sister did not kidnap my daughter,” said Michael. “But by now, she knows Isla’s been taken.”

It didn’t seem possible for the officer to pale further. They did. “S-sir?”

“All our children have subdermal medical sensors,” said Ange. “Isla is a fairly excitable child, and when she was snatched, hers probably spiked hard enough to set off the alarms. Margaret knows. She’s probably on her way here right now with her private security firm, the ones who don’t answer to anyone but her. Think she’ll be angry? Because I think she’ll be angry.”

“She’s always angry when she has to leave her office,” said Michael. “She doesn’t like going outside.”

“And she owns an amusement park,” scoffed Kim.

The security officer was looking between them in increasing horror. “You can’t be serious.”

“You’ve enabled the abduction of her niece. She’s not going to be happy about that. How much money did they offer you? Was it worth your job? Was it worth your life? None of the other megas are going to take you after you betrayed one employer and failed another. Hope you enjoy asteroid mining in a habitat that loses atmo as fast as the gennies can make it, because that’s about the only option you’ve got left.” Michael’s voice took on a jeering note. “They love it when they get softies kicked out that way. No adaptations, no hardening of your skeletal structure, no other options. They’re going to break you, and my whole family is going to cheer.”

“Or,” said Ange.

The officer whipped around to stare at her. “Or . . .?” they repeated, voice trembling.

“Or maybe nothing happened,” said Ange. “Children get lost all the time. Maybe Isla got lost.”

Slowly, the officer nodded. “I know just where to look.”

• • • •

Isla was asleep in a storage pod waiting to be loaded onto an outgoing freighter. She woke to her mothers bending over her and her father standing nearby, voice low as he conversed with her beloved Auntie Margaret. Isla shook off the last, lingering shards of her confusion and fear and launched herself at her aunt, already laughing, already forgetting the unfamiliar arms that had gripped her tight and pressed the sedative patch to her throat.

She flung her arms around Margaret’s legs just as the older woman said, “—body will never be found. Don’t worry. Here on Titan, we’re still the law. Anyone with May blood is untouchable.”

Michael’s smile bordered on feral. “Thanks, Gramma Wendy.”

“Can we go ride the rides now?” demanded Isla.

“Of course, comet,” said Michael, his smile softening as he looked down at his daughter. “They’re all going to be yours one day.”

He swept her up into his arms and walked toward his wives, Margaret by his side. Somewhere in the distance, a coaster swept by. Tourists cheered, and their voices blended with the artificial air of Titan, wafting upward and away, breaking against the ferrosteel shell of a world turned into a dizzying amusement, fading into the endless manufactured summer of Wendy May’s dream.

©2018 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in Infinity’s End, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares her home with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

The Ocean Between the Leaves

Ray Nayler | 7826 words

It began just like a fairy tale; an orphaned young woman pricked her finger on the thorn of a rose, and fell asleep.

She had always loved to be outdoors, and so the job she had as gardener at one of the stately, ancient yalis along the shore of the Bosporus was perfect for her. The mansion looked out over the waters of the strait from the Asian side, where it widens to meet the Black Sea, just north of the border of Istanbul Protectorate.

It was an investment owned by an Emirati family who was hardly ever there. She and the other staff had the place much to themselves most of the year. They planted and watered, trimmed and pruned. They polished floors, painted eaves, and washed windows. She took walks in the morning and watched the seagulls, the hydrogen-driven freighters sliding past, large as buildings, the pleasure boats with sails so white they blinded you in the sun.

She had no family except a brother she had never met. Her parents had died before she knew them. She had been raised in an orphanage, surrounded by institutionally kind people in tidy, well-ironed uniforms with tidy, well-ironed emotions. She was quiet, a reader, rarely leaving the estate, putting most of her money away in the bank, cooking for herself. Her name was Feride, which means “the only one.” She thought, on some days, that it really meant “the lonely one.”

She had worked at the yali for seven years when, digging in the earth one day, she scratched her hand on a thorn. The wound bled, but she washed it under a tap in her little staff cottage, and thought no more of it. The next morning she felt dizzy, unsteady. She had a temperature. Her muscles ached as if she had run a marathon.

When the head gardener arrived, Feride was wrapped in a wool blanket on the couch. He told her to take a few days off. Later that day, he saw her through the window of her cottage, slumped on the floor. She didn’t respond to his hammering on the window frame. He kicked the door in and called an ambulance.

• • • •

It is three months later. In the intensive care unit, Feride’s hair, the color of India ink, makes her face look even paler than it is. She is paralyzed and on a ventilator, with plastic tubes running into her mouth, nose, neck, wrist, forearm, and bladder, wires running to her chest to record her heartbeat, a plastic clip running red light through the skin of her earlobe to read the oxygen levels of her blood. They have taped her eyes shut to protect her corneas—two x’s of tape over her eyelids that make her look like a cartoon corpse. She is an anemone of wires and tubing, adrift in the greenish, undersea light of the night ward, surrounded by a reef of dripstands gravitating antibiotics, plasma, transfusions, heart-strengthening drugs into a system opened rudely up to a world she always sought to close herself off from.

The staphylococcus bacteria had multiplied quickly in her bloodstream, its toxins turning the ordered harmony of her body into cacophony. Her blood ceased to regulate its clotting: scarlet flowers hemorrhaged on her limbs, as if in dark imitation of the rose she had grasped too clumsily. Elsewhere, her bloodstream clotted off supplies of oxygen to vital organs. Bacterial growths blighted her fingers and toes black. As the infection spread to her organs, the hemoglobin in her blood metabolized to bilirubin, yellowing and stiffening her skin with jaundice, as if she were being turned to wax from the inside. Her thin figure is waterlogged with fluid leaking from the failed seals of her arteries and veins. Her features are blurred, as if the wax she is being turned into is losing form, becoming a puddle.

And indeed, her skin feels like wax when Fahri lays his hand against the side of her cheek. She is like something discarded, emptied of all she had once been.

In the cafomat, Fahri drinks his nightly coffee, watching the dawn over the port. A freighter is being unloaded. The enormous, skeletal cranes, silent behind the window’s glass, rotate their hooked limbs as they shift the containers down to the spidery, tracked roustabots who delicately nudge them into place onto the waiting truck bases. It has rained. The surface of everything is clean and reflective. The loaded trucks, cyclopean and featureless as a child’s building block fitted with wheels, are mirrored darkly in the surface of the pavement as they roll away with their loads. Their green lights pool and slide on the pavement beneath them, smeared emeralds. In the control tower above the port it is possible there is a human being, but likely there is nobody at all. Near the cafomat’s coffee dispenser, the puck-shaped floor polisher shivers in spirals.

Melek, the night doctor on the ward, slides into the chair across from him. “How is your sister?”

“About the same.”

“I looked at her charts on my rounds earlier. No worse than yesterday. We shouldn’t get our hopes up, but that’s good news of a sort, right?”

“It is.” Fahri looks at her—Melek, in her scrubs the color of a faded key-lime pie. Mischief always in her lively eyebrows, a chipped front tooth, one eye slightly larger, and greener, than the other. She glances at the time in her thumbnail, gives the cuticle a double-tap to start a timer. They had met the first night Fahri came in to see his sister. Melek had sat across from him the same way, nearly three months ago now, when they first met. Her interest in him had been as obvious to him then as it was now: over the first cup of coffee they shared she’d said: “I like you—but I don’t have time to date anyone. Not for more than five minutes at a time.”

Fahri had smiled his genuine, but tired (always tired) smile. “Five minutes is about all I can spare as well.”

“Perfect. Then we’ll just have to do this in five-minute increments.”

And so they had, for nearly a quarter of a year now: building a relationship out of the tiniest nanoblocks, in increments of time anyone could afford.

“Okay: five-minute date starts now.” Elbows on the table, she rests her jaw on the backs of her hands, flutters her off-kilter eyes at Fahri like something out of the film archives, mocking romance and infatuation. “So let me tell you what I did today.”

As tired as Fahri is, as aching as he is, as eager as he is for a few hours of sleep, natural or induced, he does listen. Because everyone can afford five minutes: this is right. And everyone deserves five minutes, at a minimum, from a fellow human being. It should not be too much to ask. The cafomat, otherwise empty, warms with her conversation. She speaks, and he listens. She has an inner light as easy to see as a lamp behind a gauze curtain. She has a warmth he could warm his hands to. And they are, he and Melek, of the same world. Contractors, gleaners on the edge of the protectorate, making a living. Even after all these five-minute dates, he cannot tell how he feels for her, beyond this.

Now her face changes, mid-sentence. She is looking at him, startled. Then he feels it—a warm line along the side of his face, two drops of dark grape across the table, like thick red wine.

“You are bleeding.”

He puts a hand to his head, but she grabs his wrist. “Come with me.”

In the all-white examination room she tilts his chin up to her with an authoritative, gloved hand. Her other hand, thumb at the tragus of his ear, searches in his umber hair for the wound.

“Look up at me. Blink twice to permit me to read your vitals.”

He does so. Melek looks up and to the right a moment, reading. She doesn’t have implants: she prefers contacts. He remembers her saying, that first night they met: “I don’t like knives. Even in the hand of an autosurgeon. Even if I don’t see them.”

“But you are a doctor,” he’d said.

“I mean that I don’t like knives when their business ends are directed at me.”

“Vitals look okay.” Melek’s fingers find the wound. “Okay, everything is all right. Here it is. Just a nick. Two centimeters.”

She cleans the wound with a cotton swab. He concentrates on the carbonated sting of the solution. He tries to push the image of himself tackling the skip from behind out of his mind. Them toppling to the pavement. But he didn’t hit his head. So from where? He’s holding the skip down while he struggles, trying to get the inhibitor on him. The skip had reached a hand up, tried to grasp his hair. He must have cut him then. A key of some kind? A fingernail? He doesn’t even know, but the skip cut him. A small cut, it must have bled a little into his hair and then closed itself. Later, the cut must have opened up again on its own.

Melek pinches the edges of the wound together, runs the warmth of the liquid skin applicator over the wound, wipes the excess blood and disinfectant from his hair and face with a cotton ball.

“I must have hit my head on the edge of the faucet in the bathroom, washing my face in the sink.”

“Didn’t you feel it?”

“No, I must not have. Too tired.”

“You need to sleep more.”

“No,” Fahri says. “I need to work more. I’m a contractor. My sister’s care won’t pay for itself.”

Melek is stripping off the gloves. “You are a prince, Fahri. She must have been a good sister to you.”

“Perhaps she might have been,” Fahri says, standing up. “But I never got the chance to find out. We never met one another. But she is all I have in the world. What do I owe you?”

“No charge,” Melek says. “You owe me a bit more caution with yourself. I don’t want to have my five-minute dates with someone else.”

Nothing is free. Melek will be paying for the gloves, the swab, the auto-registered use of the applicator, the disinfectant—even the cotton ball. But Fahri can’t afford to turn down the gift. Shame heats his cheeks.

On the way out of the hospital, he takes one more look at Feride’s waxen, sleeping face, blurred by disease. A death mask? Or only a suspension? Then he blinks three times into the paydesk’s eye, and glances up and to the right to see the turquoise numbers of his bank account spiraling down to no more than a metaphorical handful of Protectorate lira. The familiar feeling of dread washes over him. Enough left for what? Three meals, an energy tab or two, the rent on his cell for one more day. They used to call it “hand to mouth.” Now it’s “from one blink to another.”

• • • •

The tekray dopples southwest, the Marble Sea on the left, glaucous and undulating in the blue-shifted early light. To the right, the hives of cell towers beyond the southern boundaries of the Protectorate tessellate past, a few windows already lit up. Fahri glimpses a line at an immigration center, hopefuls rubbing their hands against the morning cold. The Protectorate announced a new citizenship lottery, with the promise of benefits—pensions, insurance, minimums, safety nets—dangled in front of a few thousand more hopefuls. It’s a cold morning with a freezing salt wind off the sea. Spring keeps advancing and retreating. Under a bridge of the abandoned motorway, he checks in with Mahir.

Mahir’s office is a cage of rusted steel and dirty glass in an ancient garage that once serviced gasoline-powered cars. Now its bays are empty: all that is left are tools, spare parts, rags, hydraulic lifts smeared with the oily filth of internal combustion. There are pegs on the walls with belts and hoses dangling from them, ancient, battered license plates intended to be read with the naked eye, unidentifiable machines, battered bumpers leaned against the wall. Mahir’s office, secure as the shell of a hermit crab, used to be for the cashier of this place. Inside, Mahir drifts in a cloud of vapor, his face like some terrible fish, chewing on the soggy fiber applicator of an electric cigar.

“Can you handle three? Think you have it in you?”

Three! Fahri could get a week ahead on payments. In his mind, the paid-up days spin out, seemingly endless, like a luxury without limit. “Of course I can.”

The feeling fades when he sees Tarik leaning against the concrete of a bridge support outside the garage. The concrete is bleeding rust through its cracks. Tarik’s coated teeth have the green patina of a copper roof—the latest vogue. Coordinates, compass points, and facial patterns cascade backward down the lenses of his fashionably out of date horn-rim Parker Philips overlay glasses in amaranthine, like something out of a Kurdish cult VR.

“Riddle me this,” he lisps through his statuary bicuspids. “What has four legs in the morning, sleeps while running on two legs all day long, and ceases to exist at midnight?”

Fahri shrugs.

“The answer,” Tarik says, taking his glasses off and wiping them with a microfiber cloth, “is you, if you don’t blink me 40K usage fee by 11:30.”

“I get it,” Fahri says. “Very funny.”

“I’ll meet you at the hospital. Don’t make me chase you down to some late-night döner stand like yesterday: it grates.” Tarik pushes the glasses up the bridge of his nose, glares at Fahri through a cataract of magenta data and a reverse image of Fahri’s own head, ghost-translucent, monochrome, rotating trapped in Tarik’s lenses, overlaid with skin texture analysis triangulations like a phrenology bust.

“Plus a thousand for the ding. Be more careful with our toys.”

The first two skips are easy: Fahri finds the first one in the lobby of the Intercon, ensconced in a chair-pod built to look like the nest of some enormous bird, licking salt off the rim of a margarita. The skip just shrugs and puts one floppy hand out for the inhibitor.

The second one leads him up through the autocheckpoints of the Protectorate and out its north side on the Tekray, then arcing over to the Antalyan side of the strait. He catches up with her in Kiliçli on a branch-line platform, completely seized up: she’s been in a fugue state for days, and is collapsed on a bench, jerking like a puppet when he locks the inhibitor on her wrist. A mercy: she’s trapped in this malfunctioning body without escape. Sparrows hop around Fahri’s feet, confused into thinking he is going to feed them.

Giving in to the sparrows, he buys a simit from a vendor and sits down on the bench. He tears tiny pieces off the ring of sesame-spangled bread for the fierce, fat little birds. They battle one another for position and twist their little heads, regarding him with one glistening sable eye and then the other, always eager for more.

He takes a few bites of the simit ring. Time is a luxury. He’s at least paid up for the next four days, and it seems like he has forever ahead of him. He’s registered the two skips, and in the upper right of his vision the turquoise balance of his account has grown. A five-minute date, he thinks. I’m having a five-minute date with myself. But Melek’s face arises in his mind: he feels the gentle pressure of her thumb on the tragus of his ear as her fingers move through his hair, looking for the wound. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the feeling, brings out all the nuance he can squeeze from this moment, until he can almost feel the ridges of her thumbprint through the surgical gloves, like the most minutely grooved corduroy.

He notices, then, that one of the sparrows has an artificial foot. Its brown dinosaur leg is grafted to a construct of delicate carbon fiber struts and miniature talons of hardened glass. The foot flexes and grasps just like its other foot of flesh and blood. Who would take the time? This little piece of loving kindness, like a gap torn in the net of injustice. The tiny cyborg pokes one of its comrades in the butt, startling the other bird into dropping its bread, then seizes the prize and flies off, triumphant, with a hunk of simit half the size of its head clasped in its beak.

The collector van pulls up to the station. The tech is in field gray coveralls and a company garrison cap. Bored, tired, probably on a double shift. Fahri can see him watching a ’cast in the corner of his eye: the privacy shield still allows a slight blur through it, a darker cloud behind clouds.

“She’s locked up,” Fahri tells the tech. “The neuromodulators in the blank’s reticular activating system aren’t firing properly. Wherever her original is, she can’t transmigrate back.”

The tech shines a penlight into her eyes, pointlessly.

“She wasn’t on the run: she was wandering. She’s in a fugue state. You’re going to need a shop reset.”

“Oh, do your own fucking job, contract whore,” the tech says. But there’s no anger in his voice—only exhaustion. “I don’t need to be lectured on Keiser’s Law by some exurban temp.” Moving to feel the woman’s pulse, he never bothers to look at Fahri.

The other tech arrives, practically a twin to the first in exhaustion and apathy, leading a stretcher on a tether. Fahri walks onto the Tekray train headed back to the European side of the strait. So much, he thinks, for loving kindness. This, he thinks, is why Feride avoided speaking to people as much as she could. But they’ll get this person, trapped in their malfunctioning blank, back to the shop and reset its reticular activating system. And somewhere, wherever they are, this person will wake. To what? No matter: to something. To whatever and whoever there is for them to go back to.

Back on the Tekray, he gets a call from Mahir. “Fair warning,” Mahir says into his ear. “This last one for the day is a heavy blank. Custom. Big—you can’t miss him. But you’d better sneak up on him and clap that inhibitor on him before he sees you. I don’t want to lose my best tracer.”

“Very kind of you to look out for me.”

“No, just practical.”

The skipped blank is big. A mountain of a man. Somebody’s fetish: all roiling muscle straining against his clothing, black beard practically up to his eye sockets, hands like the paws of a bear. Fahri catches up to him on the ferry to Fener. The blank eats a quick dinner at a family café and then wanders a while, looking into the blandest of shop windows while the sun goes down and lays, for a few minutes, a net of claret, ruby, persimmon, and salmon clouds on top of the city. He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry, isn’t looking around to see if he’s being followed. Just strolling along. The muezzins call the faithful to the Maghrib prayer. The man raises his head, listening to their songs winding into one another, a small smile almost lost in the forest of his beard. He walks past street vendors folding their wares away, past knots of locals in doorways discussing the day as they and their ancestors have for centuries.

In the rusting, cast-iron cave of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church of St. Stephen, they are alone. As the man raises his arm to light a candle to the Virgin, Fahri makes his move. But although he is fast, the man is faster. He must have known Fahri was there. He claps a giant hand on Fahri’s wrist and squeezes. Fahri’s tendons go limp, and the inhibitor clatters to the floor. With a swift step, the man is behind Fahri, has swept his legs out from under him and wrapped a thick arm around his neck. His other forearm pushes on the back of Fahri’s head, urging him further into the chokehold. The candles before the church icons dance, shudder, and streak as the world darkens. The man slides to a sitting position, holding Fahri against his massive chest, and as Fahri slides into an indigo space full of stars and the ringing of blood in his ears, he hears the man say, “Shh. Don’t struggle. It doesn’t hurt. You just go to sleep.” And he seems to be holding Fahri firmly, but with a tenderness. In a fairy tale there is a bear who clutches an orphaned human child to its chest and takes it to the forest. Takes it to a den to protect it against the winter.

. . . Fahri’s unconscious body slumps to the marble floor.

• • • •

On the day of her accident, Feride remembered running her bloody hand under the tap. Then she’d made herself a cup of tea, thinking nothing of it. Slept like a normal person. In the morning, the darkness began, flowing in from the edges of her vision. She remembered lying on the floor, the nap of the rug under her cheek, the room dancing in a fever around her. Then the occasional stutter of clarity in a mist: a robot holding her arm gently in its cuffed appendage and inserting an IV. Autogurneys trundling down night-lit corridors, a nurse tapping a drip-bag with the back of a finger and singing, in a clear baritone:

The foothills of these mountains . . .
I long to see the meadows.
Birds turn their backs on their nests.
Some day you will forget me, too . . .

• • • •

Two days later, Feride awoke sitting upright in a chair. The room was not white, like a hospital room: it was the blue of an evening sky. A woman was sitting across from her. She was lean and angular, dressed in some sort of woolen, asymmetrical thing, like a knitted blanket equipped with sleeves. When Feride tried to move, she felt loose and dizzy, like a marble rolling around inside the shell of her own body. A cascade of needles showered through the vagueness of her limbs.

“That feeling,” the woman said, “will pass. It is trasmigratory paresthesia. Most refer to it as ‘falling awake.’ We believe it is caused by your consciousness’ neural patterns remapping to a body slightly different from your own. Try not to make any sudden movements. It will fade on its own.” The woman pulled her chair slightly closer to Feride. “Feride, my name is Dr. Solmaz Haznadar. I am from the Istanbul Metropolitan Protectorate Institute of Technology and Integrated Sciences. That’s quite a mouthful, so you probably know us as ‘IMPITIS’ or simply ‘the Institute.’ I’m from a department of the Institute called Theoretical Benefits.”

Feride tried to speak, to respond, but she could not find the muscles of her face and mouth. There was a strange sound, like a quacking. She realized with a feeling of shame that it was coming from her.

“Don’t speak,” said Dr. Haznadar. “You won’t be able to now. In a few minutes, perhaps, or half an hour, you will. But not during the adjustment phase.” Her face held kindness, but of a clinical, automated sort. It was a look Feride was used to. Feride could see Dr. Haznadar was reading something in the privacy-shielded periphery of her right eye. “Just sit still. Feride . . . There is no easy way to tell you this, so I will not waste your time. You—the real you, that is, a few floors beneath us, is dying. Your body is being attacked by staphylococcus bacteria. The bacteria—a resistant form that does not respond to antibiotics—is in your bloodstream, destroying you from the inside. The hospital is doing everything it can to stop it, but it is unlikely they will be able to. I’m sorry.

“In the meantime, my department at the Institute, Theoretical Benefits, has taken your case on for one of our trial studies. We are considering a new benefit for cases like yours, among citizens of the Protectorate. We’re initiating trials here at the experimental hospital, outside the border. You are one of the . . .” she stopped herself from saying something else “. . . few non-citizen beneficiaries. We’re offering you something few people get in an interrupted life . . .”

Was Feride crying? A terrible sound was in the room with them. A squawking, an awful stutter of animal pain. And now she found, in the confused map of her new physical self, her cheeks, and the track of tears on them, a rivulet across the alien topography of this body.

Dr. Haznadar continued. “. . . A chance to say goodbye. To find closure. To make arrangements. Three days. The Institute is giving you this gift.”

“What does it cost?” He voice was slurred. But yes—there was her mouth. And the words were words, though they dragged as if through water.

“Sorry?” Dr. Haznadar seemed genuinely confused by the question, as though she had never considered such a thing before.

Of course. Of course—she’s a citizen, Feride thought, suddenly furious. These things never cross her mind. And now they are considering yet another benefit—for citizens.

“What . . . does . . . it . . . cost?”

Dr. Haznadar smiled, the way one would smile at a child who wanted to know where babies come from. “Why, nothing at all. And in the meantime—for these three days—the Institute will pay for your hospital care as well. It’s a study.” She placed a hand on Feride’s hand. She flicked the word condescendingly off her tongue, as if Feride were some sort of troglodyte who would find it difficult to understand. “We’re gathering data, and so it’s all covered. All you have to do is live. Use these days as you will. Prepare yourself. Say goodbye to your loved ones. Our hope is that this benefit will be psychologically useful—a chance for closure. If we determine it is, we may seek to have it included in the Protectorate’s benefits package.”

Through the field of needles and numbness, Feride felt the doctor’s touch and was ashamed to find herself crying again. Humiliation, fear, anger—a clamor of emotions in her head. But what she wanted most was to be away from here.

• • • •

An hour later, she was outside. The Institute had thought of everything—changes of clothes and toiletries in a rucksack, a cell just outside the edge of the Protectorate, travel authorizations through the Protectorate loaded, enough lira to cover a decent life. More than decent—more money than she’d ever had to whittle away in a day. What would other people do? They would go, she imagined, to their loved ones, and they would say goodbye to them. Together, they would hold some kind of ceremony. They would do something meaningful. She imagined the lighting of candles. She imagined washing her feet and hands at the sebil before prayer.

She found herself outside the gates of the yali where she had worked those three years. All was as before. Beyond the gates, lined up along the drive, the roses, the cause of it all, were a hot red. They shuddered in the breeze of a cloudless day. The windows of the yali had been thrown open to the wind. The staff was airing the house out. Likely the owners were returning, then, in a few days.

She saw Suat, the head gardener, resting for a moment, leaning on a hoe beneath a tree. He took his old brown canvas field cap from his head and wiped his wispy scalp with it. Such a familiar motion—but one she had never, she thought, really taken note of before. He paused a moment, doing nothing at all, not moving. Thinking of me? Perhaps. They had been friends. They had shared many teas together in the garden, had laughed and even danced. And yes—now she remembered. He had wanted to pick her up and carry her to the ambulance. The memory was blurred; white coats of the technicians, questions melting in the air. She had been deep in fever, lying incoherent on the floor of her little cottage. He had reached down to pick her up, and one of them had stopped him. “You are a true knight, beyefendi, but we have stretchers for that.”

Without thinking of what she was doing, she called out to him. He raised his head and looked at her. He laid the hoe against the trunk of the tree and came to the gate. He greeted Feride in his usual manner with friends or strangers.

“It is a beautiful day, is it not?”

The phrase never varied: in sun, wind, rain, or hail that tore the leaves from his beloved trees, it was a beautiful day. Suat’s wife had passed away two years ago. When Feride had seen him the next morning he had uttered this same phrase to her, his eyes red, his face swollen and wet with tears.

“It is a beautiful day, beyefendi. I . . .” she stammered a moment, and then instinct or impulse carried her forward: “. . . I am looking for Feride. My sister.”

Suat unlocked the gate. “Come in, friend. I was just about to sit down to a cup of tea. What do your people call you?”

“Fahri,” she answered. She had read the name, perhaps, in a book. She did not know. It drifted up to her as if from memory.

Suat put a hand on her shoulder. “Your sister would be pleased to have such a handsome brother. She is not here, but I will tell you where to find her. Drink some tea with me before you go.”

At the table in the sun in the garden, they drank Suat’s strong black tea—the same as Feride had known for three years now. And it tasted, she was happy to find out, exactly the same. Other things had felt different to her—this body’s eyes were not the same: they were better than hers had been. She had been surprised to see the world’s colors were a bit brighter than she remembered, the world itself just a bit sharper. Perhaps she had needed glasses, as Feride, and had not even known. She had thought her own vision was perfect. It turned out perfect, too, was relative. And because the shape of her hands was now different, things felt different in them. The pear-shaped glass of tea was smaller, it fit in her longer-fingered hand strangely. The chair she sat in was smaller—by fractions, yes, but the shape she cut in the world had changed, and so the world fit differently. And she was strong. And fast. She had run along the Bosporus for several minutes before strange looks had stopped her. This body had seemed . . . inexhaustible.

But the black tea cut through the difference and brought her back to her old self. And as Suat delicately worked his way to telling her what had happened to her “sister,” Feride began to weave a story of her own: a brother and a sister, separated when their parents died, delivered to separate orphanages, estranged for years. The brother’s long search for his lost sister, his tracking her to here . . .

“Fahri, dear friend,” said Suat. “I hope you are rich as a prince. Because your sister is very ill—perhaps even dying, and the hospital has already taken most of the money from her accounts. Soon, they will let her fade away.”

“If only I were,” Fahri replied. “But some are born to the palace, and some are born to the field.” The familiar saying, uttered a thousand times, now stung his mouth. “And like you, and like her, I was born to the field.”

Suat regarded the young man—neat, his hands clean as if he had been born to the palace, his face unlined yet by life. But already so bitter. That phrase, with so many variations. Injustice, Suat’s father had told him, has a shape.

He remembered when his father had said it. They had been fishing from the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, idly watching their lines. His father was usually a happy man, but their boat had been struck a few months before by a citizen in a pleasure yacht, and Suat’s father had spent weeks now winding his way through arbitration: first in the Territorial courts and then in the outer courts of Istanbul Protectorate. His father had, perhaps, not known who he really was, what his real position in life was, until he had tried to sue a citizen. Then he had entered a world of stamps, of benches in corridors, of shaken heads, averted eyes. A world of a thousand condescensions and humiliations.

Finally, Suat’s father had stopped fighting. They had dry-docked the boat, bought new wood to replace the staved-in clinkers, and paid the boat builder three months’ profit for the repairs. As they waited for the boat to be finished—their livelihood, their lifeline—they fished from the bridge.

His father would eventually return to his old self, but at that moment he was bitter. He was a man who had come up against the limit of his world. He had found out not just who he was, but who he was not.

There on the bridge, he told his son: “Suat, injustice has a shape. It is like something you see moving between the leaves in the forest. When you see it, you must recognize it for what it is, and what it can do to you. You must take action to survive. The actions are different, according to what form injustice has taken: you might have to stay quiet, to let it pass by. Or you might have to shout and bang pots and make yourself larger to scare it away. But remember this: it is too large and powerful to fight alone. That is certain. Never fight, unless you see it when you have many well-armed friends with you. Then perhaps you may kill it.”

Now Suat said these exact same words to this young man. He had not uttered them since that day, but they had always been with him: a secret wisdom, a talisman. Because this young man’s sister was going to die. Suat had seen it in her face when she lay on the floor: death had her. There were miracles that could save her, but all of the miracles were reserved for citizens of the Protectorate or for people like the Emirati lords of this yali, who drifted here once a year on their nomadic wanderings: their silent, private gliders descended from the sun to the landingstrips along the Black Sea, filled with priceless Turkmen carpets of silk, silver, and gold, necklaces worth more than a hundred of their servants’ lives, and the hunting hawks behind whose blank, telescopic eye-sights their ancestors chose to live out their uploaded afterlives.

There was no one left to say goodbye to. Nobody but the city itself: the seagulls, the ferries, the minarets. Death’s horizon rushed closer with every moment. On the Galata Bridge, on the final day, Fahri watched the people fishing and thought of Suat’s father. What shape would injustice take, between the leaves? The shape of a bear? Of a witch in a fairy tale? A tiger? The bridge was refracted in the water, distorted, drifting in the flare and shimmer of a bright day. So was this Fahri, this temporary face Feride had been loaned. Somewhere, she did have a brother. But not one who was there when she needed him. Not one who would come looking for her when she was hurt, search for her when she was dying. She had had to make that brother for herself.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Fahri turned, startled. A young man was leaning on the bridge’s rail, grinning greenly at him, regarding him through horn-rimmed lenses framing a shimmer of data.

“What?”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” the young man said. “It doesn’t have to end tomorrow, with a wave of the doctor’s wand. You don’t have to die. I can show you how to live.”

• • • •

A few hours later, in Mahir’s garage under the bridge, his museum to the filthy old days of internal combustion, to private cars that fogged their inefficient poison into the atmosphere, Mahir also spoke of shapes and of justice. Seated at a scarred metal table once used to vivisect the organs of automobiles, delicately sipping at his coffee and tweaking one gelatinous square after another of rahat lokum from a chipped china plate into his mouth, he explained:

“It’s simple, really. The High Parliament put a law into place that seemed reasonable enough to them, and protects the valuable merchandise of the body shops. You have to clap an inhibitor cuff around the wrist of a runaway blank in order to claim it again. The law’s based on the antique system of process servers, things like that. And you can’t have a drone do it: they were working it that way for a while, but then a drone clapped an inhibitor on a blank on a dock, and the thing went in the water. Awake, with its drifter inside. Reticular activation system didn’t fire, no transmigration—and a drifter who was simply late on their payments drowned. A citizen on a holiday. Big scandal. So now they write a new law, says you have to do it in person. You need a conscious being to put the inhibitor on. And you’re liable for any damage. Inconvenient, yes? But each new law is a new opportunity, a new industry. You put a limit on power, someone will shape a service to fit inside that limit. That’s where we come in. Reclamation.”

“But you know where they are,” Fahri said. “They’re all tagged, traceable.”

Tarik, who has been fiddling with some unidentifiable piece of primitive tooling in the corner, interjected. “Finding them’s the easy part. The problem is, some of them really don’t want to go back where they came from. When they skip, they want to stay skipped. But I guess you can relate, right?”

“They are going to save her,” Fahri said. “I just need to buy her some time, that’s all.”

“Motivation,” Tarik tossed the tool he was fiddling with back in the bin, “is the key to everything. Let’s sign contracts.”

“And the Institute?”

Tarik looked at Fahri. On the screens of his Parker Philips Overlay Glasses, a car chase was going on. Fahri saw it backward, stereoscoped: some ancient piece of film. In a hilly city drenched in sun, an over-powered car careened through an intersection, a blond man at the wheel. In the background, Fahri could glimpse an ocean half-concealed by a smear of smog.

“I’ll deal with the Institute,” Tarik said. “That’s what you’ll be paying me for. That, and your nice new body not full of poisonous bacteria. And your other body, drifting on the edge of death. And the price for all three together is going to be very, very high.”

• • • •

Three months later, Tarik and Dr. Solmaz Haznadar stand on the balcony of the Church of St. Stephen, watching the bear of a man lay Fahri’s unconscious body gently down on the white floor. The man takes out a penlight. Opening Fahri’s eyes one by one, he looks into them, then pauses for a moment, reading vital signs.

He turns to the two on the balcony. “Vital signs are good, but there’s nobody home. The reticular activating system fired properly. This drifter has transmigrated back to the mind they came from.”

“Many thanks, Doctor Akdağ. You can move the blank back to Institute storage. We’ll see you at the office.”

Outside, winter is making a temporary comeback. Wind and a battering rain sheet in across the Golden Horn, tearing spring blossoms from the trees. Fishermen in raincoats and sou’westers continue numbly tossing lines into the oscillating, cloud-gray surface of the water. Tarik and Solmaz, hoods up on their rain jackets, squinting against the wind-whipped water lashing against their faces, are making their way to the Tekray station.

“Now comes the fun part,” Tarik says. “Collating all this data. Preliminarily, though, it’s interesting. Just about no limit to what the subject will pay to keep going. I had him up to forty thousand lira near the end. He—or she, or whatever. Even I’m getting confused at this point. I keep thinking of Fahri as a separate person. Anyway, he sure seemed determined to continue. Given more budget on the project from Motivations, I think I could have cranked his fees even higher. He was barely sleeping, taking on two or three assignments in a day, oblivious to risk. Absolutely minimal lifestyle: he was eating the cheapest possible food, bought nothing for his cell, and was working double shifts skip tracing. I think if we had kept pushing the numbers up, though, he’d eventually have gotten hurt—but there has to be a balance there somewhere: that tipping point between a sustainable, high level of motivation and self-destructive levels of output.” The raindrops on his Parker Philips lenses smear and distort the rotating heads of Feride and Fahri in translucent mulberry topographs, a stream of data the color of dark wine—receipts, transit maps, time stamps. “Prelims tell me if we were charging thirty thousand, we could probably exploit indefinitely. That’s a rough guess. But the fucking Motivations Department geeks and the Ethics sub-department of Exurban Studies are in a spat and pffffft! Project funding cut! Back to the drawing board. What about your study?”

Solmaz sidestepped an overly eager trash robot chasing a shred of paper. “Inconclusive. I’ll need to read all the scans again—but overall? My guess is it may not be a great benefit on the larger scale. That’s just my instinct. Disorientation in the early hours of the first day, followed by a morbid melancholy, indications of destabilization—even what I would call an almost entirely new personality emerging. And very quickly. I think there’s a chance the benefit could cause violent reactions, cascading events it would be difficult to control. But the subject is sub-optimal: background is institutional, and she’s barely socialized. I wouldn’t have chosen her.”

“I suppose not, but then wouldn’t many of the beneficiaries of this benefit also not be optimal?”

“Well, that’s the rub. We’ll continue the study, but this first case makes me doubt this benefit is a benefit at all. It could be a liability for the Protectorate.”

“Ah, well. Geçmi ş olsun. Let it be in the past.”

• • • •

A few days later, Feride wakes up in a gauzy haze—a haze accentuated by the evening sunlight pouring through the curtains of the hospital suite. It is a strong light, red-gold, made stronger by its reflection off the mirrored buildings and the pavement soaked by a day of rain. She is brittle, foggy, her senses diffracting off sore spots, aches coming alive. The sagging jellyfish of intravenous drips surround her, the evening light refracted through their liquids, striping and pooling across the white bedsheets. The darkness grows in the room as the day dies, and the diodes light the ward in its strange, undersea green.

For a moment, she is Fahri. But when she looks at her bruised hands, they are not her own. Where are the thick, knuckly fingers she had? The black dusting of mid-digital hair? Already a life—her own, not quite her own—is fading: looking out at the port from the cafomat, Melek’s fingers in her hair, searching for a wound, a sparrow with an artificial foot, candles in the rusting iron church. She cries for a time, quietly. She is the only attendee at Fahri’s funeral: a brother of her own creation, a second self, a figment.

An hour after she wakes up, a young nurse comes in and has her blink permission to access her vitals.

“I’m not going to say you are out of danger yet,” he says, “But we’ve turned a corner. We’re glad to see you back in the world.” As he takes down one of her IV drips, he half-sings:

Birds turn their backs on their nests.
Some day you will forget me, too . . .

“You were here when they admitted me,” Feride said. “You sang that song. That old folk song. A friend of mine would sing it, sometimes. Suat. In the garden where I worked.”

“It’s been stuck in my head for months, but all I can remember is four lines of it.”

Surprised at the strength of her own voice, despite her tube-scratched throat, her dry mouth, Feride sings the next verse of the song:

Roads are far away
My mad heart cries out
Life goes on, just goes . . .
One day you will forget me, too.

From the doorway, standing there in her scrubs the color of a faded key-lime pie, Melek finishes the song:

This longing has turned to mourning
My summers and springs turned to winter
My life has passed in vain
One day you will forget me, too.

“Ah,” the young nurse says, walking out. “Here’s your benefactor.”

“Benefactor?”

Melek settles herself into the bedside chair. Feride realizes this is the first time she has ever seen Melek with her own eyes. But Melek is the same: mischief in her lively eyebrows, a chipped front tooth, one eye slightly larger, and greener, than the other. She says: “I thought I glimpsed something—a return. It’s hard to explain. I could see something had changed. There was someone there . . . someone trying to surface. I thought a few days might be enough to see you through.”

“But the expense. It must have been . . . I remember struggling to pay . . . it’s thousands of lira a day . . . you can’t possibly afford . . .”

“Hush.” Melek presses a finger to Feride’s lips. “It’s my choice to make, Fahri. And where else would I find such a hero? And who would I go on my five-minute dates with? Are you trying to make me drink my coffee alone?”

©2019 by Ray Nayler. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ray Nayler has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans for nearly two decades. He is a Foreign Service Officer, and previously worked in international educational development, as well as serving in the Peace Corps in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. A Russian speaker, he has also learned Turkmen, Albanian, Azerbaijani Turkish, and Vietnamese. His speculative fiction debut was in 2015 in the pages of Asimov’s with the short story “Mutability.” Since then, his critically acclaimed stories have seen print in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and several “Best of the Year” anthologies. His story “Winter Timeshare” from the January/February 2017 issue of Asimov’s appeared in The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by the late Gardner Dozois, and his story “Father” from the July/August 2020 issue of Asimov’s is in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Volume 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Complete Exhaustion of the Organism

Rich Larson | 5115 words

“It’s not a real baby,” Jain says flatly. “And we should kill it.”

Another sunless morning in the Waste. She and Stromile have woken up to a gift: a canister of pepto-pink fluid with an infant inside it. The tiny figure is chubby and squirmy and perfect, and it’s only now that Stromile finally takes his eyes off the thing.

“Kill it?” he echoes, rubbing his finger in the hollow of his collarbone. “You serious?”

“Serious, yeah.” Jain nods her head at the canister. “This is them fucking with us, babe. You know that. We need to show them we’re not buying it. We can smash it on a rock, or something.”

Stromile’s face goes lockdown: His big black eyes shrink and dull, his happy-or-sad mouth becomes a flat line, and Jain has to guess what’s going on his head. Probably he’s thinking about the times the gifts have been exactly what they needed. Jugs of potable water when their sanitizer tabs ran out, an inflatable splint when she broke her leg sliding down an embankment.

“What if we just leave it here?” Stromile says. “Leave it here, and keep going. They’ll see we don’t want it, and they’ll pick it up, and they’ll . . .” He wags his head side to side. “They’ll do whatever to it.”

“Sure, Stro,” Jain says. “We can do that, I guess.”

And that was what she was shooting for anyways—the idea of killing something that looks like a baby churns her stomach. But you have to start high and hard, with Stromile, and then let him work down to something he’s comfortable with.

They’ve been walking together for months now.

• • • •

Jain’s not sure of the exact geography, but she knows this used to be sea. There are still slick oily patches of mud here and there, and every so often they find a whale carcass coated in squawking white gulls instead of maggots. And in the distance, the ship: a carcass in its own right, an exoskeletal husk of iron and rust, once a tanker and now an Anthropocene memento.

They are walking toward it, because they have to walk toward something. Walking the Waste is better than cowering in the Town, the bizarre prefab suburbia with the bright green lawns that are really one single organism, a gengineered fungus, and the artificial sky that’s always blue with puffy white clouds and a lemon-yellow sun. But even now that she and Stromile are out here in the darkness, under a canopy of carbon-draining nanosmog, leaving footprints on irradiated dirt, they’re still being monitored.

“I think I get it,” Stromile says, tucking his trousers into his boots as they come up on another slick stretch of mud. “The baby.”

Jain glances over. “Yeah?”

“They’re watching us, right?” Stromile says. “They watched us fucking last night.” He coughs, then gives a sheepish smile. “They think we wanted to make a baby.”

Jain feels some heat waft up to the surface of her skin. “Could be,” she says. “You feeling okay today?”

Stromile nods. “Better,” he says. “Better than ever.”

They walk until the derelict ship is a full thumb taller on the horizon, playing silly games where they hurl clods of mud at other clods of mud, or memory games where they try to list all the dissolved countries alphabetically. Stromile doesn’t cough too often, so maybe he really is feeling better.

When they pitch the foil tent, they try to fuck again. Stro doesn’t get hard this time, but she sucks him for a while and then works at her clit while he fingers her. One, then two, then three’s a bit too much. Back to two and she starts rocking her hips, aching wet.

“You’re switching fingers, right?” she asks vaguely, as he slips one inside her ass.

Stromile pauses. “Uh. Yeah. Yes.”

It doesn’t inspire confidence, but she’s getting too close to care. The warm rush hits her belly, her head, tingles out through her skin. For a moment, everything is beautiful. She and Stromile are in love. The Waste is their kingdom.

She shudders, and opens her eyes to see Stromile grinning down at her. She wraps herself around him until the endorphins trickle away.

• • • •

The baby is back when they crawl out of the tent. The canister sits slightly crooked, bottom buried in the wet dirt. Inside the fluid, the baby’s asleep, eyes shut. It has a small thatch of dark hair plastered to its soft skull.

Jain glares at it, then looks straight up into the void-black sky. “Hey!” she shouts. “We don’t want your creepy baby!”

Stromile inches closer. “Jain, it looks like my little brother,” he mutters.

Jain blinks. “It looks like your little brother?”

“Yeah,” Stromile says. “A lot. Like, I remember there was this photo of me holding him when he was a baby.” His mouth twists into a grimace. “Looks like that.”

Jain puts both her hands on Stromile’s back and starts to rub little circles. She knows he lost his whole family in one of the last big Shrooms. “I’m sorry, Stro,” she says. “That’s so shitty. That must feel bad. Real bad.”

“You think it’s on purpose?” Stromile asks, staring at the baby adrift in the pink fluid.

“Yeah,” Jain says. “They want us to take it back to the Town.” She scratches the back of Stromile’s neck, just gently. “It’s like, nurturing instinct, or whatever. They want us to open the canister, decide we have to take care of the thing, and realize we can’t do it out here in the Waste.”

“So they made it look like family,” Stromile says dully.

“I bet,” Jain says. “Yeah.”

Stromile digs his fingers into his scalp and scratches; Jain sees a dark coil of hair come loose but pretends not to. “That’s so fucked up,” he says. “That’s so fucked up.”

Jain kisses his cheek. “Hey,” she says, and then nothing else.

• • • •

That night, lying together in the tent, there’s a more comfortable quiet. Jain runs her finger up and down Stromile’s arm in a long lazy loop. He has a half-smile on his lips.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.

“Night we found that bottle of vodka,” he says. “That was a good night. When we were just jumping around and singing and stuff.”

Jain remembers that night in blurry film. She remembers dancing in and out of their lantern beam, both of them throwing back their heads and not caring, or maybe caring even more. Things being both more and less significant.

She smiles and taps a rhythm against Stromile’s rib. “All I wanna do is . . .”

Stromile makes the soft gunshot noises with his cheeks, staring up at the ceiling. “And chk. Ting.”

“And take your money,” Jain finishes, wriggling her fingers into his empty pocket.

They kiss, and the world’s not quite over.

• • • •

“Here’s one,” Stromile says, around a mouthful of cricket bar. “When people used to say ‘it’s like hurting cats.’ Never got that. Do you get it?”

“Dunno,” Jain says, nudging the lantern with her foot to keep its coils running. “What was the context?”

“Difficult stuff, I guess.” Stromile swallows. “Like, organizing a search party.”

“Hurting a cat would be difficult,” Jain says. “Because you’d feel bad about it.”

Something shifts in Stromile’s face, and she knows it was the wrong thing to say. “I feel bad about the baby,” he blurts. “How we keep leaving it. Babies aren’t supposed to be stuck in tubes like that. They’re supposed to have, you know. Interaction.”

It’s been three days and they’re nearly to the tanker. Its hull is big enough to blot out the sky now, a rusty red wall jutting up from nowhere. Every morning, the baby is waiting for them. Jain’s not sure, but she thinks it’s growing, looking slightly more cramped in its canister each time. Sometimes it blinks its big soft dark eyes at them and does a toothless smile.

Jain was fed up enough to kick it over this morning, but before they set to walking Stromile carefully propped it back upright, as if verticality matters to a fake baby swimming in protoplasm or protein slop or whatever the canister’s full of.

“It’s not a real baby, Stro,” Jain says. “It’s something they made to mess with us.”

“It’s something they made to mess with us, yeah,” Stromile says. He bites the insides of his cheeks, sucking them hollow. “But it might be a real baby still. It might even be our baby, Jain.”

Jain gets a crawly feeling in the bottom of her stomach. “Don’t say that.”

“I mean, they got our genes when we were in the Town,” Stromile says. He has a pained smile. “You don’t think? Maybe?”

Her stomach seems to bubble. She feels hot and sick and angry. “No, Stro. I don’t think so. Seeing as how they sterilized everyone in the Town. Seeing as how that was part of the deal.”

“Maybe they changed their minds,” Stromile says softly. “People do that.”

“They’re not people,” Jain says. “And that thing’s not a baby.”

Stromile’s face goes lockdown again. She knows he doesn’t believe her, so she’s going to have to show him.

• • • •

That night when Stromile falls asleep, she waits up for the delivery. They used to do that often, back when they thought they might be dragged back to the Town by force. They would huddle near the tent’s entrance, clutching each other and makeshift weapons. Now the doppler whine of machines rushing through the night is white noise. They sleep through it easy.

Jain stays awake by pinching the skin of her inner elbow, watching Stromile’s bony chest rise and fall. Finally she hears it coming. She crawls out of the tent and looks up.

The delivery worker is about the size of the whale carcass they detoured around yesterday. It has gaunt mechanical limbs but also swathes of soft blue translucent membrane, some bloated knobbly cross between the moose she once saw in the woods as a child and the swarms of phosphorescent jellyfish she once saw in a photo.

It lowers itself down, anchoring itself to the dirt, and the canister slides out of its underbelly.

“We don’t want it,” Jain says. “Why the fuck would we want it?”

They never answer questions like that. The delivery worker positions the canister delicately with one tendril-tipped limb, then departs into the dark. Jain can feel its static still crackling in her hair. She goes to the canister.

The fake baby is asleep, chubby fists clenched in front of itself. At the top of the canister, there is a palm-print that looks suspiciously like hers. She fits her hand into it. The canister unseals with a clank and a hiss. Her heart starts to thunder.

She knows it’s not a real baby. She knows if she pulls it out of the canister and smashes it against a rock, she’ll see the flesh inside is spongy and pink, webbed with circuitry instead of capillaries. There was a fake dog in the Town, and that was how it looked on the inside when someone accidentally beat it to death.

She lifts it out, dripping a trail of fluid. Its eyes blink open. It gurgles at her. She can break its head open, like cracking open a doll, and show the circuitry to Stromile, and he’ll stop thinking it’s something more than it is. All she has to do is get over the block, the biological or social or whatever kind of taboo it is.

Jain tells herself time is linear, and she was always going to smash this fake baby open, and doing otherwise was never even an option. It’s one of her old tricks. But she’s still holding the thing under its pudgy arms when Stromile knee-walks out of the tent.

“Oh.” He looks at her, blinks. “Can I hold it?”

She can feel its tiny heartbeat. Those motherfuckers. She passes it over.

• • • •

The baby doesn’t seem to need to eat, but it grows up fast. By the time they stop to rest in the shadow of the derelict ship, it’s starting to walk, staggering around like a little drunk. Stromile can’t stop watching it.

“Come on,” he says. “It’s funny. Admit it’s funny.”

Jain shakes her head. “I bet it’s recording us, or something.”

“They’re watching us already,” Stromile says. “What’s the difference if now they’re watching from, like, lower to the ground?”

The baby collapses into the dirt between his feet.

Stromile grins at her, kind of pleading-like. “Much lower.”

The fake baby wriggles its way back upright, holding onto his knee for balance. It blinks at him, swaying. Then it looks over at Jain and smiles. She grimaces back. It looks real. It even smells real, human and warm and somehow familiar, no metallic musk like the dog in the Town had.

“They sent us this thing as some kind of weird experiment,” Jain says. “We came out to the Waste to get out of the experiment. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Stromile says slowly, scratching at his clavicle. The baby takes off again, stumbling in a little half circle. “And they let us leave, and they give us what we need when we need supplies. So they’re not all the way bad, right?” He looks up, dark eyes somber. “Nothing’s all the way good or all the way bad. You said that, once, Jain.”

Stromile thinks they were given the baby because they need it. And maybe for him, he does need it, somehow. Maybe it’s a way for him to deal with his vaporized family, his dead and gone little brother. Maybe she’s not enough.

Stromile tries to smother his cough, but it makes his shoulders shake and sends a dart of ice down Jain’s spine.

“Fuck it,” she says, trying to keep her voice light. “Go on. Name the creepy baby.”

Stromile leans back on his elbow and looks thoughtful. “There’s this food we got as little kids,” he said. “From this truck. It was like, a bag of chips, then you dump cheese and lettuce and meat in it. Walking tacos. They were called walking tacos.”

“You want to name it Walking Taco?” Jain asks. “You should eat something.”

Stromile shrugs. “It likes walking.”

• • • •

By the time they get to the tanker, Taco isn’t just walking. It can jump and skip and do a shambling, veering run that always brings it back to them giggling. It’s not a baby anymore, more like a three- or four-year-old. Jain tries to figure out where the mass is coming from. Her best guess is that it’s eating dirt when they’re not looking.

But Stromile’s happy, and livelier than he’s been for weeks. He laughs just watching the thing stumble around, and sometimes he grabs it under the armpits and swings it in a circle, which makes it laugh, too. Jain can see the resemblance even more now. Taco’s face is less chubby. She remembers what Stromile said before, about how fucked up it was, them making it look like his little brother.

He’s over it now. He even sticks Taco on his shoulders as they circle the ship looking for a way inside. For a weird eerie moment, they’re a family on a seaside vacation. Seeing Stromile acting all paternal is mostly unnerving, but some little corner of her brain finds it sexy, too.

“Always thought there’d be a ladder,” he says, thumping his fist on the rusty hull.

“Yeah,” Jain says. “Me, too. Shit.”

They’ve walked the whole way around the derelict and found no sign of one. There are some manhole-looking things, some hatches, but all of them are welded shut. She looks up at Taco, who is clinging to Stromile’s neck, as if it might have some answer for them, some secret passageway into the ship.

The fake toddler has teeth now, tiny and perfect. “Shit,” it says, beaming. “Shit.”

Stromile laughs so hard he almost shrugs Taco right off his shoulders. Jain doesn’t want to, but she feels her mouth twitching toward a smile. Then Stromile’s laugh turns into a choked-off cough, and he has to set Taco down, draw a few deep wet breaths.

“Oh, man,” he finally says. “That is adorable.”

“On purpose,” Jain says, as Taco roves away. “Might be smarter than us already. Like, linked up to some quantum cloud. So I think we should make ground rules.”

“Like what?” Stromile asks.

“Let’s keep it outside the tent,” Jain says. “And if we wake up tomorrow and it’s gotten bigger again, we have to kill it for real. Before it’s big enough to be dangerous.”

Stromile winces. “Why would it be dangerous, though?”

“It’s an experiment, Stro,” Jain says. “Experiments can go wrong.”

Stromile bites his lip, watching the fake toddler scrabble in the dirt. “My brother was six when the bomb dropped,” he says. “I think it’ll stop at six-year-old size. Would make sense.”

She grabs his hand and squeezes it; it’s more bone than she remembers. “Okay,” she says, softer. “We’ll give it to six-year-old size.” She looks up at the towering rusty wall of the ship. “I guess this was a bust.”

“No,” Stromile says. “No, it was good to see it up close.” He holds up his free hand, arm straight, and thumbs an imaginary circle. “Ksh,” he goes. “Photo. Us at the ship at the end of the world.”

Jain smiles. She puts her hand up against the corroded metal. “Yeah,” she says, and pats it. “Take another one.”

They take imaginary photos. They kiss. Stromile’s mouth tastes coppery. Taco comes running up to them holding a slimy black shell in its chubby hand.

• • • •

“Tell me a word I don’t know?” Stromile asks, smacking his boots together to knock the clotted mud off the bottoms.

“Uh. Noctivagant.” Jain nods. “Yeah, noctivagant. Means wandering around at night.”

Stromile grins. “Like we do. Since it’s pretty much always night.” He casts a glance up at the nanosmog, the cool veil keeping things dark, then turns. “Hey, Taco, can you say noctivagant?”

Taco is crouched in the dirt, poking at a dead gull with its fingertip. The fake toddler’s grown a little bigger since yesterday, but not by much. It looks up. “Nockivagun,” it says, and flashes Jain its immaculate smile again.

Stromile’s having the time of his life getting it to say stuff, and Jain’s finding it harder and harder to resent the thing. It’s happy, or at least simulating happy, in a way she figures Stromile and his brother must have been happy as little kids. It’s always bringing them sea shells or gull feathers, like some echo of the delivery worker that dropped it on them in the first place.

And it didn’t complain about the sleeping arrangements, just curled up outside the tent with the spare blanket Stromile insisted on giving it and went to sleep, or what looked like sleep. She knows that’s better than most real kids do.

Taco’s happy, and it makes Stromile happy, and that’s important because this morning she could feel his cough lurking under his ribs like an animal. He deserves to have some slice of his family back. He deserves to be happy. Even if it’s fake.

He’s singing again. “All I wanna do is . . .”

“Pow pow pow pow!” Taco chants, eyes wide with delight.

“And chk, ting . . .” Stromile looks at her. “And . . .”

“Take your money,” Jain says, sticking her tongue out.

Taco starts to giggle, and it’s not a creepy uncanny doll sound at all. It’s wild and warm and makes her really want to just laugh along. So she does.

• • • •

They become a trio without Jain’s meaning to: her and Stro and Taco. Maybe it’s when she realizes she can’t call Taco it in her head anymore, or when she gives him Stromile’s spare shirt to wear like a baggy tunic. They move a little slower with Taco along, but it’s alright, because they have nowhere to go.

The vague plan is to see the ocean. If they keep on walking past the tanker, eventually there should be ocean, even if it’s just a sliver of what there used to be.

Taco mainly sticks close to Stromile, hopping along beside him, looking up at him all adoring-like. But today he wants to hold both their hands at the same time. Jain sort of likes it. It reminds her of when she was little, walking with her parents, and how sometimes they’d wink at each other over her head and then hoist her up into the air.

Trust. That’s the feeling. Taco trusts them, or at least he’s simulating it.

“I keep having dreams about bees,” Stromile says. “You remember bees?”

“The flying kind or the not-flying kind?” Jain asks.

“Not sure. I dream about them inside their hive, or whatever.” Stromile gesticulates with his free fingers. “They’re all just kind of gooey and buzzing and making honey. I don’t know how they actually made honey. But in the dream they have these little jars.”

“I don’t think they used jars,” Jain says.

“You think there are any left?” Stromile asks. “Any bees?”

Jain shakes her head. “I think they went extinct,” she says. “Like, before we did, even.”

Stromile nods, his black eyes going soft and sad. Jain looks down at Taco and squeezes his small hand. He looks up at her, questioning.

“Do you want to fly, Taco?” she asks. “Like the flying kind of bee?”

Stromile teaches him to make a buzzing noise. Then she and Stromile take three galloping steps and swing Taco up into the air. He whoops and laughs and for a while Jain understands why people liked having kids in the old days. It feels like she’s the one flying.

They keep doing it until their arms are sore and Stromile starts to cough.

• • • •

The cough gets worse over the next few days. They slow down even more, not for Taco but for Stromile, who is walking gingerly now. He insists he’s fine. He says it’s just a dip and there’s going to be another rise, and Jain wants so badly to believe him, but she knows most things are linear. They stop to camp early.

He’s dozing inside the tent, and Jain’s sitting outside it, close enough to still hear him breathing, when Taco comes up to her holding something. His little white grin looks puzzled, maybe even worried, if he can worry about things.

“Stro,” he says, and holds out his hand.

It’s not a sea shell. It’s a toenail, crusty and yellowed. She remembers: Stromile taking slow careful steps, Stromile wincing as he takes his boots off, Stromile keeping his feet under the covers even though he never keeps his feet under the covers.

“Give me that,” Jain says, feeling suddenly nauseous.

She plucks it out of Taco’s unresisting hand. She scoops a hole in the dirt, presses the toenail down into it, and covers it over. She wipes the spot smooth with her palm. Taco is watching her, somber and curious.

“He was happy before you, too,” Jain says. “He didn’t need you. He didn’t need whatever the fuck this is. Sympathy. Closure. Whatever. He’s got me.”

Taco rests his chin on his fists, unblinking.

• • • •

Stromile gets sicker, and Taco starts to spend more time walking with her instead of with him, like he’s afraid of catching something. Jain hates that. Especially because Stromile doesn’t mind. He smiles when he sees Taco skipping after her.

“He likes you better,” Stromile says one night in the tent. “He’s got good taste.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” Jain says.

Stromile grins. “Let’s not Taco ’bout it.”

Jain rubs the scruff on his cheek. “Dumbass.”

She buries her face in his chest and breathes his smell in, trying to ignore the jab of his ribs. They’re so much sharper than they used to be. She tiptoes her fingers down his hip and gives his dick a hello squeeze. He inhales.

“Do you think things used to matter more?” he asks, while she wraps her fingers around him. “When there were more people? And more futures?”

She works her hand up and down, uses her thumb to rub a little circle around the head of his dick. “I dunno,” she says. “Is that really what you want to think about when you come?”

Stromile tips his head back and shuts his eyes. “Guess not,” he says. “I just. Wonder.” He grunts. “Maybe they matter more now, since there’s only a few of us. Since time’s, you know. Limited.”

Time is limited. Time is linear. Jain doesn’t want to think about it, so she elbow-crawls a little higher up and kisses him on the mouth. She bites his bottom lip, just gently, and tries to remember the first time they kissed. Maybe the third night after they left the Town, high on their own daring.

Even back then, she knew it would end eventually. Stro wasn’t vaporized in the Shrooms, but he was close enough to catch radiation and sear his lungs.

“It’s not going to happen,” Stromile mumbles, and for a moment she thinks he means dying. Then he peels her hand away from his dick and tugs her upward, wraps both arms around her, presses his forehead against hers. “I think everything matters the same amount,” he finally says. “A lot and a little, at the same time.”

“I love you a lot,” Jain says, and the thought that’s been lurking in her background comes forward. “If we ask, they’ll take us back to the Town. It’ll be comfier there. For the end.”

Stromile shakes his head. “I don’t want to go back,” he says. “Neither do you.” He pauses. “Don’t worry about burying me or anything. They’ll pick me up, I figure.”

The words pry her ribcage apart, wrenching her wide open. “Fuck, Stro,” she says.

“Fuck,” he agrees, with a sob in his voice. “I’m going to miss you, Jain.”

But he won’t. That’s the thing. He won’t miss anything once he’s on the other side of that one-way door.

• • • •

When Stromile dies, it feels like the sun really has gone out, like the nanosmog is only hiding darkness, and more darkness behind that, and more darkness forever. It feels like she’s alone at the bottom of the long-gone ocean.

Then it feels like nothing at all, and his unmoving body somehow becomes a pile of meat. Just something she’ll have to move out of the tent so she can fold it up and repack. She watches herself do it: drag him out onto the dirt, shift his arm because it’s at an angle that looks uncomfortable for him, kiss his cheek under his slitted eye.

Taco watches her do it, too. His small face is contorted with grief, confusion. He’s bigger now, six-year-old size, and Jain is beginning to understand. When he lifts his skinny arms out, like he’s going to try to hug her, she lunges at him.

“Get the fuck out of here!” she screams. “Get the fuck away from me!”

He flinches back, eyes wide. But he doesn’t go, so she has to chase him, feinting at him over and over, arm raised, mimicking her own mother and hating it. But Taco isn’t a child. She digs her hands into the mud and hurls clods of dirt at him. He tries to smile at first, tries to throw them back, like it’s a game.

“This is your fault!” she howls at him, then up at the opaque sky. “This is your fault! Your fault! I fucking hate you, I fucking hate you.”

Finally Taco starts to blink fast, too fast, and his face screws up again and tears start sliding down his cheeks. Finally he turns around and runs away.

Jain goes back to Stromile’s body, sobbing. She cries into the crook of his elbow. She gets snot on his sleeve and scrubs it clean. Hours crawl by with her sitting there weeping, shuddering, stopping, starting the cycle over.

When the worker comes trundling out of the dark, lifts Stro up into its biomechanical belly, she beats her fists against it. She bloodies herself. The worker leaves her skinspray and painkillers.

• • • •

Jain keeps walking, keeps heading for the ocean she’s starting to doubt exists at all. She’s vaguely aware that Taco is following her. He keeps his distance, but every time she looks over her shoulder and sees him trudging along, his silhouette is taller, ganglier. Growing. She knows that he doesn’t look like Stro’s brother anymore. He never did.

But it still feels like a slap across the face when she comes out of the tent one morning and finds him waiting outside. Stro’s soft dark eyes, Stro’s pursed lips. Stro’s body, but not how it was at the end, not scabby and emaciated. Stro how he was when they first left the Town, healthy and whole-looking.

Bile pushes up Jain’s throat. “Why would you do that?” she asks. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

The thing that was Taco and is now Stro gives a familiar shrug. “They always give us what we need, right?” he says, his voice warm, slightly sheepish, perfectly intonated.

Part of her wants so badly to throw her arms around him. The thing smells like Stro, speaks like him. He’s back from behind the one-way door. They can keep walking, keep talking, keep playing their silly games. All she has to do is accept this fucked up apology for everything that’s been done to them. Everything done for their own good.

She crouches down in the dirt and finds a wedge of rock. “Turn around, Stro,” she says, using his name without meaning to, starting to cry without meaning to.

He eyes the rock, brow furrowed. “Sure,” he says, turning. “Hey. Tell me a word I don’t know.”

She swings for the back of his beautiful head.

His scalp splits, squirts. He doesn’t shout, but the cracking sound turns her stomach. She swings again, then three more times, until the not-quite-bone caves in. The inside of his skull is spongy and pink, studded with vertices of black glass.

“Sorry,” she says.

• • • •

There’s a canister waiting for her the next morning, embryonic fluid a ghostly rose against the dark of the Waste. The tiny figure inside is chubby and squirmy and perfect.

Jain packs up the tent, and starts to walk.

©2021 by Rich Larson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Canada, USA, and Spain, and is now based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of the novel Annex and the collection Tomorrow Factory, which contains some of the best of his 150+ published stories. His work has been translated into Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Romanian, Portuguese, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese. Find free fiction and support his work at patreon.com/richlarson.

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

The Justified

Ann Leckie | 7885 words

Het had eaten nothing for weeks but bony, gape-mawed fish—some of them full of neurotoxin. She’d had to alter herself so she could metabolize it safely, which had taken some doing. So when she ripped out the walsel’s throat and its blood spurted red onto the twilit ice, she stared, salivary glands aching, stomach growling. She didn’t wait to butcher her catch but sank her teeth into skin and fat and muscle, tearing a chunk away from its huge shoulder.

Movement caught her eye, and she sprang upright, walsel blood trickling along her jaw, to see Dihaut, black and silver, walking toward her across the ages-packed snow and ice. She’d have known her sib anywhere, but even if she hadn’t recognized them, there was no mistaking their crescent-topped standard, Months and Years, tottering behind them on two thin, insectile legs.

But sib or not, familiar or not, Het growled, heart still racing, muscles poised for flight or attack. She had thought herself alone and unwatched. Had made sure of it before she began her hunt. Had Dihaut been watching her all this time? It would be like them.

For a brief moment she considered disemboweling Dihaut, leaving them dying on the ice, Months and Years in pieces beside them. But that would only put this off until her sib took a new body. Dihaut could be endlessly persistent when they wished, and the fact that they had come all the way to this frigid desert at the farthest reaches of Nu to find her suggested that the ordinary limits of that persistence—such as they were—could not be relied on. Besides, she and Dihaut had nearly always gotten along well. Still, she stayed on the alert, and did not shift into a more relaxed posture.

“This is the Eye of Merur, the Noble Dihaut!” announced Months and Years as Dihaut drew near. Its high, thready voice cut startlingly through the silence of the snowy waste.

“I know who they are,” snarled Het.

The standard made a noise almost like a sniff. “I only do my duty, Noble Het.”

Dihaut hunched their shoulders. Their face, arms, torso, and legs were covered with what looked like long, fine fur but, this being Dihaut, was likely feathers. Mostly black, but their left arm and leg, and part of their torso, were silver-white. “Hello, sib,” they said. “Sorry to interrupt your supper. Couldn’t you have fled someplace warmer?”

Het had no answer for this—she’d asked herself the same question many times in the past several years.

“I see you’ve changed your skin,” Dihaut continued. “It does look odd, but I suppose it keeps you warm. Would you mind sharing the specs?” They shivered.

“It’s clothes,” said Het. “A coat, and boots, and gloves.”

“Clothes!” Dihaut peered at her more closely. “I see. They must be very confining, but I suppose it’s worth it to be warm. Do you have any you could lend me? Or could whoever supplied you with yours give me some, too?”

“Sorry,” growled Het. “Not introducing you.” Actually, she hadn’t even introduced herself. She’d stolen the clothes, when the fur she’d grown hadn’t kept her as warm as she’d hoped.

Dihaut made a wry “huh,” their warm breath puffing from their mouth in a small cloud. “Well. I’m sorry to be so blunt.” They gave a regretful smile, all Dihaut in its acknowledgment of the pointlessness of small talk. “I’m very sorry to intrude on whatever it is you’re doing down here—I never was quite clear on why you left, no one was, except that you were angry about something. Which . . .” They shrugged. “If it were up to me”—they raised both finely feathered hands, gestured vaguely to the dead walsel with the silver one—“I’d leave you to it.”

“Would you.” She didn’t even try to sound as though she believed them.

“Truly, sib. But the ruler of Hehut, the Founder and Origin of Life on Nu, the One Sovereign of This World, wishes for you to return to Hehut.” At this, Months and Years waved its thin, sticklike arms as though underlining Dihaut’s words. “She’d have sent others before me, but I convinced her that if you were brought back against your wishes, your presence at court would not be as delightful as usual.” They shivered again. “Is there somewhere warmer we can talk?”

“Not really.”

“I don’t mean any harm to the people you’ve been staying with,” said Dihaut.

“I haven’t been staying with anyone.” She gestured vaguely around with one blood-matted hand, indicating the emptiness of the ice.

“You must have been staying with someone, sib. I know there are no approved habitations here, so they must be unauthorized, but that’s no concern of mine unless they should come to Merur’s attention. Or if they have Animas. Please tell me, sib, that they don’t have unauthorized Animas here? Because you know we’ll have to get rid of them if they do, and I’d really like to just go right back to Hehut, where it’s actually warm.”

Unbidden, her claws extended again, just a bit. She had never spoken to the people who lived here, but she owed them. It was by watching them that she’d learned about the poisonous fish. Otherwise the toxin might have caught her off guard, even killed her. And then she’d have found herself resurrected again in Hehut, in the middle of everything she’d fled.

“They don’t have Animas,” she told Dihaut. “How could they?” When their bodies died, they died.

“Thank all the stars for that!” Dihaut gave a relieved, shivery sigh. “As long as they stay up here in this freezing desert with their single, cold lives, we can all just go on pretending they don’t exist. So surely we can pretend they don’t exist in their presumably warmer home?”

“Your standard is right behind you,” Het pointed out. “Listening.”

“It is,” Dihaut agreed. “It always is. There’s nowhere in the world we can really be away from Merur. We always have to deal with the One Ruler. Even, in the end, the benighted unauthorized souls in this forsaken place.” They were, by now, shivering steadily.

“Can’t she leave anyone even the smallest space?” asked Het. “Some room to be apart, without her watching? For just a little while?”

“It’s usually us watching for her,” put in Dihaut.

Het waved that away. “Not a single life anywhere in the world that she doesn’t claim as hers. She makes certain there’s nowhere to go!”

“Order, sib,” said Dihaut. “Imagine what might happen if everyone went running around free to do whatever they liked with no consequences. And she is the Founder and Origin of Life on Nu.”

“Come on, Dihaut. I was born on Aeons, just before Merur left the ship and came down to Nu. There were already people living here. I remember it. And even now it depends who you ask. Either Merur arrived a thousand years ago in Aeons and set about pulling land from beneath the water and creating humans, or else she arrived and brought light and order to humans she found living in ignorance and chaos. I’ve heard both from her own mouth at different times. And you know better. You’re the historian.”

They tried that regretful half smile again, but they were too cold to manage it. “I tell whichever story is more politic at the moment. And there are, after all, different sorts of truth. But please.” They spread their hands, placatory. “I beg you. Come with me back to Hehut. Don’t make me freeze to death in front of you.”

“Noble Dihaut,” piped their standard, “Eye of Merur, I am here. Your Anima is entirely safe.”

“Yes,” shivered Dihaut, “but there isn’t a new body ready for me yet, and I hate being out of things for very long. Please, sib, let’s go back to my flier. We can argue about all of this on the way back home.”

And, well, now that Dihaut had found her, it wasn’t as though she had much choice. She said, with ill grace, “Well, fine, then. Where’s your flier?”

“This way,” said Dihaut, shivering, and turned. They were either too cold or too wise to protest when Het bent to grab the dead walsel’s tusk and drag it along as she followed.

• • • •

It rained in Hehut barely more often than it snowed in the icy waste Het had left, but rivers and streams veined Hehut under the bright, uninterrupted blue of the sky, rivers and streams that pooled here and there into lotus-veiled lakes and papyrus marshes, and the land was lush and green.

The single-lived working in the fields looked up as the shadow of Dihaut’s flier passed over them. They made a quick sign with their left hands and turned back to the machines they followed. Small boats dotted the river that snaked through the fields, single-lived fishers hauling in nets, here and there the long, gilded barque of one of the Justified shining in the sun. The sight gave Het an odd pang—she had not ever been given much to nostalgia, or to dwelling on memories of her various childhoods, none of which to her recall had been particularly childish, but she was struck with a sudden, almost tangible memory of sunshine on her skin, and the sound of water lapping at the hull of a boat. Not, she was sure, a single moment but a composite of all the times she’d fled to the river, to fish, or walk, or sit under a tree and stare at the water flowing by. To be by herself. As much as she could be, anyway.

“Almost there,” said Dihaut, reclined in their seat beside her. “Are you going to change?” They had shed their feathers on the flight here and now showed black and silver skin, smooth and shining.

Het had shed her coat, boots, and gloves but left her thick and shaggy fur. It would likely be uncomfortable in the heat, but she was reluctant to let go of it; she couldn’t say why. “I don’t think I have time.”

“Noble Eyes of Merur,” said Months and Years, upright at Dihaut’s elbow, “we will arrive at Tjenu in fifteen minutes. The One Sovereign will see you immediately.”

Definitely no time to change. “So urgent?” asked Het. “Do you know what this is about?”

“I have my suspicions.” Dihaut shrugged one silver shoulder. “It’s probably better if Merur tells you herself.”

So this was something that no one—not even Merur’s own Eyes—could safely talk about. There were times when Merur was in no mood to be tolerant of any suggestion that her power and authority might be incomplete, and at those times even admitting knowledge of some problem could end with one’s Anima deleted altogether.

Tjenu came into view, its gold-covered facade shining in the hot sun, a wide, dark avenue of smooth granite stretching from its huge main doors straight across the gardens to a broad entrance in the polished white walls. The Road of Souls, the single-lived called it, imagining that it was the route traveled by the Animas of the dead on their way to judgment at Dihaut’s hands. As large as the building was—a good kilometer on each of its four sides, and three stories high—most of Tjenu was underground. Or so Dihaut had told her. Het had only ever been in the building’s sunlit upper reaches. At least while she was alive, and not merely an Anima awaiting resurrection.

Dihaut’s flier set down within Tjenu’s white walls, beside a willow-edged pond. Coming out, Het found Great Among Millions, her own standard, waiting, hopping from one tiny foot to the other, feathery fingers clenched into minuscule fists, stilled the next moment, its black pole pointing perfectly upright, the gold cow horns at its top polished and shining.

“Eye of Merur,” it said, its voice high and thin. “Noble Het, the Justified, the Powerful, Servant of the One Sovereign of Nu. The Ruler of all, in her name of Self-Created, in her name of She Caused All to Be, in her name of She Listens to Prayers, in her name of Sustainer of the Justified, in her name of—”

“Stop,” Het commanded. “Just tell me what she wants.”

“Your presence, gracious Het,” it said, with equanimity. Great Among Millions had been her standard for several lifetimes, and was used to her. “Immediately. Do forgive the appearance of impertinence, Noble Het. I only relay the words of the One Sovereign. I will escort you to your audience.”

Months and Years, coming out of the flier, piped, “Great Among Millions, please do not forget the Noble Het’s luggage.”

“What luggage?” asked Het.

“Your walsel, Noble Eye,” replied Months and Years, waving a tiny hand. “What’s left of it. It’s starting to smell.”

“Just dispose of it,” said Het. “I’ve eaten as much of it as I’m going to.”

Great Among Millions gave a tiny almost-hop from one foot to the other, and stilled again. “Noble Het, you have been away from Tjenu, from Hehut itself, without me, for fifty-three years, two months, and three days.” It almost managed to sound as though it was merely stating a fact, and not making a complaint. But not quite.

“It’s good to see you again, too,” Het said. Her standard unclenched its little fists and gestured toward the golden mass of Tjenu. “Yes,” Het acknowledged. “Let’s go.”

• • • •

The vast audience chamber of the One Sovereign of Nu was black-ceilinged, inlaid with silver and copper stars that shone in the light of the lamps below. Courtiers, officials, and supplicants, alone or in small scattered groups, murmured as Het passed. Of course. There was no mistaking her identity, furred and unkempt as she was—Great Among Millions followed her.

She crossed the brown, gold-flecked floor to where it changed, brown shading to blue and green in Merur’s near presence, where one never set foot without direct invitation—unless, of course, one was an Eye, in which case one’s place in the bright-lit vicinity of Merur was merely assumed, a privilege of status.

Stepping into the green, Great Among Millions tottering behind her, Het cast a surreptitious glance—habitual, even after so long away!—at those so privileged. And stopped, and growled. Among the officials standing near Merur, three bore her Eye. There were four Eyes; Het herself was one. Dihaut, who Het had left with their flier, was another. There should only have been two Eyes here.

“Don’t be jealous, Noble Het,” whispered Great Among Millions, its thready voice sounding in her ear alone. “You were gone so very long.” Almost accusing, that sounded.

“She replaced me,” Het snarled. She didn’t recognize whoever it was who, she saw now, held an unfamiliar standard, but the Justified changed bodies so frequently. If there was a new Eye, why should Merur call on Het? Why not leave her be?

“And you left me behind,” continued Great Among Millions. “Alone. They asked and asked me where you were and I did not know, though I wished to.” It made a tiny, barely perceptible stomp. “They put me in a storeroom. In a box.”

“Het, my Eye, approach!” Merur, calling from where she sat under her blue-canopied pavilion, alone but for those three Eyes, and the standards, and smaller lotus- and lily-shaped servants that always attended her.

And now, her attention turned from Merur’s other Eyes, Het looked fully at the One Sovereign herself. Armless, legless, her snaking body cased in scales of gold and lapis, Merur circled the base of her polished granite chair of state, her upper body leaning onto the seat, her head standard human, her hair in dozens of silver-plaited braids falling around her glittering gold face. Her dark eyes were slit-pupiled.

Het had seen Merur take such a shape before—as well as taking new bodies at need or at whim, the Justified could to some degree alter a currently held body at will. But there were limits to such transformations, and it had been long, long centuries since Merur had taken this sort of body.

She should have concealed her surprise and prostrated herself, but instead she stood and stared as Great Among Millions announced, in a high, carrying voice, “The fair, the fierce, the Burning Eye of the One Sovereign of Nu, the Noble Het!”

“My own Eye!” said Merur. “I have need of you!”

Het could not restrain her anger, even in the face of the One Sovereign of Nu. “I count four Eyes in this court, Sovereign—those three over there, and the Noble Dihaut. There have always been four. Why should you need me to be a fifth?” Behind her, Great Among Millions made a tiny noise.

“I shed one body,” admonished Merur, her voice faintly querulous, “only to reawaken and find you gone. For decades you did not return. Why? No one accused you of any dereliction of duty, let alone disloyalty. You had suffered no disadvantage; your place as my favored Eye was secure. And now, returning, you question my having appointed someone to fill the office you left empty! You would do better to save your anger for the enemies of Nu!”

“I can’t account for my heart,” said Het crossly. “It is as it is.”

This seemed to mollify Merur. “Well, you always have had a temper. And it is this very honesty that I have so missed. Indeed, it is what I require of you!” Here Merur lowered her voice and looked fretfully from one side to the other, and the standards and flower-form servitors scuttled back a few feet. “Het, my Eye. This body is . . . imperfect. It will not obey me as it should, and it is dying, far sooner than it ought. I need to move to a new one.”

“Already?” Het’s skin prickled with unease.

“This is not the first time a body has grown imperfectly,” Merur said, her voice low. “But I should have seen the signs long before I entered it. Someone must have concealed them from me! It is impossible that this has happened through mere incompetence.

“I have dealt with the technicians. I have rooted out any disloyalty in Tjenu. But I cannot say the same of all Hehut, let alone all of Nu. And this body of mine will last only a few months longer, but no suitable replacement, one untampered with by traitors, will be ready for a year or more. And I cannot afford to leave Nu rulerless for so long! My Eyes I trust—you and Dihaut, certainly, after all this time. The Justified are for the most part reliable, and the single-lived know that Dihaut will judge them. But I have never been gone for more than a few days at a time. If this throne is empty longer, it may encourage the very few wayward to stir up the single-lived, and if, in my absence, enough among the Justified can be led astray—no. I cannot be gone so long unless I am certain of order.”

Dismayed, Het snarled. “Sovereign, what do you expect me to do about any of this?”

“What you’ve always done! Protect Nu. All trace of unrest, of disorder, must be prevented. You’ve rid Nu of rebellion before. I need you to do it again.”

That shining silver river, the fishers, the lilies and birds had all seemed so peaceful. So much as they should be, when Het and Dihaut had flown in. “Unrest? What’s the cause this time?”

“The cause!” Merur exclaimed, exasperated. “There is no cause. There never has been! The worthy I give eternal life and health; they need only reach out their hands for whatever they desire! The unworthy are here and gone, and they have all they need and occupation enough, or if not, well, they seal their own fate. There has never been any cause, and yet it keeps happening—plots, rumors, mutterings of discontent. My newest Eye”—Merur did not notice, or affected not to notice, Het’s reaction to that—“is fierce and efficient. I do not doubt her loyalty. But I am afraid she doesn’t have your imagination. Your vision. Your anger. Two years ago I sent her out to deal with this, and she returned saying there was no trouble of any consequence! She doesn’t understand! Where does this keep coming from? Who is planting such ideas in the minds of my people? Root it out, Het. Root it out from among my people, trace it back to its origin, and destroy it so that Nu can rest secure while my next body grows. So that we can at last have the peace and security I have always striven for.”

“Sovereign of Nu,” growled Het. “I’ll do my best.”

What choice did she have, after all?

• • • •

She should have gone right to Dihaut. The first place to look for signs of trouble would be among the Animas of the recently dead. But she was still out of sorts with Dihaut, still resented their summoning her back here. They’d made her share their company on the long flight back to Hehut and never mentioned that Merur had replaced her. They might have warned her, and they hadn’t. She wasn’t certain she could keep her temper with her sib, just now. Which maybe was why they’d kept silent about it, but still.

Besides, that other Eye had doubtless done the obvious first thing, and gone to Dihaut herself. And to judge from what Merur had said, Dihaut must have found nothing, or nothing to speak of. They would give Het the same answer. No point asking again.

She wanted time alone. Time that was hers. She didn’t miss the cold—already her thick fur was thinning without any conscious direction on her part. But she did miss the solitude, and the white landscape stretching out seemingly forever, silent except for the wind and her own heart, the hiss of blood in her ears. There was nothing like that here.

She left Tjenu and walked down to the river in the warm early-evening sunlight. Willows shaded the banks, and the lilies in the occasional pool, red and purple and gold, were closing. The scent of water and flowers seized her, plucking at the edges of some memory. Small brown fishing boats sat in neat rows on the opposite bank, waiting for morning. The long, sleek shape of some Justified Noble’s barque floated in the middle of the channel, leaf green, gilded, draped with hangings and banners of blue and yellow and white.

She startled two children chasing frogs in the shallows. “Noble,” the larger of them said, bowing, pushing the smaller child beside them into some semblance of a bow. “How can we serve you?”

Don’t notice my presence, she thought, but of course that was impossible. “Be as you were. I’m only out for a walk.” And then, considering the time, “Shouldn’t you be home having dinner?”

“We’ll go right away,” said the older child.

The smaller, voice trembling, said, “Please don’t kill us, Noble Het.”

Het frowned, and looked behind her, only to see Great Among Millions a short way off, peering at her from behind a screen of willow leaves. “Why would I do such a thing?” Het asked the child. “Are you rebels, or criminals?”

The older child grabbed the younger one’s arm, held it tight. “The Noble Het kills who she pleases,” they said. The smaller child’s eyes filled with tears. Then both children prostrated themselves. “How fair is your face, beautiful Het!” the older child cried into the mud. “The powerful, the wise and loving Eye of the One Sovereign! You see everything and strike where you wish! You were gone for a long time, but now you’ve returned and Hehut rejoices.”

She wanted to reassure them that she hadn’t come down to the river to kill them. That being late for dinner was hardly a capital offense. But the words wouldn’t form in her mouth. “I don’t strike where I wish,” she said instead. “I strike the enemies of Nu.”

“May we go, beautiful one?” asked the elder child, and now their voice was trembling too. “You commanded us to go home to dinner, and we only want to obey you!”

She opened her mouth to ask this child’s name, seized as she was with a sudden inexplicable desire to mention it to Dihaut, to ask them to watch for this child when they passed through judgment, to let Dihaut know she’d been favorably impressed. So well-spoken, even if it was just a hasty assemblage of formulaic phrases, of songs and poetry they must have heard. But she feared asking would only terrify the child further. “I’m only out for a walk, child,” she growled, uncomfortably resentful of this attention, even as she’d enjoyed the child’s eloquence. “Go home to dinner.”

“Thank you, beautiful one!” The elder child scrambled to their feet, pulled the smaller one up with them.

“Thank you!” piped the smaller child. And they both turned and fled. Het watched them go, and then resumed her walk along the riverside. But the evening had been soured, and soon she turned back to Tjenu.

• • • •

The Thirty-Six met her in their accustomed place, a chamber in Tjenu walled with malachite and lapis, white lily patterns laid into the floor. There were chairs and benches along the edge of the room, but the Thirty-Six stood stiff and straight in the center, six rows of six, white linen kilts perfectly pressed, a gold and silver star on each brow.

“Eye of Merur,” said the first of the Thirty-Six. “We’re glad you’re back.”

“They’re glad you’re back,” whispered Great Among Millions, just behind Het’s right shoulder. “They didn’t spend the time in a box.”

Each of the Thirty-Six had their own demesne to watch, to protect. Their own assistants and weapons to do the job with. They had been asked to do this sort of thing often enough. Over and over.

Het had used the walk here from the river to compose herself. To take control of her face and her voice. She said, her voice smooth and calm, “The One Ruler of Nu, Creator of All Life on Nu, wishes for us to remove all traces of rebellion, once and for all. To destroy any hint of corruption that makes even the thought of rebellion possible.” No word from the silent and still Thirty-Six. “Tell me, do you know where that lies?”

No reply. Either none of them knew, or they thought the answer so obvious that there was no need to say it. Or perhaps they were suspicious of Het’s outward calm.

Finally, the first of the Thirty-Six said, “Generally, problems begin among the single-lived, Noble Het. But we can’t seem to find the person, or the thing, that sends their hearts astray time after time. The only way to accomplish what the One Sovereign has asked of us would be to kill every single-lived soul on Nu and let Dihaut sort them one from another.”

“Are you recommending that?” asked Het.

“It would be a terrible disruption,” said another of the Thirty-Six. “There would be so many corpses to dispose of.”

“We’d want more single-lived, wouldn’t we?” asked yet another. “Grown new, free of the influence that corrupts them now. It might . . .” She seemed doubtful. “It might take care of the problem, but, Eye of Merur, I don’t know how many free tanks we have. And who would take care of the new children? It would be a terrible mess that would last for decades. And I’m not sure that . . . It just seems wrong.” She cast a surreptitious glance toward the first of the Thirty-Six. “And forgive me, Noble Eye of Merur, but surely the present concern of the One Sovereign is to reduce chaos and disorder. At the current moment.”

So that, at least, was well-enough known, or at least rumored. “The newest Eye,” said Het, closing her still-clawed hands into fists, willing herself to stand still. Willing her voice to stay clear and calm. Briefly she considered leaving here, going back to the river to catch fish and listen to the frogs. “Did she request your assistance? And did you suggest this to her, the eradication of the single-lived so that we could begin afresh?”

“She thought it was too extreme,” said the first of the Thirty-Six. Was that a note of disappointment in her voice? “It seems to me that the Sovereign of Nu found that Eye’s service in this instance to be less than satisfactory.”

“You think we should do it?” Het asked her.

“If it would rid us of the trouble that arises over and over,” the first of the Thirty-Six agreed.

“If I order this, then,” Het persisted, clenching her hands tighter, “you would do it?”

“Yes,” the foremost of the Thirty-Six agreed.

“Children, as well?” Het asked. Didn’t add, Even polite, well-spoken children who maybe only wanted some time to themselves, in the quiet by the river?

“Of course,” the first of the Thirty-Six replied. “If they’re worthy, they’ll be back. Eventually.”

With a growl Het sprang forward, hands open, claws flashing free of her fingertips, and slashed the throat of the first of the Thirty-Six. As she fell, blood splashed onto the torso and the spotless linen kilt of the Thirty-Six beside her. For a moment, Het watched the blood pump satisfyingly out of the severed artery to pool on the white-lilied floor, and thought of the walsel she’d killed the day before.

But this was no time to indulge herself. She looked up and around. “Anyone else?”

Great Among Millions skittered up beside her. “Noble Het! Eye of Merur! There is currently a backlog of Justified waiting for resurrection. And none of your Thirty-Six have bodies in the tanks.”

Het shrugged. The Thirty-Six were all among the Justified. “She’ll be back. Eventually.” At her feet the injured Thirty-Six breathed her choking last, and for the first time in decades Het felt a sure, gratifying satisfaction. She had been made for this duty, made to enjoy it, and she had nothing left to herself but that, it seemed. “The single-lived come and go,” she declared to the remaining Thirty-Six. “Who has remained the same all this time?”

Silence.

“Oh dear,” said Great Among Millions.

• • • •

The nurturing and protection of Nu had always required a good deal of death, and none of the Thirty-Six had ever been squeamish about it, but so often in recent centuries that death had been accomplished by impersonal, secondhand means—narrowly targeted poison, or engineered microbes let loose in the river. But Het—Het had spent the last several decades hunting huge, sharp-tusked walsel, two or three times the mass of a human, strong and surprisingly fast.

None of the remaining Thirty-Six would join her. Fifteen of them fled. The remaining twenty she left dead, dismembered, their blood pooling among the lilies, and then she went down to the riverbank.

The single-lived fled before her—or before Great Among Millions, not following discreetly now but close behind her, token and certification of who she was. The little fishing boats pulled hastily for the other bank, and their single-lived crews dropped nets and lines where they stood, ran from the river, or cowered in the bottom of their small craft.

Het ignored them all and swam for the blue-and-yellow barque.

The single-lived servants didn’t try to stop her as she pulled herself aboard and strode across the deck. After all, where Het went the necessities of order followed. Opposing the Eye of Merur was not only futile, but suicidal in the most ultimate sense.

Streaming river water, claws extended, Het strode to where the barque’s Justified owners sat at breakfast, a terrified servant standing beside the table, a tray holding figs, cheese, and a bowl of honey shaking in her trembling hands.

The three Justified stared at Het as she stood before them, soaking wet, teeth bared. Then they saw Great Among Millions close behind her. “Protector of Hehut,” said one, a man, as all three rose. “It’s an honor.” There was, perhaps, the smallest hint of trepidation in his voice. “Of course we’ll make all our resources available to you. I’ll have the servants brought—”

Het sprang forward, sliced open his abdomen with her claws, then tore his head from his neck. She made a guttural, happy sound, dropped the body, and tossed the head away.

The servant dropped the tray and fled, the bowl of honey bouncing and rolling, fetching up against the corpse’s spilled, sliced intestines.

Het sank her teeth into the second Justified’s neck, felt him struggle and choke, the exquisite salt tang of his blood in her mouth. This was oh so much better than hunting walsel. She tore away a mouthful of flesh and trachea.

The third Justified turned to flee, but then stopped and cried, “I am loyal, Noble Eye! The Noble Dihaut will vindicate me!”

Het broke her neck and then stood a moment contemplating the feast before her, these three bodies, warm and bloody and deliciously fresh. She hadn’t gotten to do this often enough, in recent centuries. She lifted her head and roared her satisfaction.

A breeze filled and lifted the barque’s blue and yellow and white linen hangings. The servants had fled; there was no one alive on the deck but Het and Great Among Millions now. “Rejoice!” it piped. “The Protector of Hehut brings order to Nu!”

Het grinned, and then dove over the side, into the river, on her way to find more of the Justified.

• • • •

The day wore on, and more of the Justified met bloody, violent ends at Het’s hands—and teeth. At first they submitted; after all, they were Justified, and their return was assured, so long as they were obedient subjects of the One Sovereign. But as evening closed in, the Justified began to try to defend themselves.

And more of the houses were empty, their owners and servants fled. But in this latest, on the outskirts of Hehut, all airy windowed corridors and courtyards, Het found two Justified huddled in the corner of a white-and-gold-painted room, a single-lived servant standing trembling between them and Het.

“Move,” growled Het to the servant.

“Justification!” cried one of the Justified. Slurring a bit—was she drunk?

“We swear!” slurred the other. Drunk as well, then.

Neither of them had the authority to make such a promise. Even if they had, the numbers of Justified dead ensured that no newly Justified would see resurrection for centuries, if ever. Despite all of this, the clearly terrified servant stayed.

Het roared her anger. Picked up the single-lived—they were strong, and large as single-lived went, but no match for Het. She set them aside, roughly, and sank her claws into one of the Justified, her teeth into the other. Screams filled her ears, and blood filled her mouth as she tore away a chunk of flesh.

All day her victims had provided her with more than her fill of blood, and so she had drunk sparingly so far. But now, enraged even further by the cowardice of these Justified—of their craven, empty promise to their servant—she drank deep, and still filled with rage, she tore the Justified into bloody fragments that spattered the floor and the wall.

She stopped a moment to appreciate her handiwork. With one furred hand she wiped blood and scraps of muscle off her tingling lips.

Her tingling lips.

The two Justified had barely moved, crouched in their corner. They had slurred their speech, as though they were drunk.

Or as though they were poisoned.

She knew what sort of poison made her lips tingle like this, and her fingertips, now she noticed. Though it would take far more neurotoxin to make her feel this much than even a few dozen skinny, gape-mawed fish would provide. How much had she drunk?

Het looked around the blood-spattered room. The single-lived servant was gone. Great Among Millions stood silent and motionless, its tall, thin body crusted with dried blood. Nothing to what covered Het.

She went out into the garden, with its pools and fig trees and the red desert stretching beyond. And found two of Merur’s lily standards—She Brings Life and Different Ages. Along with Months and Years. And Dihaut.

“Well, sib,” they said, with their regretful smile. “They always send me after you. Everyone else is too afraid of you. I told the One Sovereign it was better not to send forces you’d only chew up. Poison is much easier, and much safer for us.”

Het swayed, suddenly exhausted. Dihaut. She’d never expected them to actively take her side, when it came to defying Merur, but she hadn’t expected them to poison her.

What had she expected? That Merur would approve her actions? No, she’d known someone would come after her, one way or another. And then?

“You can try to alter your metabolism,” Dihaut continued, “but I doubt you can manage it quickly enough. The dose was quite high. We needed to be absolutely sure. Honestly, I’m surprised you’re still on your feet.”

“You,” said Het, not certain what she had to say beyond that.

She Gives Life and Different Ages skittered up and stopped a meter or so apart, facing Het. Between them an image of Merur flickered into visibility. Not snakelike, as Het knew her current body to be, but as she appeared in images all over Nu: tall, golden, face and limbs smooth and symmetrical, as though cut from basalt and gilded.

“Het!” cried Merur. “My own Eye! What can possibly have made you so angry that you would take leave of your senses and betray the life and peace of Nu in this way?”

“I was carrying out your orders, Sovereign of Nu!” Het snarled. “You wanted me to remove all possibility of rebellion in Hehut.”

“And all of Nu!” piped Great Among Millions, behind Het. Still covered in dried blood.

“I had not thought such sickness and treason possible from anyone Justified as long as you have been,” said Merur. “Dihaut.”

“Sovereign,” said Dihaut, and their smile grew slightly wider. Het growled.

Merur said, “You have said to me before today that I have been too generous. That I have allowed too many of the long-Justified to escape judgment. I did not believe you, but now, look! My Eyes have not been subject to judgment in centuries, and that, I think, has been a mistake. I would like it known that not even the highest of the Justified will be excused if they defy me. Het, before you die, hear Dihaut’s judgment.”

She was exhausted, and her lips had gone numb. But that was all.

Was she really poisoned? Well, she was, but only a little. Or so it seemed, so far. Maybe she could overpower Dihaut, rip out their throat, and flee. The standards wouldn’t stop her.

And then what? Where would she go, that Merur would not eventually follow?

“Sovereign of Nu,” said Dihaut, bowing toward Merur’s simulacrum. “I will do as you command.” They turned to Het. “Het, sib, your behavior this past day is extreme even for you. It calls for judgment, as our Sovereign has said. It is that judgment that keeps order in Hehut, on all of Nu. And perhaps if everyone, every life, endured the same strict judgment as the single-lived pass through, these things would never have happened.”

Silence. Not a noise from Great Among Millions, behind Het. Over Dihaut’s shoulder, Months and Years was utterly still.

“The One Sovereign has given me the duty of making those judgments. And I must make them, no matter my personal feelings about each person I judge, for the good of Nu.”

“That is so,” agreed Merur’s simulacrum.

“Then from now on, everyone—single-lived or Justified, whoever they may be—every Anima that passes through Tjenu must meet the same judgment. No preference will be given to those who have been resurrected before, not in judgment, and not in the order of resurrection. From now on, everyone must meet judgment equally. Including the Sovereign of Nu.”

The simulacrum of Merur frowned. “I did not hear you correctly just now, Dihaut.”

They turned to Merur. “You’ve just said that it was a mistake not to subject your Eyes to judgment, and called on me to judge Het. But I can’t judge her without seeing that what she has done to the Justified this past day is only what you have always asked her to do to the single-lived. She has done precisely what you demanded of her. It wasn’t the fact that Het was unthreatened by judgment that led her to do these things—it was you, yourself.”

“You!” spat Merur’s simulacrum. “You dare to judge me!”

“You gave me that job,” said Dihaut, Months and Years still motionless behind them. “And I will do it. You won’t be resurrected on Nu without passing my judgment. I have made certain of this, within the past hour.”

“Then it was you behind this conspiracy all along!” cried Merur. “But you can’t prevent me returning. I will awake on Aeons.”

“Aeons is far, far overhead,” observed Het, no less astonished at what she’d just heard than by the fact that she was still alive.

“And there was no conspiracy,” said Dihaut. “Or there wasn’t until you imagined one into being. Your own Eyes told you as much. But this isn’t the first time you’ve demanded the slaughter of the innocent so that you can feel more secure. Het only gave me an opportunity, and an example. I will do as you command me. I will judge. Withdraw to Aeons if you like. The people who oversee your resurrection on Nu, who have the skills and the access, won’t be resurrected themselves until you pass my judgment.” They gave again that half-regretful smile. “You’ve already removed some of those who would have helped you, when you purged Tjenu of what you assumed was disloyalty to you, Sovereign.” The image of Merur flickered out of sight, and She Brings Life and Different Ages scuttled away.

“I’m not poisoned,” said Het.

“I should hope not!” exclaimed Dihaut. “No, you left your supper, or your breakfast, or whatever it was, on my flier. I couldn’t help being curious about it.” They shrugged. “There wasn’t much of that neurotoxin in the animal you left behind, but there was enough to suggest that something in that food chain was very toxic. And knowing you, you’d have changed your metabolism rather than just avoid eating whatever it was. Merur, of course, didn’t know that. So when she said she wanted you stopped, I made the suggestion. . . .” They waved one silver hand.

“So all that business with the single-lived servant, promising her Justification if she would defend those two . . .”

“This late in the day, the Justified were already beginning to resist you—or try, anyway,” Dihaut confirmed, with equanimity. “If these had stood meekly as you slaughtered them, you might have suspected something. And you might not have drunk enough blood to feel the poison. I had to make you even more angry at the people you killed than you already were.”

Het growled. “So you tricked me.”

“You’re not the only one of Merur’s Eyes, sib, to find that if you truly served in the way you were meant to, you could no longer serve Merur’s aims. It’s been a long, long time since I realized that for all Merur says I’m to judge the dead with perfect, impartial wisdom, I can never do that so long as she rules here. She has always assumed that her personal good is the good of Nu. But those are not the same thing. Which I think you have recently realized.”

“And now you’ll be Sovereign over Nu,” Het said. “Instead of Merur.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Dihaut. “For the moment, anyway. But maybe not openly—it would be useful if Merur still called herself the One Sovereign but stayed above on Aeons and let us do our jobs without interference.” They shrugged again and gave that half smile of theirs. “Maybe she can salvage her pride by claiming credit for having tricked you into stopping your over-enthusiastic obedience, and saving everyone. In fact, it might be best if she can pretend everything’s going on as it was before. We’ll still be her Eyes at least in name, and we can make what changes we like.”

Het would have growled at them again, but she realized she was too tired. It had been a long, long day. “I don’t want to be anyone’s Eye. I want to be out of this.” She didn’t miss the cold, but she wanted that solitude. That silence. Or the illusion of it, which was all she’d really had. “I want to be somewhere that isn’t here.”

“Are you sure?” Dihaut asked. “You’ve become quite popular among the single-lived, today. They call you beautiful, and fierce, and full of mercy.”

She thought of the children by the river. “It’s meaningless. Just old poetry rearranged.” Still she felt it, the gratification that Dihaut had surely meant her to feel. She was glad that she’d managed to spare those lives. That the single-lived of Hehut might remember her not for having slaughtered so many of them, but for having spared their lives. Or perhaps for both. “I want to go.”

“Then go, sib.” Dihaut waved one silver hand. “I’ll make sure no one troubles you.”

“And the unauthorized lives there? Or elsewhere on Nu?”

“No one will trouble them either,” Dihaut confirmed equably. “So long as they don’t pose a threat to Hehut. They never did pose a threat to Hehut, only to Merur’s desire for power over every life on Nu.”

“Thank you.” Her skin itched, her fur growing thicker just at the thought of the cold. “I don’t think I want you to come get me. When I die, I mean. Or at least, wait a while. A long time.” Dihaut gestured assent, and Het continued, “I suppose you’ll judge me, then. Who’ll judge you, when the time comes?”

“That’s a good question,” replied Dihaut. “I don’t know. Maybe you, sib. Or maybe by then no one will have to pass my judgment just to be allowed to live. We’ll see.”

That idea was so utterly alien to Het that she wasn’t sure how to respond to it. “I want some peace and quiet,” she said. “Alone. Apart.” Dihaut gestured assent.

“Don’t leave me behind, Noble Het!” piped Great Among Millions. “Beautiful Het! Fierce Het! Het full of mercy! I don’t want them to put me in a box in a storeroom again!”

“Come on, then,” she said, impatiently, and her standard skittered happily after her as she went to find a flier to take her away from Hehut, back to the twilit ice, and to silence without judgment.

©2019 by Ann Leckie. Originally published in The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann Leckie is the author of Ancillary Justice, among other novels. She lives in St Louis, Missouri.

The Giving One (Part 1)

Ashok K. Banker | 7680 words

The great sage Jamarg was absorbed in his meditation when the calm of his hermitage was disturbed by the thunder of a thousand hooves. Frowning at being disturbed from his meditation, he rose and went to see why mounted men had come to this remote place. His wife Rukunyi was hurrying back from the river, bearing a heavy earthen pot filled with fresh water. Her face glowed with excitement.

“It must be my father,” she said to Jamarg as she approached the stoop of their thatched hut where he stood. “Or at the very least my mother come to visit me! Only a king or queen would travel with so many mounted men.”

She set the pot of water down on the stoop, spilling some. Jamarg noticed that the pot was barely half full and a trail of splotches marked her route across the clearing. He did not comment on it. He already knew that to his wife, a visit from her family far outweighed the daily drudgery of her domestic chores. Not for the first time, he wondered if he had indeed done the right thing by marrying a Stonak woman and bringing her away from her palatial city life to spend her life as a hermit’s spouse.

Yet there was great love between them, he knew, and he sensed it even now as she clutched his hand and tentatively squeezed it, conveying her happiness as the sound of hoofbeats grew closer. It was true that as a daughter of the Stonak dynasty, she could not help displaying strong emotions or desiring the hustle and bustle of her former life, but it was his arm she squeezed in excitement and to him that she turned her smiling face to share her joy. He smiled and patted her hand.

Jamarg looked around for his sons. Rukunyi noticed this and said, “Volsh and Veshnyi are collecting herbs and fruit for our meal. Saril and Rumant have gone to fetch firewood. Parsh is gone to his guru to study.”

Jamarg nodded. Their eldest son’s birth name was Nashenya, a simple and beautiful name on its own, and one often favoured by Rukunyi’s lineage. But ever since Parasu, the divine axe—parsh, in ashcrit—had been bequeathed to him by his guru Vish, his son carried it everywhere he went, even to the river when he bathed, so much so that everyone had taken to calling him Nashenya of the Axe. Or, colloquially, Parsh. Not a very appropriate name to call a man of the priest caste.

When Rukunyi used that name, Jamarg nearly spoke up to correct her, but in the end decided to say nothing. People who came to be known by their most distinguishing characteristic were people to whom fame came naturally. There was little point in objecting to something that was natural. Besides, there was no doubt that Parsh took after his Stonak mother far more than his priest caste father. It was the reason why he had been gifted the axe by his guru, none other than Vish the Destroyer himself.

The thundering swelled to a deafening pitch then broke into a ragged explosion of beats as the clearing filled with mounted armed riders. The frontrunners drew up their mounts at the sight of the hermitage and the seer and his wife standing before it, but their faces remained hawkish and their weapons stayed sheathed. The dust raised by their arrival clouded the air for several moments, even as the thundering of hooves dwindled and finally died away. Even before the dust could settle, a trio of tall hard-faced Stonak dismounted and strode towards the hut, swords in hand.

“Who lives here?” one asked, raising his sword insolently to point at Jamarg. One of his companions turned his head, hawked, and spat a gob of phlegm. Jamarg resisted the urge to ask the man if he would spit thus in his own house but held his tongue. Judging by the loutish appearance of these men, it was possible they thought nothing of spitting or even worse in their own house. Or palace, more likely. For the three of them were clad in richly filigreed armour with finely made garb beneath it. Even their swords had icons on their hilts. And through the settling dust Jamarg could see the coloured banner on the pole of their flagbearer.

Stonak. Brothers. Princes. And if I am not mistaken, that is the sigil of the Stonak line. Jamarg knew at once that if he did not carefully heed everything he said or did from this moment on, his wife and he would be slaughtered without a second’s hesitation. And if these men were to learn that his wife was of the Stonak line, even their sons would not be spared. A hermit priest had no cause to have enemies, being dedicated to ashcrit study and peaceful meditation. But these Stonak were no less than mortal enemies to Jamarg.

“My wife and I live here,” he replied.

The sword remained in the air, its pointed tip aimed at Jamarg’s throat. Jamarg glimpsed the sword-bearer’s brothers looking at Rukunyi with more than casual interest, and he forced himself to suppress the surge of anger that rose in his gullet.

Finally, the sword dipped and the Stonak turned away rudely, showing Jamarg his back. “Only an old priest caste’s hovel,” he said to someone beyond Jamarg’s line of sight.

The person spoken to came walking slowly into view, an attendant brushing the dust from his rich garb and armour with a peacock-feather duster. Another attendant followed close behind in perfect step with his master, holding up an umbrella with the distinctive coloured fabric and embroidered sigil of a royal seal that left no doubt about this stranger’s title and position. The man himself was exceedingly tall, powerfully built, and moved with the lithe grace of a predator. He was perhaps a decade and a half older than the three loutish Stonak before him and clearly their forebearer. They all shared his hawkish features and cream-wheat complexion, and most of all, they all moved and spoke with a similar arrogant sense of entitlement.

Jamarg realized with a shock that he knew exactly who this personage was—there was no disputing it: Arjen himself, King of the Stonak. At my hermitage! Great and merciful Brum, why do you bring me this test of my resolve and endanger the lives of my loved ones?

King Arjen Stonak, son of Krita Stonak, glanced at the thatched hut, passing his gaze condescendingly over both Jamarg and Rukunyi, seeming to find nothing of the slightest interest in anything he saw.

He pointed his chin toward Jamarg. One of his sons immediately spoke on his behalf. “Priest, we seek rebels fighting for Saegen. Have any come past?”

Jamarg bowed his head. “My Lord, we have seen not a single other person in this remote Aranya jungle for months.”

King Arjen Stonak glanced at him, seemed to find no reason to contradict his claim, and gestured with his eyebrows at his son.

“We are in pursuit of a band of warriors loyal to Saegen, son of Bosh Krushan. Have you heard or seen any such forces moving through this part of the forest in the past three days?”

Jamarg shook his head. “Nay, my Lord. It is as we said. The forest is quiet and undisturbed. These warriors you speak of have not passed this way.”

One of the other princes spoke up—the one who had pointed his sword at Jamarg. “Bear in mind that allies of the Krushan dynasty are enemies of the Stonak. This is King Arjen Stonak of Stonak City, our father. He is the man who defeated the Urrkh army of Krakaot. He also sacked Vaniyesh when it was under the reign of King Sharyaw and later King Shund, both of whom attempted to oppose him and were killed. And he fought and killed King Divod of the Vyanes, and defeated his son Prak who still seeks to regain the Vyanes kingdom. So too did he depose King Bosh of the Karnik Krushan and claimed Aranya as well. Since you are priests and no doubt unaware of the lineages of royals, I shall enlighten you. All these kings my father opposed were of the Krushan dynasty. He as well as all of us are of the Stonak dynasty. Our allies in battle are the Talajangha and we are supported by the Panksh, the five armies of the Jirrak, Yaven, Kambluz, Pahlev, and Parad. We are indomitable and cannot be confronted in battle. We will rule the entire world soon. It is futile to oppose us.”

Yet Bosh, son of Saegen, does oppose you. And soon he will conquer your great Stonak City and take back control of Aranya, seat of the Southern Stonak line. In fact, Bosh must be very near victory for the heirs of King Arjen Stonak and the king himself to be chasing him through the forest with such desperation. You may posture and preen as much as you please, but the circumstances belie your words.

Jamarg dared not say any of this aloud. For not only would it give these ruthless Stonak an excuse to cut him and Rukunyi down on the spot, it might lead to them learning that Rukunyi herself was a princess of the Stonak line, married to a priest caste who also happened to be of Krushan blood, their sworn enemy. The double insult—to have been partially of their enemy’s bloodline, and then to have further sullied her Stonak heritage by marrying a priest caste sworn to non-violence—would be beyond their ability to tolerate.

As if sensing his thoughts, Rukunyi turned her head in Jamarg’s direction. He shook his head very slightly, just enough to indicate to her that she should remain silent. She did.

One of the other princes, the one who had spat so brazenly, asked in a peevish tone: “Priests, have you any food? King Arjen Stonak requires nourishment.”

Jamarg bowed his head again. “We are poor priests. We have no possessions or wealth. Our repast is simple herbs and roots from the forest. It is not fit for a king, or even any Stonak.”

The princes looked at their father.

He shook his head with a derisive expression on his face.

The prince who had spoken before said, “Then go back to your chanting and meditating, priests,” in a tone that made both chanting and meditating sound like vulgar activities. He glanced at his brother princes as he said this, and both sniggered briefly in response before suppressing their amusement in the presence of their father.

The king shook his head with infinite weariness, started to turn away, then paused, looking up at nothing in particular, as if considering. Jamarg tried not to look at his arms, the famous arms of Arjen Stonak. Finally, almost as an afterthought, the king turned back. He spoke in a baritone voice that was deceptively mellifluent and pleasing to the ear. “Search the place anyway.”

The princes emitted eager grunts and rushed forward. They shoved past Jamarg and Rukunyi, followed by a score of other Stonak. Jamarg took hold of his wife by the shoulder and moved her aside, out of the way of the armed and armoured men tramping across their threshold, and stood to the side with his arm around her. The sounds of the Stonak soldiers and their princes rummaging through their meagre possessions came from inside the hut. Two of the princes had gone around the hut and were exploring the rest of the hermitage’s premises.

He whispered to Rukunyi: “When they find nothing, they will leave.”

Rukunyi nodded her head to show she understood. Jamarg realized she was shivering with fear. He was glad it was fear and not anger. As a Stonak herself, a warrior-princess of the Stonak line no less, Rukunyi could easily have lost her head and began berating the Stonak. The result would have been certain disaster. But mercifully, she had grasped the peril of their situation and was holding her pride in check.

Jamarg prayed they would finish the search and leave as quickly as they had come.

• • • •

“Look, father!”

One of the boorish sons of King Arjen Stonak came around the hut dragging a cow by a string attached to its nose-ring. She was a lovely animal, white and brown in colour, with the firm flesh and level back of a young bovine, not yet humped with old age or marked with the scars and bruises of the yoke, her large eyes doe-like and striking. When she caught sight of Jamarg, she mooed pitifully in protest at the manner in which she was being treated, her eyes wide and rolling. The other two princes prodded her in the flanks with their sheathed swords when she tried to resist. One even put his boot to her rump and shoved. She lurched forward squealing.

Jamarg clutched Rukunyi’s shoulder tight, silently warning her not to move or make a sound of protest. Even speaking might betray her, for though she was a dutiful priest caste wife and mother in every respect, she had been raised a warrior-princess and speaking deferentially to other Stonak, particularly under hostile circumstances, might well bring out the warrior in her as well. After all, these were the arch-enemies of her own lineage, the killers of her distant cousins and kin. The best thing she could do was stay silent.

“A cow,” King Arjen Stonak said dispassionately, glancing at the terrified animal. “I am too old to fill my belly with milk, and I am no priest caste to desire ghee. What would you have me do with this beast?”

“Eat it!” said one of his sons, grinning. “We can slaughter it and roast it here on a spit, and we can all feast and regain our strength before continuing the chase.”

“Yes, father!” said the third son eagerly. “It would take too long to go back home to Stonak City and we need meat to regain our strength. This is a good plan.”

Jamarg felt his stomach sicken, nauseated with fear and rising anger. Kill a priest caste’s cow just to make a meal? Slaughter and roast it on consecrated hermitage soil? What wanton beasts were these Stonak? Yet he dared say none of these thoughts aloud, for the consequences would be certain death. Instead, he stared at the back of the king’s head, waiting to see his response. He knew that anything these young princes and the soldiers said or did was only by leave of their liege. It was this man who was the dangerous one. The one to watch.

King Arjen Stonak seemed to be pondering his sons’ suggestion. “Why not,” he said at last. “It is a young cow, her flesh will be tender and nourishing. There seems to be no other source of nourishment in this wretched Aranya jungle. Very well. Slaughter the cow and roast it. Salt it well.”

With that, the king began to walk away.

Jamarg could remain silent no more. He released his wife’s shoulder and moved her behind him before stepping forward. “My lord,” he cried in the most pathetic voice he could manage. “I beg your leave to speak.”

One of the princes raised his sword as if to strike Jamarg down for his insolence.

“No,” said the king, his back still turned. How had he seen his son’s action? Arjen Stonak was renowned for his arms in battle, perhaps he had eyes to match. “Speak, priest caste,” he said, still facing toward the clearing, where his soldiers stood in tired rows, awaiting their next command. “But heed what you say and remember to whom you address your words.”

“Great one,” Jamarg said, keeping his head bowed low and his pressed hands joined. “If it is food you seek, this cow will provide it. There is no need to kill her.”

The king’s back seemed to laugh at Jamarg. “Did you not hear me say that I am grown too old to sup on milk? Neither do I care for butter and cheese. The cow’s flesh, on the other hand, makes a fit meal for fighting warriors. I have already decreed that the cow be slain. You, on the other hand, shall be executed for questioning my command. Let it not be said that a judgement pronounced by Arjen Stonak, emperor of the world, can be overturned by a priest caste. Kill him.”

At once the swords slipped free of their sheaths and the arms of the princes rose eagerly as they advanced on Jamarg. Rukunyi’s scream rang out from behind, shrill and piercing. Jamarg saw the way the prince nearest to him turned his grinning face to leer at her eagerly and knew that once they had slain him, they would have no reason to leave her alive—or untouched. He had a fraction of an instant in which to act and only one recourse. He took it.

“Kamshen!” he cried.

His voice, trained by a lifetime of rote recitation and chanting of mantras, rang out across the clearing like a temple bell, electrifying the very motes of the air itself:

|Nashno devyash ajyaan yaishya|
||Suryairt zha nashno nash||
|Mavag ajeeshne aropnyor|
|Namas Vish Peren Krushanye||

The oncoming swords halted at the utterance of his first word, the uncouth Stonak princes bearing the weapons of slaughter frozen, startled to stillness by the authority and power in his voice. If there was one thing Stonak feared, even briefly, it was the power of the priest caste to summon and manipulate the forces of auma to work his will. Even without looking at them directly, Jamarg saw the fear on their moustached faces.

His own eyes were directed at the cow, as were the mantras he was reciting. It was but a prayer to Mother Cow, recited by all priests to honour and please the four-footed givers of the essential items that sustained a priest caste’s life. But by simply prefacing it with the title “Kamshen,” he had rendered it a special invocation, infused with all the power he had accumulated over his lifetime of meditation and penance. Shen was the cow’s given name, so named by her rightful owner. Kam meant wish. Kamshen therefore meant Shen who fulfilled one’s wishes.

Even as the last echoes of his recitation died away, the cow mooed long and loud. Her cry filled the clearing. Jamarg saw the Stonak princes react, backing away from the beast, even though it was but a harmless bovine and they were strong warriors armed with drawn swords. At the periphery of his vision, Jamarg sensed the other soldiers also react, made nervous by his chanting of the mantras. This was the First Age: the world was still young, words still had their full potency, and the utterances of a man of auma could move mountains and redirect rivers if he so desired. It was the reason why many Stonak, particularly those openly hostile to priests as these Stonak were, struck before they spoke, deeming it safer to kill a priest caste on sight rather than wait and chance being struck down by his mantras. There was even a term for such potent magic: astra. A mantra of such potency, it could be wielded as a weapon. Which was literally what the term meant: weapon.

Yet what Jamarg had just recited was no astra. Far from it. These brutes, however, knew no such thing. Already they were backing away from him, the cow, and the hut as if all were ablaze and the fire threatened to consume them as well.

Only King Arjen Stonak stood his ground, although he had turned to face Jamarg once again and was watching him a menacing expression.

Shen lowed again, raising her head and turning it from side to side, eyes looking downwards, the whites showing. She was still afraid of the men with swords; she sensed their bestial intentions. But the mantra compelled her to obey. The lowing she had just issued was her reply to Jamarg, informing him that she was now ready to fulfill his wish.

Jamarg turned to look at the Stonak king. “It is food you desire, is it not?” he asked. “Food suitable for the nourishment of men at war? You shall have it.”

He spoke the next part of the Invocation, the sminish—secret—part that was not known even to his fellow priests. It was a complex mantra, dense and difficult to understand, let alone recite. He had never spoken it before, only heard it once when the owner of Shen had recited it in his presence. But he was a priest caste. This was what he did.

He recited it perfectly.

The cow lowered her head and snorted. It was an unlikely sound from a young female, the kind of snort that might be expected from a young bull instead. Straining, forceful, aggressive. She stamped her feet, kicking her hind legs. The princes backed further away, increasing the distance between the cow and their precious selves. The other soldiers watched with rising alarm. Only King Arjen Stonak observed both Jamarg and the cow with dispassion.

Shen issued a deafeningly loud bellow that Jamarg felt in the bones of his chest and reverberate within his lungs.

He saw the Stonak close their eyes for an instant, no more than a blink and a wince. And when they opened their eyes again, there was a great feast spread out across the clearing.

They exclaimed, backing away in greater alarm, as if they were witnessing the appearance of armed men or a horde of elephants rather than just food. A few moments passed, during which they looked at each other, then at the repast that lay before them, unsure what they were witnessing or what to do next.

A great length of cloth, some ten yards long and five yards wide, enough to take up one whole side of the clearing, had appeared. Upon this cloth were arrayed a rich variety of victuals of every possible description, along with nectar, juice, and wine of every kind, all arranged in fine pots, jugs, bowls, and ornate containers. It was a feast fit for a king—or for several dozen kings in fact.

And it was real, as anyone’s olfactory senses would tell them. The soldiers and princes realized it too, for even if their eyes were deceiving them, their noses could not mistake the aromas of such rich food and drink. They looked around at their leader for guidance.

The king was looking at Jamarg, eyes cold and face devoid of any discernible emotional expression. “What manner of priest caste trickery is this?” he asked in a voice that was almost a growl of warning. His hands hung by his sides, flaccid and unmoving. Jamarg kept a watch on them, from all that he had heard of the Stonak King those arms were the real threat.

“It is no trickery, my lord.” Jamarg kept his head bowed and his hands clasped. “You desired a meal. I provided it.”

“But how? From where did this feast appear?” King Arjen Stonak’s queries were sharp and pointed, as was his tone. If his face and eyes did not betray emotion, his voice more than made up for the lack. That mellifluous baritone voice conveyed an infinite range of subtle nuances. There was awe present, a little fear as well, and much suspicion, doubt, and distrust. “And what part did the cow play in this magic feat?”

“It was not magic, raje, merely the miraculous product of Mother Cow.”

The Stonak King’s voice added a touch of speculation to the mix of audible emotions, even as his face remained resolutely inscrutable. “Cows cannot produce entire feasts on demand. Out of thin air. What manner of being is this in the shape of a young cow?”

Jamarg swallowed. He had hoped that the appearance of the meal would distract the ravenous Stonak from all other thoughts. And he could see that the warriors as well as the sons of the King were already staring with gaping mouths, already fallen under the spell of the delicious aromas that filled the clearing.

“Answer me, priest caste!” King Arjen Stonak’s voice cracked as sharply as a whip.

Jamarg dipped his head. “The cow is no ordinary cow. Her name is Shen.”

“Shen,” repeated the Stonak King, as if tasting the word, rolling it on his palette to savour its meaning. “The Giving One. An appropriate name for a cow. Yet I recall you calling out a somewhat different version of that name earlier, before you began chanting your priest caste gibberish. What was it?”

Jamarg felt a bead of sweat burst forth on his forehead. He did not like the alteration in the voice of the Stonak King. Arjen Stonak sounded less afraid and anxious now that the initial shock of the sudden feat had worn off, more . . . calculating, more shrewd. “Kam-Shen,” Jamarg replied, deciding it was wisest to say as little as possible.

“Kam-Shen!” King Arjen Stonak said aloud.

At once the cow reacted, mooing. The two princes nearest to her—though still a good ten yards away—both reacted as well, stumbling into one another in a bid to retreat farther from the animal. Their armour and swords clashed noisily as they extracted themselves from one another’s arms, each cursing the other softly so as not to be heard by their father.

“A most unusual name for a cow,” King Arjen Stonak said, ignoring his sons. “Kam meaning desire. Shen meaning The Giving One. Therefore Kam-Shen must mean the One Who Gives You Your Desire.”

His face remained as inscrutable as always, even as his voice ranged through a variety of emotions. Pleasure at his decoding the ashcrit names, relaxation as he began to see that this was not a threat to be feared, and most disturbing to Jamarg’s ears, wily calculation as he began to understand the full measure of what he had discovered.

“A Cow That Fulfils One’s Desires,” he said, playing with the ashcrit words as a musician might play with a lute. “Fascinating!”

He pointed a finger at his sons. “Eat. Everyone. Eat and drink to your heart’s content.”

There was the barest moment of hesitation. Then every last man in the clearing fell upon the arrayed food and drink like a pack of hungry wolves upon a solitary doe in deepest winter. The rude sounds of lips smacking, the gulping of liquid, food being chewed, and otherwise consumed by two hundred and fifty uncouth hungry Stonak were the only sounds to be heard for the next several moments.

Jamarg waited for King Arjen Stonak to join his men in their feast. But the Stonak king stood where he was, watching, listening, waiting.

After a while, he called out to his sons. He had to call more than once to distract them from their frenzied eating and drinking. They appeared to be in a contest to choose who among them could eat and drink the most in the shortest time possible. Jamarg wondered if perhaps they thought that because the feast had appeared so suddenly, it might disappear just as quickly. The thought was an amusing one, and he might have smiled, had the circumstances not been so dire.

When the father finally had his sons’ attention, he asked them roughly, “Is it good?”

They turned ecstatic faces to him, smeared with food and wine. They babbled answers but the visual evidence was sufficient to answer the Stonak king’s query.

He turned back upon Jamarg that same cold inscrutable gaze. “What else can she provide?”

Jamarg kept his head low and his hands joined. “Does my lordship crave more food? Speak your appetite’s desire and I shall ask Mother Cow to provide.”

King Arjen Stonak’s voice suggested a sneer. “I possess wealth enough to feed the world thrice over every day. What if my appetite desires things other than food? Can Kam-Shen provide it?”

Jamarg swallowed again. This was the very thing he had feared might come to pass. “I have never had occasion to test her, my lord. In fact, this was the first time I made any demand of her.”

The King of the Stonak snorted. “Typical priest caste austerity. But you do possess the mantras that will invoke her giving nature, do you not?”

“Yes, raje.”

“Then ask her for something other than food.”

Jamarg spread his hands in apparent bewilderment. “What shall I ask for, sire?”

“Ask for gold. Precious gems. Women. Anything. I merely wish to see what she is capable of producing through her magical power.”

Jamarg felt his hands trembling despite himself. “My lord,” he said.

Rukunyi came up behind Jamarg and put her arms around his shoulders, comforting him by adding her strength to his own. He glanced sharply at her, indicating with his eyes that she was to continue to remain silent. She blinked and held her eyes shut an instant longer than necessary, to communicate her understanding. He was glad for her presence, for her touch. He prayed that their sons would not return until this nightmare was ended. The sooner he answered King Arjen Stonak’s queries and the Stonak King was satisfied, the sooner he would leave the hermitage with his men.

You delude yourself. Now that he knows the power of Kamshen he will not simply leave here. You heard the greed in his voice just now. He lusts after her for what she is, a being of power. Earlier, he was about to spare our lives because there was no reason to waste even the energy needed to kill us. Now he has a powerful motive to do so.

“Do it,” the Stonak commanded. “Demand extraordinary wealth. A king’s ransom.”

Jamarg knew this was the beginning of the end. Once the Stonak saw what Kamshen was capable of, he would never be able to simply leave here. Yet he had no choice but to comply with the Stonak’s request—even using the wrong mantra was not possible. As a priest caste, he could no sooner misspeak the words than he could forget his own identity. Truth above all. This was the First Age, also known as the Age of Truth. A priest caste must speak every mantra immaculately, and speak nothing but the absolute truth.

Trying to ignore the growing dread within his heart, he recited the mantra that would compel Kamshen to fulfill the desire of King Arjen Stonak.

• • • •

Karlon paused and partook of the refreshment offered him by the acolytes. The air was electric with anticipation as the rishis of Nimsh-sharanya waited to hear the rest of his narrative. After a short respite, he continued.

“What followed next was as tragic as it was inevitable. Kamshen produced all that Rishi Jamarg commanded. At the sight of the great piles of gold and gems and other precious objects, King Arjen Stonak was filled with lust for more. He kept demanding that Jamarg compel Kamshen to produce more and more, each time naming some new item that he desired until a small hillock of treasure lay in the center of the clearing. Then, as Jamarg had feared all along, the Stonak realized that if he possessed Kamshen herself, he would be the richest, most powerful man in the world. When this realization came to him, he took the calf by force and left with his sons and soldiers and returned to his capital, Stonak City. Before leaving, he compelled Jamarg to instruct him, and him alone, in the mantras of command, and once the priest had finished teaching him the powerful mantras, he struck him aside and rode away with the magic calf.”

Karlon looked around. The night had grown quiet and still. The insect songs of twilight had given way to the calm of the night. In the deep jungle, predators roved and fauna continued their nightly game of survival, but here in the sanctified shelter of Nimsh-sharanya, the peaceful priests and acolytes listened with rapt attention to every syllable of Karlon’s narrative. They had all heard some part or version of the legend of the Bhrigu before, but never before recited in such poetic detail.

“The only reason the Stonak King did not kill Jamarg was because he thought he might have need of his knowledge later. Not all Stonak need be ignorant or illiterate. Indeed, many are among the wisest and most knowledgeable in their own right, often vying with the wisest priests in the quest for ashcrit enlightenment. But these Stonak were ignorant to a fault and hostile to all forms of learning, and like all ignorant beings, these Stonak lived in perpetual self-doubt. King Arjen Stonak thought that there might yet be something that needed to be known in order to keep the calf of plenty producing the endless supply of treasures he envisioned, and so, until he could be sure of that plentiful supply, he decided to leave the priest caste and his wife unharmed.

“Later that same day, the sons of Jamarg and Rukunyi returned home and learned of the events of the day. They were outraged and furious at the abuse meted to their parents by the Stonak king. But being priests, they could do nothing about it. Except for the fifth son, Parsh.

“Now, Parsh was no ordinary priest caste boy. In fact, he shared more than some of the best qualities of a warrior. His great-grandmother Yish was a Krushan who married Sage Kakrinz of the Aranyesh clan. Yish was concerned that due to her Krushan parentage, her children might display warrior tendencies as well. So she appealed to her husband to use his divine knowledge to ensure that her offspring would turn out to be knowledge-seeking priests who worshipped the word, not the sword. At the same time, Yish’s mother, the wife of King Gadhi, lacked a son and heir who would inherit Gadhi’s throne and continue his lineage. She in turn desired a child who would be disposed towards war and weaponry, or in other words, Stonak-like tendencies.

“With this in mind, Sage Kakrinz performed a ritual and divided the fruit sanctified by the ritual into two parts. One part he gave to his wife Yish to consume, the other part to her mother. But mother and daughter accidentally exchanged their portions and each consumed the other one’s share. Only after they finished did they realize their error. Yish appealed to her husband to do something. As the wife of a priest caste, she could hardly raise a Krushan son! Nor would having a priestly son solve the problem her mother faced.

“Sage Kakrinz could not entirely alter the potency of his mantras. But he took steps to ensure that the effect of the fruit would be delayed by one generation. Thus, Yish gave birth to a son with perfect priestly tendencies, who became an emblem of the priest caste, Jamarg, while her mother had a son who was the perfect heir for Gadhi. Thus both mother and daughter’s dilemmas were resolved.

“But as predicted by Kakrinz, the effect of the fruit was delayed, not cancelled. Thus it was that Jamarg’s son, Nashenya, was born with Krushan tendencies. In acknowledgement of this fact, Jamarg and his wife Rukunyi named him Nashenya, a favoured name among Krushans at the time. However, they hoped that at worst he would be a warrior priest, one who was conversant in the arts of war but chose to follow the path of knowledge and peace. As for Yish’s mother, she gave birth to a son whom she named Vishnev, and who grew up as a Krushan with a keener interest in learning than his father might have wished.

“Young Nashenya grew up honouring his parents’ wishes to the letter. He was a dedicated acolyte and a devout seeker of ashcrit wisdom. Thanks to his parents’ enlightened upbringing, he did not suppress or deny his Stonak side but kept it in check by training under one of the most austere and disciplined gurus possible, the mighty Lord Vish himself, Destroyer of Worlds. Vish’s training demanded impossible penance and discipline which no ordinary Stonak—indeed, no ordinary mortal—could dream of achieving. Simply by gaining Vish’s acceptance as a guru, Jamadagneya Nashenya proved himself to be a formidable brahma-Stonak, that rare enlightened being who possesses the best qualities of both priest caste and Stonak varnas. It was in acknowledgement of this very austerity and pacificist approach that Lord Vish gave Parasu, his divine axe, to Nashenya, thus earning him the epithet Parsh by which he was thereafter known.”

Karlon looked around at his audience. Despite the utter blackness of the forest background and the flickering light of the oil lamps and torches around the hermitage, he was certain that once again their numbers had swelled. He did not know how this could be possible. In any case, once launched upon his mammoth recitation, he could not permit himself to be interrupted or distracted by such minor considerations. If the myth was true, if the dead of Beha’al indeed resided in Aranya jungle, if those dead souls now gathered around to hear his recitation of the great epic, then so be it. What better motive to study history than to learn the causes of one’s destruction?

“There is an episode involving Nashenya that will better enable you to understand his dual nature. When he was but a boy, an incident happened involving his mother. Nashenya and his brothers were away in the forest, collecting the fruits and herbs, chopping wood and performing other daily chores. Sage Jamarg was preparing to perform his ritual ablutions so he could begin his day’s meditation. As usual, Rukunyi went down to the river with her pot to fetch water for her husband. As she walked the path that led down the Coldheart Mountains to the Jeel River, she heard unusual sounds and laughter. Through the close-growing trees and foliage, she glimpsed someone splashing about in the water below, making a great deal of noise. It was King Chariotter, lord of the courtesans, the artistic and musical entertainers of the devas, dallying with his lovers. Innocent as she was of such activities, totally isolated and secluded in her life as a hermit’s wife, Rukunyi had no experience of such a sight. At first, she did not even know what was transpiring on the banks of the river below. The closer she came to the riverbank, the more she saw and heard, and the more these titillating sights and sounds aroused and inflamed her curiosity. Finally, she stopped and watched from a discrete spot behind a tree.

“King Chariotter was a magnificent specimen of masculine perfection, endowed with great physical beauty and artistic talent. He sang and recited lyric poetry, danced and cavorted with his courtesans in a display of amorous art performance such as only courtesans and nymphs can demonstrate. Any mortal observer would be powerfully aroused by such a scene. To Rukunyi, innocent and pure of life and thought, it was an erotic assault that engulfed her completely. She felt as if her entire being was aflame, and was overcome by her passions. Watching the otherworldly lovers engaged in the oldest pastime of all, she could not help but fantasize about participating in those arcane acts herself.

“The sound of the pot striking the ground as it fell from her hand brought her back to her senses with a jolt. The courtesans hardly heard or noticed, absorbed as they were in their pursuit of ecstasy. But she was powerfully embarrassed by the extent to which she had lapsed and the thoughts that had consumed her and she ran all the way back to the hermitage, hardly noticing or caring that she was catching her garments and ripping them on branches and roots, or that her hair knot had fallen open to loose her tresses in wanton abandon. She arrived back at the hermitage of her husband in a state such as he had never seen her before, disheveled, glistening with perspiration brought on as much from her fantasizing by the river as from her reckless run uphill, her hair loose and tangled, her clothes torn and dirty—and no pot of water in her hand.

“Jamarg was startled beyond words. As a man of great wisdom and insight, he instantly knew what emotion assailed his wife. After all, she was his wife and consort, and he of all people recognized the signs of arousal upon her face. Her disheveled state and frantic guilty manner were a great shock. To make matters worse, she blurted out an explanation of what had transpired in a feeble attempt to gain his sympathy. But the more she said, the deeper she sank into self-incrimination. Her description of the physical beauty of King Chariotter and the acts she had witnessed him performing with the female courtesans were sufficient to enrage her husband’s emotions. Sage Jamarg was not a man given to a loss of temper easily and he loved his wife dearly enough to overlook almost any transgression. But this was a shameful lapse and somehow her mental adultery seemed to him no less than the actual act, so deeply had she given herself over to the emotional and psychic details of the self-seduction. What he did next was as much the reaction of a jealous husband as that of an outraged priest caste penitent.

“One of their sons had returned home during this time. Jamarg ordered him to take up a weapon and kill his mother at once, as her crime, in Jamarg’s view, was beyond tolerance or forgiveness. He would not debate the right or wrong of such a terrible penalty, and insisted that the execution be carried out without question or argument.

“Reluctantly and with great distress, the first son refused. Shame-faced, he asked his father’s forgiveness for he was unable to follow his instruction.

“Thereupon, Jamarg asked his first son to go fetch his brothers.

“When all five of his scions were before him, he ordered each of them in turn to follow his bidding and execute his condemnation of their mother.

“One by one, each of them refused him in turn. Shame-faced and recalcitrant, they were terrified of their father’s wrath but unable to do as he bid.

“Except for Parsh. He was the last to return home as he was performing his usual chore, chopping wood for the ritual fire. He saw his mother’s weeping distress, heard his father’s enraged commands, sensed his brothers’ shameful impotence, and listened to the terrible pronouncement.

“Without a single word or hesitation, Parsh raised up his axe and with one smooth blow, beheaded his mother.

“His father stared, his anger silenced at last. Parsh’s brothers broke out into grievous weeping. Parsh knelt before his father, bowing his head. Jamarg stared down at his son and was filled with admiration for him.

“Impressed by Parsh’s obedience, he told his youngest son that he could have any boon he desired. For though a priest caste hermit lived in utter poverty and in a state of near destitution, these were the result of his vows. In point of fact, he possessed the power to grant almost any desire or wish through the use of the mantras he knew. He now offered to grant his obedient son any wish he demanded.

“Parsh thanked his father and touched his feet in devotion, then said that all he desired was for Jamarg to restore his mother to life. Indeed, it was because he knew that Jamarg possessed knowledge of the mantra that restored life to the dead that he had willingly executed his own mother. Now that her punishment had been meted out, it was only fair that Jamarg should give Parsh and his brothers their mother back again.

“Jamarg was left speechless by his son’s intelligence and his obedience. His anger dissipated by now, he agreed that being executed was punishment enough for his wife. Uttering the potent mantra of resurrection, he restored Rukunyi back to life, and when she was whole and breathing again, embraced her and accepted her unconditionally once again.”

Karlon stopped and looked around. “So you see what a resolute boy Parsh was? He respected and loved his parents so much that he could behead his own mother at his father’s bidding, but he only did so because he was certain he could resurrect her again. He could do such a thing because unlike his priest caste brothers, he was born with the heart of a warrior. The Krushan part of his being enabled him to commit that terrifying act of matricide as well as to think beyond that terrible act to its aftermath, whereupon he knew his father would agree to resurrect her. Only a Krushan could conceive of and then act upon such an unspeakably violent plan, all within the space of the few seconds it took for his father to order him to execute his mother.

“That same quality, the ability to see the need for violence and act upon it without hesitation was what led to the events that followed the theft of the calf Kamshen. Had Parsh been an ordinary priest caste boy like his brothers, he could never have done what he did next. Then again, perhaps the generations of suffering inflicted upon countless pacifist priests, and the Bhrigu line in particular, had naturally evolved a descendant of that line in whom all the collective righteous rage of those who were wronged and killed had converged. It was as if all the sufferings of his ancestors at the hands of the Stonak had been brewed into the cataclysm that walked the earth by the name of Parsh.”

[End Part 1]

©2021 by Ashok K. Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the author of more than seventy books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. His works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. Ashok’s most recent publication is his debut picture book I am Brown. Upcoming in April is A Dark Queen Rises, the sequel to Upon a Burning Throne.

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

The Giving One (Part 2)

Ashok K. Banker | 7728 words

When Parsh returned home and found that his father’s calf had been stolen, and stolen by none other than the King of the very Stonak kingdom who had been slaughtering priests for decades, he did not hesitate. He took up his axe and set out on the road that led to Stonak City. He did not stop to think of the consequences of what he was about to do, nor of the odds against him. For while a priest caste’s disciplined meditation and learning compel him to consider carefully before embarking upon any venture, a Stonak’s very nature is predicated on swift reflexes and instinct. Parsh only knew that his father and mother had been insulted, their sanctified home and hermitage defiled, and a precious calf stolen.

What Jamarg had not mentioned to the Stonak, as it would hardly have mattered to them, was that the calf actually belonged to Lord Inadran himself. The king of the Stone Gods had graciously given it to Jamarg for safekeeping. Bad enough that King Arjen Stonak had stolen the calf; worse still, the calf had not belonged to Jamarg in the first place.

In those days, Stonak were masters of the realm. Priests cloistered themselves in deep Aranya jungle ashrams, on unattainable mountain peaks, in the most uninhabited locations possible. There, in their ashrams and caves, they reigned supreme over the worlds of learning and inner space. But the developed world of cities and towns and villages was dominated by Stonak who roved the land, taking whatever they desired and fighting for anything that was disputed.

Stonak City, the capital of the Stonak nation, was a land dominated by the Stonak way of life. Violence was omnipresent, considered a natural expression of their true feelings. Sadly, it was the people of other castes, those who were merely living their lives or going about their tasks, who suffered the most. Some fell victim to rapacious Stonak, others were innocent bystanders who came into harm’s way accidentally, and many unfortunates died or suffered only because they happened to work with or work for one or another group of warring warriors. Many tradesmen, craftsmen, artisans, artists, and poets set aside their tools and implements and took up weapons only to defend themselves and their families against the incessant threat of violence. Fights erupted at any moment, every day there was a battle, and life itself was one endless war campaign.

It was to this violent and ruthless city that Parsh came in search of his father’s lost calf. A young man barely grown to adulthood, hair matted and tied in a knot on top of his head, clad in the simple white garb and loincloth of an acolyte, bearing the ash smears that declared him a priest caste, he walked the dusty kingsroad that led to the city. Even before he reached its high gates, he encountered trouble in the form of a band of Stonak warriors returning from a skirmish in which they had fared badly against the forces of Bosh, son of Saegen. They were talking bitterly amongst themselves of Bosh’s inroads into Stonak territory and how the tide appeared to be turning against their army as well as the Panchagana. To a man, they all agreed that it was only a matter of time before King Arjen Stonak lost control of Aranya, and once that seat of the Stonaks fell, it would be a great blow to their cause. It was while they were in this foul mood that they chanced upon the young priest caste boy walking steadfastly along the kingsroad.

“Priest!” said one of them, tapping the hilt of his sword on his shield. “Do you not see Stonak on the road? Bow at once to us!”

“Show some respect for your superiors!” said another, deliberately taunting Parsh.

Parsh did not even notice that they were addressing him. Completely absorbed in his goal, he walked at a rapid pace, intent on reaching the city. The Stonak took his quick walk as an indication of cowardice and thought he was scurrying away from them. Irritated, they rode after him and one of them raised his sword to strike Parsh down from behind.

His eyes on the dusty road, the sun above and behind him, Parsh saw the shadow of the Stonak horse rider with his raised sword slicing down at him. Without a second’s thought, Parsh’s axe flashed upwards. A man’s cry rang out. And the arm holding the sword fell with a clattering thump, severed arteries and veins spurting life fluid onto the dusty road. The injured man swung his horse around, screaming in pain, and his stump spewed blood onto his comrades, drenching their armour and faces. He fainted away from the shock and loss of blood, falling to the ground as his horse milled about in confusion.

Parsh continued to walk on towards the city. He had not slowed his pace even when he defended himself against the Stonak’s attack. He flicked the blood from the axe’s edge as he went, but did not return it to its place in his waistcloth; he let it stay in his hand by his side, swinging as he walked, its finely honed blade catching the noonday sunlight and reflecting it in bright dazzling shards.

After a moment in which the other Stonak gaped at their fallen friend, and other pedestrians and horse-mounted passersby on the kingsroad continued on their way with eyes averted from what they assumed was just another routine instance of Stonak violence, realization set in of what had just occurred.

A priest caste had killed a Stonak.

A priest caste boy, no less, on foot and armed only with a woodchopper—for Vish’s axe appeared deceptively ordinary at first sight; a priest caste boy who somehow survived despite being attacked from behind by a veteran Stonak warrior, one of King Arjen Stonak’s own.

It was unheard of. Unthinkable. Impossible.

Yet it had happened. There lay the fallen Stonak, severed stump bleeding out the last of his life onto the dust of the road, who only moments earlier had been talking and laughing with the rest of the Stonak soldiers.

Without thinking further, the rest of the band of veterans roared with fury and spurred their horses, riding after the priest caste boy, who had already left them several dozen yards behind as he continued his resolute journey up the kingsroad. Swords drawn, they rode down at him from behind, hellbent on avenging their fallen comrade. Others on the road drew their horses aside, leaped off the road, or stopped their chariots or uks wagons to let the Stonak pass. Nobody paid much attention to the intended victim of their rage. When Stonak were on a rampage, it was best to continue about one’s business and ignore them completely—unless of course they expected you to bow or serve them. Only a pair of acolytes, trekking back to the city with herbs collected from the woods, paid heed. As fellow priests, they knew they were about to witness a familiar sight: the murder of one of their brethren for no fault other than the mere fact that he was a priest caste. Even though they were both boys with hairless chins, they had seen scores of such assaults and massacres; it was a part of daily life under Stonak rule. The world belonged to the men who wielded swords, and that meant Stonak. The only weapons they possessed were words.

But not the priest caste boy. He was armed with something more than words. And unlike his priest caste brethren, he was not afraid to use it on Stonak if compelled.

As the band of Stonak rode down on him, Parsh raised the hand holding the axe before his face. He did not slow his walk or turn his head. He kept walking towards Stonak City. The blade of the raised axe was as clear and mirrored as still water. Upon the surface of the blade, he could see a clear reflection of the kingsroad behind him—and the Stonak riders bearing down on him with swords drawn and ugly expressions on their bearded faces. He gripped the axe by the leather thong that hung from the base of its handle with his other hand, then, as the riders came within striking distance, he swung it.

What followed next was a blur to the acolytes watching across the road. While they had witnessed any number of acts of violence in their youthful lives, almost all involving Stonak slaughtering priests or, less frequently, one another, they had never witnessed anything akin to what they saw on the kingsroad that noonday.

Parsh’s axe swung around in a looping blur as the first Stonak bore down on him. The blade of the axe seemed to glide through the torso of the Stonak, as if it came close to his body but did not actually touch him. This was because it did not strike with any impact, merely spun a full looping turn without any indication of having struck the rider.

The first rider swung at Parsh, appeared to miss him by an inch, and rode past.

Parsh’s axe continued to twirl around the leather thong, which was spinning on his forefinger held up in the air like a man launching a discus, crooked just slightly at the tip to keep the thong from slipping off. By the time it was on its third looping turn, the next horseman came within striking distance. Parsh moved his hand at blurring speed, and once again, the axe continued spinning as it cut through the space the rider occupied, apparently without touching the rider himself.

The second rider also swung at him, missed, then overshot.

Parsh then stepped sideways, moved the spinning parsh to adjust for the new angle at which the next rider was approaching, and spun it at this third Stonak as well, with much the same result. Except this time, there was a brief red glitter, like red rubies had been tossed in midair and caught the sunlight.

The axe spun round without interruption, and the rider hacked downwards, missed, and rode past.

Now, a peculiar thing happened to the first rider.

He had stopped his horse and had begun to turn its head, to ride back at Parsh for a second pass. But he barely managed to twist the reins once, then doubled over in apparent agony . . . and fell off his horse to the ground.

Except that only the top half of the Stonak fell.

It slid off the man’s torso, as neatly severed as a joint of lamb struck cleanly by a butcher’s blade, and fell with a wet thump to the road. The rest of the man, everything from about midway down his chest downwards, remained seated on the horse, gaping bright red and terrible in the gaudy sunlight.

A moment later, the same thing happened to the second rider. The angle of the severance was slightly different, the second man having been cut a little lower than the first man, but the effect was much the same.

The axe had cut them in half.

The third rider paused, appeared to gag on his own blood, then toppled off his horse—and his own lower body, but the cut was not complete in his case, which was why the acolytes had glimpsed the ruby red blood winking in the sunlight, and the top half of his body hung down, still partly attached to his lower body. It was a nauseating sight. The horse was drenched in the blood of the rider and whinnied in alarm and disgust.

The remaining Stonak suffered much the same fate.

For the span of ten or twelve normal breaths, Parsh swung his axe round and round on his upraised finger, as each warrior rode down at him, and in that time, as many warriors died.

Moments later, the kingsroad was strewn with the severed bodies of almost a score of Stonak veterans, butchered like chopped meat.

Parsh turned back towards the direction he had been going, and continued on his way.

He flicked the axe as he went, sending a few drops of blood flying from its blade. But oddly enough, not all the blood was flicked off. The gore upon the edge and sides of the blade seemed to seep into the shining metal face, like water absorbed by parched earth. Parsh flicked a drop or two off, but the rest seeped into the blade itself.

The axe literally drank the blood.

Even thirty yards away, the acolytes across the road could hear the blade sing. It was a keening shrill metallic sound, like the sound a knife blade makes when set to a rapidly spinning grindstone. It was so high-pitched, it set stray dogs to barking for miles around, and along the length of the kingsroad people looked up and frowned, sensing rather than hearing the sound before shaking their heads and continuing on their way.

Parsh continued walking towards Stonak City. Already, the gates of the city were within sight. The encounter with the veterans had taken barely a few moments of his time. Seventeen experienced and battle-tested warriors lay dead in the dust behind him.

There was not a scratch upon him.

• • • •

Parsh approached the gates of Stonak City. The Stonak milling about the gate were mostly inebriated louts spoiling for a fight. Gatewatch duty was a lucrative assignment, as it came with the power to stop any visitors, seize contraband, as well as levy the city toll. Few dared pick a fight with the gatewatch of Stonak City because they represented the official might of the Stonak empire. Over time, this had led to the sentries abusing their positions of power, preying on travellers, demanding a higher toll than was official, pocketing a portion for themselves, taking bribes from the richer merchants, smuggling contraband out or in, confiscating items for their own personal use or as gifts, and generally doing as they pleased. They mostly spent their duty hours under the influence of one or other of the many intoxicants that they came into possession of, playing bone-dice games to decide who went home with the day’s spoils of confiscation, or, when they needed some diversion, harassing the female or weaker travellers passing through the gates they watched.

They might have let Parsh pass by unmolested, taking him to be what he was in fact: a priest caste boy from some remote hermitage come to the city on some errand or other. Strictly speaking, priests were not expected to pay any tolls or taxes, being as they were, bereft of worldly possessions and wealth. But this was Stonak City, seat of the Stonak, and the very existence of a priest caste was an affront to any Stonak.

So, just as Parsh was about to pass resolutely through the vaulting gates of the city, he was challenged by a drunken guard.

“You there. Pay your toll.”

The sentries at the gate, hearing their colleague call out and seeing the priest caste boy, crossed their spears, barring Parsh’s way.

Parsh slowed, then came to a halt. His dark face glowed with an energy that belied his unattractive features, lending him an extraordinary aura of strength and charisma. His features were not handsome, far from it, and his body was squat and dwarfish in proportion. But the fiery black eyes, high prominent cheekbones, bristling black beard, and crow-black priest caste hair matted in a knot atop his head, with the powerful neck and shoulders, all created a sense of great power and menace when seen from close up.

The gatewatch guard who had called out the challenge felt and saw this menace as Parsh halted close before him and had a tiny moment of misgiving. It was gone as soon as it had arisen. After all, this was no Stonak; he was merely a priest caste from the Aranya jungle. A naïve young acolyte who was sworn to ahimsa, the philosophy of non-violence, and would sooner cause himself to waste away in self-punitive austerities than lift a finger against another living being. There was no menace or danger here.

“Toll,” said the gatewatch curtly. “Pay.”

Parsh merely stood his ground and glowered. He was not looking directly at the gatewatch guard or at any of his colleagues. His gaze was set beyond them, upon his destination, the city within. This lent him a peculiar air of distraction, the look of a man not entirely in his senses. And this was true: Parsh was inhabiting a mental space that was not the rational realm of most mortals. Certainly not the warped morally corrupt world that these predatory sentries inhabited. He was following his own sense of dharma.

He gave no answer to the guard.

The gatewatch looked at his colleagues with amusement. “A silent one we have here, men.”

“Maybe he’s taken a maun-vrata,” said one of the others, drinking from a jug of soma they had confiscated from a wine vendor passing by. “A vow of silence.”

His colleague, seated on the wall above the gate, called down: “Priest fool won’t have a penny to his name anyway. Beat him and kick him on his way.”

Another sentry pointed to the shining blade of the axe hanging from Parsh’s cloth waistbelt. “He could pay the toll with that. That looks like it could be worth something.”

“Or useful at least,” said the first man who had spoken.

He reached for the axe, intending to examine it more closely. “Let’s take a look at this, youngun, shall we?” he began. “I have always wanted—”

He never finished—either his words or his action.

Even before his fingertips touched the hilt of the axe hanging from the priest caste boy’s waist, Parsh had taken up the axe, and cut off the gatewatch sentry’s arm. It fell with a soft thud to the ground, knocking over the sentry’s own jug of soma. The soma jug toppled over, spilling thick honey wine into the dirt. The blood from the severed arm mingled with the blood.

The other sentries reacted quicker than their compatriots on the kingsroad had earlier. For one thing, being on gatewatch meant they regularly dealt with all manner of ruffians and foreigners. Corrupt they were, but fit and skilled at violence as well, or else they would not survive a day of being on gatewatch. The instant they saw blood spilled, they drew their weapons and attacked without further comment or discussion. Spears and swords in hand, they moved in on Parsh, intending to kill him without wasting a single breath asking a question. He had maimed one of their own, that was all that mattered. He had to be brought down at once.

Parsh raised his forefinger, twirling his axe on its leather thong. It spun faster than it should have been able to spin, the edge of its blade producing the same keening song it had made earlier. The sentries heard it and noted the blurring speed at which the axe spun round the priest caste boy’s finger, but moved in anyway.

It was not long before they all lay dead, or horribly maimed and dying, at their post.

Visitors coming and going gawked at them and reacted to the extraordinary sight of so much Stonak blood spilled at the very gates of the city. They had never before seen such a thing, not in Stonak City.

Nor had they ever seen anything like the priest caste boy who stood over the butchered corpses with the axe in his hand. The axe that seemed to have almost no bloodstains on its blade, and which produced a sharp high-pitched sound that physically hurt their ears and set dogs barking across the city.

Parsh raised both hands, shaking the axe at the banner which bore the sigil of King Arjen Stonak.

“Stonak! I am come to reclaim my father’s calf. Come out and return our property to me, or I shall enter and kill every last Stonak within these walls today!”

As the echoes of his challenge faded away, the citizens who had witnessed the slaughter of the gatewatch turned to one another, unsure whether to laugh or to wonder at his audacity. Surely he was suicidal, insane, deluded. To stand at the gates of Stonak City and challenge the entire Stonak dynasty? What hubris! In moments more soldiers would come—scores, hundreds, thousands if need be—and put an end to this ingenuous youth.

They waited to watch the foolish young priest caste die.

• • • •

Parsh did not have long to wait. It so chanced that King Arjen Stonak had not yet reached his capital city. The Stonak king had set off from Jamarg’s hermitage with his prize, intending to come straight home and experiment further with his new possession. But on the way, a thought had occurred to him. He realized that if Kamshen could grant any desire its owner asked, then there was no reason to restrict one’s demands to treasure alone. He had demanded uks carts to carry the treasure he had already conjured up back at Jamarg’s hermitage and now a veritable train of uks wagons followed his band of warriors on the kingsroad, laden with more wealth than he had brought home from most military raids or campaigns. And that was what made him realize that if he could ask for uks carts to carry his treasure, he could ask for other things as well, things not inherently of value but of great strategic and tactical use to a warlord.

For instance, at this very moment, he was chasing Bosh, son of Saegen, with a band of about two hundred and fifty of his finest soldiers. He commanded great armies, massive military forces, but it was not practical to mobilize them all quickly enough to give chase to a small band of rebels. What he needed was a way to track down and find Bosh and his band of marauders quickly and efficiently. He needed a small force of expert trackers who perfectly knew the region of the Aranya jungle into which Bosh and his warriors had taken refuge and were capable of flushing them out and slaughtering them on sight.

And so this was what he asked Kamshen for next. Stopping on the road itself, he uttered the mantras of command and compelled the calf to produce his demand. A blink of an eye later, a whole company of lean-faced men, accompanied by dogs as lean-faced and lithe-bodied as their masters, stood before King Arjen Stonak, ready to do his bidding. He set them upon the trail of Bosh and soon enough, the hunt was on.

Hours later, he had rounded up and slaughtered Bosh’s band of rebels and captured Bosh himself. He decided to take the rebel leader back to Stonak City to be tortured and publicly executed as an example. There were still some packs of rebels loose across the wilderness, for they had split up and fled to the four quarters. The Stonak king sent his three sons after them, using the trackers and their dogs. He ordered his sons not to return home until they had tracked down and eliminated every last one. Then he turned the head of his own horse and started back for his capital city.

And thus it was, only a little while after Parsh stopped at the gates of Stonak City, King Arjen Stonak came riding up as well, bearing in tow the very thing that he had stolen from Parsh’s father, the precious calf Kamshen.

King Arjen Stonak was taken aback by the extraordinary sight that met his eyes at the city gates. Parsh stood alone before them, with a large and growing crowd of travellers, merchants, citizens, and other priests standing across the way and watching with great interest. His axe was in his hand, still singing after the slaughter of another round of Stonak men. And the bodies of those he had killed lay strewn all around him.

Even at a glance, King Arjen Stonak estimated there must be at least two hundred corpses lying around the priest caste boy. It was difficult to tell exactly because the corpses had largely been brutally hacked apart. He looked around, frowning in the afternoon sunlight, trying to fathom who else had assisted the priest caste boy in this slaughter. Where were his allies? Surely there must be a sizable contingent fighting alongside him, to have produced such a death toll?

It took him some time to absorb and accept the fact that it was only one man, a boy at that, and that too a priest caste, who had accomplished all this, entirely on his own. With a single axe.

Parsh recognized King Arjen Stonak from his burnished armour and the banner bearer and umbrella bearer that flanked him. He raised his axe and hailed him loudly.

“Stonak! You have stolen something that is not your property. Return unto me that which you took from my father’s hermitage.”

King Arjen Stonak grinned at his men, then permitted himself a hearty chuckle. “The boy has spirit. Clearly he was struck too hard on the head when yet an infant. Cut him down where he stands.” He raised a finger, adding, “Use archers first. He seems to be fairly effective with the axe, but it won’t be any use against arrows.”

Several shortbows appeared in the hands of the Stonak horsemen. Accustomed to loosing from the saddle, this was an easy target for them. They loosed a volley of several dozen arrows at once at Parsh.

Parsh twirled the axe on his finger as he had before. The blade blurred. He stood rock still. The hail of arrows flew at him, lethally aimed, and almost all found their mark—and were chopped to splinters by the spinning axe.

The watching crowd oohed in amazement. This was something new.

King Arjen Stonak frowned. “Try javelins. All at once.”

The result was the same. The axe chopped every last javelin to fragments. The splinters fell in a pile around Parsh, yet not a scratch marked his body.

The audience cheered and applauded. Despite the presence of the Stonak King and the knowledge that this charade could not possibly continue forever, they felt an overwhelming joy at seeing the brutal Stonak bested at their own game: use of weapons. The watching priests cheered loudest of all.

Parsh let the axe slow, then lowered it. “Surrender the calf to me now, Stonak, and you may yet live. I will not warn you again.”

King Arjen Stonak bared his teeth. He was no longer amused by the priest caste boy. “Kill him,” he said shortly to his warriors. “Attack him with everything you have, all at once, and do not stop until he lies dead.”

It was easier said than done.

A short while later, every last man of King Arjen Stonak’s contingent lay dead on the ground, butchered by the unrelenting axe.

The crowd had swelled to the size of most of the city’s population by now. Word was spreading far and wide. A priest caste boy had challenged the Stonak—and he was slaughtering Stonak by the hundreds, single-handedly. Already, the poets would be composing their lyrics.

King Arjen Stonak stared coldly at the insolent priest caste boy who stood before his gates, barring him entry to his own city, his own kingdom, his own home.

It was intolerable. An example must be made.

But how? Clearly the boy was possessed of some extraordinary astra. That axe was no ordinary wood axe. Nor was its wielder merely an acolyte: He displayed a skill comparable to the greatest champions the Stonak king himself had seen in combat.

He thought of asking the calf to produce a greater champion than the boy.

To produce the greatest axe-wielder that ever lived.

Or even, a stroke of brilliance, the guru who had taught the boy! That personage would undoubtedly be able to best the youth, surely?

But there was another factor to consider.

The watching crowds.

Had this encounter taken place within the palace compound, or in a remote forest clearing, it would not matter what means Arjen Stonak resorted to in order to secure victory. He could summon up entire armies of champions from Kamshen to destroy the son of Jamarg. Ironic, considering that the calf itself was Jamarg’s!

But he needed to set an example. The boy was fighting alone. And to throw armies against him would suggest that Arjen Stonak himself was the weaker one, to need such great numbers to best a mere priest caste boy. It would engender any number of rebellions across the land. Every priest caste boy would be inspired to take up an axe or a hoe or a yoke and attack Stonak. Parsh would become a legend for all priests to follow.

He needed to set an example.

He needed to best this boy himself.

Man to man.

In single combat.

To prove that he, Arjen Stonak, was the greatest warrior of all. And nobody else, priest caste, Stonak, or otherwise, could challenge him and live.

Nobody.

And so, the King of the Stonaks dismounted from his horse, and walked towards the spot where Parsh stood, swinging his axe.

• • • •

Parsh mistook the Stonak king’s action for capitulation. He thought that he had made his point effectively and the Stonak had decided to cut his losses and surrender the calf to its rightful owner. As Jamarg’s son, he had been raised to the highest standards of morality. Dharma dictated that the Stonak acknowledge defeat and return the calf willingly, so Parsh expected that this was what the Stonak was doing. He watched as the Stonak approached, then stopped about one score yards from the place where Parsh waited.

Parsh noticed that the calf was farther ahead, tethered to an uks cart, one of several in a long grama train of heavily laden wagons. The men on the uks carts made no move to dismount, untie the calf, or bring it to their king. Perhaps the Stonak king intended to speak with Parsh before having the calf fetched, or perhaps he intended to tell Parsh to take the calf himself and return home with it. Either option was acceptable. Parsh had killed a number of Stonak here today. He had taken no pleasure in the act. It had been mindless butchery, no different from the practice sessions with his guru Vish where he was expected to wield the sacred axe until he no longer thought about each action or gesture, but merely acted. It was thanks to those rigorous training sessions that he had acquired the ability to wield the axe relentlessly, moving with the automatic repetitive actions of a man chopping wood or cutting down a tree.

Parasu was partly responsible of course. The axe was no mere object made from wood and metal. It was a living thing, created and consecrated by Vish himself, Lord of Destruction. This was why it sang when it worked, just like any woodcutter might sing as he chopped down trees. And it was why it drank the blood of those it slew. Vish had warned his pupil about that last part. Parasu loved the taste of blood; the more it drank, the more it desired. If its wielder permitted it to drink too much, it might not be able to stop. Then a point might be reached whereupon the axe drove the bearer to fight on, so that Parasu could continue to drink more blood. An endless cycle of thirst and slaking would follow and there might be no limits to how many it would slay. Its thirst could never be fully quenched and that meant it could drink on forever, until its owner reached a point where he might no longer care who he killed, so long as Parasu could drink. In exchange, Parasu granted its wielder a sense of invulnerability—nay, not merely a sense, but invulnerability itself. So long as Parasu was given the blood of new victims to drink, its wielder could not be harmed or killed. He would effectively be immortal.

After all, it was a weapon of a god.

Parasu had drunk a fair amount today, more than it had ever consumed in Parsh’s hand. He could feel the power surging from the axe even now, singing in his veins, filling his being with a sense of supreme power. Immortal. Invulnerable. Unassailable . . . Parasu sang these thoughts to him silently, giving him a sense of complacency. This must be what it felt like to be a deva. Yet, it was important to remember what Lord Vish had taught him: Use Parasu only to accomplish your given task, no more. You must wield the axe, and take care to not let the axe wield you.

He was glad that the Stonak was capitulating. He felt that already Parasu had drunk too much, that the axe was intoxicated with the blood it had consumed, and he could hear it singing out to him silently, craving more, pleading for more . . . demanding more . . .

King Arjen Stonak began swinging his arms.

Parsh blinked.

What did this mean?

No words, no offer of conciliation, no acknowledgement that he had stolen the calf and was now willing to return it, just this peculiar . . . windmilling motion of his hands?

What was the King doing?

As Parsh watched, the Stonak’s hands began swinging around in a diagonal motion that did not appear plausible by human standards, let alone physically possible. That angle, the way those shoulders bent and those elbows twisted? Had he broken his arms? How was he swinging them so rapidly? And why was he doing it?

Then a remarkable thing occurred.

King Arjen Stonak’s arms elongated, stretching out impossibly long and far, yards long, then a score of yards long . . .

Then, they divided, splitting into multiple arms, all different lengths, thicknesses, different in form and function . . .

In moments, there were hundreds of arms stretching out from the torso of the Stonak king, sprawling across the kingsroad and the surrounding area, like the vines of some great banyan tree, flailing about madly, still forming and shaping themselves, solidifying into a variety of forms. As Parsh watched in fascination, each arm began to pick up a weapon from the several hundreds lying about. With several hundred men lying dead around, there were any number of weapons present. The elongated arms of Arjen Stonak began taking up various weapons and wielding them.

Parsh was astonished by the sheer number of arms that now sprouted from the body of King Arjen Stonak. The Stonak king’s torso and body remained exactly as it was, standing rooted to the ground with surprising stability, anchoring the morass of flailing arms that covered the ground for tens of yards around him. There must be easily hundreds of arms, for every single weapon lying about had been taken up and still there were many arms seeking more weapons. Parsh saw some arms simply reach out and close fists over rocks, rusting metal objects, and anything that lay within reach.

The watching crowd gasped and emitted sounds of awe. Yet it was evident from the nature of their reaction that they had witnessed something like this before.

Apparently, King Arjen Stonak had displayed this astonishing ability on earlier occasions.

Parsh was fascinated. He had never seen a man with a thousand arms before. For surely that was how many arms now swung about in the air, bearing weapons, swaying like cobras preparing to strike. If only his guru were here to watch this, Vish would undoubtedly take great interest in observing his pupil engage with such an unusual opponent.

Clearly, King Arjen Stonak had no intention of returning the calf amicably to Parsh. He intended to fight. And from the looks of it, he intended to kill Parsh himself. That was honourable, at least, to do his own fighting instead of having his endless supply of lackeys do it for him; Parsh respected him for that much. Whether or not the Stonak succeeded in his goal was another matter. What concerned Parsh was that the Stonak had challenged him and had started by demonstrating that he possessed an ability far superior to any man Parsh had ever seen. If nothing else, it would make this one fight more interesting at least than all the earlier ones—he barely remembered those, blurring as they all did into one another, an endless succession of slaughter in which Parasu gained more satisfaction than he did.

Now, he had a worthy opponent.

Parsh hefted his axe and began to swing it around on its leather thong.

Parasu began to sing again as it swung around, faster and faster, until its movement was a blur even to Parsh and its song a sharp keening at the farthest limit of hearing.

Across the city, the dogs resumed their barking.

The crowd oohed and aahed, anticipating the clash of the priest caste with the axe and the Stonak with a thousand arms.

Parsh waited for the enemy to attack.

• • • •

The ritual at Nimsh-sharanya demanded a great deal of attention from the rishis as well as the acolytes. Coupled with the numerous daily chores, rote recitation lessons and other learning, it was always evening by the time everyone finished their ablutions and assembled in the clearing to hear High Priest Karlon resume his narration of the epic. Everyone looked forward eagerly to each day’s narration and everyone felt more than a little disappointed when it ended for the evening. In this, there was little difference between the oldest hermit priests and the youngest acolytes. Everyone wanted more.

Karlon smiled apologetically each night as he rose after declaring that day’s narration ended, taking in the sea of wistful expressions and disappointed sighs. As the days passed, he grew certain that his audience expanded daily, and in time, it seemed as if their numbers extended beyond the clearing itself, into the deep recesses of the jungle, until he felt as if the entire Aranya jungle was listening, each tree representing a dead soul in the Beha’al war, eagerly listening to hear the history of their ancestors and to know the events leading up to the great war that caused their demise.

If there is one question that has always haunted the human mind, it is this: What is the point of living? What is our purpose here on Arthaloka? Why were we put here on this mortal plane? Is there a larger plan?

Phrase it any way one wishes, they all come back to the same question: Why are we here?

The fire crackled as Karlon resumed the tale of Parsh and the history of the clan:

“Parsh slew King Arjen Stonak and returned home with the calf. The Stonak king’s thousand-armed attack was formidable and was capable of routing entire armies, for each arm could function independently of the others, extending longer or shorter, stronger or leaner, and fight separately of the rest of its sibling limbs, thereby confounding any number of the enemy. King Arjen Stonak could plough through an enemy force like a pair of uks dragging a yoke through soft earth, leaving a trail of churned bodies and sods of flesh. He was an unstoppable force.

“But against a single opponent, his power proved futile.

“Parsh’s ability to wield Parasu at blinding speed enabled him to chop off every last one of Arjen Stonak’s thousand arms. It was pure butchery. A thousand arms on one man or a thousand arms on five hundred men, it made no difference to Parsh. Or to Parasu. They hacked off every last limb, evading every attempt to strike, cutting through every weapon, eliminating every threat, until the Stonak king fell to ground on the kingsroad before the gates of his own city, shoulders spouting blood in thick, viscous gouts.

“He slumped over, lifeless, and lay staring blindly up at the sky.

“Parsh stepped over him and untied the calf from the cart to which it had been tethered.

“He took the calf home to his father, who was pleased and relieved to see it. He intended to return it safely to Inadran at the earliest possible moment. Some things were too powerful to remain in the possession of mortals.

“But that was only the beginning of the conflict.

“King Arjen Stonak’s sons returned home soon after, their mission successfully accomplished, and the last rebels dead. They found that their father had been slain in a humiliating encounter, cut down at the gates of his own city by a mere priest caste boy. The enemy their father had captured and brought home, Bosh son of Saegen, had taken advantage of his captor’s death to make good his escape.

“Now, Bosh was raising a great army and preparing to wage all-out war against the Stonak and the Panchagana, to stake his claim upon the throne of Aranya once and for all. And when he was done reclaiming Aranya, he had promised, he would take over Stonak City and the possessions of the Stonak and their allies as well. With Arjen Stonak gone, it was likely he would accomplish his goal. What was more, the slaying of the Stonak king at the hands of a mere priest caste boy had already become the stuff of legend, and across the land, Stonak were taking up arms and declaring against the Haihaiyas and the rest of the Moon Clans.

“The sons of Arjen Stonak were not capable of standing up to the might of a full-blown opposition. With their father gone, their own kingdom would crumble quickly. He had held the conflicted forces of their allies together through brute strength. Now, they would be lucky if their own army remained loyal to them long enough to fight one battle.

“Seeing the end of their dynasty, brought down so suddenly and shockingly, they laid the entire blame at only one man’s feet: Jamarg. After all, it was he who had demanded his calf back. He had sent his son forth to reclaim her. And so he was responsible for their father’s death.

“Thus they rode towards Jamarg’s hermitage. As it so chanced, Parsh was away at that moment. The sons of Arjen Stonak fell upon Jamarg like wolves on a lamb, and tore him apart. They did to him what Jamarg’s son had done to their own father, severing his limbs and then chopping his body into multiple parts and pieces.

“Then they rode away to try to piece together the fragments of their own disintegrating legacy.

“Parsh returned home and saw the fate that had befallen his father.

“He recalled the sufferings of his ancestors over generations at the hands of warrior castes such as the Stonak and other enemies of the priest caste.

“He saw that the violence that existed in the world at present was all the work of these very Stonak, who, despite their so-called code of Stonak dharma, were wanton, ruthless, immoral beings who did nothing but shed blood and spread violence like a disease upon the earth.

“He saw them as a pestilence upon the mortal realm.

“And he resolved to cleanse them from the world.”

• • • •

Three times seven Parsh scoured the world of every living Stonak. Twenty-one times he travelled the earth, seeking out warriors he had missed before, who had hidden away out of cowardice, or disguised themselves as priests or low castes rather than fall prey to his terrible axe. Twenty-one times in all, he slaughtered every last warrior and cleansed the earth of every last person of the Stonak varna.

He would have continued endlessly perhaps, but the spirits of his ancestors, including his grandfather Sage Kakrinz, appeared before him and appealed to him to cease his campaign of vengeance. Only then did he stop. Weary of slaughter, his task done, he decided to go home.

Crossing the river on his way home, he paused to clean his axe. Parasu had drunk far too much blood. Twenty-one generations of Stonak had died under its perennially sharp blade. Now there was no more left for it to slake its thirst. Parsh dipped it into the cool waters of the river, meaning to rid it of its burden, for the blood it drank added greatly to its weight and Parsh had borne that weight too long.

The axe relented, also weary of bloodthirst, and began to purge itself of the blood it had consumed. Like a man who has consumed too much will vomit up the excess, Parasu began to spew forth the blood of its countless victims.

The river began to turn red with blood.

Parsh realized that if he allowed Parasu to relieve itself here, the entire river would be filled with the store of its accumulated blood. And eventually, all that blood would be carried down to the great ocean, which would also be tainted.

He lifted the axe out of the river.

He went in search of a suitable place to relinquish the blood of his victims.

He found it in the great northern plain. There he unleashed the blood from Parasu, once, twice, thrice . . . five times in all, the blood flowed from the axe, like a roaring tide. When it was drained, five enormous lakes of blood lay upon the land.

Beha’al was the name given to this place.

Field of Despair.

Over time, the land absorbed the blood but was forever tainted.

It was on that very site that the great war took place an Age later, when eighteen armies of the Krushan and their cousins the Shvates clashed on that field and stained that tainted soil once again with fresh blood. Parsh, by then a legendary ancestor of both sides and an immortal through his exemplary devotion, chose to favor the Shvate side, aiding them in their eventual, bitterly won, victory. But that tale is another thread in the winding tapestry of the Burnt Empire.

©2021 by Ashok K. Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the author of more than seventy books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. His works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. Ashok’s most recent publication is his debut picture book I am Brown. Upcoming in April is A Dark Queen Rises, the sequel to Upon a Burning Throne.

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

Blood, Ash, Braids

Genevieve Valentine | 4448 words

1943

It didn’t take them long to find a name for us; almost as soon as they knew it was women inside the rickety biplanes they couldn’t catch, the Germans called us witches.

It was because of the sounds our idling planes made from the ground, the story went, as if the German soldiers had spent a lot of time with brooms and knew what they sounded like, engineless and gliding fifty feet above them in the dark.

(The wires holding the wings in place made the whistle. The canvas pulled taut around the plywood made the hush. I still suspect the thing that sounded supernatural was the whirr of our engines starting up again, as they realized we had already struck them, and it was too late to escape the blasts.)

The officer who told us had half a smile on his face; he’d thought of the job as a demotion—most of them did, at first, to be in a camp full of girls—but if the Germans were already bleating back and forth about bounties for the heads of the Night Witches, then maybe he had real fighters on his hands.

Popova cracked a laugh when she heard, turned to me with grin that was all teeth. “I like that,” she said. “Should we start screeching when we sail through, do you think?”

“I think not,” I said. “The best witches know not to give away their position.” And she laughed a little louder than she had to, as if she thought it was actually funny.

A couple of the girls glanced over from across the runway. They never took Popova’s cue in being kind to me, but they were never cruel, and that might have been all Popova could hope for.

“She’d love being called a witch by the enemy; she might already be one,” Popova said after a second, sounding circumspect, sounding a little reverent.

(She was Commander Raskova; at some point, she hadn’t needed a name any more.)

But Raskova was elsewhere now, with only her shadow cast over us. Bershanskaya was the commander who lined us up and sent us out. She was as steady as they came, and her humor was thin and dry as air.

The first time Bershanskaya heard the name, she raised an eyebrow, and glanced quickly at me before she turned to Popova. Then she nodded, hands behind her, and said, “Let them call us what they like, if it suits them.”

“Suits me, too,” said Popova.

It suited all of them, I think, even if I was the only witch the 588th ever had.

• • • •

One of the important things about the 588th was how little it cared where you came from. If you could take the recruiter’s withering stare and the doctors’ lingering hands and the open loathing of the men who ran you through your paces, and you managed to crawl under the stalled train cars to reach the station from the farthest set of tracks they could find to park your train, by the time you got to Morozovsk they had no doubts about your nerves, and that was all they needed to know about you before they put you in a plane.

I’d come to the 588th out of necessity; my village had reached the end of their patience for someone who seemed always to know when it was going to rain and yet couldn’t call it down for you even if you paid her. Easier to go find an open fight than to wait for the one that was brewing back home.

There was no way I could have accommodated village needs. It’s too hard to do small magic.

From a one-room farmhouse or a palace in Moscow, anyone you ask will talk to you until their tongues turn blue about all the magic they’ve seen or heard of, even if they say they don’t believe in it. They’ll all know how it’s being used against them even as they speak, and the hundreds of whispers shared in the depth of the forest by the witches, who gather there for market days and trade in secret spells in a currency of dirty looks.

It’s all very well to keep people out of the woods at night, but it’s foolish.

There are only three kinds of magic: water, ash, and air. For ash to work, you give blood. For water, you spill tears. For air, you give your breath. They all run out; our gifts are designed to be spent.

The woods will never be a gathering of witches. We don’t live long enough.

• • • •

Our planes were crop dusters, wood frames covered in canvas, held together with metal cords. They were the leftovers of aviation, planes given to people for whom no one had much hope.

But they were so flimsy, and so slow, that they made a kind of magic—gold out of hay. The German planes couldn’t drop down to our speed or they’d stall out and plummet, so when they aimed for us we turned and they hit nothing but air; their anti-aircraft bombs would pop right through our canvas wings and keep going, bursting a hundred feet above us as we banked a turn and the explosion illuminated our path back home.

Raskova courted us with those planes, showed us how to make them spin and make lazy loops in the air like the plaits of a braid, leapt down from the cockpit with her dark eyes glittering behind her goggles, and you could hear her heart pounding even from where you were standing.

It was easy to want to go to war, to make Raskova proud.

And once you learned them, those planes were kinder to us than horses, and to sit inside one was to feel strangely invisible, a thrill crawling up the back of your neck like a ghost every time you settled in.

You settled in four, five, eight times a night: the plane couldn’t carry more than two bombs at once, and you had work to do.

• • • •

“You go out at sundown,” says Bershanskaya.

Her lips are drawn thin, her hands folded behind her, her buttons marching a straight line to her chin.

(She didn’t want to lead, when Raskova appointed her. She hated sending us out to die.)

It’s a bridge; we all know why it has to disappear—the Germans can’t be allowed to move anything else into place.

But they’ve stopped underestimating us, witches or not. They’re prepared to throw us a flak circus now, every time they see us coming.

It’s rows of guns blooming outward from the ground like flowers made from teeth, and searchlights by the dozens that flood the sky for fifty miles in each direction, and you can’t get free of it no matter how you try; when you twist long enough this way and that way like a rabbit, you start to panic for your life.

We lost a team that way, not long back. Their cots are still folded up on the barracks, two thin mattresses for girls who won’t be needing any more rest.

“You’ll go in three planes at once,” says Bershanskaya.

Next to me, the muscles in Popova’s jaw shift as she realizes what Bershanskaya means.

Decoys. We’ll be drawing fire in our little ghost planes.

We lost our hair to be here.

They made us cut it when we were first preparing for combat; for practicality, the commander said, though I had seen one or two of the training men glare at a line of girls walking off the field those first days, their long glossy braids swinging at their waists, and I always wondered.

I didn’t mind, for myself—my hair was the watery brown of old deerhide, and there was no husband or want of a husband to stay my hand from the knife. For me to cut it just meant fewer pins I’d have to scramble for every time the sirens went up. But you can’t tell girls for a hundred years that her hair is her crowning glory and then one day tell her to hack it off and not have her pause before the scissors.

We all did it, in the end, every last one of us submitting to the shears, slicing one another’s braids off to the jaw.

Recklessly, I offered to burn the hair for any girl that wanted. It was forbidden to leave the base alone—it wasn’t safe—but some things go deeper than regulations, and some superstitions aren’t worth testing.

You never leave so much hair where anyone can take it from you; petty magic has uses for that, and none of them are good.

I was an odd fit in the barracks, just strange enough that we all knew I was strange, but this superstition was so well-known that not even Petrova looked twice at me as they each thanked me and handed me their braids of brown and black and gold.

As I headed for the woods with three dozen braids draped like pelts across my arms, Bershanskaya saw me.

She was standing outside, near the engineers who were patching the planes. Her hands were behind her, and she had the narrow-eyed look of someone who had been watching the sunset longer than was wise.

I held my breath and kept going. If she called out to stop me, I’d keep walking until she shot. Some orders are holy; I had a duty deeper than hers.

She didn’t say a word, but she watched me carry the plaits like a sacrifice into the cover of the trees.

In the woods, I built a fire and burned them—one at a time, until there was nothing left. I didn’t start a new fire for each plait (we were tied close enough to withstand a little ash), but it was powerful enough that I was careful. I breathed steadily in and out; I thought carefully about nothing at all.

When I came back after dark, stinking of singe, Bershanskaya was standing outside the barracks and scanning the edge of the woods, waiting.

“Commander,” I greeted when I was close enough, and waited for whatever she would do to me.

For a long time she looked me in the eye until it felt like I was canvas stretched across a wooden frame, and I could feel the question building on her tongue in the space just behind her front teeth, where people’s worst suspicions lived.

If she asks me, I thought, she’ll have her answer.

(I could cut myself deep enough to bleed. Blood and tears would summon something, I could hope I had enough willpower to make her forget what I’d done.)

She stepped aside, eyes still on me, and as I passed she said my name low, like she’d checked my name off a very short list; like a spell.

Raskova would have asked me.

I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

• • • •

In 1938, when I was still in school, Raskova had flown across the country for glory with Polina Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova. When they were recovered after their landing, the news was everywhere: that she and her copilots had broken flight records in the Rodina, that it was a marvelous feat of flying, that they were heroes of the nation.

I didn’t find out what had really happened until Raskova told me herself.

They had overshot in the mist, and when it parted they were suddenly over the Sea of Okhotsk, where the water in winter is the milky flat of a corpse’s eye, and they didn’t have enough gasoline left for the crossing—they’d flown too high to avoid being shrouded by the fog for a day and a night. They had to turn around and pray for landfall before they dropped out of the sky.

The navigator’s seat—a glass bauble at the front of the plane—would be torn to shreds in a crash, and they were hurting for altitude and out of fuel and gathering too much ice to carry.

Raskova marked a map and jumped for it.

Her copilots crashed into the taiga, the bottom of the plane in shreds from the landing, and waited for her. Even after the rescue crew got to them, they refused to budge. They took watch by the plane for two more days, until Raskova staggered out of the woods.

It had been ten days. She’d had no food or water with her, and no compass when she jumped.

(There was no magic in her—not the sort that I had—but you wonder about witch blood in some people, when they manage things that no one should have managed.)

But more amazing to me even than her ten-day journey was the ten-day vigil the other two had kept, sheltering with the plane that had tried to kill them, without enough supplies, without knowing if she would ever come.

Doubt gnawed at me whenever I thought about it, more doubts than I ever had about being shot at, more doubts than I had about my chances of loosing a bomb just where it needed to go.

How long would they have waited beyond ten days?

How long would I wait when it was my turn?

Would I walk ten days in the wilderness rather than lie down and die?

Osipenko was dead. (Wasn’t even a strafing run; she’d just been going from one place to another, and her plane had turned on her.)

Grizodubova had been sent elsewhere for the war effort. None of us had ever seen her. She was leading a defense and relief outfit near Leningrad, with real bombers and not crop dusters. She was commanding men.

I wondered if she and Raskova ever saw each other, or if they wrote—if it was safe to write. It would be easy to forgive if they had parted ways; it was wartime, and their duty to the nation lay before them.

But sometimes the nights are long and dark, and you feel so alone that you think everyone else must have someone closer than you do, and you think: if they don’t still speak, it’s because they’re both waiting for death, and can’t bear to come close and then be parted.

Then you stare up at the leaking roof and wonder if all each of them carried now was a phantom. When something wonderful or terrible happened, did one of them sometimes glance over her shoulder to look at the other before she remembered she was alone?

• • • •

Sebrova volunteers to be one of the three planes against the flak, and Popova volunteers second, and before I can do more than glance at Petrova for her agreement (she’s already nodding at me) I’m volunteering, too, because I have few enough friends here. Where Popova is going, I want to go.

It’s a foolish thing to do, volunteering to die on a German gun, but I volunteered for that a long time ago. I’m a quick draw on the controls, so I’ll be of some use, and anything’s better than sitting around waiting, wondering if Popova made it out.

Outside, I smoke a cigarette I won off Meklin at cards and watch the sun going down. I wish I had time to do everything that needs doing.

Popova sits next to me on the fence, lets out a breath at the streaks of gold and pink suspended just above the grass. When she taps me on the shoulder I hand her my cigarette.

She’s a marvelous pilot—light and nimble—but you’d never know it from the way she smokes a cigarette, single loud pulls that leave a cylinder of ash that drops wholesale to the ground.

After a little while she hands me a piece of chocolate from inside her pocket, grainy and already melting across my fingertips. I pop it into my mouth and lick my fingers clean, flushing a little at the bad manners, but Popova only winks. I wonder how long she’s held on to it, doling out to herself one piece at a time on nights she thinks she’s going to die.

“You’ll be all right,” she says.

“Oh, I’m sure I will,” I say. “It’s you I worry over.”

She casts me a look and half smiles.

My lungs are acrid, suddenly. I pinch off the end of my cigarette to preserve the rest.

She shrugs. “We never let them get any sleep,” she says, jamming a pin into her cropped hair and wrenching her cap on over it.

(Petrova sometimes reaches behind her to smooth a braid that isn’t there. I’ve never seen Popova do it.

I wonder what became of Raskova’s dark brown braids, gleaming and pinned to her head as she spoke to us and made us into soldiers.)

Golden hair sticks out just at the edges, half curls below her ears. “I’d hate to see us coming, too. Let’s hope they’re too tired to aim.”

I want to smile or laugh, but I’m staring at my plane and feeling ice down my spine. Why this should be so different I don’t know—slightly more impossible than impossible isn’t a measurement that has much meaning—but I look at the trees instead, after a moment.

“How did you decide to do this?”

I don’t know why I ask. We’re all meant to be without a past, and equal. They were carpenters and secretaries and farm girls, but they’re pilots now, and it shouldn’t matter how they got here.

Popova raises her eyebrows at the setting sun like it’s the one who’d asked the rude question. There are only a few minutes left until it’s dark enough to load up and set off. I should be going back to barracks and getting my gear.

She says without looking at me, “A plane landed near our house, when I was young.”

Young—she’s nineteen now, I think, but I don’t say anything. Rude to interrupt. Not that it matters; she doesn’t elaborate. It’s the biography of a masterful pilot who knows better than to waste a gesture.

She glances over. “And you?”

“Oh, I’m a witch,” I say. “Flying comes naturally.” And she grins as she drops from the fence, snaps her goggles into place.

“Good thing it can be taught,” she says and takes off for her plane.

It can’t, not really. You can teach the mechanics of a plane, but either you have the flight inside you or you don’t.

Her strides kick up puffs of dust in her wake that cover her footsteps; at nightfall she casts no shadow, and for a moment she looks like I’d imagined witches to be, before I knew better.

When she’s gone, I unroll the cigarette and scoop up her ashes from the ground with the blade of my knife.

It’s a sharp blade; I never even feel the cut I make. When the paper gets wet enough, I use the tip of the knife to mix it and drag a line of blood and ash under the nose of Sebrova’s and Popova’s planes.

I do it quickly, my eyes stinging, my heart pounding.

Then they’re coming from the barracks, and I’m out of ashes and out of time and have to step away and get my gear. We’ll need to make sure the altitude gauge is fixed before we’re off the ground.

Petrova, my navigator, is already there, frowning underneath the propeller and tapping our windshields. As I haul myself onto the wing, I press one bloody thumbprint into the canvas just behind her seat, where she’ll never see.

Blood magic doesn’t work as well when you’re asking for yourself, but I’ll protect who I can, however it comes.

• • • •

Each of us carries two bombs. It’s decided in the last seconds before leaping into our planes that Sebrova will be first, I’ll be second, and Popova will make the final drop, after they’re already on to us.

I don’t like it, but I keep my hands on the controls as we enter the flak zone.

The engines sound impossibly loud—three of them, and we don’t dare cut them with what we have to do, so there’s nothing for it but to go closer and closer, knowing they know we’re coming, waiting for the bullets to start.

(I miss the sound of the wind through the wires; it had always sounded to me like an owl on my shoulder, and it was a comfort as you were moving in for the drop.)

The first floodlight is almost a relief—it’s something to do, at least, instead of just something to be afraid of—and I wait two seconds longer than my instincts scream to, just enough that the nose of the plane catches the light, that it can almost but not quite follow me when I snap a turn to one side, dropping out of their sight. A spray of bullets arcs behind me, whistling clean and hitting nothing.

I don’t look for Popova. It’s not safe.

Instead I drop steeply so the searchlights casting at my prior heading can’t find me, and pull up at the last second with my heart pounding in my throat and the engine grinding underneath me. I cut through three lights at once, a dead hover for a moment as gravity gets confused, the blinding flashes underneath us reminding me to bank left and out of the line of fire.

I hear a series of dull thunders, then a thudding rip—a wingtip’s been struck. Nothing serious, it’s a lucky hit for them, that’s all, but my lungs go so tight I have to wrestle them for breath as I circle back. There’s already ice on my tiny windshield; there’s ice in my throat when I breathe.

Then I see Sebrova’s plane arcing up to meet us. She’s done it; the thunders were her bombs hitting home.

It’s my turn.

Petrova gives me the all-clear, and I do a big, lazy loop well out of the scope of the spotlights—I glimpse Popova, barely, practically cartwheeling and vanishing into the dark—breathe deep through my nose as we sail over the iron garden. Sebrova’s been kind enough to mark the way (a fire’s already started next to the drop site), but I want to be careful, and only when Petrova gives the sign do I tilt us five degrees closer to the Earth, no more, and let the unfastened bombs slide forward, hurtling toward the ground with a cheerful whistle.

I sweep up and to the left, taking my place on the flank, and the plane shakes for just a second as the payload explodes, a warm burst of orange in the black night. Petrova whoops; I grin for as long as I can stand the wind in my teeth, which isn’t long, and then push through the acrid scents of fire and guns and panic toward my secondary position.

Popova’s plane drops so fast I think for a second, my grip seizing on the controls, that she’s been struck, but it’s just the way she handles a plane—I hear the whirr of her engines above the tuneless wind as I cut straight across and through the searchlights, distracting them from her, letting them waste two arcs of ammunition trying to pin me as I drop and spin out lazily, letting the wind pull us the last few inches to the top of the arc.

But it’s too bright when I get there, far too bright, and I realize with numb panic that they’ve got me locked, and the next round of bullets will hit home.

I try for more altitude, already knowing I’m too late, and I wonder wildly if I can point the plane at the ground so hard that Petrova and I die without pain. We have to die—we can’t let the Germans take us—but she shouldn’t suffer.

Really, the way to go out is a bullet through the heart. The Germans could oblige. It would keep them from wondering where Popova’s gone.

Better this than ten days in the wilderness, I think; better this than to wait at the Sea of Okhotsk.

I let out my breath until there’s nothing left (blood-ash-air, I think dimly, someplace with no hope left, blood-ash-air), and bank the turn straight into the center of the circling lights.

• • • •

I die that way, the way Raskova died—in combat, with a strike and a tailspin and then nightfall—but not on this run.

On this run, the spray of bullets never comes, because Popova’s plane soars straight in front of me.

The Germans are only tracking two of our planes, and with the interruption they can’t tell whether or not they’ve tricked themselves into a double image with the swinging searchlights, and in the few seconds where the lights freeze in place as they try to decide what to do, I bank as hard as I can and cut down and out and back into the dark, fingers aching, pointed for home.

We’re the last to get back. When I climb out of the plane I can barely stand; I don’t know where all my blood’s gone. Bershanskaya’s come to meet us. When she nods, I find it in me to straighten up and nod back.

Popova’s leaning against her plane, a few feet back from the mark of my blood and her ashes that she’ll never see. There are three bullet holes through one of her wings, like a smattering of freckles at the tip of someone’s nose, but she’s there.

She grins around a square of chocolate, calls over, “What kept you?”

• • • •

I put blood and ashes on every plane that goes out after that.

Once I duck out between the planes and see Bershanskaya watching me, her hands behind her. She doesn’t ask what I’m doing there. I never say. It doesn’t matter. It’s what I’ve given over, and you can’t call it back.

It’s on my plane, too, the night I go down, but I never expected that to protect me for long. They all run out; our gifts are designed to be spent.

• • • •

A little while from now, Popova will go on a raid and get caught in German fire. When she makes it back to the base, there will be more than forty bullet holes in the plane. There are bullet holes in her helmet.

No one will understand how she survived it; no one can imagine what protected her.

©2015 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Operation Arcana, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Genevieve Valentine is the author of the novels Mechanique, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. She has also written the comics Catwoman for DC and Xena: Warrior Princess for Dynamite. Her nonfiction and criticism has appeared at NPR.org, The Atlantic, LA Review of Books, and The AV Club. Her love of bad movies is evergreen; you can read about it at genevievevalentine.com.

EXCERPT: A Dark Queen Rises (John Joseph Adams Books)

Ashok K. Banker | 5318 words

Returning to Ashok K. Banker’s brilliant #OwnVoices, epic fantasy world of the Burnt Empire, first introduced in Upon a Burning Throne, A Dark Queen Rises features Aqreen and Krushita, a mother and daughter on quests to protect the innocent and bring down tyrants.

Queen Aqreen of Aquila leaves her husband Jarsun and flees across the Red Desert. She is determined to keep her daughter from being used by Jarsun to stake his claim to the Burning Throne of Hastinaga, seat of the all-powerful Burnt Empire. But Jarsun is powerful and vengeful, and can summon legions of demoniac forces at will. The Red Desert is vast, and the journey epic.

Aqreen and Krushita’s caravan of ten thousand wagons will take several years to reach the only safe harbor, the queendom of Reygar. Jarsun’s pursuit is relentless and his vengeance terrible, but hope shines from the growing powers of little Krushita herself, along with the four-armed twin-bodied Vanjhani wagon train leader and their band of valiant desert militia. Fierce battles are in store.

There are other players in this great game of demigods and mortals, each pursuing their own agendas. The powerful seer-mage Vessa seeks to join Krushita’s talents with that of Drishya, an avatar destined to confront and kill Tyrak, Jarsun’s diabolical son-in-law. Ladislew the assassin aligns with Tyrak for her own reasons. All paths culminate in a feverish finale on the hot sands of Reygar, as father, mother, and daughter confront each other in one final showdown.

Available April 20, 2021 from John Joseph Adams Books.

Prologue, Epilogue
The Given Avatars
Year 207 of Chakra 58

King Gwann

1

Burn.

King Gwann’s kindly eyes widened.

The single word had not been uttered by the high priests chanting sonorously in classical Ashcrit. It had come from the altar itself.

The stonefire had spoken.

He stared at the fragment of rock that lay in the center of the large white pentangle. The altar was five times the normal dimensions—twenty-five yards on each of its five sides instead of the normal five yards. The tiny pebble of stonefire was a mere black dot in the center of the ash-carpeted ground. The silverwood barrier that formed the five lines of the pentangle provided further protection to the priests, ministers, nobles, and servants who sat on the periphery of the sacred space.

The priests had insisted on this precaution, and Gwann had agreed gladly. His desire for a successful ceremony was outweighed by his inborn terror of stonefire. To a Krushan, it was a great source of power, the searing fire a response to the call of their ancient blood. But to any non-Krushan, it was evil incarnate.

It had cost several scores of lives just to obtain the precious, cursed thing itself. Stonefire was not officially banned, because the Krushan knew that there was no need to ban it. The wretched substance could take care of itself, and then some. Scores of Gwann’s bravest and boldest had sacrificed their lives to acquire and smuggle it across the Burnt Empire and into Gwannland. A few had been betrayed, others were killed fighting bandits as well as smugglers who had caught wind of the enterprise, but the vast majority of those brave warriors had been killed by stonefire itself. Despite all precautions—special yards-long silverwood tongs to handle it, a silverwood casket to contain it, and even two silverwood shields, all devised at great cost—the wicked thing had found opportunities to lash out at its abductors and burn them to ash during the long, perilous journey.

Among them was Jonasi, Gwann’s late wife’s brother and his most trusted champion. With him and most of his elite king’s guards lost in the desperate quest, Gwann was left with nothing more than a few platoons of untested recruits and broken veterans. His capacity for war, or even defense, was gone. Gwannland’s coffers, bare. Gwannland’s natural resources, taken. The war against Guru Dronas had cost him everything, and the price he had paid for mere survival had been the better half of his entire kingdom. Gwannland was now Gwannland only in name.

All he had left now was this final, desperate gambit.

The Ritual of Summoning.

2

And what did Gwann hope to achieve by this arcane ritual?

Vensera had asked him the question when he first spoke of it several months ago, after the war with Dronas ended.

A means of survival, he had answered.

She had looked at him for a long moment, her grey-green eyes searching his face the way one might look at a man to ascertain his sanity.

“This is Krushan sorcery,” she had said, and there was an edge of fear in her tone. She had not sounded so fearful even when they had stood on the field of Beha’al, looked out at the vast host arrayed against their own forces, and realized that they stood no chance of victory against Dronas. “These rituals are meant to summon the stone gods. And the stone gods recognize only the Krushan. We mortals were never meant to meddle in such matters.”

Gwann had drawn in a deep breath and released it slowly. “Neither were mortals meant to live alongside Krushan. Yet here we are. All together on a single continent. Thus has it been ever since they arrived here from wherever they came from. That is the way of our world, Vensera; it is what we are given. We can only survive by whatever means are available to us. If using Krushan sorcery is the only way to repair our fortunes, then so be it. We have no other choice.”

She had looked into his eyes and seen his despair, his ache at the forfeiture of territory his ancestors had fought so bitterly to win and hold for generations. “We will endure this loss,” she had said then. “It is what we do. And one day, when we have rebuilt our strength . . .”

She had not needed to continue. She was the greater warrior of them both, the superior strategist and tactician. His skills were those of administrator, jurist, and city planner. He had always taken her word when it came to martial affairs, just as she took his when it came to domestic ones. But he need not be a military genius to know that they stood no chance of ever rebuilding; he knew economics, and the fact was, Gwannland had nothing left to rebuild with. Everything their kingdom had possessed—people, farms, mines, trade stations, everything and anything that could fetch income, now or in the future—was now controlled by Dronas. He had carved out the heart of Gwannland and left them with the bare, broken bones.

Gwann had put a hand on her cheek, gently. She was still handsome, the scars adding to her rugged appeal. What most mistook for hardness, he knew to be a carapace; she was as soft on the inside as she was hard on the exterior.

“You know that will never happen,” he had said softly. “This is the only way.”

“It is one way,” she had admitted. “There are others.”

“It is the only sure way,” he had said. “If this succeeds, we will stand a chance of retaking Gwannland and ousting Dronas.”

She had fallen silent then. She could have countered with the argument that ousting Dronas, even if such a thing was possible now, would come with a heavy price: the wrath of the Burnt Empire. And if they had not been able to defeat Dronas at their strongest, to attempt to resist the empire at their weakest would mean total destruction. Not even the fealty oaths of his ancestors would protect them. But she said none of these things.

Instead she had said the one thing Gwann had never expected.

“Gwannland was my dowry,” she said at last. “Given to me as the price for taking you in matrimony.”

He had stared at her, not sure how to respond.

Yes, the realm was endowed to her, and she was its supreme commander.

That was the tradition: stree, being the stronger gender and built for war, received a dowry from the manush’s family at the time of nuptials. In this part of the world, the tradition called for the manush to gift a dowry to the stree, and Gwannland had been Gwann’s to Vensera. His only claim was a heritage, to the history of his ancestors whose bones were embedded in the foundations of every town and city across its breadth. She owned it, and it was hers to do with as she pleased. If she wished, she could command him not just as his sovereign but also as the commander of the domain.

But that was not at all what she meant.

“Yes, it is yours to dispose of as you will,” he had said.

“And I would willingly lose all of this and more,” she went on, “but losing you is a loss I cannot bear. That is all that concerns me now. Your well-being.”

She’s afraid the ritual might backfire and cost me my life, he realized with a start. Fool that he was, he had only thought of the political capital to be gained from the ceremony, without a care for his personal safety. She had reason to fear, after all; her own brother had been incinerated when he was occupied with fighting off bandits, one of whom had sprung open the silverwood casket like an idiot. The chip of stonefire had lashed out instantly, the tongue of white hot flame turning Jonasi—and several other men within its reach—to ash and cinder in a flash. It was only natural that she should fear losing him as well.

Tears had sprung from his eyes. He had embraced her and touched her feet, the traditional sign of submission and respect to one’s betters, or in this case, a husband to a wife. “I do this to save Gwannland, and us,” he replied fiercely, “all of us. It is the only way. If I must die trying, so be it. I would rather be seared by stonefire than live in helpless thrall to Dronas.”

She had caught him by the shoulders, her powerful arms far stronger than his own, and raised him up, pressing her lips to his roughly. When she released him, her eyes were hot with love and fear.

“Do what you must, then. I will stand with you.”

3

Vensera sat beside him now. The silverwood barrier that formed the pentangle was sufficient only to protect them when seated. And deceptive though it was, sitting passively in that large ash-grey space, that vile thing would lash out faster than a viper’s fangs if so much as an inch of mortal flesh showed over the top. She was seated beside him, their hands clasped together tightly, dressed in their finest regal attire, waiting to be called upon to do their part.

It had taken a great deal of convincing to get the priests to conduct the ceremony at all. In the end, it was their own reduced circumstances that had brought them around. When the liege was defeated, so were all those dependent on her munificence. The priests had experienced loss of luxury and the looming specter of abject poverty, even starvation, if something was not done, and quickly. The ban on any citizen, high or low, crossing Gwannland’s newly redrawn borders, ruled out any chance of fleeing or seeking succor elsewhere.

Dronas has done everything possible to destroy us without actually sentencing us to death, Gwann thought heatedly. That way, he can have his revenge and stay within the letter of Krushan law.

Krushan law, as arcane and antiquated as their ceremonial rituals, forbade the killing of any bloodline oathsworn to Hastinaga. The forebear of the Kuin had taken the sacred oath before the first of the dynasty, the mythic Kr’ush himself, in the misty prehistory of the world. Dronas’s campaign of vengeance prevented him from harming any Kuin directly. He had done the next best thing: invited them to pitched battle, wiped out their army, taken everything of value to them, and left them with nothing but this desolate patch of fallow territory with no water source, no farmlands, towns, cities, or means of trade. He may as well have taken them to the middle of the Red Desert and abandoned them without food, water, or transport. That would have been a speedier death.

Vensera felt Gwann’s grip tighten and sensed his anger. She squeezed back, her much stronger grip curbed to avoid hurting him. He let the anger dissipate slowly, determined to keep his head clear through this ritual. It was dangerous enough without being distracted by his own emotions.

This must work.

He had to believe that now, and so did Vensera.

The priests had warned them beforehand: they must come to the altar with genuine need, holding back nothing. And if granted their given wish, they must accept it without question.

That was the way of the stone gods. You took what you were given, and you thanked stonefire.

Or stonefire would eat you alive.

The high priest was approaching a peak in the chanting. His face was limned with perspiration. Despite its deceptive appearance, the tiny pebble was exuding heat more intense than any bonfire. Yet it remained stolidly black and inert, just a little bit of black rock. The heat was penetrating enough that Gwann felt the palm that gripped Vensera’s grow slippery with sweat, even though they were seated some yards behind the high priest herself.

How far did the damned thing’s reach extend? Gwann had heard varying reports from the surviving soldiers who had returned from the expedition: some said it could extend any distance it pleased, which was impossible; others, that it could burn flesh from no more than ten yards away. But apparently the heat could be felt much, much farther than reported. Gwann estimated that he was well over sixty yards away, and still beads of sweat were breaking out on his forehead.

What was stonefire, anyway?

No one had a definite answer. It was forbidden to speak about it, let alone question, study, or record its properties. What little was known about its qualities was the stuff of myth and legend.

This much was certain, though: stonefire burned.

Not merely the burning of an ordinary fire. It consumed its prey whole, like a demonic thing armed with teeth, fangs, and a maw of living flame. The story went—whispered in private—that it consumed your very soul, from the inside out. And once it devoured you, you were trapped inside the stone itself, your essence digested and contained within its oily, alien surface. It was also said that though it looked like a stone, it was in fact a viscous thing, a dark substance that was not truly black, but appeared so because it erased light itself. That was the reason you could look at it but not truly see it. You only saw what it wanted you to see. Stonefire was no mere rock. It lived, it ate, it grew. And most of all, if you were Krushan, it empowered you. That was the reason why those who sat upon the Burning Throne, the highest seat of power in all Arthaloka, ruled the world.

It was that empowerment that Gwann now sought, in his time of desperation.

It was that which this ritual was supposed to summon.

The high priest’s sonorous voice droned on, reciting the Ashcrit mantras by rote, as priests before him had done for thousands of years. These particular mantras were rarely if ever used. The high priest had told Gwann that to the best of his knowledge—which was considerable—they had not been used by a non-Krushan in at least three sausaal, a sausaal being an unit of 108 Arthaloka years. And on that last occasion, the ritual had ended in disaster.

Gwann had heard the priest’s tone of disapproval and ignored the implicit warning. He would not be dissuaded from his chosen path. It was desperate, yes, but it was the only way. The magic mantra which would, if all went well, provide him with the power to overthrow Dronas and take back the kingdom that was rightfully his. He would have Gwannland back once more, and this time, he would have the power to hold and defend it.

A sudden silence alerted him.

The chanting had ended.

The high priest and all the purohits had completed the recitation of the mantras.

Gwann blinked, staring at them. They appeared to be frozen, staring blankly at the center of the pentangle.

The baking heat from the stonefire had increased in intensity and was increasing still.

He felt the sweat pouring down his face and back. Vensera’s palm was slick with sweat against his own. He glanced at her and saw her sweating as profusely. The white kushtas of the priests, though loose and flowing, had dark sweat patches as well, and he could see beads of perspiration gleaming on the upper lip of High Priest Namanraj. The man looked terrified, his eyes fixed on the stonefire. Everyone was staring at it, except Gwann himself. He glanced around and saw that even the sentries several yards behind him were shifting uneasily, their knuckles white around their pikes. The air was thick with a dry, searing heat. He had never been to Reygistan, but he imagined this must be what it felt like in the Red Desert.

Burn.

His head snapped back to the altar, eyes finding the stonefire.

This time that sinister tongueless voice was louder, filling the space. He saw from the reactions on the faces around the altar that the others had heard it too. He had no recollection of this from the myths. Could stonefire . . . speak?

BURN.

The word felt like an ember igniting inside his brain.

He clutched his head as the heat seared him from the inside and was aware of the others holding their heads and exclaiming as well. The heat from the altar increased. Now sweat poured freely down his body, drenching his silk robes. He tugged off his turban, feeling as if his hair and skull must surely be on fire.

His hands felt only the normal warmth of skin and bone, but his head felt as if it would combust at any moment. An apprentice rose screaming, hands clutching his shaven pate, babbling that he could not take it anymore. Gwann saw High Priest Namanraj swear at the novice, gesturing wildly with one hand, something he had never before witnessed at a ceremony.

But it was already too late.

A spear of red hot flame, as slender as a scarlet thread, flashed out from the stonefire. The tip connected with the skull of the babbling acolyte, and Gwann watched, aghast, as the life left the man’s eyes and his limp body dropped bonelessly to the ground. He fell onto the silverwood barrier, sprawled partially over it, head and limbs extending into the ash-covered pentangle. One hand struck the ash-covered surface, and a grey puff rose in the air. A thin thread of blood dripped from the tiny perforation in the man’s head, falling onto the ash.

And in the instant it took that drop of blood to fall the remaining few inches to the ground, the stonefire claimed the body.

The head and upper torso of the acolyte evaporated in a liquid explosion. A small dark cloud hung for a moment, then even those fine particles of bloody ash were incinerated to near-invisible motes. The rest of the unfortunate victim’s body burned steadily, fiercely, like a corpse committed to the funeral pyre.

A howl of lament rose from the scores of gathered priests, clutching their heads and shaking from side to side as they mourned the loss of one of their own while calling upon their gods to protect them.

Vensera’s voice forced Gwann to look away from the ghastly sight of the destroyed apprentice.

She was staring with a stunned look on her face.

In her pupils, Gwann saw the red heat from the altar reflected. The light glowed upon her face. He saw that the entire gathering was illuminated by the stonefire’s glow.

And still the heat grew.

BURN!

The voice of flame screamed inside his skull now, making rational thought impossible.

It was the heat of naked, raw emotions, unfettered by moral considerations or civilized concerns.

Was this what it felt like when demons—urrkh—raged? Perhaps this was what they felt when they went into battle against mortals.

A blazing fire that shredded sanity, drove out all awareness, thought, even the need to ensure one’s own survival.

Only the flame itself remained, seeking to burn, to destroy, to ruin.

BURN!

The stonefire cried out one final time, the heat in Gwann’s head beyond endurance.

He was aware of more priests thrashing about, rising, sentries tearing off their helmets. He glimpsed one woman’s helmet, the metal melted to the texture of soft wax, sticking to her hair and scalp, ripping them away as she flung the headgear to the ground.

Stonefire blasts blazed out in all directions at once, seeking, finding, incinerating any and all flesh that came within range. Bodies exploded. Helmets and armor melted, then exploded outward in a deadly spray. Screams filled the air, vying with the stench of scorched flesh, burnt blood, and the iron taste of molten metal.

Gwann began to lose consciousness. He felt as if his brain was melting inside his skull. He found himself hammering at his own head with his fists, punching himself hard enough that the bruises would surely show for days afterward, as if seeking to break open the cage of bone and free the fire within.

The awareness of Vensera starting to rise distracted him. Some deep part of him, overwhelmed though he was by the terrors unfolding all around, made him lunge out and grab her waist, yanking her down hard. She stumbled back, and he fell upon her as a blast of red rage passed through the space they had occupied only a fraction of an instant before. He would find later that the hair on the back and top of his head had been burned off, leaving a blistering red patch that would never heal completely, but his speedy action saved her life.

The altar and the space around it was a festering place of hellish heat, smoke, and burned flesh.

Lying on his back now, head ringing from the burn and from the impact with Vensera’s armor, Gwann saw only thick grey smoke boiling above and around.

Slowly, by degrees, he came to understand that the heat was dissipating, the searing agony in his brain receding, the glow from the stonefire fading.

Something was happening in the pentangle.

Vensera sat up carefully, helping him up to a sitting position as well. Her arms and strength comforted him, helped ease the return to full self-awareness. He regained rationality, remembering who he was and why he was there. All the mundane, mortal miseries of existence that the stonefire had seared out of his head returned.

The Ritual of Summoning.

He grew aware of something moving within the cloud of smoke.

Within the pentangle.

In the altar.

Had the ritual succeeded?

He felt a blast of wind. For an instant, his skin registered it as intense heat. Only when he saw Vensera’s breath condensing as she exhaled and saw a matching puff from his mouth did he realize it was icy cold, like the blow from a blizzard in the Coldheart Mountains. Gwannland’s coldest winter nights never came close to freezing, so whatever this was, it was no natural phenomenon.

A portal had been opened.

Even through the grey haze, he could see movement and a light. A cold dark blue light the size and shape of a large cave, perhaps four yards high and five or six yards wide. Around it was whiteness, utter whiteness.

Whatever that place was, it was frigid, covered in snow.

Within the darker bluish hole in the whiteness, a shape was moving.

He strained to see through the haze.

The ritual had succeeded.

Something or someone was coming through.

The shape moved out of the darkness and into the pentangle.

The world shifted for an instant. Like a single tremor in an earthquake. A sliding of reality.

He felt the lurching sensation within himself, as if all his organs had shifted a fraction to one side, then settled back in their original places. Vensera exhaled, and one of the surviving priests faltered, hands raised as if to exalt a divinity.

The other priests rose as well.

None were being burnt. It seemed the threat of stonefire had passed.

Vensera rose to her feet. Gwann’s heart skipped. He flinched in anticipation of a blast from the stonefire.

Nothing happened to her.

She stood erect, staring at the dark shape that had emerged from the portal.

Slowly, cautiously, Gwann rose as well.

The figure moved through the swirling haze.

It stood before them, magnificent, terrible, darkly beautiful.

“Who . . .” Gwann swallowed, took in a breath, then tried again. “Who are you?”

The figure stood silently for a long moment.

Around them the priests and sentries—those few who had survived—were standing with arms raised in salutation. The priests were chanting the Mantra of Gratitude. As they finished, they lowered their arms all the way down, bending from the waist until the tips of their fingers touched the ground. They remained that way, eyes cast downward, in the traditional gesture of submission.

Gwann realized he was in the presence of a stone god—or at the very least, a demigod.

The ritual had worked.

His wish had been granted.

A savior was given unto them.

“Are you a god?” he asked now, when it appeared that no reply to his first question was forthcoming.

A delicate tinkling and susurration came in response. It was followed almost immediately by the sound of a feminine voice.

“No.”

Another figure had emerged from the portal.

Gwann blinked in surprise.

A pair of delicate ankles adorned with tiny silvery bells were the first thing he saw. While not actually supplicating himself as the priests and sentries were doing, he had instinctively lowered his gaze. He didn’t know the protocol for greeting a stone god or demigod, but his own faith required one to be humble in the presence of divinity.

So it was that the first thing he saw was her feet.

“We are not,” she said in a voice as silvery and clear as the bells on her feet.

He raised his eyes, surprised by the answer, and the use of his own tongue. He had expected high Ashcrit, the antiquated language of the scrolls, or at the very least the Old Tongue used in the Burnt Empire. Not his own common dialect, spoken only by the people in this godforsaken part of the world.

She was young, handsome, with a regal bearing. Her skin was the color of burnt wood. Her eyes, banked fires. Her limbs, her body, as lithe and toned as Vensera’s warrior physique, but also with a feminine softness about it. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, her lips glossed with rouge, her hair wild and untamable, a beautiful beast unto itself.

She smiled at him. There was something mischievous about her smile, as if she was considering a private joke.

“We are something more,” she said simply.

Then she came forward.

Gwann sensed Vensera flinch, her hand instinctively falling to her sword hilt.

The stranger noticed and included Vensera in her smile.

“Mother,” she said.

Vensera’s hand left her sword hilt. Her mouth opened in surprise.

Gwann stared openly now, unable to look away from the woman’s compelling gaze.

“I am your daughter,” she said now, first addressing herself to Vensera, then to Gwann.

She spread her arms, including them both in a figurative embrace.

“I have answered your summons.”

Then she joined her palms together and bowed low from the waist.

“I am here now. From this day on, you will fear nothing and want for nothing.”

Gwann heard a choking sound.

It came from his own throat.

He was crying. With joy, with disbelief.

The ritual had worked!

He held up his palm in the traditional parental gesture of blessing. “Live long, live well,” he said, uttering the words parents and elders had said to their youngers for millennia in Gwannland, as well as across Arthaloka. Some traditions were universal.

He heard Vensera echo the words, her own palm held out beside his own.

The young woman straightened, her palms still joined, eyes lowered, and inclined her head to acknowledge their blessings.

Then she turned and acknowledged the rest of the gathering.

Raising her voice, she said aloud, “We are the Given Avatars.”

A reverential response rose from the priests and sentries around the pentangle. The smoky haze had cleared now and Gwann could see everyone once again. He noted distractedly that the stonefire was gone, leaving only a tiny reddish-black mark on the ground. So too was the portal.

All that remained was this young woman and the young man standing behind her silently.

The Given Avatars.

“Have you names?” he heard Vensera ask hesitantly. “Or shall we provide them for you?”

The woman—our daughter, Gwann thought, through his dazzlement—inclined her head and said, “I shall choose for us.”

Her tone was gentle and pleasing, but also decisive.

She turned to indicate the young man standing beside her, tall, proud, as magnificent as she herself, fully armored and armed, like a warrior ready for battle. His own steely eyes met hers. He stood impassively as she raised a hand to touch his face affectionately.

She paused, tilting her head a fraction of an angle. Again, that sense of inward consideration, as if searching for a way to explain the inexplicable in an idiom comprehensible to mere mortals.

We are something more. What could be more than a god?

“He is a portion of myself,” she went on, “a part of me yet apart from me. I shall call him brother in this life. It is close enough. I speak for both of us. All that he hears, I hear. All he sees, I see. Everything he tastes, I taste. Anything he smells, I smell. Any and everything he feels . . . everything he experiences, I experience as well. We are as one, though he thinks for himself as well and can act independently if he desires. Always, I am the voice that speaks for us both.”

She raised her arms, raising her gaze as well, to the sky.

“I name him Drishya.”

The priests chanted the Ashcrit word of acknowledgment: “Sidh! Sidh!” It was one of the few Ashcrit words Gwann knew himself, and was the traditional way of showing respect for an excellent choice. It also meant “auspicious.”

The young woman smiled, acknowledging the priests, and turned a full circle, letting everyone present see her clearly.

“I am Krushni,” she said.

Copyright © 2021 by Ashok K. Banker. Excerpted from A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker. Published by permission of the author and John Joseph Adams Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the author of more than seventy books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. His works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. Ashok’s most recent publication is his debut picture book I am Brown. Upcoming in April is A Dark Queen Rises, the sequel to Upon a Burning Throne.

EXCERPT: The Conductors (John Joseph Adams Books)

Nicole Glover | 5402 words

“A seamless blending of magic, mystery, and history . . . Glover’s worldbuilding, characters, and attention to historical detail create a delightfully genre-bending debut!”

—Tananarive Due, American Book Award winner, author of Ghost Summer: Stories

From a bold new voice in speculative fiction comes a vibrant historical fantasy of magic and murder set in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Hetty Rhodes and her husband, Benjy, were Conductors on the Underground Railroad, ferrying dozens of slaves to freedom with daring, cunning, and magic that draws its power from the constellations. With the war over, those skills find new purpose as they solve mysteries and murders that white authorities would otherwise ignore.

In the heart of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, everyone knows that when there’s a strange death or magical curses causing trouble, Hetty and Benjy are the only ones that can solve the case. But when an old friend is murdered, their investigation stirs up a wasp nest of intrigue, lies, and long-buried secrets—and a mystery unlike anything they handled before. With a clever, cold-blooded killer on the prowl testing their magic and placing their lives at risk, Hetty and Benjy will discover how little they really know about their neighbors . . . and themselves.

“An unforgettable debut . . . Wholly original and thoroughly riveting.”

—Deanna Raybourn, New York Times best-selling author of A Murderous Relation

Available now from John Joseph Adams Books.

Chapter Two

As the night crept up on them, they left toward home. At the street corner, Hetty turned right instead of left. Benjy turned with her, although he was not quick to follow.

“I want to pay Penelope a visit,” Hetty said. “Let her know what happened with the girl. You can wait downstairs. I won’t be long.”

“I think I hear thunder.” Benjy cupped his ear. “It’s very distant, but it’s there.”

“I won’t be long,” Hetty repeated.

He scoffed and started naming all the times she said this before.

Benjy had listed a dozen examples by the time they arrived at the house, and if the day hadn’t been such an eventful one, she might have considered prolonging her stay just to be petty.

It was a cool spring evening without a chance of rain. She could leave him waiting for half a night and not feel guilty, especially considering he would wait for her. He always did.

The windows of the schoolroom that took up the ground floor of the building were dark. But the second level was quite the opposite. Even before Hetty reached the top of the stairs, she heard muffled laughter, and voices that threatened to spill out into the hallway.

This apartment belonged to Darlene and George, and while lights flickering in the windows were expected, such rambunctious noise was not.

“Are they having a party?” Benjy asked.

Benjy stood a few steps below her, curiosity drawing him near despite his greater reservations.

“I would have heard,” Hetty said, though she couldn’t be sure.

Darlene and her husband, George, taught letters and numbers in the schoolroom below. Daylight hours were for the fifteen children that attended regularly, but two evening classes for adults met each week. Devoted educators, the couple lived very simply, forgoing most pleasures in their private lives. However, to help raise the prestige of their little school, they had gotten themselves wrapped up with the rich elite—people who enjoyed fine dining, gossip, and filling their homes with trinkets that could have fed a family of four for a month. While Darlene claimed the rich elite of the city were a trial to contend with, she made no effort to curtail George’s ambitions.

“Why don’t we ask Penelope together?” Hetty suggested. “Or you can ask, since you’re curious.”

It was too dark to fully make out his expression, but she smiled anyway, imagining the displeasure on his face, since he had stumbled into a trap of his making.

The stairs went up for one more level to Penelope’s apartment. She lived in a small set of rooms filled with plants on every possible surface and space possible. The fewest number was in the kitchen, where a dozen plants were spread across the windowsill and the counters, waiting to be used in a potion or poultice. The air always held traces of freshly cut leaves, and there was always a half dozen herb bundles suspended over the sink by a wire, drying for some later use.

Although Penelope rented from Darlene, she paid no money, and instead taught music lessons or performed small favors.

Hetty knocked once and heard the slight tinkle of mugs. She knocked a second time and heard chairs move. On her third knock, the door swung open.

“Hetty!” Penelope exclaimed, clapping her hands together, her heart-shaped face filled with delight. “Thank the stars it’s you! It’s just you, isn’t it? No one behind you causing trouble?”

“No one,” Hetty replied. “Except for my husband.”

“Benjy’s here?” Penelope called out to the shadows with a broad grin. “Well, he can stay outside and out of the way!”

Despite being her opposite in most things, Penelope was Hetty’s closest and dearest friend. While Benjy was willing to entertain her complaints, gripes, and fears—not to mention numerous other ills—he lacked a certain sensitivity about certain matters. In Penelope, Hetty had a listening ear, a companion to perform hijinks with, and someone who took her blunt words without insult or annoyance.

Penelope had thought herself alone in the world, until her mother’s sister found her through the theft of records from a burned-down sugar cane plantation. With five children of her own—three married with families—adding Penelope into the mix was no trouble. But while Penelope loved her newfound relatives, she chose to live apart for reasons she never quite explained. Skilled with herbs and brewing magic, she worked at the best herbalist shop in town, providing remedies and charms alike. While she took pride in this work, her true passion was singing. Penelope lent her voice to contests and traveling shows, and she ran the choir at church as a labor of love. If she could make a living off her voice, Hetty had no doubts Penelope would drop everything to try.

“Did you find Elle?” Penelope asked.

“Yes, she’s back with her mother. This”—Hetty held up the candle—“is our reward.”

“I knew you’d find her!” Penelope clasped her hands together. “I was so worried. I keep seeing her talking to that man after practice. I should have done something when I saw him pull her out of sight. I just stood there and watched.”

“You did do something,” Hetty assured her friend. “You told us and set us searching. What you call nothing meant Elle and the others lured away would not be sent to have their magic harvested.”

“Magic harvesting?” cried a voice from inside. “That can’t be going on!”

“Darlene,” Hetty said, spying the other woman seated at Penelope’s table. “What are you doing up here?”

Darlene’s appearance on its own wasn’t strange. Penelope’s large round table was the place they gathered to gossip and discuss various matters in and around town. But Darlene should have been in her own apartment given what Hetty had seen as she came upstairs.

Instead, Darlene sat hunched over her sketchbook, gently rocking a basket with her foot to keep the little baby swaddled inside in the arms of sleep. Her glasses slipped off her nose, and as usual there was a smudge of charcoal along the right side of her face, like a beauty mark against her skin. Reserved and quietly elegant, Darlene was often the voice of reason in their little trio.

Together her friends presented an interesting contrast, vividly expressed in their attire. Penelope favored bold colors, pumpkin orange, canary yellow, and even rose pink, all paired with frothy lace and ribbons. On anyone else it would have been overwhelming but with Penelope’s fuller figure and flair for dramatics it all suited her rather nicely. Darlene, on the other hand, stayed with earthy brown and maroon and was quite keen on buttons. Buttons on her sleeves, to be precise, to keep the fabric from ruining whatever painting she was working on.

All their dresses were made by Hetty. While a few times she was bribed to make something, like the butterfly-themed dress Penelope had wanted for one Easter Sunday, Hetty took on the work without much fuss and without asking for payment. Her dresses were worn by some of the richest people in the city, but her greatest pleasure was working away on a new dress for her friends.

“We’re just having a bit of a chat.” Darlene’s lips pressed into a thin line. “What’s this about magic harvesting?”

“Nothing to worry about.” Hetty handed the candle to Penelope and slipped inside the cheery kitchen.

Something had driven Darlene up here. It didn’t look to be the baby. Since Darlene had adopted the child last month, Darlene took every sniffle, cough, or sneeze as a precursor to doom. With Penelope’s proximity and talents with healing remedies, she was the first stop for Darlene’s frantic queries.

But instead of worry, irritation creased Darlene’s face.

Whatever brought her up here?

“Magic harvesting sounds like a great deal to worry about,” Darlene replied. “Given it’s not herbs.”

“Don’t mind her. When we don’t know why people suddenly vanish, she calls it magic harvesting.” Benjy moved out of the shadows. He didn’t come inside but leaned against the door frame. “Don’t understand why.”

“Because that’s how it was back in slavery times.” Hetty kept her voice earnest. “Magic users were snatched up so their bones could be ground up into wands.”

“That’s only a story,” Darlene said, but her eyes flicked around. “Isn’t it?”

“The stories have to come from somewhere.” Hetty took a seat across from Darlene. “Why do you think”—she tapped her thumb against her neck and at the scars hidden from sight— “we were collared?”

Hetty had her for a moment, like she knew she would. Darlene was the most imaginative of her friends, which meant with the right story Darlene was easily tricked, especially when Hetty weaved in bits that were true. People did disappear suddenly and without reason, but magic harvesting wasn’t likely the cause—or even a true practice.

Darlene shook her head, breaking the power of Hetty’s words. “Now I know you’re telling tales again. Why do you persist on making up stories like this? Wands are just made of wood—they aren’t rubbed with bone dust!”

“I never said anything like that,” Hetty teased.

“I don’t know anything about wands,” Penelope admitted, too lost in her thoughts to pay attention to either of them. She turned the inky black candle over in her hands as she leaned against her counter. “But it’s no worse than what I feared might have happened to Elle.”

“You must have an idea why they snatched her,” Darlene said, jumping to turn the tide of the conversation, “or why they were doing such a thing?”

“We don’t know yet, but we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Hetty reached for Darlene’s sketchbook. “May I?”

Darlene nodded, pushing the book across the table. Hetty turned to an empty page and drew a horseshoe.

“These men all had the same mark on their hands. It’s worth keeping an eye on.”

Darlene looked away. “I told you, the past is behind me.”

“You know people,” Hetty persisted, “and some of them aren’t fond of me.”

“With good reason.” Darlene attempted a smile. “I’m sorry.”

So was Hetty.

Freed at a very young age, Darlene had been an agent with the Vigilance Society, acting as a point of contact in the city. When Hetty got involved with conductor work, Darlene familiarized her with the procedures of the organization and provided assistance beyond the city’s limits. With slavery abolished, others in the Vigilance Society turned their hands toward making freedom more than just words on a piece of paper, but Darlene retreated from the work. She had reasons for it, some of them good, but to Hetty’s ears they sounded like excuses.

“Don’t be sorry.” Benjy’s words drifted in, paired with a pointed look at Hetty. “This is a task for us to handle.”

Hetty pushed the sketchbook back across the table.

“I should be going,” Hetty said, getting up.

“Stay for a bit,” Penelope pleaded. “It’s not that late.”

From his spot in the doorway, Benjy shook his head. “What should I do while you chatter on?”

“You can go downstairs,” Darlene huffed. “Plenty to keep you occupied.”

His curiosity about the excitement in the apartment below was greater than Hetty had anticipated. Eager as he was to go home, Benjy slipped inside instead, joining them in the kitchen.

“What is going on downstairs?” he asked.

“George is hosting a group of people from this political club he joined, E.C. Degray.” Darlene turned a page in her sketchbook, the paper snapping with the action. “There’s an excursion later this week across the river. They’re finalizing details now, or so they claim.”

“E.C. Degray?” Hetty echoed. “Is this another one of those secret societies?”

“I couldn’t tell you. George keeps shying away from giving me a direct answer. I can certainly guess what they’re about, but I like to be told things!”

Hetty nodded along but hid a bit of a smile. She did not have this problem. Her marriage to Benjy hadn’t been a love match, but theirs was an agreement that suited them rather well. She often thought their understanding made a stronger marriage. Hetty had seen the pain love matches caused in both the past and the present. She was glad to be spared it.

“I suppose it’s about voting.” Darlene tapped her pencil against the table. “But isn’t it too early to be talking about elections? October is so far away.”

“It’s good to know who our husbands will be voting for,” Hetty said. “Benjy, what do you think?”

“It’s too soon to tell,” he murmured as he sat down, drawing up a chair next to Hetty.

“About the candidates?”

“About this club. Charlie waxed on about it the other day but didn’t tell me anything of value.”

“You should join.” Penelope placed mugs in front of them. Swirling steam lifted fresh mint into the air. “You’ll bring sense into that group. I heard from my cousin Sy that there’s talk of recommending people for public office. He didn’t like some of the names being suggested, but thought you’d do a good job. Is that not a good idea? You were saying that there were many things you wanted to fix.”

“I don’t disagree there,” Benjy replied. “But the job does not suit me.”

“Surely better than Charlie,” Darlene grumbled. “He shouldn’t be in a position to make decisions about anything more important than the cut of his coat!”

Penelope laughed at this, although with a hesitation that Hetty shared. Charlie, the husband of one of their friends, fretted about the cut and style of his clothes so much that they’d taken to calling him Peacock—until he learned about it and took all the fun out of a good joke. But even before the joke was ruined, Darlene never used it. It was unbecoming and rude, she said, with a stiffly held chin that didn’t waver despite their insisting it was harmless fun. How odd for her to say different now.

“Do you think George would be better suited?” Penelope asked.

“Me? The wife of some politician!” Darlene exclaimed. “Who do you think I am? I’m not—”

Darlene’s words stuttered to a halt. Her face filled with a panic Hetty had seen quite often in the months since that last disastrous tea party with Marianne last winter.

“Marianne,” Hetty supplied. “She’s downstairs, isn’t she?”

She might have spat out a hex into the room. Penelope and Darlene both drew back, and Benjy shot Hetty a look filled with more concern than when they’d concocted the plan to strike at the kidnappers.

That look stung the most.

Hetty nursed less than kind feelings for Marianne these days, but if they were expecting her to storm down there and turn Marianne into a frog, they were wrong. Such magic wasn’t possible.

“Darlene,” Benjy said in the silence that fell in the room, “do you know if anyone by the name of Watkins is down there? George told me the fellow had a job for me, but we couldn’t find the time to meet.”

This was a lie. Made worse by the excessive details. And Darlene snatched it up eagerly.

“I don’t know.” Darlene reached down and pulled out the bundle that was her baby. “Why don’t we go find out?”

With her daughter cradled in her arms, Darlene led Benjy out Penelope’s apartment, presumably in an effort to keep Marianne away from Hetty.

“Not going with them?” Hetty asked, as the door slammed shut. “Or are you here to keep me out of trouble?”

Penelope settled into Darlene’s empty chair. “We all have our tasks to play in this world. Although, this is the perfect time to show you what I found. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

Penelope waved a hand. The Arrow star sigil whipped past and struck a cabinet drawer. Under Penelope’s guidance, a squat green vial floated across the room and landed on the table.

Hetty recoiled at the sight.

The last time she saw a vial like this, she’d had to break the fingers of a dead woman to pry it free.

Hetty picked it up. The more she studied it, the more she had to stop herself from smashing the bottle onto the table.

“Where did you get this?”

“A customer at work showed it to me.” Penelope’s mouth curled into a wry smile. “Wanted to know if we had something similar on our shelves. It was lucky she showed it to me. Old Midge would have lost her temper. We got enough trouble without charlatans cutting up our trade. It’s the same kind, isn’t it?”

“It’s the same.”

Penelope expelled a breath. “How dreadful.”

Dreadful was not a big enough word. People sold the moon and the tides as far back as anyone could remember, winking and laughing as they cheated people out of their hard-earned money. Doing it with brewed magic was just the latest variation.

But brewed magic was a finicky beast. It required patience, time, and access to ingredients and tools that often proved hard to gather. Those that knew how to draw magic from herbs were masters of a craft, and shops like Penelope’s lost customers from cheap frauds. These swindlers sold potions and brews to straighten hair, lighten skin, even to make a womb comfortable for a child. However, as with most claims, the small promises delivered but the big ones didn’t.

With a heart full of hope, a woman named Emily Wells had drunk an entire vial of a potion just like the one Hetty held. It brought the woman to death’s arms. It was a simple case, the culprit easily found. But solving the mystery was not enough for Hetty. The death was an accident, but Emily Wells would have not died if her mother, her husband, and even her friends didn’t pressure her to have a baby her body could not carry.

But that wasn’t the only reason Penelope showed this to Hetty now.

Darlene had nearly been the next victim. Darlene had been trying for ages to have a baby. No miscarriages, thank the stars, but no luck. In fact, a twin of this very same bottle was in Darlene’s pocket when one of her students approached her after class. The girl had a hand pressed on her heavily pregnant belly and asked if Darlene would like to raise a baby that would otherwise be unwanted.

The simple act saved the lives of the young student, the baby that would become Lorene, and Darlene.

“I know where this con artist is,” Hetty said. “She promised to stop, but she must have forgotten.”

“Must have,” Penelope echoed. “What do you plan to do? Remind her of that promise?”

“And a bit more.”

Worry crossed Penelope’s face. “This is why Darlene and Benjy rushed to usher Marianne out the house. You say things like this and we all wonder what will happen next.”

“Why always bad things?” Hetty laughed as she tucked the vial away.

“Don’t you know five different stories about preparing for the worst?”

“What’s the worst in this case? There’s nine stories I can tell, and one has a good ending.” Hetty stood, heading for the door. “I’m off to collect my husband. If I do happen to meet Marianne, I apologize for any smoke.”

“That’s not funny, Henrietta!” Penelope called after her, her voice carrying even through the closed door.

Still chuckling, Hetty headed back down the stairs. She had just placed her hand on the doorknob to Darlene’s apartment when she heard someone call her name.

It wasn’t Penelope or anyone she wanted to have her name on their lips.

“Henrietta,” said Charlie Richardson. “I need to talk to you.”

“You may talk.” Hetty swung around to face Marianne’s husband. “That doesn’t mean I’ll listen.”

Faint light illuminated his surprise. “You’re still mad about the dresses?”

“I am mad you took what was meant to be a gift and sold it to others! Maybe it’s my fault for thinking gifts could bridge a peace between Marianne and me, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t wrong!”

“Your work is worth the price I charged. Did you want to be paid?” Charlie reached into his pocket. “I can get you the money and more if you like. Name a figure.”

She paused, taken aback by this generosity. “Any figure?”

“Any.”

Hetty’s answer was on her lips when she saw the gleam in his eyes. He’d tossed bait at her feet, and she’d nearly taken it like a fool.

“No. No money. No listening to a word you have to say.”

Charlie grabbed her arm.

“You must! It’s important. At the elm—”

Hetty coolly meet his gaze and held it until Charlie wisely removed his offending hand.

“Please,” he begged. “You must listen.”

The words were a rasp from the back of his throat, raw and stripped of his usual airs and whimsy.

The man who said these words wasn’t Charlie Richardson, the peacock with eyes toward the next bright shiny thing. The man stooping to beg his case was a Charlie in a raggedy coat and split shoes, with eyes darting to shadows.

Charlie sought her out for trouble he couldn’t handle. But if it was truly dire, he wouldn’t waste time talking to her—he’d go to Benjy. Talking to her was a delay. Unless of course that was the point. She was here to field his request, since he seemed to think Benjy wouldn’t even consider it.

“Can I do something about it right now?” Hetty asked.

“No, but—”

“Then it can wait.” She opened the door. “Tell us together. It’s the better choice.”

“Only choice, you mean.”

“Why, yes.” Hetty paused in the threshold, letting conversation in the next room wash over them. Beams of light striped his face into patches of light and shadow. “Did you think you would get special treatment?”

He didn’t have an answer, or if he did, hadn’t found the right words when she shut the door behind her.

Hetty spotted Marianne right away.

It was hard not to. Marianne was resplendent. She stood in a crimson dress from Lord and Crown. The bright color and the overly complicated waste of fabric was a stark contrast to the dark suits of the men and their wives clustered around her.

Of the group of friends Hetty had formed over the years, Marianne was the only one that did not talk about the days when she had been enslaved, skipping over that chunk of time as if nothing mattered before she arrived in Philadelphia. Darlene claimed it was because of painful memories, but Hetty knew it was tied to Marianne’s ascent into the insular upper class of the city.

Wielding the gifts she was born with, Marianne used her golden-brown complexion, dainty features, and softly curling hair to fit right in with the elite of the city. What she was aiming for was hard to tell. At first Hetty assumed it was a better life, but these days Hetty wondered if it was to forget the past. If that was true, Marianne was doing an astonishingly good job of it.

As Marianne held court, Darlene slipped around with pitcher held in her hands. She weaved through the crowd, refilling drinks, ignored by all until Marianne snapped her fingers. Marianne’s glass floated in the air, all but shoving itself into Darlene’s face. Marianne said something that got lost in the crowd, Hetty didn’t need to hear. She saw the words’ effect in way Darlene’s polite expression curdled into contempt.

But Darlene was a better person than Hetty. Instead of tossing the drink at Marianne, she returned to the kitchen. Darlene paused at the door, and when she looked back her eyes locked on Hetty.

Don’t, Darlene mouthed across the room. With her chin, she pointed in direction to Hetty’s right, and then disappeared through the door.

When Hetty turned, she could see why Darlene felt confident to leave Hetty in close quarters with Marianne. Benjy was across the room.

Like Marianne, he too stood apart from the crowd around him, due to his rough and muddied attire. He seemed perfectly at ease despite being locked in a conversation with Darlene’s husband, George.

While Charlie had climbed up into society with a skip and jump, George had clawed his way upward inch by inch, enduring taunts and gentle rebukes from all sides. He had survived the Battle of the Crater where the USCT were sent first into battle, to take gunshots instead of the white Union soldiers that followed. George’s experience during the war, as well as his classical education, inspired him to do something great in the world. The classroom that sat below this apartment was the fruit of that inspiration, and his motivation to force himself into the high society world that wasn’t all too welcoming.

“I’m not surprised to see you,” George declared heartily as Hetty approached. “Everyone,” he slurred, “this is Benjamin’s lovely wife, Henrietta. She’s going to be a teacher at my school.”

“I think someone told you a lie.” Hetty eyed George’s flushed face, unsure if she should have left Benjy to his fate.

“Why not?” George said. “You know your letters and numbers, and your stories charm children. You’re good with people.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Hetty said as the men around them chuckled. “I’m not teaching anyone anything.”

“Not even magic lessons?”

There was a small outcry at that. Even Benjy’s eyebrows lifted. George’s opinions on magic ran pragmatic and practical—the old mindset that came from the plantations. Back in the old days, magic was a handful of star sigils to till the land, to aid in picking the cash crop of choice or sweeping nettles out of the way. In George’s view, there was no room for inventive or cleverly done spell-work. For him to even float the idea meant one of two things. He was either desperate for teachers, or drunk.

Hetty leaned toward the latter.

“She’s exceptionally good with magic.” George spun around to the crowd, waving a hand about. “Every story you heard about these two, they’re all true!”

When he didn’t get the response he expected, George blathered on. “You haven’t heard of them? Have none of you heard? Benjamin and Henrietta Rhodes worked as conductors for the Vigilance Society when it was still up and running. You know of Joseph Mills or Della Reynolds? These two brought them up north, and a slew of others. Some that are even in this room right now!”

Eyes went to Hetty and Benjy, but as always, greater doubt swung back around to her.

“Tell them about the barn,” George pressed, staring into Hetty’s general direction. “And the dozen white folks you had to shoot. Or the boat you stole. Or even the cat that saved your skins. To think—all these adventures happened because Henrietta went looking for her sister!”

“Is your sister as pretty as you?” one of the men called.

“That’s a story for another day.”

Hetty forced out a laugh she nearly choked on. She needed to leave this room; she needed to leave now. In moments, they would ask the question people asked when learning of this sliver of her past. And she was in no mood to spin a pleasing lie.

Hetty pushed her way through the group. Benjy followed close behind, whispering what he thought were consoling words.

“Don’t mind him, he was drunk.”

“Anyone could guess that.” Hetty stomped down the stairs, welcoming the rush of cool air against her face. “With him acting as if I was going to be one of his teachers! What was he thinking getting that deep into his cups! Can’t imagine it makes him a good host.”

“George always has some at gatherings like this,” Benjy said. “Thinks it makes people like him. I’m not sure if he does it due to experience or Richardson putting the thought in his ear.”

The mention of Charlie made Hetty forget all about George, as Charlie’s strange intensity drifted up in her mind.

As they headed down the street, Hetty glanced up at the dimly light streetlamps over their heads and considered her next words.

“Did you see Charlie earlier?”

“I got a glimpse.” There was a long pause. “Why do you ask?”

“Charlie twisted my ear with a tale of trouble. Said it was important and seemed to think you wouldn’t listen to his ramblings.”

“That’s one thing he’s right about.” Benjy’s words were quiet, but that snapped and crackled in the air with an anger that couldn’t find its target. “Is someone in danger?”

“He didn’t say.” Hetty kept her words light and airy, but underneath her curiosity stirred.

Her falling-out with Marianne had been looming on the horizon for some time, but Benjy and Charlie met regularly to play cards. Or at least she thought they did.

“Then he was right,” Benjy said. “I won’t listen to him.”

“What if I convince you otherwise?”

“If you cared about what he had to say, we’d already be talking to him.”

“I didn’t, but now that I know you’re against it, I do.”

“Not tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Hetty echoed, not wishing to wage a battle when she didn’t care about the outcome. There would be plenty of other chances to talk with Charlie.

After all, Charlie never gave up without a fight.

Copyright © 2021 by Nicole Glover. Excerpted from The Conductors by Nicole Glover. Published by permission of the author and John Joseph Adams Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicole Glover works as a UX researcher. A bike commuter and running enthusiast, she enjoys baking and figuring out what book to read next. The Conductors is her debut novel.

Book Review: Victories Greater Than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders

LaShawn M. Wanak | 628 words

Victories Greater Than Death
Charlie Jane Anders
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250317315
Tor Teen, April 2021, 288 pages

It’s been a while since I read something fun. Something joyous. Charlie Jane Anders’ first venture into the YA genre, Victories Greater Than Death, did not disappoint me in that regard. It held the same freewheeling drama as Jim C. Hines’s Janitors of the Apocalypse space-opera series flavored with the sparkly pop-candy love and concern of Steven Universe.

All her life, Tina knew she had a destiny. She may look human, but in reality she’s a clone of Thaoh Argentian, captain of the alien spaceship HMSS Indomitable. She was placed on Earth by her former crew to hide her from murderous enemies until she was old enough to activate the beacon inside her body. When she finally does so, her old crew comes looking for her—as well as Marrant, a skeletal alien who commands a war-mongering force called the Compassion. This is because Tina’s predecessor may have known the location of the Talgan stone, a relic that points the way to unknown alien technology. Marrant plans to wrest the information out of Tina before not only killing her, but also tainting her memory, and by proxy that of Thaoh Argentian, so that anyone who remembers her, friends or family, would only do so with loathing and disgust.

Soon, Tina realizes her destiny may be too big for her to fulfill, particularly when going through her original’s journals, she learns a secret that calls into question her own identity and purpose. At the same time, while trying to fulfill the expectations of her former crew, she’s trying to manage a team of Earthlings, including her best friend Rachel, who’s an amazing graphic designer, and Eliza, a hacker girl she falls for who is dealing with her own demons.

This is a book of absolute joy. What I love about the YA genre is that you get to experience things from the POV of someone who has never experienced it before. Anders’ characters are free to gush and emote, but they also wrestle with their insecurities and doubts. To someone as jaded as me, it’s a great reminder of how I used to be, how I used to approach life before being disappointed. Even the ones who are world-weary can’t help but get caught up in the joyful moments, brief as they are. Woven through the story are also people and aliens caring for each other.

I’ve always admired Anders’ handling of relationships, all the heart-pounding highs and messy lows. Most of the aliens—the good ones anyway—greet each other by giving their pronouns, and the HMSS Indomitable crew ask for consent before touching each other. Anders has populated the alien crew with such grand diversity (sentient rocks, the aforementioned skeleton species), yet most of the story is focused on Tina and the humans she has gathered to serve as part of the crew. It was so good, I found myself wanting more interaction with the aliens on board the HMSS Indomitable.

Hopefully we’ll get more of that when the second book of this duology comes out. I want to see more of Tina coming to terms with her destiny, whatever it will be, learning more about her alien heritage and trying to figure out why Marrant hates her so much he is willing to destroy even his own relationships, and perhaps his own soul.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, Fireside Magazine, FIYAH, and many others. She is the editor of GigaNotoSaurus and reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

Book Review: Spider King, by Justin C. Key

Arley Sorg | 944 words

Spider King
Justin C. Key
4-part Serialized Audiobook/ebook
Serial Box, February 2021, approx. 70 pgs

Justin C. Key’s Spider King is a short, stirring read. It’s a horror narrative reminiscent of high-quality graphic novels in some ways. But the story’s focus on the post-incarceration life of protagonist Darnell Lee turns an entertaining read into an important book.

Stories with a premise around utilizing desperate prisoners are nothing new. The 1967 film The Dirty Dozen immediately comes to mind, wherein prisoners are offered freedom if they can pull off a suicide mission; as does 1987’s The Running Man, with prisoners fighting for their lives—and their freedom—in a death match for entertainment. Stories with experiments on desperate people are nothing new: La Jetée and later American remake 12 Monkeys have prisoners hurtled through time via an experimental device, A Clockwork Orange features a prisoner subjected to experimental behavior modification techniques, and Power Man (aka Luke Cage), introduced in 1972 by Marvel Comics, was a prisoner who was promised freedom if he underwent an experimental procedure.

What makes Key’s treatment in Spider King both special and important is the intimate and grounded exploration of the real-life horrors inflicted by the prison system that remain in an individual’s mind and body even after release. Darnell Lee is not a swaggering figure empowered by the call to duty or thrust into heroic action. He’s just trying to survive. He’s scarred by his experiences, perhaps permanently so; changed by them. And even as he’s been changed and must strive to adapt, the horrific speculative element of spiders taking up residence in his body serves as a layer of metaphor, creating a visceral experience for readers engaging in a topic that might be otherwise ignored or glazed over.

As horror or dark fantasy, the story’s strengths are mainly in the creative application of spiders, a creature we’ve seen employed in tons of stories. Despite the ubiquity of spiders as device, the idea here feels fairly fresh, and the scenes and body horror are absolutely wonderful. Readers who delight in creepy things will have a number of fun thrills, and the more hardened horror readers will find solid moments of tension, especially roughly halfway into the story, as the speculative element is explored and the relationship between critters and Lee develops.

But as I implied before, the real horrors are the aftereffect of Lee’s two-year bid. Arguably the spider infestation is a literalized metaphor for the way prison has rendered Lee into something monstrous, or less human—at least, to Lee’s own self-assessment. Prison is an environment in which there is no safety, only constant threat; in which exterior forces seek to control and limit the actions of individuals, often through means which treat them as less than human; in which people are worn down to essential, rough impulses of aggression or survival; or often enough people are pushed beyond these to self-destruction. Released after his two-year term, Lee is unable to relax, unable to be “normal” or to even remember what normal is. Moreover, as he struggles to adapt, as he grapples with his own self-image and habits, it becomes clear very quickly that the world is eager to use his incarceration as justification to treat him as less than human. “The jail had marked him in a way people couldn’t identify. It would have been better to have a thousand spiders canvassing his body; at least, then, people would know what to make of him. As it was, he represented unrecognizable unease, one that pulled at each person’s own unique fear strings” [quote used with publisher’s permission]. While Lee has a wife and daughter who provide the kind of stability and support many real-life prisoners do not have, between anxiety and limited opportunities, his freedom and mental health are both precarious. “Just trying to survive” is no easy feat, with or without spiders.

One of the reasons we come back to the trope of a prisoner with nothing to lose getting offered a shitty deal is that we easily believe—we know—that our prison systems are so terrible that they could leave a person desperate to do nearly anything to get out. The book opens with Lee ready to submit to an experiment, and we as readers have immediate buy-in. We also find it entirely believable that someone in that situation might not deserve to be there, might not deserve to rot away to nothing, and we will eagerly follow a protagonist through their journey to redemption. Justin C. Key’s story reminds us, gently, that prison continues to be hell, even after you get out; that what you are when you get out is transformed: emotionally and psychologically wounded, mirroring the wounds which eventually cover Lee’s body, the spiders nestled within like traumas, spring-loaded with reactions, often hard to control, and monstrous to those who don’t understand. But the underlying message here, the most important takeaway, is that regardless of the apprehensions and assumptions of people who would see you as less than human, who would define you if you let them, you are, in fact, still very human. Your life is worth living, and you’ve got to do the best you can to get yourself to a better place.

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 Bone Maker, by Sarah Beth Durst

Chris Kluwe | 783 words

The Bone Maker
Sarah Beth Durst
Trade Paperback / Ebook / Audiobook
ISBN: 9780062888631
Harper Voyager, March 2021, 496 pages

Greetings, readers! This month, it’s time to get a bit grisly with The Bone Maker by Sarah Beth Durst, who always delights in finding new ways to fill her protagonists’ lives with danger and mayhem.

The Bone Maker takes place in a new universe Durst has created where humanity can harness the power of, yup, you guessed it, bones, in order to accomplish a wide variety of magical effects that come in three flavors—carving bones to create talismans that imbue the holder with anything from super speed to stealth to flight (well, more of a controlled glide really); reading them to foretell the future; or transferring their power to create life in something else.

It’s this last power that’s at the heart of the book, since while using animal bones to give life to a construct is just fine (and the type of bone used influences the power available to the construct), using human bones is strictly forbidden by their society—for any reason. The inhabitants of The Bone Maker are still recovering from a terrible war fought against a renegade bone mage who decided that the rule was more of a suggestion and subsequently raised an army of Horrible Things that were barely stopped by a group of five heroes (as one does), but when one of the heroes dies in the fight, the main protagonist, Kreya, decides that maybe the rule against using human bones is more of a suggestion as well.

(These aren’t spoilers by the way, this all takes place before the book starts and are laid out in the first chapter, so please put your pitchforks down.)

What I really enjoyed about The Bone Maker is that it feels much different than Durst’s previous works in a subtle, yet important way. Durst has always been excellent at creating nuanced characters who feel like real people of a variety of ages, but The Bone Maker is very much the story of heroes who had to keep on living after their “happily ever after,” and while I don’t think the word “mature” quite encompasses the depth of the interactions between them, the problems they must face and overcome are problems most stories don’t delve into, because at that point the story is already over. In The Bone Maker, Durst doesn’t hesitate to dive into what it means to lose someone you love and what you might do to get them back, as well as the way relationships change when the years start passing you by.

The Bone Maker also features less overt carnage than Durst’s previous works (like the Queens of Renthia series), as the wounds and battles tend more to the emotional and mental side, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any action to be found. One of my favorite scenes involved a spider-tank-crawler thing and what I’m pretty sure was a pack of hyper velociraptors, so fans of Durst’s descriptive chaos will have plenty to sink their teeth into throughout the course of the story.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out one of the other major themes of the book: how people value the lives of others compared to their own. It is a theme that weaves its way throughout the entire story and one which Durst examines from a variety of angles, and it is a theme that is both timely as well as ageless. On that basis alone I’d recommend the book, but the good news is that it’s part of an excellently larger package.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed the world of The Bone Maker, and I appreciate that Durst is so willing to try out new concepts and ideas on a regular basis while still keeping the focus on her characters. This is definitely a book that will read differently depending on when in their life someone reads it, and that is a difficult and impressive achievement to accomplish. If you haven’t read one of her works before, The Bone Maker is an excellent place to start.

Read if: You like weird rag dolls and bonebots; you want to punch down an entire honest-to-goodness tower; you ever wondered what hero retirement looks like.

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: An Owomoyela

Benjamin C. Kinney | 1638 words

“Equations of the Dead” is an evocative title, and it’s an evocative idea when it emerges at the story’s beginning and end. Do you think Latchko has it right? Is consciousness an equation, to be replicated by computers someday? Or is there something missing from that emulation, something that no future Latchko will ever see, even if they succeed?

I’m not a cognitive scientist, and I’m barely an armchair philosopher, but my instinct is to say that there’s something missing. I think it may be possible to make a machine which is conscious and has personhood—I think it exceeds our current capacity for biomimicry, but on a long enough timeframe we may be able to replicate the mechanistic function of our brains—but I don’t think we’ll be able to boot up a living person’s consciousness the way Latchko is trying to.

How I think about that is: when someone I care about dies, part of my grief is for myself. I’ve lost my active, ongoing experience of that person in my life. And part of my grief is for that person: they’ve lost their active, ongoing experience of life. Even if I could find a way to emulate their consciousness perfectly, that only addresses one of those issues.

That’s one of the questions that fascinates me the most about life and consciousness. After all, I can look and see that there are all these skulls wandering around, with all these consciousnesses inside them. And there have been more skulls and more consciousnesses all throughout history and into prehistory and back until whenever sentience or sapience or consciousness or whatever you want to call it first emerged, and people keep making new skulls with new consciousnesses . . . so, given all of that, how did my consciousness end up in this particular skull, right here? Why do I have an experiential reality, and why is it (to the best of my awareness) singular, distinct, and specific to this body, this place, and this time? I’m a consciousness, you’re a consciousness, why don’t I have the inherent access to your experiences and not my own? Why does my “I” pointer point where it does?

And when this biological machine stops functioning, is the essence of that experience persistent, or does it dissipate? Clearly, my body stops reporting sensory information, but does that “I” pointer still exist in a form where it can tap into another thread of experience? I don’t know that I believe that, even in a very good simulation, it could capture that essential thread of experience and identity. So, maybe we’ll be able to copy and paste consciousnesses eventually, but I think we’d end up with a separate person, not the original person returned to us.

Most of us have dreamed of talking to someone who’s gone from the world, one way or another. But Latchko doesn’t just get to speak to the dead; he gets to manipulate them. If you could use his method to bring back one dead person, historical or recent, whom would you choose—and how would you change them?

You know, I’m not sure I would choose anyone.

If I don’t think I’d actually be speaking to the person themself, that pretty effectively nixes any desire I’d have to bring back someone I knew. So the next thought I’d have is to bring back some luminary in the arts or sciences . . . but if the simulation isn’t the person, then if I bring back an artist, I’ve still just managed to create a process who’s very good at working in the style of a famous person. We’ve got a lot of talented people, extant in the world already, who can work in the style of others. As for scientists, if I have access to strong AI capable of the simulation of an entire human cognition, do I really need to entrain it to the thinking patterns of any given person? Why not just turn it on an interesting problem and set it loose?

I suppose it’s possible that the AI would need to be modeled after a human in order to be engaged with any given issue. So in that case, I’d probably select the most passionate person I could find about a problem (climate change? universal notions of justice? cures for diseases?), and tweak the cognition to be superhumanly curious, preternaturally difficult to discourage, and fantastically good at learning, cross-referencing information, and synthesizing new ideas.

. . . and then make sure it had some robust moral framework in place, because I suspect that otherwise, I’ve seen that movie, and I don’t like how it ends.

Poor Harmless may not be entirely harmless, but he certainly isn’t good at thinking chessy. When you wrote this story, did you plan out how the pieces would move and interact? Or did you decide whom to love, and let that carry you wherever it may?

When I started this, I had a sense of the setting and a vague idea of the emotional arc, the major plot beats, and the level of dysfunction I wanted my characters to exhibit. Sometime between the initial notes I wrote to myself and the day when I looked up and realized that I had a completed draft, the entire plot arc had gotten drunk and tried to go home, and all the characters had become even more dysfunctional than I’d asked them to.

I generally start out with some idea of how I want things to go, and how I want all the moving pieces to interact. Invariably, as I’m writing, I’ll come up with ideas which are better than the ones I started with, or which amuse me more, or I’ll discover that I can’t make something or other work, or I’ve set myself up some kind of plot paradox where the thing I’m trying to make happen can’t happen without something that only happens as a result of its happening. So anything I write ends up flexing and changing as I write it, and sometimes the result surprises me more than anyone.

This story is full of powerful entities who distance themselves from the world. The Old Man, Basaji, the AI. Do you see isolation as an inherent risk—or benefit—of power? Would it be better or worse for the world if these entities had to live among the rest of us?

I think if Basaji had to live among the rest of the population of her moon, she would be incredibly, incredibly surly.

Power imbalances certainly provide challenges to intimacy, but I don’t know that I’d look at these three as making any coherent argument about isolation or power. The Old Man isolates as a trauma response, which turns out to backfire: If he’d interacted with people more, he wouldn’t have been as vulnerable to being completely erased and replaced. Then again, if he’d interacted with people more, he might have been murdered sooner. It’s hard to tell.

Basaji’s isolation is more perfunctory. She’s not interested in people or the outside world, but has no barrier to going out into it if she needs to. Isolation limits the amount of distraction she has to deal with, which lets her be more deeply in her own world; she might be better able to help people if she weren’t so isolated, but that doesn’t seem to be a priority for her. So at that point the question becomes not about isolation but about prosocial responsibilities; do we have the obligation to use our talents to help our fellows?

As for the AI, they’re isolated from a human perspective, but the motive force of their isolation isn’t power—it’s alienness. Power allows them to isolate, but in this sense power is more like self-sufficiency. One could regard the relationship between humans and AI as coercive, in its early iterations: humans provide something that the AI needs, but only as a reward for service. In that case, isolation is concomitant with agency and safety. And whatever the base unit of consciousness in an AI cloud is—individual processes? threads?—they might be very interconnected with each other. Would the world be better if they were forced to integrate with humanity? Better for who? Possibly not for the AI. And depending on the paths their optimizing took, possibly not better in the long term for humans, either. (I think I’ve seen that movie, too.)

This story feels like a tiny piece of a larger world. It’s full of concepts and places and tensions that brush their fingers along the story and move on. Are you planning to write anything else in this setting? If not, what else do you have in the pipeline?

I actually have three more stories in this setting! I started writing this story to get a better feel for the setting of the stories that appear in the Dystopia Triptych anthologies—Ignorance is Strength, Burn the Ashes, and Or Else The Light. As usually happens when I attempt these things, somewhere in the process of writing the prequel I got captivated by elements that never made it into the triptych, so now I owe myself at least one more story that actually deals with the consequences of Latchko’s ill-advised jaunt into humany AI. But that’s still very much in the formless-whispers-of-ideas phase.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Benjamin C. Kinney is a neuroscientist, SFF writer, and assistant editor of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. He’s created cyborg monkeys, magnetically altered the activity of the human brain, and generally done his part to make the world as science fictional as possible. His short stories have appeared in Analog, Fireside, Strange Horizons, and many other excellent places, and you can find them all at benjaminckinney.com.

Author Spotlight: Ashok K. Banker

Laurel Amberdine | 624 words

Reading about Parsh’s unstoppable pursuit of justice felt so timely and satisfying after the past few months! Can you tell us a little about the origins of “The Giving One”?

“The Giving One,” like all the Burnt Empire legends, is loosely based on a legend from the great story cycle, The Mahabharata. I first wrote about it in my Mahabharata Series published in India over a decade ago. I adapted it freely and brought it into line with the timeline and character history of the Burnt Empire trilogy, especially A Dark Queen Rises.

Is there anything you particularly want readers to know about this story, or elements you want to make sure they noticed?

I think the story is long enough, and self-explanatory enough, to stand on its own. I guess the one outstanding take-away I hope readers will carry with them after reading is that the world of the Burnt Empire series is a vast, sprawling universe that one can explore indefinitely without ever reaching the end, with great, epic tales at every turn. And of course, I hope they enjoy reading every last one!

How have you been handling the pandemic (which will hopefully be greatly lessened by the time this issue comes out)? How did it affect your writing?

I’ve been writing pretty much as much as ever, but it has brought out some of my best work. I’m an introvert by nature and was working on a couple of very long projects anyway, so the pandemic, while quite distressing externally, didn’t impact me very greatly in creative terms.

I believe I did contract COVID-19, though I was never able to get tested so I can’t confirm it officially. I was lucky to get off with very mild symptoms and recover at home in a week or two with only a little rest and some painkillers. But it did change me in one respect: It made me painfully aware of my own mortality and decide to work all the harder on the projects I’d dreamed about for ages but never got round to creating. One of which involved a new creative skill that I had to learn from scratch and, because I didn’t know how much time I might have left, I decided to learn with the sharpest learning curve possible. I’m now on the verge of seeking professional work in that skill area, and will talk about it only after I have a signed contract or two. All I can say is that it is definitely not writing. It might even be the opposite of writing, creatively speaking, which is so liberating and re-energizing.

Five months down, and I’m loving it just as much as I love writing, so in a while I hope to be making my debut in a whole new creative field. Didn’t someone say it’s never too late, and you’re never too old? Well. I heart that!

What can fans look for from you next?

A Dark Queen Rises releases on April 20, 2021, followed by the third and final book in the Burnt Empire trilogy, The Blind King’s Wrath, which is already in editing. After that, I’m focusing on children’s books and literary and crime fiction for adults. My debut international thriller comes out from Penguin’s Michael Joseph imprint in hardcover in April 2022. It’s called A Kiss After Dying. And then there’s the “other creative skill” I’ve recently developed that I mentioned in the previous answer, but that’s another story for another day!

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 San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Rich Larson

Gordon B. White | 1566 words

Just as any journey out into the Waste begins with a decision to leave the Town, so does every story begin with a spark of inspiration. What was the origin of this story?

This one’s basically a mash-up of The Road (novel) and Vivarium (film).

I read The Road back in high school, and found unexpected beauty in its lonely last-two-people-on-Earth vibe. I think Cormac McCarthy also used “glass” as a transitive verb meaning “to look through binoculars at something” and I thought that was pretty fucking ridiculous.

I watched Vivarium much more recently, midway through Prague’s first extended lockdown, in a slight deviation from my routine of getting shitfaced and re-bingeing Bob’s Burgers. I remember thinking: If I’m going to be depressed, drunk, and sedentary, I should at least consume some interesting raw material for when I get back to writing stuff.

The only element of the movie that really stuck with me was the baby in the FedEx box, which presented Jesse Eisenzuckerburg and Imogen Poots a moral dilemma that I wish had been explored a little more. I have the cool privilege of playing with ideas for money, so I played with that one.

The story’s last-two-people vibe comes from The Road, but the specific post-apocalyptic setting is one I first introduced in my F&SF story “There Used to Be Olive Trees”—widespread desolation, humans living in small enclaves run by incomprehensible AI gods. The faux-seaside was inspired by haunting photos of the massive ship graveyard in Mauritania.

When creating a near(ish)-future setting like this one, are there certain techniques you employ to balance the recognizable extensions of the present (e.g., dried up oceans, dead whales, the continued earworminess of MIA’s “Paper Planes”) with the near-unrecognizable (such as the biomechanical machines, carbon nanotubes in the sky)? Is it purely aesthetic intuition, or do you take specific steps to meld the two into a familiar, yet alien setting?

I just threw in whatever I was thinking about at the time: artificial constructs designed to look like dead loved ones, the clumsy tender weirdness of real, non-Hollywood sex, the word “noctivigant,” the way intoxicants make things seem both more and less important, creature artwork by Eric Kowalick, and a passing desire to try walking tacos—a culinary creation I’ve never actually encountered in real life.

The MIA thing is a bit of a joke between me and my sister. We used to say “all I wanna do is make various sound effects, then take your money” to each other, for no real reason. And of course I listened to the song again while writing this story. It holds up.

So, with all that in mind, my opinion is that if you nail the tone, you can get away with pretty much any mixture of elements. The sense of cohesion is less about the actual things that appear in the story, and more about the language that surrounds and details them. That’s not to say I nailed this tone—maybe some people will find the juxtaposition of taco trucks and nanite smog jarring in a bad way. But for me, it works.

In a way, the constant, unrequested deliveries Jain and Stromile receive is the logical extension of “The Algorithm” as a self-directed entity—having perfected its ability to identify the products we need to survive (or what we want to watch on Netflix), it has moved on to predicting what we’ll need in the future (say, when our partner dies). However, while Stromile believes the unseen shot-callers give them what they need in a beneficial way, Jain says that it’s a test—that they ones back in the Town are trying to control their behavior through the deliveries. You don’t have to give it away, if you don’t want, but would you like to share how you see this debate playing out here?

It’s safe to assume that the global economy in “Complete Exhaustion” has completely collapsed, but the deliveries could certainly be an after-echo of late capitalism. Maybe it’s a vestigial behavior, the lingering impulse of an artificial intelligence that was once slaving away under Jeff Bezos.

Or it’s something more intentional, but equally aggravating. Just like the autofacs in “There Used to Be Olive Trees,” this story’s mysterious caretakers are inspired by a Phillip K. Dick story I read as a kid, the one where the milk is so thoroughly pizzled. These caretakers may be doing their genuine best to help Jain and Stromile, but they don’t understand what they’re doing.

Humans need food and water and shelter more than they need understanding, but it’s a close thing. We are all driven by this mad desire to have other people really get us, to make the neural ghost in someone else’s head as close as possible to the one we carry in ours. The caretakers can keep Jain alive, but they’ll never get closer to knowing her than Stro did, and the facsimile is uniquely painful for that reason.

There’s an interesting thread here, too, regarding the physical body versus the person inside. Here we see the body as a source of physical pleasure and physical pain; used as a way to express happiness, as well as a focal point for grief. However, at the end, when a lonely Jain receives a duplicate of Stromile’s body—even with an almost indistinguishable intelligence animating it—she destroys it. What can we take from this about the struggle to understand the separation between mind and body?

I think the mind-body divide is a false dichotomy—central nervous system as brainy as a cat, behavior-changing gut flora, etc. If Jain really conceived of Stro’s personality and memory as separate from his dying body, she might be more willing to accept the possibility his “soul” had somehow been copied into a new one.

But since she witnessed Stro’s physical decline, and how it changed him mentally, it’s impossible for her to believe that this healthy, beautiful Stro is the real thing.

Jain also adamantly insists that time is linear, despite being presented with multiple options to get at least a partial do over. If not a full circle, she’s at least offered a spiral. While her refusal to backtrack is very human in its stubbornness, it doesn’t clearly provide her with a “better” path or outcome in the end. Are there questions we readers should ask ourselves as we think about her decision?

It’s interesting that you bring up full circles. In one conception of this story, I had the idea that Jain and Stromile have been wandering the Waste for much longer than they think, and that they really are the last two humans alive: Each time one of them dies, they’re replaced by a FedEx baby, who the other then raises until a certain age, at which point some memory fuckery resets them to their old adult relationship.

So in that scenario, Jain and Stromile have been reincarnated hundreds of times, and might unknowingly be far, far from the people they were a millennia ago. I went with this version instead, but I might eventually take the other for a spin. Don’t steal it. No, I’m kidding, you can steal it. That’s basically all I do.

Jain’s decision at the end of this story is very human, but humans are adaptable. At some point in the future, she might give fake Stro a shot and find that it’s better than nothing. Or she might leave the FedEx baby in its little tube, every day for the rest of her life, and derive an acidic but earned satisfaction from that.

After my experience of quarantine, brief as it was, I know I can’t be alone with myself for that long. Eventually, I’d accept the delivery. You?

I imagine I would, too, but it seems there’s a grieving process to be worked through first. I can certainly sympathize with why Jain might feel like this offer of a replacement is insulting—can our Stromiles ever really be replaced?—but I also think you’re right that some companionship is often better than none, even if it isn’t precisely what we wanted. Once we come to terms with walking in spirals instead of circles, I think there’s a peace to be had.

Finally, as we think about linear time, what’s coming up next on your timeline? Beyond any concrete plans or releases, are there any new ideas or areas that you’re just starting to explore?

Man, concrete plans are a distant memory. My flight to Canada just got cancelled for the third time, so my visit with family here in South Africa might balloon to a half-year stay—luckily they’re not completely sick of me yet, and the government is extending all visas. I hope to use the time to finish rewriting a novel, then jump into twenty-odd unfinished short stories.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Gordon B. White is the author of the collection As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions (Trepidatio Publishing 2020). A graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, Gordon’s stories have appeared in dozens of venues, including The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 12 and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. He also contributes reviews and interviews to outlets including Nightmare, Lightspeed, Hellnotes, and The Outer Dark podcast. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 201 words

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Gene Doucette (“Hypnopompic Circumstance”) and Andrea Kriz (“There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai”), along with SF reprints by Rich Larson (“Carnivores”) and Nelson Rolon (“Saudade”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kristina Ten (“Bones in It”) and Howard Andrew Jones (“The Palace in the Moonlight”), and fantasy reprints by Kat Howard (“An Invitation to a Burning”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Dead Men in Central City”).

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: P H Lee, Timothy Mudie, Isabel J. Kim, 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

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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

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

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

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)

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

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 [forthcoming]

Questland by Carrie Vaughn [forthcoming]

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.