FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, August 2014

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty-one of Lightspeed!

Hugo voting closed last month, but awards season continues with the 2014 World Fantasy Award nominations. No Lightspeed or Nightmare stories made the ballot (nor anything from my anthologies), but yours truly was once again nominated in the “Special Award, Professional” category for my work editing anthologies and magazines. That marks the sixth time I’ve been nominated for the World Fantasy Award (three times each in this category and the anthology category). I’m honored to again be nominated but of course I also wish to congratulate the other nominees. You can see all of this year’s finalists at worldfantasy.org/awards.

In other awards news, the Shirley Jackson Awards were presented at Readercon in mid-July. As you may recall, Maria Dahvana Headley’s story from Lightspeed, “The Traditional,” was nominated, as was “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” by Sam J. Miller from our sister-magazine, Nightmare. We’re sad to report that Maria didn’t take home the prize, but we’re simultaneously thrilled to announce that Sam did. Thus “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” becomes Nightmare’s first award-winning story! Congrats to Sam, and to all of the other winners and nominees, of which you can see the full list at shirleyjacksonawards.org/award-winners.

• • • •

In case you missed it last month, my latest anthology, HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects came out. It’s an anthology of science fiction/fantasy stories told in the form of fictional crowdfunding project pitches, using the components (and restrictions) of the format to tell the story. This includes but is not limited to: Project Goals, Rewards, User Comments, Project Updates, FAQs, and more. The idea is to replicate the feel of reading a crowdfunding pitch, so that even though the projects may be preposterous in the real world, they will feel like authentic crowdfunding projects as much as possible. The anthology is on sale now. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/robot-army.

In other anthology news, the next installment of The Apocalypse Triptych—the apocalyptic anthology series I’m co-editing with Hugh Howey—comes out next month. The new volume, The End is Now, focuses on life during the apocalypse. The first volume, The End is Nigh (about life before the apocalypse) is on sale now. Pop over to johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych for more information.

• • • •

With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We have original science fiction by An Owomoyela (“Undermarket Data”) and E. Catherine Tobler (“A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman”), along with SF reprints by Gardner Dozois (“Morning Child”) and David I. Masson (“Traveller’s Rest”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Tahmeed Shafiq (“The Djinn Who Sought To Kill The Sun”) and Kat Howard (“Meaningful Exchange”), and fantasy reprints by Ken Liu (“State Change”) and Gwyneth Jones (“The Grass Princess”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella is “Rule of Engagement,” by Sherwood Smith, and of course we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Christopher Moore and Elizabeth Bear. We’ve also got novel excerpts from Dru Pagliassotti (Clockwork Secrets) and Peter Watts (Echopraxia).

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This month, look for the aforementioned Clockwork Secrets by Dru Pagliassotti. Learn more from EDGE at edgewebsite.com.

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and six World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

SCIENCE FICTION

Undermarket Data

An Owomoyela

A drink arrived that Culin hadn’t ordered.

No one sent drinks to the crowded annex where Culin sat, crammed in with seven other people, all with contagion bands on their sleeves and matching tattoos on their arms. Sending drinks was an affectation Culin didn’t see much in the Dead Engine at all.

The bartender who’d brought it over—Nis with the slit nostrils, the only one who’d serve the contages with anything approaching civility—shrugged, pointed to a woman at the counter, and said “Don’t ask me.”

“I can’t accept this,” Culin said. The thumb glass was sweating in the muggy air, and Culin could smell it from where he sat. It smelled like spices, something organic, something expensive. Everyone in the annex was watching.

“It’s paid and she won’t take it back,” Nis said, and pushed the glass at Culin. Culin took it. Then, as Nis walked away, and before any of the other contages could make an offer or express interest or make a grab for it, Culin tipped it back into his mouth.

The drink was red and full-bodied and savory-sweet, with only the breath of the alcohol keeping it from feeling syrupy on his tongue. He wasn’t worried about being drugged. His armband marked him as too virulent to take advantage of, and there were cheaper ways to get at someone in his profession. When he lowered the glass he saw the woman who’d bought it already on her way out the door.

He jumped up, abandoning his own cheap distillate, but by the time he limped out of the door she’d already vanished into the spider’s-maze of alleyways. It was shitting down rain, most of it hitting the walls and the wires and the dishes with their antennas nosing toward the shreds of sky; a few lucky droplets managed a direct path down onto Culin’s neck and shoulders, while the rest slid down the buildings and into the gutters. Not many people wanted to be out on nights like this. Not many got a choice.

Culin sighed, and unclipped his gloves from his belt. There was no point in returning to the bar; Nis made it his business to know as little as possible, and no one else would touch the mystery. A red cordial for a red-banded contage, a disappearing woman—what good would come of wondering about it?

He pulled the gloves on and fastened the buckles around his wrists, setting the rubber snug against his palms. Then he took hold of the data line running up the side of the bar and climbed into the disused vertical avenues of the city.

• • • •

The white flag, stained grey from rain and city grime, called him halfway up a block of flats to a job. People like him didn’t have territories, but this—inconvenient from the streets and rooftops both—was as close as it came to his: the space where it was easier for those who preferred to move in three dimensions than two.

There was no ledge at the window, but good climbers never needed them. This window had a clothesline anchor, an outdated and rusting data satellite, a data network link, a lectric link, an illegal lectric link, and a canister full of mineral wool in which a few seeds were failing to germinate. He made the leap from the opposite building and caught the proper network’s lectric link—never could tell how the hack jobs would hold—and knocked on the window.

No one answered for a minute or so, then a shadow came up to the window grime and slid the plastic away. With that gone, the shadow became a young woman, who blinked blearily at him and then settled her eyes, as though by natural magnetism, on his arm.

“LEMR. What do you need?” Culin said, and shifted. If he hooked his foot against the bolts of the hydroponics pot he could lean away from the window. Give her some contage-free space to breathe.

She blinked at the band, then swallowed and looked at his eyes. “Data’s out. I’m running security on Tii Market; I can’t go dry.”

Culin grunted. “How many others on security?”

“Not enough. People don’t feel safe anyway. Losing one set of eyes is going to keep people home.” She shook her head. “I just need data back.”

“Soon. Yeah.” Culin glanced behind her into the flat. It was spare, like he’d expect from someone her age, living alone; new monitors and cables and keyboards, like he’d expect from someone on the data lines for a living. “What do you pay in?”

“Name a vendor,” she said. “I’ll get you your worth.” Her look got sharp. “Minus the time you spend.”

Culin nodded, and turned to the data line. The woman pushed the dirty window plastic closed.

A few meters up the data line there was a patch of lectric tape where another LEMR had hacked onto the line and patched it up. He peeled the tape away, pulled a reader out of his pocket, hooked it up, and went to work.

• • • •

Nis didn’t bother asking for an order, most days. There were only so many drinks Culin could afford, and when he came in moving like all his muscles ached and looking like his mind was in the wires, that meant he was on a job, working rough, and unlikely to afford more than the drink which would be his rent for the annex stool. The stuff he was getting today was from Nis’ backroom still, with flecks of sediment drifting at the bottom.

Least, that was what he ordered. Nis arrived at his table with another thumb glass of something sweet and red, and it took Culin a moment to react.

“You drink it,” he said, and pushed himself up to limp into the main room.

The woman from the other day was at the counter. Tall, solid, and pale, she had slick brown hair just verging on black, and a face people would call handsome—but probably not where she could hear it. Her eyes were a thunderstorm green.

She also had a halo of empty seats around her. Culin was used to seeing those halos, but mostly around contages.

If there was one thing she wasn’t, it was a contage. Even this close she looked clean and not quite real. Real was soggy cigarette butts on a pavement which had started off grey and grimed its way to charcoal; it was the smell of people who only afforded full showers when it rained and the water discounts hit. Real was acne scars and loose skin from lean months; it was yellowing, uneven fingernails and sour breath. Real wasn’t her.

Which meant one of two things: She was fantastically sheltered, or fantastically augmented. And sheltered didn’t come down to the undermarket.

“So, sit down,” she said.

Culin shook his head. “They don’t like me on the stools here.”

“No, but they like me. So, sit down.”

She took a sip of her drink, and didn’t seem that concerned with whether he sat or not. The bartender at this end of the counter—a burly woman who looked like she’d put out her share of fights—was scrubbing out a pitcher and not-looking at them as hard as she could.

“I’m sorry I had to disappear on you last night,” the stranger said. “I got a call. Not that it helped; nothing’s panned out.”

She turned, and something glinted behind her pupil. Culin startled; he’d never seen an ocular camera, but he could guess his picture had just been snapped. And who the hell was she, coming down here with optic implants and talking to him like he should know what she was talking about?

“I think you have the wrong person.”

“I don’t think so.” The corner of her mouth tugged up into a smile. “Culin Wei, the hook-footed LEMR contage who spiders the walls and frequents the Dead Engine. How many of you can there be in a city?”

Not many. Culin still didn’t take the seat. “Why were you looking for me?”

“Because you’re good and you’re desperate and you know things I’m never going to know,” she answered. “And we can help each other.” She extended a hand. “Name’s Jace. I keep the peace, Upcity.”

Culin ignored the cold dread at that intro, and ignored the hand. “Helping Upcity cops doesn’t end well for us, most days.”

“This isn’t most days.” Her voice cooled, and the smile disappeared. So did the offered handshake. Now she was giving him the look that rats gave injured pigeons. “Today, I want to help you. I’m probably the only person in the city who does. And today if we don’t fix this thing, it’s both our necks. So sit down.”

He still didn’t sit down.

She watched him like she really did expect that he’d just soil the nest for her, then sighed. “Fine. This data thing. You’re on it?”

“Every LEMR in the city is probably on it,” Culin said.

“What makes you say that?”

He exhaled. “I traced the signal,” he said. “Checked thirty, thirty-five cables—copper, optic, market, slough.” Legal, illegal, he didn’t say. “Everyone’s calling LEMRs to get it fixed.”

“Must be keeping you in bread,” Jace said.

Culin shook his head. “I don’t know how to get it fixed.” Besides, they’d been calling; he hadn’t been answering. He’d been trying to work out what was wrong. He could show up and play the hero once he could actually fix things.

“You got a lead?” Jace asked.

Culin grunted.

Jace watched him, then rolled her eyes and growled. “Fine. Here’s what I know.” She flipped a smartscreen out onto the table, and Culin noticed without surprise that it was a model he’d never be able to afford. And, if he could afford it, it would get him killed for carrying it. “All your lines are being clogged with encrypted data. We can trace it back, but it seems to be originating everywhere. Sounds like a virus, but it doesn’t look like it’s transmitting itself, and of the people who are actually willing to let me lay hands on their screens, none of them seem infected with anything. Have you got anything more than that?”

Culin digested that. “You’re a tech?”

“Special investigator,” she said. “Data is kinda important to us in Upcity.”

She said that with a note of self-deprecation. It was the first thing that made him think they could do business. “You looked at the nodes yet?”

She blinked. “Nodes?”

He grunted again. “You don’t know nodes?”

“Tell me about them.”

“Where all the data goes,” Culin said. “Everyone connects to nodes, nodes connect to each other. They keep data on hand, too, in case your smartscreen gets nicked or busted. You want a picture of what’s going through the data, you go to the nodes. If they’ll talk to you.”

Jace gave him a sidelong grin. “It’s less distributed, down here,” she said. “Would have made my job easier if I’d known that.”

None of that was adding up. “Who sent you down and didn’t know that?” Culin asked. Upcity might be insular and arrogant, but he found it hard to believe they’d dispatch a special agent who didn’t know how the thing they were investigating worked.

And Jace wasn’t even subtle about dodging the question. She shrugged, stood away from the bar, and said “So, show me to a node.”

• • • •

The way to the closest node took them out of the undermarket and into the slough, where the previous day’s rain had pooled in oily lakes on the pavement. It was a shorter path on the ground than the walls, although left to his own devices, Culin would have taken the walls anyway. As it was, he limped in front of Jace, trying without success to avoid odd looks from anyone. He was a limping contage leading some Upcity clean; there was no way to avoid people’s attention.

They got to one of the better buildings in the slough, meaning that most of the windows were still in place and none of the footholds on the walls were cracking and ready to give way. Culin looked up, the climb slotting into his mind without him needing to think about it. “You, stay down,” he said. “I’ll ask what’s been happening.”

“I can climb,” Jace said, digging in her hip pouch for gloves. Culin shook his head.

“Not what I’m worried about. You come up, we get nothing.”

“And why’s that?”

Culin looked down from the wall, up into Jace’s face. “Because they trust us,” he said. “You couldn’t pass for a LEMR if we had uniforms. You look like someone who’d care if they had an illegal lectric link or hacked data.”

Jace huffed, and gave the wall a cursory look-over, eyes skipping from one link to another. “All right; I’ll sit this one out.”

“You sit them all out,” Culin said. Then, when she didn’t seem to comprehend, he said “Everyone who’s not in Upcity has an illegal something. Why do you think we don’t like Upcity cops?”

She looked like she was swallowing something bitter there, but she relented. “Gimme your smart,” she said. “I’ll load it with what you need to know.”

• • • •

Like most of the node managers in the district, Lisp had barred windows and reinforced walls, most of which weren’t actually necessary because no one in their right mind would risk breaking a node if people could find out about it. That was fouling the nest in the most spectacular way.

Lisp actually opened the window when Culin came up and knocked, letting him into the flat with only a little extra distance between them. Then, Lisp knew about being a contage—he’d been one, yellow-band, for most of his life until noding got him the money to go Upcity for treatment. He didn’t talk about it, much, but you could see it in his attitude and the set of his shoulders.

“Not the equipment I’m having trouble with today,” he mumbled, and ushered Culin back toward the bedroom. Or what had probably been intended as a bedroom, once upon a time—now, it looked like a data center had exploded in there, and Culin suspected that Lisp slept on the pile of old cushions in the room with the barred windows. His privacy was one thing, but the transit of the district’s data was entirely another. “You seeing this?”

Culin nodded. “Got a white flag on it,” he said. “And I know someone who says it’s clogging lines all over the city.”

On one of the stationary terminals bolted to the wall, a message popped up: 1,1.

Lisp glanced at it and, without much thought, typed in 2,3. It was one of the ubiquitous call-and-response codes, a little ping, pong to let the person on the other end know that someone had picked up the connection, that a real person was typing. “It’s coming through me. And Py’s node, and Erich’s, and every node I’ve talked to.” He scratched at the thinning hair at his temple. Lisp didn’t actually lisp, but he did mutter, and Culin wished he could lean in to listen closer. “I try to scrub, but soon as I get a pattern set up for the encryption, it changes. No use tracing the origin, neither. Comes from everywhere. I try to block it, I just end up shutting the whole network down.”

“Do you know how it started?” Culin asked.

“Know how it did here, yeah.” Another message popped up on Lisp’s terminal, and he typed something back in keyboard shorthand, one-handed. “Ask any other node and it started different. But I can give you all the records I’ve took, if it helps ya. Origins, patterns, volumes, all it.”

“Might,” Culin said. Or it might help Jace, who seemed to have more resources for dealing with data like that. Lisp nodded absently, then wandered across the room to another terminal attached to a large bank. A few more commands, and a burner on the floor spat out a thin finger of smartfilm, which Lisp picked up and tossed in Culin’s direction.

“That’s all I have,” Lisp said. “Hope it does you more good than it did me.”

• • • •

By the time Culin got down to the alley again, Jace had made herself a seat out of an abandoned water drum and had her feet up on the wall across the path. Culin had to fight off a stab of disgust; sure, no one had probably come down this way, but there were things you didn’t do if you weren’t an asshole. Taking up the entire alley was one of them.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Jace said, without bothering to get up. Culin made an acknowledging noise, and Jace waved a hand up at the walls. “You fix all of this?”

“Electric Maintenance and Repair,” Culin said.

“You’re licensed, though.”

He grunted. “That’s what the L stands for.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?” Jace asked. “You go around and fix all their illegal hacks just like you fix the legal ones?”

“Not like they don’t pay me for the illegal stuff.” He crossed his arms. “Got a question for you, though.”

She motioned him to go ahead.

“You’re Upcity. But it doesn’t bother you?”

She hesitated on that just long enough to tell him she’d be lying. “Arresting the entire district is outside my pay grade. I just want this thing solved. What did you get?”

He pulled the smartfilm out of his pocket. Down here, the light was too muddy to see the smudges of burned data, but Jace took it from him and fed it into her smartscreen without a second look. He heard the beep of it making access, and Jace’s eyes flicked over the data. He watched her. It was hard to believe someone could know what they were doing without knowing about things like district nodes, but she looked like she understood what she was seeing. Straight through to the point where something caught her eye, and she grinned.

“Hah!” The exclamation made him jump; it was too much noise for an alley like this, and it made him want to clear the area. “An hour on the job and you’re nabbing more leads than I did in three days; I knew you were a good idea! I can use this, trace it back—”

She plucked the film out from between his fingers, and then he couldn’t parse what was happening; she was moving closer to him, her hand was coming up toward his neck, and he flinched and stumbled sideways, ready to suffer the first blow, but her hand caught him, pulled him closer, and then her mouth was on his mouth, her breath hot in his.

Culin shouted into her, and threw himself away. Hit the wall. Jace stumbled back and Culin tried to say something but found he had no words—he was gasping.

“Sorry,” Jace said, sounding more surprised than sorry. It was hard for Culin to hear her anyway, over the rushing of blood through his ears, the heartbeat rattling through him. “That wasn’t because you were desperate,” she said, and her words seemed to have the tone of an apology. “I mean, I didn’t decide to go for you because I thought you’d be desperate.”

He stared at her, breathing hard, until it occurred to him that that, that was why she thought he’d jumped away, and then the fear got spiked with rage. She had his saliva on her lips, her sure-to-be-augmented Upcity lips, probably being preserved at that moment ready for any lab wanting to look at it. He pushed away from her, back up against a wall, and spat “You fucking Upcity whore!”

Jace blinked, at that. “For one kiss? Come on, I was happy.”

“For—” he said, and the words imploded. “I’m—” Implosion again. He was shaking, and the grit in the concrete wall rattled against his back as though his shirt was nothing. His hand went to his arm, nails digging in just under the contagion band, and his voice was tighter than his fist. “They can charge me,” he said. “They can fucking charge me!”

It took a moment, then her brow furrowed. “You’re worried about biological battery?”

Culin was breathing too hard to answer that.

“C’mon; I kissed you,” Jace said. “And whatever it is you’ve got, I’m immune.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Culin hissed.

“Law says—”

“I don’t fucking care what the law says!” The fear was kicking at his ribcage; it felt like his muscles would constrict him, grind out his breath. “I care about my mates who got banged up three years on when an old lay worked out they could get them back for something for the price of a Shunt Street traffic bribe.” I care that you’ve stolen my DNA, he couldn’t say. Spit was just one more thing to hold against people like him. If it came down to his word, the word of a gimp contage, a barely-legal LEMR scuttling around in the rain and the grime, his word against hers, he might as well just turn himself in as guilty and save the trouble.

He took in a breath to say something, anything, and discovered that the fear was turning into nausea, and the nausea was thrumming through his blood. He turned to put a hand on the wall, pitched forward, and vomited.

“Whoa,” Jace said, and stepped forward to help him. How she thought she was going to help, he didn’t know.

“Fuck off,” he snarled, and scrabbled for the wall. He could climb faster than she could, and he was sure of that; he could climb faster than any of these people who preferred the ground. He’d preferred the walls for a long time, where he was mostly whole instead of only half, where his crushed, hooked foot was an asset, not an injury.

Not that it stopped Jace from following him. She was half a story up by the time he’d cleared two.

“Culin,” she called. Then, louder, in that don’t-screw-with-me, I’m-the-law voice, “Culin!”

But he was as good as gone.

• • • •

Culin’s perch wasn’t even a flat; more like what a flat would be after the ceiling fell in on half of it and all the windows got busted out. But it was enough shelter from the rain that the important corner kept dry, and enough shelter from the wind that if he curled up with blankets in the dry corner he wasn’t too cold, and it was in such an awkward place that none of the landlords or roof gangs knew about it to come and collect rent. Lectric and data were both hacked, of course, but like Jace had said: He was licensed for maintenance and repair on these things. LEMRs didn’t pay for these unless they wanted to, and Culin didn’t want to.

His hands were shaking after the climb, but there wasn’t much he could do about it except try to push everything out of his mind until any shit on its way to the fan hit the blades. He hooked his smartscreen to the rat’s-nest of cables in the dry corner. Eighty-one new messages blinked into his notifs, and almost a thousand onto the common LEMR lines; he scanned the subjects, opened a sample handful, and skimmed them. All reports of flooded data lines, drowning in either encrypted signal or gibberish noise.

A burst of laughter caught Culin’s attention and he looked to see three kids clambering up the wall opposite his window, only to disappear into a balcony door. Two girls and a boy, he thought, though they were the age and dress and grime that made it difficult to tell. He froze, as though by moving he’d become noticeable and monstrous to them, like a troll under a bridge.

Never mind that there was another spectre in the district; a spectre of choking data lines and failing data net. Much more dangerous than a man with bad blood, skulking in a ruined flat. Give people a small, specific threat and a large one with no obvious solution and they’d spend their energy on the smaller one every time.

Though there was something to be said for the parallel there: him with the biological poison of his blood; the data lines with the algorithmic poison of their trash data. Mark the lines as contagious, he thought. And Upcity knows the next time it dips in for a kiss from our network, we’re both screwed.

He shook himself out of it.

Data fed knowledge to the schools and freelance teachers. It told the fire climbers where to go when fires broke out, it requested doctors and delivery of groceries and missing-persons bounty trackers. Data ran the electricity failovers that kept the coldest parts of the city from going dark when the plants failed. Data let kids who’d never be taken by the factories or the Upcity offices or trusted as couriers or anything else run security on the streets of the district. Without data, the district went blind and dumb and deaf. It might not die—Culin knew a few things about surviving while crippled—but the balance of de-facto cooperation would swing back toward free-for-all, and the people who could manage without the distributed net of helping one another here and there in hopes of getting help off yonder would be the only ones to thrive.

They’d be criminals, mostly. And bullies. Culin had dealt with both breeds, and didn’t much want to again.

He looked at the smartscreen. The encrypted stuff clogging the lines had the usual headers, the routes the data took, but a cursory look told him mostly that it was going around in a knot through all the relay points in the district. He took an origin at random and plugged it in as an address, just to see what would happened.

1,1,2,3, he wrote.

And an answer came back: 5,8,13,21.

Odd. He’d been expecting a diagnostic error, not an answer pattern.

ping, he sent.

pong, it replied.

He considered that for a moment, then typed district?

The reply came back, far too fast: distributed.

He furrowed his brow.

Where can I get locust flour?

Again, instantly: Gage Dade Exotic Market 31.5c/kilo Market Bulk 35c/kilo Vista Anton’s 39.9c/kilo, on and on, like a search listing. For Upcity. Places no one in the district would frequent, ask about, know about. He scrolled six or seven screens down and found a few listings for ag district shops, their flour at hundreds of credits a kilo; there weren’t any barter houses, any old grandmothers in thirteenth-floor flats with locust tanks, anywhere a real district person might direct him to.

But search listings didn’t answer pings with pongs.

He typed in 1721,1722,a17,a18,a19 and got a20,2122,2123, the street crossings from the district’s transit stop to the undermarket. That was a district-specific shibboleth.

With nothing else for it, he typed in Who are you?

No one in the districts would answer that for someone they didn’t know. And it might have been his imagination, but he thought there was a pause before it spat out a chain of gibberish: I am not going to the market was busy at four hundred credits a kilo is a lot to carry up twenty flights of stairs.

Culin killed the data connection and pulled the smartscreen away. He stared at the words for a moment longer, then killed the display. Then he got out of his flat and into the more-open air.

• • • •

Culin crept through seven back alleys, passing more and more LEMR flags he didn’t know what to do with. Eventually he dropped back down to street level to clear his head, and ordered a meal at a dumplings-and-noodles cart staffed by someone with grey in his hair. Culin stayed away from the ones staffed by children, because he’d seen the way parents pulled their children close when he came by. He didn’t want the kids to go home and talk about the contage who’d handed them money.

The noodles were yellower than usual, which meant there was more millet or durum or something in the cheap mixed flower these days. The broth had a hydroponics-cabbage tang, the salt tasted like more minerals than usual, and the blobs of protein could have been bean curd or anything. There was an entire news report about the current production in the ag districts, there in his bowl, if only he knew how to decipher it.

There were too many things he didn’t know how to decipher.

The sky looked grey, like it might let loose again, and he moved into a doorway and bent his head over his bowl. He could have looked up the chance of rain, but he didn’t want to get on data lines that were already slowed to a crawl.

He’d almost finished his noodles when his vision was interrupted by a steaming bowl of dumplings, a pale hand holding them. Jace. “Peace?”

He swallowed back a sudden taste of bile. Upcity dog—she probably had tech to track him, or had planted something on him. Probably saw no problem with that, either. “Did someone tell you the best way to work down here was to buy people with food?”

Jace blinked. “I keep torquing you off, and I don’t mean to. I just thought these had to be better than what you’re eating now.”

They probably were, but Culin wasn’t about to admit that, and they weren’t that much better in any case. The menu said the dumplings were pork, but he suspected they were cooked filler with slightly more expensive seasonings than the noodles got. “I’m not hungry,” he said, and downed the last of the noodle broth so he could throw the bowl back at the dirty-bowl bin. He glanced down the street until he caught a telltale heap of fabric and limbs hidden in a crevice between two shifted-together buildings, trying hard to be invisible. “She’s probably hungrier than I’ve ever been.”

Jace followed his gaze, gave him an odd look, then turned to take the bowl over to the street kid. The kid’s eyes went wide, flicking around for avenues of escape, and Jace knelt down and offered the bowl out as though trying to lure a wild animal. Culin couldn’t hear what she said, from there, but the kid darted out of her hiding place, grabbed the bowl, and darted back to stuff the dumplings into her mouth without taking her eyes of Jace.

Jace got up and came back, spreading her hands. “Peace now?”

Culin just glared at her. She dropped her hands.

“I’m not going to charge you,” she said.

Culin growled, pushed away from the wall, and limped up the street away from the street kid Jace had fed. “I don’t care if you’re not going to,” he said. I care that you could.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Jace said. “Peace?”

He really wasn’t being given a choice in the matter.

He gave in, slumped back, crossed his arms tight over his chest. “Why the hell are you down here?”

“I want to solve this,” she said.

“Yeah, but why?”

“I’ve seen something like this in a district before,” she said. “Two districts. Got so bad that they just cut off the links to those districts; no data in or out. I don’t want that to happen here.”

Culin swallowed at the thought of being cut off, but she hadn’t answered his question. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not right,” she said, too fast. He kept his eyes on her face.

“What do you care?”

She struggled for something to say. He could see it. He could also see how inadequate it was, to her, to settle on “Because there are five-year-old boys down here who watch camera feeds so they can tell strangers when it’s safe to go to market.”

Well, that explained something.

“You’re one of those people who’s in love with the districts even though they’ve never been here,” Culin said. There had been one in a flat a few alleys away from Culin’s, a while ago. Came down to make a data lab where you could find parts for any machine in the market for cheap, from mostly modern to decades out-of-date; came down for the spirit of adaptation and ingenuity. Hadn’t counted on the lectric that was buggy at best, or the way the cold went right through the buildings no one thought to insulate. Hadn’t counted on half his protein coming from the larvae in the bread, or the way people bought up the buggy flour first, ’cause hell if they could afford protein otherwise. In the end, he’d bugged off Upcity again.

“You find anything new?” Jace asked.

He let her dodge. He pulled out the smartscreen, flipped it on, and showed it to her. “I tried talking with the encryption. It’s all patterns and words, but it doesn’t make sense.”

“That looks like a Markov chain,” Jace said. Culin frowned at her, and she explained. “You figure out what words are most likely to follow each other and use it to make sentences. Of course none of them make any sense, but every three or four words do.”

“Markov chains,” Culin muttered. “What the hell are those used for?”

“Market tests and party tricks, as far as I know,” Jace said. “But there’s a professor Upcity who’d know more. Maybe it’s a lead.” She looked over at him like she was about to say Let’s go, then caught herself. Culin shifted on his bad foot, feeling a sudden pang of imposed self-consciousness. He was no more fit for Upcity than an Upcity pet was fit for the sewers in the slough.

Jace exhaled, sharply, and reached out to clap him on the shoulder. He flinched away, and she pulled her hand back with a rueful, sidelong smile.

“I’ll keep you in the loop,” she said.

She didn’t.

• • • •

Ten hours later, the data lines cleared up like they’d never been clogged. The only news on the net was wild speculation, and aside from It was something with Markov chains?, Culin had nothing to add to it.

He kept an eye out for Jace that entire evening, but didn’t see her. No sightings, no messages. Probably to be expected, that. She might track him across the districts, but would she know his net address? Probably she had better things to do.

He went to collect his payment from the girl running security. From the look on her face when she answered her window, she wasn’t impressed with his service; still, he said “I earned something, didn’t I?”

“Minus the time you took,” she said. Then, after a second, she sighed. “Hang on a minute.” She vanished into her flat, and came back with a plastic sack to give him. “For your effort, anyway.”

“Thanks,” Culin said. Then, as an afterthought, “Sorry.”

She shook her head and shut the window on him.

He climbed up to an empty ledge, settled there, and opened the sack to find a half-full bag of red wheat, a jar of salt, and a clear envelope with a five-credit piece. It’d keep him for a couple meals; not much, but something. No one wanted to send a LEMR away empty-handed. Thin times for everyone, but not so thin you’d flirt with the rep of being someone who didn’t pay.

He tied the sack shut and started climbing again, searching through the crevices of the district for the flags that said someone might need him. All around, the buildings crowded too close together, all but rubbing shoulders to keep from collapse.

• • • •

Culin saw Jace again, after the rains had gone and the water was taking on the old-plastic funk of stuff stored up again. He was sitting in the otherwise-empty contage annex of the Dead Engine as though nothing had happened, nursing cheap distillate and a bruise on his jaw, and another thumb glass of red cordial arrived. This time, Jace was carrying it.

“Sorry to disappear on you,” she said.

Culin grunted and kicked out one of the old crates that served for chairs. She took it without comment, and Culin took the drink.

“So what was it?” he asked.

“This seventeen-year-old kid in Vista Norte, trying to get into a technical college,” Jace said, and Culin had to blink at the idea of someone being a kid at 17. “He had this project to map the districts. Not the buildings, the ideas. The data.” She shook her head. “He wanted to understand the districts. I can understand that. He just didn’t realize he was hurting them.”

“You can understand that, too,” Culin said.

Jace gave him a sharp look, then relented. “Yeah, I guess.”

She reached over and took his distillate, gave it an appraising sniff, then tasted it. He watched her, but she didn’t show disgust.

“Upcity has a cure for that,” Jace said, gesturing at his contage band. “We could take off the tattoo, too.”

Culin leaned back, probing at his bruise.

“So, you came here to save us,” Culin said. “Then it turns out it’s some Upcity rat? That must smart.” He smiled despite the ache. “The people down here know me. Tat or no tat, they know who I am. Upcity, even another district, I’d just be the no-reputation LEMR from the junk district slums. Sounds like no cure.”

Jace watched him for a moment. “How’d you get that bruise?”

He winced, and turned away.

“We might not be perfect, but I think we’re closer to it than you are,” Jace said.

Culin shrugged. “You might be better than us, but this is the place that lets me be good.”

“And throws stones at your face?”

It’d been a shoe, but it didn’t matter. “Hazards of existing.”

She looked pained. “It shouldn’t be.”

That wasn’t a sentiment he could do much with. “And, what? You’re here to make my life better? I don’t really want to be your district charity adoption case.”

Jace looked chastised, but more like she’d already been thinking it than like he’d called her out. “Friend, then? Can that work?”

That didn’t compute. “Friend?”

“Well, clearly I can’t save you.” She pinched at the skin between her thumb and forefinger. “And we’ve seen where trying to study you gets us. But you interest me. Maybe you could deputize me.”

Culin doubted that Upcity taught people the meaning of the word “deputy”—at least, any definition that would follow them down into the districts. “I fix lectric and data lines.”

She shrugged. “Then that’s where I’ll start.”

He was about to respond, but it occurred to him that maybe Jace was like a bloodborne disease he wasn’t getting rid of. What you could do—with contagion, with the crud in the water supply, with the bugs in the flour and the very fact of Upcity and the districts—was learn how to live with it as best you could.

He shook his head, sighed more for effect than for protest, and said, “Let me buy you a drink, this time.” Jace raised an eyebrow, and Culin ignored it and raised a hand for Nis to come.

© 2014 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, 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, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.

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

Morning Child

Gardner Dozois

The old house had been hit by something sometime during the war and mashed nearly flat. The front was caved in as though crushed by a giant fist: wood pulped and splintered, beams protruding at odd angles like broken fingers, the second floor collapsed onto the remnants of the first. The rubble of a chimney covered everything with a red mortar blanket. On the right, a gaping hole cross-sectioned the ruins, laying bare all the strata of fused stone and plaster and charred wood—everything curling back on itself like the lips of a gangrenous wound. Weeds had swarmed up the low hillside from the road and swept over the house, wrapping the ruins in wildflowers and grapevines, softening the edges of destruction with green.

Williams brought John here almost every day. They had lived here once, in this house, many years ago, and although John’s memory of that time was dim, the place seemed to have pleasant associations for him, in spite of its ruined condition. John was at his happiest here and would play contentedly with sticks and pebbles on the shattered stone steps, or go whooping through the tangled weeds that had turned the lawn into a jungle, or play-stalk in ominous circles around Williams while Williams worked at filling his bags with blueberries, daylilies, Indian potatoes, dandelions, and other edible plants and roots.

Even Williams took a bittersweet pleasure in visiting the ruins, although coming here stirred memories that he would rather have left undisturbed. There was a pleasant melancholy to the spot and something oddly soothing about the mixture of mossy old stone and tender new green, a reminder of the inevitability of cycles—life-in-death, death-in-life.

John erupted out of the tall weeds and ran laughing to where Williams stood with the foraging bags. “I been fighting dinosaurs!” John said. “Great big ones!” Williams smiled crookedly and said, “That’s good.” He reached down and rumpled John’s hair. They stood there for a second, John panting like a dog from all the running he’d been doing, his eyes bright, Williams letting his touch linger on the small, tousled head. At this time of the morning, John seemed always in motion, motion so continuous that it gave nearly the illusion of rest, like a stream of water that looks solid until something makes it momentarily sputter and stop.

This early in the day, John rarely stopped. When he did, as now, he seemed to freeze solid, his face startled and intent, as though he were listening to sounds that no one else could hear. At such times, Williams would study him with painful intensity, trying to see himself in him, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, and wondering which hurt more, and why.

Sighing, Williams took his hand away. The sun was getting high, and they’d better be heading back to camp if they wanted to be there at the right time for the heavier chores. Slowly, Williams bent over and picked up the foraging bags, grunting a little at their weight as he settled them across his shoulder—they had done very well for themselves this morning.

“Come on now, John,” Williams said, “time to go,” and started off, limping a bit more than usual under the extra weight. John, trotting alongside, his short legs pumping, seemed to notice. “Can I help you carry the bags?” John said eagerly. “Can I? I’m big enough!” Williams smiled at him and shook his head. “Not yet, John,” he said. “A little bit later, maybe.”

They passed out of the cool shadow of the ruined house and began to hike back to camp along the deserted highway.

The sun was baking down now from out of a cloudless sky, and heat-bugs began to chirrup somewhere, producing a harsh and metallic stridulation that sounded amazingly like a buzz saw. There were no other sounds besides the soughing of wind through tall grass and wild wheat, the tossing and whispering of trees, and the shrill piping of John’s voice. Weeds had thrust up through the macadam—tiny, green fingers that had cracked and buckled the road’s surface, chopped it up into lopsided blocks. Another few years and there would be no road here, only a faint track in the undergrowth—and then not even that. Time would erase everything, burying it beneath new trees, gradually building new hills, laying down a fresh landscape to cover the old. Already grass and vetch had nibbled away the corners of the sharper curves, and the wind had drifted topsoil onto the road. There were saplings now in some places, growing green and shivering in the middle of the highway, negating the faded signs that pointed to distances and towns.

John ran ahead, found a rock to throw, ran back, circling around Williams as though on an invisible tether. They walked in the middle of the road, John pretending that the faded white line was a tightrope, waving his arms for balance, shouting warnings to himself about the abyss creatures who would gobble him up if he should misstep and fall.

Williams maintained a steady pace, not hurrying: the epitome of the ramrod-straight old man, his snow-white hair gleaming in the sunlight, a bush knife at his belt, an old Winchester .30-30 slung across his back—although he no longer believed that they’d need it. They weren’t the only people left in the world, he knew—however much it felt like it sometimes—but this region had been emptied of its population years ago, and since he and John had returned this way on their long journey up from the south, they had seen no one else at all. No one would find them here.

There were traces of buildings along the way now, all that was left of a small country town: the burnt-out spine of a roof, ridge meshed with weeds; gaping stone foundations like battlements for dwarfs; a ruined water faucet clogged with spiderwebs; a shattered gas pump inhabited by birds and rodents. They turned off onto a gravel secondary road, past the burnt-out shell of another filling station and a dilapidated roadside stand full of windblown trash. Overhead, a rusty traffic light swayed on a sagging wire. Someone had tied a big orange-and-black hex sign to one side of the light, and on the other side, the side facing away from town and out into the hostile world, was the evil eye, painted against a white background in vivid, shocking red. Things had gotten very strange during the Last Days.

• • • •

Williams was having trouble now keeping up with John’s ever-lengthening stride, and he decided that it was time to let him carry the bags. John hefted the bags easily, flashing his strong white teeth at Williams in a grin, and set off up the last long slope to camp, his long legs carrying him up the hill at a pace Williams couldn’t hope to match. Williams swore good-naturedly, and John laughed and stopped to wait for him at the top of the rise.

Their camp was set well back from the road, on top of a bluff, just above a small river. There had been a restaurant here once, and a corner of the building still stood, two walls and part of the roof needing only the tarpaulin stretched across the open end to make it into a reasonably snug shelter. They’d have to find something better by winter, of course, but this was good enough for July, reasonably well hidden and close to a supply of water.

Rolling, wooded hills were around them to the north and east. To the south, across the river, the hills dwindled away into flatland, and the world opened up into a vista that stretched to the horizon.

• • • •

They grabbed a quick lunch and then set to work, chopping wood, hauling in the nets that Williams had set across the river to catch fish, carrying water, for cooking, up the steep slope to camp. Williams let John do most of the heavy work. John sang and whistled happily while he worked, and once, on his way back from carrying some firewood to the shelter, he laughed, grabbed Williams under the arms, boosted him into the air, and danced him around in a little circle before setting him back down on his feet again.

“Feeling your oats, eh?” Williams said with mock severity, looking up into the sweaty face that smiled down at him.

“Somebody has to do the work around here,” John said cheerfully, and they both laughed. “I can’t wait to get back to my outfit,” John said eagerly. “I feel much better now. I feel terrific. Are we going to stay out here much longer?” His eyes pleaded with Williams. “We can go back soon, can’t we?”

“Yeah,” Williams lied, “we can go back real soon.”

But already John was tiring. By dusk, his footsteps were beginning to drag, and his breathing was becoming heavy and labored. He paused in the middle of what he was doing, put down the wood-chopping ax, and stood silently for a moment, staring blankly at nothing.

His face was suddenly intent and withdrawn, and his eyes were dull. He swayed unsteadily and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. Williams got him to sit down on a stump near the improvised fireplace. He sat there silently, staring at the ground in abstraction, while Williams bustled around, lighting a fire, cleaning and filleting the fish, cutting up dandelion roots and chicory crowns, boiling water. The sun was down now, and fireflies began to float above the river, winking like fairy lanterns through the velvet darkness.

Williams did his best to interest John in supper, hoping that he’d eat something while he still had some of his teeth, but John would eat little. After a few moments, he put his tin plate down and sat staring dully to the south, out over the darkened lands beyond the river, just barely visible in the dim light of a crescent moon. His face was preoccupied and glum, and beginning to get jowly. His hairline had retreated in a wide arc from his forehead, creating a large bald spot. He worked his mouth indecisively several times and at last said, “Have I been . . . ill?”

“Yes, John,” Williams said gently. “You’ve been ill.”

“I can’t . . . I can’t remember,” John complained. His voice was cracked and husky, querulous. “Everything’s so confused. I can’t keep things straight—”

Somewhere on the invisible horizon, perhaps a hundred miles away, a pillar of fire leapt up from the edge of the world.

As they watched, startled, it climbed higher and higher, towering miles into the air, until it was a slender column of brilliant flame that divided the sullen black sky in two from ground to stratosphere. The pillar of fire blazed steadily on the horizon for a minute or two, and then it began to coruscate, burning green and blue and silver and orange, the colors flaring and flickering fitfully as they merged into one another. Slowly, with a kind of stately and awful symmetry, the pillar broadened out to become a flattened diamond shape of blue-white fire. The diamond began to rotate slowly on its axis, and, as it rotated, it grew eye-searingly bright. Gargantuan unseen shapes floated around the blazing diamond, like moths beating around a candle flame, throwing huge tangled shadows across the world.

Something with a huge, melancholy voice hooted, and hooted again, a forlorn and terrible sound that beat back and forth between the hills until it rumbled slowly away into silence.

The blazing diamond winked out. Hot white stars danced where it had been. The stars faded to sullenly glowing orange dots that flickered away down the spectrum and were gone.

It was dark again.

The night had been shocked silent. For a while, that silence was complete, and then slowly, tentatively, one by one, the crickets and tree frogs began to make their night sounds again.

“The war—” John whispered. His voice was reedy and thin and weary now, and there was pain in it. “It still goes on?”

“The war got . . . strange,” Williams said quietly. “The longer it lasted, the stranger it got. New allies, new weapons—” He stared off into the darkness in the direction where the fire had danced: There was still an uneasy shimmer to the night air on the horizon, not quite a glow. “You were hurt by such a weapon, I guess. Something like that, maybe.” He nodded toward the horizon, and his face hardened. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what that was. I don’t understand much that happens in the world anymore. . . . Maybe it wasn’t even a weapon that hurt you. Maybe they were experimenting on you biologically before you got away. Who knows why? Maybe it was done deliberately—as a punishment. Or a reward. Who knows how they think? Maybe it was a side effect of some device designed to do something else entirely. Maybe it was an accident; maybe you just got too close to something like that when it was doing whatever it is it does.” Williams was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “Whatever happened, you got to me afterward somehow, and I took care of you. We’ve been hiding out ever since, moving from place to place.”

They had both been nearly blind while their eyes readjusted to the night, but now, squinting in the dim glow of the low-burning cooking fire, Williams could see John again. John was now totally bald, his cheeks had caved in, and his dulled and yellowing eyes were sunken deeply into his ravaged face. He struggled to get to his feet, then sank back down onto the stump again. “I can’t—” he whispered. Weak tears began to run down his cheeks. He started to shiver.

Sighing, Williams got up and threw a double handful of pine needles into boiling water to make white-pine-needle tea. He helped John limp over to his pallet, supporting most of his weight, almost carrying him—it was easy; John had become shrunken and frail and amazingly light, as if he were now made out of cloth and cotton and dry sticks instead of flesh and bone. He got John to lie down, tucked a blanket around him in spite of the heat of the evening, and concentrated on getting some of the tea into him.

He drank two full cups before his fingers became too weak to hold the cup, before even the effort of holding up his head became too great for him. John’s eyes had become blank and shiny and unseeing, and his face was like a skull, earth-brown and blotched, with the skin drawn tightly over the bones.

His hands plucked aimlessly at the blanket; they looked mummified now, the skin as translucent as parchment, the blue veins showing through beneath.

• • • •

As the evening wore on, John began to fret and whine incoherently, turning his face blindly back and forth, muttering random fragments of words and sentences, sometimes raising his voice in a strangled, gurgling shout that had no words at all in it, only bewilderment and outrage and pain. Williams sat patiently beside him, stroking his shriveled hands, wiping sweat from his hot forehead.

“Sleep now,” Williams said soothingly. John moaned, and whined in the back of his throat. “Sleep. Tomorrow we’ll go to the house again. You’ll like that, won’t you? But sleep now, sleep—”

At last John quieted, his eyes slowly closed, and his breathing grew deeper and more regular.

Williams sat patiently by his side, keeping a calming hand on his shoulder. Already John’s hair was beginning to grow back, and the lines were smoothing out of his face as he melted toward childhood.

When Williams was sure that John was asleep, he tucked the blanket closer around him and said, “Sleep well, Father,” and then slowly, passionately, soundlessly, he started to weep.

© 1984 by Gardner Dozois.

Originally published in OMNI.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gardner Dozois is the author or editor of more than a hundred books. He was the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine for twenty years, and still edits the annual anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, now in its Thirty-First Annual Edition. He has won fifteen Hugo Awards and thirty-two Locus Awards for his editing, plus two Nebula Awards and a Sidewise Award for his own writing. He was initiated into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame a couple of years back. His most recent books are Dangerous Women and Old Mars, both co-edited with George R.R. Martin, and coming up is a new anthology Rogues, also edited with Martin. He lives in Philadelphia.

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

A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman

E. Catherine Tobler

The spaceman shows up on a hot summer afternoon, not in the dead of night when you’re crouched in the garden peering through a telescope that shows you the endless glories and wonders of the night sky. There’s no spaceship making a bright arc against a star-spangled sky. Just a man in a spacesuit, standing at the edge of your hammock. His presence reminds you school is over and relatives will be coming soon and you don’t want to see them. They will ask you who can’t see beyond the edge of your hammock about grades and ambitions and Plans For the Future. Aunt Fran is dead and there’s just no fixing it, but funerals help us move on, Mom says so, and Mom Knows Best. You don’t want to go, because going means it happened and going means something is over.

You ask the spaceman where his blue box is and he stares at you like you’ve lost your entire mind, because boxes, he tells you in absolute certainty, are no good for space flight. Boxes are not geometrically synergistic, he tells you, whether cardboard or wood or blue. He doesn’t have any kind of an accent, no bow tie, no box, and he’s lost. He tells you he’s lost.

This is just Earth, you tell him, and he says he knows that, how stupid do you think he is, he’s been here before, so many times before he knows Rubik’s Cubes and arcades and the way ugly yellow dish gloves will stick to your fingers and turn inside out if they’re too hot when you take them off. He remembers when an icy Big Gulp in a sweating plastic cup was the best part of summer—that’s why he’s here now, summer, and why it’s afternoon, and why—

He looks over his shoulder and you, who had been plucking brows into perfect and silently sarcastic arcs in a handheld mirror while the hammock made its creak-creak-creak sound against the tree trunks, follow his gaze, because you expect robots or aliens or something to have followed him. Through a portal, from the oozing innards of a crashed spaceship, Beyond the Abyss of Time. You expect something hulking and green, or slimy and black. But there’s only the quiet fence-trimmed lane that runs alongside the bayou, bushes bending in a breeze. In the tall pecan tree, the swing moves of its own accord.

This is Louisiana, you tell him, and smack the mosquito that alights on your leg. You brush away the bloody, black smear of the bug, then tuck your mirror and tweezers into the hammock pillows. And he knows it’s Louisiana, too, so you throw up your hands and tell him he’s not lost in the least bit, then, and to have a very good day indeed, don’t let the gate hit him on the way out. You don’t even think he’s a spaceman anymore, but then he’s closer than he was a blink ago. So close you can see the space dust on the shoulders of his strange suit. Space dust?

Listen to me very carefully, he tells you—and this is rather something a spaceman should say, you’ve imagined it a hundred times, right before one arrives to carry you away (away, away, away, this is all you want). Listen to me very carefully, he says to you, because they will be here soon, and time is of the essence, you understand time, and of course you understand time. You roll your eyes and there’s something of a smile on his face, the same way there was when you asked where his box was.

They will be here soon, you echo, and wriggle your fingers at him. Menacing. Can’t you do better than that, you ask. Is it hundred-foot tall robots? Is it slime-dripping, four hundred meter-tall monsters from an oceanic pit? Technically, he says, a crevasse—you can see the bayou, can you not, this is where the world is broken—and while they’ve been here all along, they’ve never come out, not until now, because of him. Right, you say, because of you. The Chosen One.

Rather not, he says, and rolls his eyes just the way you did—is he learning things from you already? He’s not chosen, he tells you—no one is ever actually chosen, are they, he says, because that means someone else wanted them, and no, he is from a place where people do not want, even if they need, and that’s when you see the lostness in his eyes—I’m lost, he had said, and you don’t get it until right then.

Okay then, you say. You’re lost, and they will be here soon, and why do you require my assistance, if that’s what you’re demanding, because this hammock is awfully comfortable, and you’ve got eyebrow arcs to perfect. But they’re already perfect, the spaceman says, and hauls you out of the hammock by your arm. Goddamn, you want to say, because the hammock was the whole of your summer plan, but in the next instant, the hammock vanishes. Every bit of fabric turns to ash in the summer air, dropping your mirror and tweezers to the lush grass that needed mowing a week ago. Oh, you say.

And then it’s running. There’s no dissolving transporter effect, there’s no miraculous ship that appears in mid-air to stymie the as-yet-unseen threat. It’s just running, and you’re barefoot, because it was hammock time, and the lane that runs along the bayou is not without prickers and branches and is it alligator or opossum poo that’s made the ball of your right foot slick? You are relieved when you hit a patch of summer-dry dirt, because it dries out whatever’s stuck to you, but then it’s lumps of dirt and you’re behind the Saunders’ place, Bret always hitting clods of dirt out of his garden with his three iron.

The spaceman pulls you into an overgrown camellia bush and smothers your mouth with his hand. He smells like hot, sun-simmered metal and in the close space, his eyes gleam like dimes under harsh southern-noon sunlight. He narrows them and looks at you, like he’s expecting a protest, despite the hand over your mouth. You say nothing, because that will teach him something, but then he smiles—a smile like a roll of dimes on their sides—and he nods, and his hand falls away.

You remembered, he said, and you don’t question that, because right then—right the hell then!—the as-yet-unseen threat walks right past your hiding place. If you had said anything, they would have heard, so you say nothing, and you watch as the things walk past. You suppose it’s walking, at least for them. They don’t have legs so much as they have tentacles. Is that possible? How is that possible? Are tentacles geometrically synergistic?

You really wish the spaceman had a box, because there, you’d be safe. You would be made to understand exactly what was going on—you would know the threat, you would have possible solutions spread before you, and all would be made well. Instead, you are crouched in a bush that has poison ivy knotted around its roots; instead, you are pressed against the side of a man who smells like metal and smiles like dimes, and your hammock has been vaporized and Aunt Fran is dead.

The threat passes beyond the bush and the spaceman looks at you. He will give you objectives now, you think; he’ll explain everything, and you’ll do what needs doing, and then he’ll put your hammock back the way it was and Aunt Fran, too, because—

It’s all just death, he tells you, and he opens a pocket of his spacesuit, because spacesuits have pockets, sure, and he shows you the thing that isn’t possible at all. The pocket opens into blackness, but the longer you look, the more stars begin to come out. Within that slit of black, pinpricks of starlight come to life, like cells dividing until they become something entirely Else and Other. The more your eyes adjust to the dark, pupils blown wide in the face of eternity, you see constellations you recognize—there’s Orion, and you know exactly where his nebula is, but how is it in a spaceman’s pocket, how is it . . .

You stare at the spaceman, not understanding. You ask if he stole the stars, if he stole the universe, and he laughs. It’s not a happy sound; it’s not a laugh like you’ve ever heard and his metal-scented fingers seal up the pocket as quickly as they opened it. Everything was bigger on the inside, of course—this shouldn’t surprise you, even as it does. People, boxes, books, you opened them, they just went on and on and on, the way Louisiana summers do.

All right, you say to him, all right. It’s all just death but right now, we’re not dead, right, tell me we aren’t dead, because if we’re dead—and here, your voice hitches the same exact way it did when Elizabeth gave you her phone number before summer break—if we’re dead . . . if we’re dead . . .

We are not dead, the spaceman says, but neither are we exactly—

He never finishes that sentence; the threat returns, slithering back up the bayou path, looking and looking, but never seeing exactly what they go past—you and the spaceman and the pocket universe—

Neither are we exactly: corporeal, human, lost, ice cream, plans for the future, living, beyond the edge of the hammock—

The summer afternoon snaps and you’re—

The spaceman has been coming to Earth longer than you know; he never tells you how long, and you never ask. He shows up three times that you remember, and each time, he tries to tell you something you never understand. Mostly, you wonder if he can solve the physics midterm you have next week. He shows no inclination toward this, more intent on the chocolate malt sitting between you and the straw that stands suspended in its frozen middle.

One day, he says.

Today? you ask.

One day, he says again, everything will make sense and you will remember.

And this is what visitors from the stars are supposed to say, so you go with it. They know things, visitors from the stars. They know that one doesn’t actually fly about space in a box; they know that bringing people back to life is impossible; they don’t know that Mentos plus Coke equals explosion and don’t know the same thing happens with vinegar and baking soda. This is why your mother doesn’t let you in the kitchen.

What day do you suppose that will be? you ask him.

Why does it matter what day, he says. The day will be the day and that’s all. Knowing ahead of time won’t help you.

You mash the paper down the length of a second straw and add the straw to the malt. You push the straw wrapper to the side, but his eyes swing to it. His eyes are ordinary, he’s ordinary, until he dips a finger into the ice water and carries a droplet of water to the straw wrapper. This water droplet falls, precise, onto the paper, and the paper wriggles like it’s a worm. Every ridge you scrunched into it comes undone. When the paper stops moving, it’s just soggy paper flat against the Formica tabletop.

Well, that’s disappointing, he says, and reaches for another straw.

You snatch it from his hands, wanting to undisappoint him.

You tear this one carefully open, pull the straw out, and set it aside. You fold the paper in half and again and again, over and around until you hold a small paper heart within your hands. You show it to him, but do not offer it.

He reaches for the malt, pulling it close enough to suck on one of the straws. He freezes his brain with the sweet chocolate as you lean across the table, open his pocket, and slide the straw-paper heart inside.

It’s no ordinary pocket—it’s not filled with lint or keys or identification, because he’s a spaceman. He has space in his pockets. He opens his pocket and it’s black as night inside. You think you see the entire universe in there.

At the least, you watch the straw-paper heart free fall into all that sky

(is it still sky when it’s beyond the sphere of earth?

is it still sky when it holds all the stars and galaxies and nebulas that ever were?)

and you know today is the day after all. You know exactly what he means and the world snaps again and you’re—

On the swing, but not swinging. You’re just sitting there, because it’s too hot to move. Your shorts are rucked up against your sweaty thighs and you nearly can’t breathe. You hate this place and it will never be home, but right now, when a breath of air moves the swing and the you and the branches above, you like it well enough, and then there’s the spaceman.

He’s standing by the trunk of the tree, his hand pressed over a pocket in his spacesuit and you think he will smell like metal. You drop off the swing, bare feet in cool grass that needed mowed a week ago, and walk toward him. You think his pockets will be filled with stars and forever, but when he lifts his hand, there’s only something like blood filling his pocket. You think he should slump to the ground, the way he’s losing blood, the way the warm summer-metal smell of him permeates the air, but he grabs you by the arm and you’re off, down the bayou path before he’s said a word to you. Slipping feet, clods of dirt, and he yanks you into the overgrown camellia while the as-yet-unseen threat slides right by again.

Hello, you say to him when the threat has passed.

If only I had a box, he says to you, and he goes unconscious and limp in the camellia. He is dead, you are positive he is dead, because it’s all death, he said so and Aunt Fran proved it, and— Your ankle brushes the poison ivy and you wince but you don’t exactly care. You’re already reaching for the spaceman’s pocket, pushing it open with your sweat-slick fingers so you can see how it’s bigger on—

There’s only ruined flesh beneath your fingers. Your skin tingles as the spaceman’s blood moves into every fingerprint; it’s not red, it’s not blue, it’s not even ghastly green. It’s no color, but it feels like hot ice burning your fingerprints away. You wipe the blood down the matte material of his spacesuit and stare at your fingers. The prints are gone, your skin as smooth as the skin that runs the length of your forearm. Oh, shi—

Sorry, sorry, he says. Other pocket, other pocket!

There is another pocket, but you don’t dare look in it. You press a hand over his apparent wound and the pocket both and you can feel something moving inside. You have never touched a pregnant woman—Aunt Fran told you how presumptuous that was—but you imagine it would feel like this, something alive moving just beneath the skin, just beneath the sky—the sky moving just beneath the skin—

If only you had a box, you think, and you watch the threat slither past outside the bush once again. Stupid aliens, why are they always so stupid, and humans so clev—

But even as you think this, the branches of the bush part, and oh, they’ve found you. They have found you and will eat you while you’re still alive unless you and the spaceman vanish the way your hammock did. But you don’t vanish.

The aliens haul you out of the bushes and they are the worst thing you have ever seen. They are the image of every pet you ever loved, mashed into one terrible thing that should never have lived. They haul you and the spaceman to the edge of the bayou and the stench and bugs are nearly enough to knock you unconscious. You almost wish for that, because it would be better than looking into your puppy’s eyes in that alien face, but all you can do is look.

The spaceman has no gizmo that will save you or him or anyone. This, you tell the aliens, is clearly a misunderstanding. You ask them if they are lost and they stare at you.

You can’t know where they got the images of your pets—there’s dogs and cats and even a gulping fish face goes by as they look at you—but you think if they knew well enough to get those faces, they know everything there is to know about you and earth and life, but mostly, they should know that everything that lives also dies. Every face they assume as their own is dead and gone and so very dead, skin long since rotted away, burned away, chewed away, and you see the flicker of the grave upon them then. If you know death, they should know death, and they do. Wet, dissolving death.

The aliens come apart in a flood. They have no form but for that which you give them; they come apart in sticky rivers of ejaculate that whiten the edge of the bayou; they avalanche down the dirt and into the water, where they are nothing but an oily sheen. An alligator passes through, slicing the slick neatly in two.

You stare at the spaceman, who stares back at you with his dime-eyes, and you have no actual idea what has just happened, only that he smiles at you, and you smile at him and say goddamn it you owe me a hammock. And possibly also Orion, he mutters before the world snaps again and you—

You are sitting in the night-dark yard, telescope aimed at the endless glories and wonders of the night sky, bare feet curled into grass that should have been mowed a week ago. The night is too damn hot, but there should be a comet, a comet crossing through Orion’s belt, but you can’t find Orion’s belt, which is impossible, but also rather happening. You pull back from the lens, to scan the night sky and it’s just not there. It’s summer, you tell yourself, so there shouldn’t be an Orion at all, but it’s more than that.

There’s a hole in the sky where the stars used to be; there’s a stretch of black that is like looking into a pocket that is like looking into a crevasse that just keeps going and going until it stops in a shine that looks like a smile of dimes turned on their sides and you think oh, spaceman, what the hell did you do, what did you do, and when can you do it again, because sometimes these glories and wonders are just too impossible to take, and you want to bundle every single star and paper heart into a pocket, seal it up, and never look at them again. If only, you think, you had a box, a pocket, a spaceman. But the night is warm and quiet around you, your hammock and aunt have dissolved, and you do not.

© 2014 by E. Catherine Tobler.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first novel is now available. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, ecatherine.com.

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

Traveller’s Rest

David I. Masson

It was an apocalyptic sector. Out of the red-black curtain of the forward sight-barrier, which at this distance from the Frontier shut down a mere twenty metres north, came every sort of meteoric horror: fission and fusion explosions, chemical detonations, a super-hail of projectiles of all sizes and basic velocities, sprays of nerve-paralysants and thalamic dopes. The impact devices burst on the barren rock of the slopes or the concrete of the forward stations, some of which were disintegrated or eviscerated every other minute. The surviving installations kept up an equally intense and nearly vertical fire of rockets and shells. Here and there, a protectivized figure could be seen “sprinting” up, down, or along the slopes on its mechanical “walker,” like a frantic ant from an anthill attacked by flamethrowers. Some of the visible oncoming trajectories could be seen snaking overhead into the indigo gloom of the rear sight-curtain, perhaps fifty metres south, which met the steep-falling rock surface forty-odd metres below the observer’s eye. The whole scene was as if bathed in a gigantic, straight rainbow. East and west, as far as the eye could see, perhaps some forty miles in this clear mountain air despite the debris of explosion (but cut off to the west by a spur from the range), the visibility-corridor witnessed a continual onslaught and counter-onslaught of devices. The visible pandemonium was shut in by the sight-barriers’ titanic canyon-walls of black, reaching the slim pale strip of horizon-spanning light at some immense height. The audibility-corridor was vastly wider than that of sight; the many-pitched din, even through left ear in helm, was considerable.

“Computer-sent, must be,” said H’s transceiver into his right ear. No sigil preceded this statement, but H knew the tones of B, his next-up, who in any case could be seen a metre away saying it, in the large concrete bubble whence they watched, using a plaspex window and an infrared northviewer with a range of some hundreds of metres forward. His next-up had been in the bunker for three minutes, apparently overchecking, probably for an appreciation to two-up who might be in station VV now.

“Else how can they get minute-ly impacts here, you mean?” said H.

“Well, of course it could be longrange low-frequency—we don’t really know how Time works over There.”

“But if the conceleration runs asymptotically to the Frontier, as it should if Their Time works in mirror-image, would anything ever have got over?”

“Doesn’t have to, far’s I can see—maybe it steepens a lot, then just falls back at the same angle the other Side,” said B’s voice; “anyway, I didn’t come to talk science: I’ve news for you, if we hold out the next few seconds here: You’re Relieved.”

H felt a black inner sight-barrier beginning to engulf him, and a roaring in his ears swallowed up the noise of the bombardment. He bent double as his knees began to buckle, and regained full consciousness. He could see his replacement now, an uncertain-looking figure in protsuit (like everybody else up here) at the far side of the bunker.

“XN 3, what orders then?” he said crisply, his pulse accelerating.

“XN 2: pick em-kit now, repeat now, rocket 3333 to VV, present tag”—holding out a luminous orange label printed with a few coarse black characters—“and proceed as ordered thence.”

H stuck up his right thumb from his fist held sideways at elbow length, in salute. It was no situation for facial gestures or unnecessary speech. “XN 3, yes, em-kit, 3333 rocket, tag” (he had taken it in his left glove) “and VV orders; parting!”

He missed B’s nod as he skimmed on soles to the exit, grabbed a small bundle hanging (one of fifteen) from the fourth hook along, slid down the greasy slide underground ten metres to a fuel-cell-lit cavern, pressed a luminous button in the wall, watched a lit symbol passing a series of marks, jumped into the low “car” as it ground round the corner, and curled up foetuswise. His weight having set off the cardoor mechanism, the car shut, slipped down and (its clamps setting on H’s body) roared off down the chute.

Twenty-five seconds after his “parting” word, H uncurled at the forward receiver cell of station VV nearly half a mile downslope. He crawled out as the rocket ground off again, walked ten steps onward in this larger version of his northward habitat, saluted thumb-up and presented his tag to two-up (recognised from helm-tint and helm-sign), saying simultaneously, “XN 3 rep, Relieved.”

“XN 1 to XN 3: Take this” (holding out a similar orange tag plucked from his pocket) “and take mag-lev train down, in—70 seconds. By the way, ever seen a prehis?”

“No, sir.”

“Spot through here, then; look like pteros but more primitive.”

The infrared telescopic viewer looking northwest passed through the forward sight-barrier which due north was about forty metres away here; well upslope, yet still well clear of the dark infrared-radiation barrier could be seen, soundlessly screaming and yammering, two scaly animals about the size of large dogs, but with two legs and heavy wings, flopping around a hump or boulder on the rock. They might have been hit on their way along, and could hardly have had any business on that barren spot, H thought.

“Thanks; odd,” he said. Eleven seconds of the seventy had gone. He pulled out a squirter-cup from the wall and took a drink from the machine, through his helm. Seventeen seconds gone, fifty-three to go.

“XN 1 to XN 3: How are things up there?”

Naturally a report was called for: XN 2 might never return, and communication up-time and down-time was nearly impossible at these latitudes over more than a few metres.

“XN 3. Things have been hotting up all day; I’m afraid a burst through may be attempted in the next hour or so—only my guess, of course. But I’ve never seen anything like it all this time up here. I suppose you’ll have noticed it in VV too?”

“XN 1, thanks for report,” was all the answer he got. But he could hear for himself that the blitz was much more intense than any he had known at this level either.

Only twenty-seven seconds remained. He saluted and strode off across the bunker with his em-kit and the new tag. He showed the tag to the guard, who stamped it and pointed wordlessly down a corridor. H ran down this, arriving many metres down the far end at a little gallery. An underslung, railguided vehicle with slide-doors opening into cubicles glided quietly alongside. A gallery-guard waved as H and two others waiting opened doors whose indicators were unlit, the doors slid to, and H found himself gently clamped in on a back-tilted seat as the mag-lev train accelerated downhill. After ten seconds it stopped at the next checkhalt; a panel in the cubicle ceiling lit up to state “diversion, left,” presumably because the direct route had been destroyed. The train now appeared to accelerate, but more gently, swung away to left (as H could feel), and stopped at two more checkhalts before swinging back to right and finally decelerating, coming to rest and opening some 480 seconds after its start, by Had’s personal chronograph, instead of the 200 he had expected.

At this point daylight could again be seen. From the top bunker where XN 2 had discharged him, Had had now gone some ten miles south and nearly three thousand metres down, not counting detours. The forward sight-barrier here was hidden by a shoulder of mountain covered in giant lichen, but the southern barrier was evident as a violet-black fog-wall a quarter of a mile off. Lichens and some sort of grass-like vegetation covered much of the neighbouring landscape, a series of hollows and ravines. Noise of war was still audible, mingled with that of a storm, but nearby crashes were not frequent and comparatively little damage could be seen. The sky overhead was turbulent. Some very odd-looking animals, perhaps between a lizard and a stoat in general appearance, were swarming up and down a tree-fern near by. Six men in all got out of the mag-lev train, besides Had. Two and three marched off in two groups down a track eastward. One (not one of those who had got in at VV) stayed with Had.

“I’m going down to the Great Valley; haven’t seen it for twenty days; everything’ll be changed. Are you sent far?” said the other man’s voice in Had’s right ear through the transceiver.

“I—I—I’m Relieved,” tried Had uncertainly.

“Well I’m . . . disintegrated!” was all the other man could manage. Then, after a minute, “Where will you go?”

“Set up a business way south, I think. Heat is what suits me, heat and vegetation. I have a few techniques I could put to good use in management of one sort or another. I’m sorry—I never meant to plume it over you with this—but you did ask me.”

“That’s all right. You certainly must have Luck, though. I never met a man who was Relieved. Make good use of it, won’t you. It helps to make the Game worthwhile, up here—I mean, to have met a man who is joining all those others we’re supposed to be protecting—it makes them real to us in a way.”

“Very fine of you to take it that way,” said Had.

“No—I mean it. Otherwise we’d wonder if there was any people to hold the Front for.”

“Well, if there weren’t, how’d the techniques have developed for holding on up here?” put in Had.

“Some of the Teccols I remember in the Great Valley might have developed enough techniques for that.”

“Yes, but think of all the pure science you need to work up the techniques from; I doubt if that could have been studied inside the Valley Teccols.”

“Possibly not—that’s a bit beyond me,” said the other’s voice a trifle huffily, and they stood on in silence till the next cable-car came up and round at the foot of the station. Had let the man get in it—he felt he owed him that—and a minute later (five seconds only, up in his first bunker, he suddenly thought ironically and parenthetically) the next car appeared. He swung himself in just as a very queer-looking purple bird with a long bare neck alighted on the stoat-lizards’ tree-fern. The cable-car sped down above the ravines and hollows, the violet southern curtain backing still more swiftly away from it. As the time-gradient became less steep, his brain began to function better and a sense of well-being and meaningfulness grew in him. The car’s speed slackened.

Had was glad he still wore his prot-suit when a couple of chemical explosions burst close to the cable line, presumably by chance, only fifty metres below him. He was even more glad of it when flying material from a third broke the cable itself well downslope and the emergency cable stopped him at the next pylon. He slid down the pylon’s lift and spoke with his transceiver close to the telephone at the foot. He was told to make west two miles to the next cable-car line. His interlocutor, he supposed, must be speaking from an exchange more or less on the same latitude as that of his pylon, since communication even here was still almost impossible north-south except at ranges of some metres. Even so, there was a squeaky sound about the other voice and its speech came out clipped and rapid. He supposed his own voice would sound gruff and drawled to the other.

Using his “walker,” he picked his way across ravines and gullies, steering by compass and watching the sight-barriers and the Doppler tint-equator ahead for yawing. “All very well for that man to talk about Teccols,” he thought, “but he must realise that no civilization could have evolved from anywhere as far north as the Great Valley: it’s far too young to have even evolved Men by itself—at least at this end; I’m not sure how far south the eastern end goes.”

The journey was not without its hazards: There were several nearby explosions, and what looked like a suspicious artificial miasma, easily overlooked, lay in two hollows which he decided to go round. Moreover, an enraged giant bear-sloth came at him in a mauve shrub-thicket and had to be eliminated with his quickgun. But to one who had just come down from that mountain-hell all this seemed like a pleasant stroll.

Finally he came upon the line of pylons and pressed the telephone button at the foot of the nearest, after checking that its latitude-number was nearly right. The same voice, a little less outlandish and rapid, told him a car would arrive in three-quarters of a minute and would be arranged to stop at his pylon; if it did not, he was to press the emergency button nearby. Despite his “walker,” nearly an hour had gone by since he set out by it. Perhaps ninety minutes had passed since he first left the top bunker—well over a minute and a half of their time there.

The car came and stopped, he scrambled up and in, and this time the journey passed without incident, except for occasional sudden squalls and the passage of flocks of nervous crows, until the car arrived at its terminus, a squat tower on the heathy slopes. The car below was coming up, and a man in it called through his transceiver as they crept past each other, “First of a bunch!” Sure enough, the terminus interior was filled with some twenty men all equipped—almost enough to have warranted sending them up by polyheli, thought Hadol, rather than wait for cars at long intervals. They looked excited and not at all cast down, but Hadol refrained from giving away his future. He passed on to the ratchet-car way and found himself one of a group of men more curious about the landscape than about their fellows. A deep reddish curtain of indeterminate thickness absorbed the shoulders of the heights about a quarter-mile northward, and the bluish fog terminated the view over the valley at nearly half a mile southward, but between the two the latitudinal zone was tolerably clear and devoid of obvious signs of war. Forests of pine and lower down of oak and ash covered the slopes, until finally these disappeared in the steepening edge of the Great Valley, whose meadows could however be glimpsed past the bluff. Swirling cloud-shadows played over the ground, skirts and tassels of rain and hail swept across it, and there was the occasional flash and rumble of a storm. Deer could be seen briefly here and there, and dense clouds of gnats danced above the trees.

A journey of some fifty minutes took them down, past two empty stations, through two looped tunnels and among waterfalls and under cliffs where squirrels leapt across from dangling root to root, through a steadily warmer and warmer air to the pastures and cornfields of the Great Valley, where a narrow village of concrete huts and wooden cabins, Emmel, nestled on a knoll above the winding river, and a great road ran straight to the east, parallel to a railway. The river was not, indeed, large here—a shallow, stony but attractive stream—and the Great Valley (all of whose breadth could now be seen) was at this western point no more than a third of a mile across. The southward slopes terminating the North-Western Plateau, now themselves visible, were rich in shrubland.

The utter contrast with what was going on above and, in top bunker time, perhaps four minutes ago, made Hadolar nearly drunk with enjoyment. However, he presented his luminous tag and had it (and his permanent checktab) checked for radiation, countersigned and stamped by the guard commander at the military terminal. The detachable piece at the end of the tag was given back to him to be slipped into the identity disc which was, as always, let into a slot in one of his ribs; the other portion was filed away. He got out of his prot-suit and “walker,” gave up his gun, ammunition, and em-kit, was given two wallets of one thousand credit tokens each and a temporary civsuit. An orderly achieved the identity-disc operation. The whole ceremony from his arrival took 250 seconds flat—two seconds up in the top bunker. He walked out like an heir to the earth.

The air was full of scents of hay, berries, flowers, manure. He took intoxicated gulps of it. At the freshouse he ordered, paid for, and drank four decis of light ale, then ordered a sandwich and an apple, paid and ate. The next train east, he was told, would be in a quarter of an hour. He had been in the place perhaps half an hour. No time to spend watching the stream, but he walked to the railhead, asked for a ticket to Veruam by the Sea some 400 miles east and, as the detailed station map showed him, about thirty miles south, paid, and selected a compartment when the train arrived from its shed.

A farm girl and a sleepy-looking male civilian, probably an army contractor, got in one after the other close behind Hadolar, and the compartment contained just these three when the train left. He looked at the farm girl with interest—she was blonde and placid—as the first female he had seen for a hundred days. Fashions had not changed radically in thirty-odd years, he saw, at least among Emmel farm-girls. After a while he averted his gaze and considered the landscape. The valley was edged by bluffs of yellowish stone now to north and now to south. Even here their difference in hue was perceptible—the valley had broadened slightly; or perhaps he was being fanciful and the difference was due solely to normal light-effects. The river meandered gracefully from side to side and from cliff to cliff, with occasional islands, small and crowned with hazel. Here and there a fisher could be seen by the bank, or wading in the stream. Farmhouses passed at intervals. North above the valley rose the great slopes, apparently devoid of signs of human life except for funicular stations and the occasional heliport, until they vanished into the vast crimson-bronze curtain of nothingness which grew insensibly out of a half cloud-covered green sky near the zenith. Swirls of whirlwind among the clouds told of the effects of the time-gradient on weather, and odd lightning-streaks, unnoticed further north amid the war, appeared to pirouette among them. To the south the plateau was still hidden by the height of the bluffs, but the beginnings of the dark blue haze grew out of the sky above the valley skyline. The train stopped at a station and the girl, Hadolar saw with a pang, got out. Two soldiers got in in light dress and swapped minor reminiscences: They were on short-term leave to the next stop, a small town, Granev, and eyed Hadolar’s temporary suit but said nothing.

Granev was mostly built of steel and glass: not an exciting place. It made a one-block twenty-storey five-mile strip on either side of the road, with over-pass-canopy. (How lucky, thought Hadolar, that speech and travel could go so far down this Great Valley without interlatitude problems: virtually the whole 450 miles.) Industry and some of the Teccols now appeared. The valley had broadened until, from the line, its southern cliffs began to drown in the blue haze half a mile off. Soon the northern slopes loomed a smoky ruddy brown before they, too, were swallowed up. The river, swollen by tributaries, was a few hundred metres across now and deep whenever the line crossed it. So far they had only gone fifty-odd miles. The air was warmer again and the vegetation more lush. Almost all the passengers were civilians now, and some noted Hadolar’s temporary suit ironically. He would buy himself a wardrobe at Veruam at the first opportunity, he decided. But at the moment he wished to put as many miles as possible between himself and that bunker in the shortest personal time.

• • • •

Some hours later the train arrived at Veruam by the North-Eastern Sea. Thirty miles long, forty storeys high, and 500 metres broad north-south, it was an imposing city. Nothing but plain was to be seen in the outskirts, for the reddish fog still obliterated everything about four miles to the north, and the bluish one smothered the view southward some seven. A well-fed Hadolaris visited one of the city’s Rehabilitation Advisors, for civilian techniques and material resources had advanced enormously since his last acquaintance with them, and idioms and speech-sounds had changed bewilderingly, while the whole code of social behaviour was terrifyingly different. Armed with some manuals, a pocket recorder, and some standard speechform and folkway tapes, he rapidly purchased thin clothing, stormwear, writing implements, further recording tools, lugbags and other personal gear. After a night at a good guestery, Hadolaris sought interviews with the employing offices of seven subtropical development agencies, was tested and, armed with seven letters of introduction, boarded the night liner mag-lev train for the south past the shore of the North-Eastern Sea and to Oluluetang some 360 miles south. One of the tailors who had fitted him up had revealed that on quiet nights very low-pitched rumblings were to be heard from, presumably, the mountains northward. Hadolaris wanted to get as far from that North as he conveniently could.

He awoke among palms and savannah-reeds. There was no sign of either sight-barrier down here. The city was dispersed into compact blocks of multistorey buildings, blocks separated by belts of rich woodland and drive-like roadways and monorails. Unlike the towns of the Great Valley, it was not arranged on an east-west strip, though its north-south axis was still relatively short. Hadolarisóndamo found himself a small guestery, studied a plan of the city and its factory areas, bought a guide to the district and settled down to several days of exploration and inquiry before visiting the seven agencies themselves. His evenings were spent in adult classes, his nights absorbing the speech-form recordings unconsciously in sleep. In the end, after nineteen days (about four hours at Veruam’s latitude, four minutes at that of Emmel, less than two seconds at the higher bunker, he reflected) he obtained employment as a minor sales manager of vegetable products in one of the organizations.

Communication north and south, he found, was possible verbally for quite a number of miles, provided one knew the rules. In consequence the zoning here was far from severe and travel and social facilities covered a very wide area. One rarely saw the military here. Hadolarisóndamo bought an automob and, as he rose in the organization’s hierarchy, a second one for pleasure. He found himself well liked and soon had a circle of friends and a number of hobbies. After a number of love affairs, he married a girl whose father was higher up in the organization, and, some five years after his arrival in the city, became the father of a boy.

• • • •

“Arisón!” called his wife from the boat. Their son, aged five, was puttering at the warm surface of the lake with his fists over the gunwale. Hadolarisóndamo was painting on the little island, quick lines and sweeps across the easelled canvas, a pattern of light and shade bursting out of the swamp trees over a little bay. “Arisón! I can’t get this thing to start. Could you swim over and try?”

“Five minutes more, Mihányo. Must get this down.”

Sighing, Karamihanyolàsve continued, but without much hope, to fish from the bows with her horizontal yo-yo gadget. Too quiet round here for a bite. A parakeet flashed in the branches to right. Derestó, the boy, stopped hitting the water, and pulled over the tube-window, let it into the lake and got Mihányo to slide on its lightswitch. Then he peered this way and that under the surface, giving little exclamations as tiny fish of various shapes and hues shot across. Presently Arisón called over, folded up his easel, pulled off his trousers, propped paints and canvas on top of everything, and swam over. There were no crocs in this lake, hippo were far off, filariasis and bilharzia had been eliminated here. Twenty minutes’ rather tense tinkering got things going, and the silent fuel-cell driven screw was ready to pilot them over to the painting island and thence across the lake to where a little stream’s current pushed out into the expanse. They caught four. Presently back under the westering sun to the jetty, tie-up, and home in the automob.

• • • •

By the time Derestó was eight and ready to be formally named Lafonderestónami, he had a sister of three and a baby brother of one. He was a keen swimmer and boatman, and was developing into a minor organizer, both at home and in school. Arisón was now third in the firm, but kept his balance. Holidays were spent either in the deep tropics (where one could gain on the time-exchange) or among the promontories on the southern shores of the North-Eastern Sea (where one had to lose), or, increasingly, in the agricultural stream-scored western uplands, where a wide vista of the world could in many areas be seen and the cloudscapes had full play. Even there the sight-barriers were a mere fogginess near the north and south horizons, backed by a darkness in the sky.

Now and then, during a bad night, Arisón thought about the “past.” He generally concluded that, even if a breakthrough had been imminent in, say, half an hour from his departure, this could hardly affect the lives of himself and his wife, or even of their children, down here in the south, in view of the time-contraction southwards. Also, he reflected, since nothing ever struck further south than a point north of Emmel’s latitude, the ballistic attacks must be mounted close to the Frontier; or if they were not, then the Enemy must lack all knowledge of either southern time-gradients or southern geography, so that the launching of missiles from well north of the Frontier to pass well south of it would not be worthwhile. And even the fastest heli which could be piloted against time conceleration would, he supposed, never get through.

Always adaptable, Arisón had never suffered long from the disabilities incident on having returned after a time at the Front. Mag-lev train travel and other communications had tended to unify the speech and the ethos, though naturally the upper reaches of the Great Valley and the military zone in the mountains of the North were linguistically and sociologically somewhat isolated. In the western uplands, too, pockets of older linguistic forms and old-fashioned attitudes still remained, as the family found on its holidays. By and large, however, the whole land spoke the tongue of the “contemporary” subtropical lowlands, inevitably modified of course by the onomatosyntomy or “shortmouth” of latitude. A “contemporary” ethical and social code had also spread. The southern present may be said to have colonized the northern past, even geological past, somewhat as the birds and other travelling animals had done, but with the greater resources of human wits, flexibility, traditions, and techniques.

Ordinary people bothered little about the war. Time conceleration was on their side. Their spare mental energies were spent in a vast selection of plays and ploys, making, representing, creating, relishing, criticizing, theorizing, discussing, arranging, organizing, co-operating, but not so often out of their own zone. Arisón found himself the member of a dozen interweaving circles, and Mihányo was even more involved. Not that they were never alone: The easy tempo of work and life with the double “week” of five days’ work, two days free, seven days’ work and six days free, the whole staggered across the population and in the organizations, left much leisure time which could be spent on their own selves. Arisón took up texture-sculpting, then returned after two years to painting, but with magneto-brush instead of spraypen; purified by his texture-sculpting period, he achieved a powerful area control and won something of a name for himself. Mihányo, on the other hand, became a musician. Derestó, it was evident, was going to be a handler of men and societies, besides having, at thirteen, entered the athletic age. His sister of eight was a great talker and arguer. The boy of six was, they hoped, going to be a writer, at least in his spare time: He had a keen eye for things, and a keen interest in telling about them. Arisón was content to remain, when he had reached it, second in the firm: A chiefship would have told on him too much. He occasionally lent his voice to the administration of local affairs, but took no major part.

• • • •

Mihányo and Arisón were watching a firework festival on the North-Eastern Sea from their launch, off one of the southern promontories. Up here, a fine velvety backdrop for the display was made by the inky black of the northern sight-barrier, which cut off the stars in a gigantic arc. Fortunately the weather was fine. The silhouettes of the firework boats could just be discerned. In a world which knew no moon, the pleasures of a “white night” were often only to be got by such displays. The girl and Derestó were swimming round and round the launch. Even the small boy had been brought out, and was rather blearily staring northward. Eventually the triple green star went up and the exhibition was over; at the firework boats a midnight had been reached. Derestó and Venoyyè were called in, located by a flare, and ultimately prevailed on to climb in, shivering slightly, and dry off in the hot-air blaster, dancing about like two imps. Arisón turned the launch for the shore and Silarrè was found to be asleep. So was Venoyyè when they touched the jetty. Their parents had each to carry one in and up to the beachouse.

Next morning, they packed and set out in the automob for home. Their twenty days’ holiday had cost 160 days of Oluluetang time. Heavy rain was falling when they reached the city. Mihányo, when the children were settled in, had a long talk on the opsiphone with her friend across the breadth of Oluluetang: She (the friend) had been with her husband badger-watching in the western uplands. Finally, Arisón chipped in and, after general conversation, exchanged some views with the husband on developments in local politics.

“Pity one grows old so fast down here,” lamented Mihányo that evening; “if only life could go on for ever!”

“Forever is a big word. Besides, being down here makes no difference to the feeling—you don’t feel it any slower up on the Sea, do you, now?”

“I suppose not. But if only . . .”

To switch her mood, Arisón began to talk about Derestó and his future. Soon they were planning their children’s lives for them in the way parents cannot resist doing. With his salary and investments in the firm they would set up the boy for a great administrator, and still have enough to give the others every opportunity.

Next morning it was still in something of a glow that Arisón bade farewell to his wife and went off to take up his work in the offices. He had an extremely busy day and was coming out of the gates in the waning light to his automob in its stall, when he found standing round it three of the military. He looked inquiringly at them as he approached with his personal pulse-key in hand.

“You are VSQ 389 MLD 194 RV 27 XN 3, known as Hadolarisóndamo, resident at” (naming the address) “and subpresident today in this firm.” The cold tones of the leader were a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” whispered Arisón as soon as he could speak.

“I have a warrant for your immediate re-employment with our Forces in the place at which you first received your order for Release. You must come with us forthwith.” The leader produced a luminous orange tag with black markings.

“But my wife and family!”

“They are being informed. We have no time.”

“My firm?”

“Your chief is being informed. Come now.”

“I—I—I must set my affairs in order.”

“Impossible. No time. Urgent situation. Your family and firm must do all that between them. Our orders override everything.”

“Wh—wh—what is your authority? Can I see it, please?”

“This tag should suffice. It corresponds to the tagend which I hope you still have in your identity disc—we will check all that en route. Come on now.”

“But I must see your authority, how do I know, for instance, that you are not trying to rob me, or something?”

“If you know the code you’ll realise that these symbols can only fit one situation. But I’ll stretch a point: You may look at this warrant, but don’t touch it.”

The other two closed in. Arisón saw that they had their quickguns trained on him. The leader pulled out a broad screed. Arisón, as well as the dancing characters would let him, resolved them in the light of the leader’s torch into an order to collect him, Arisón, by today at such and such a time, local Time, if possible immediately on his leaving his place of work (specified); and below, that one man be detailed to call Mihányo by opsiphone simultaneously, and another to call the president of the organization. The Remployee and escort to join the military mag-lev train to Veruam (which was leaving within about fifteen minutes). The Remployee to be taken as expeditiously as possible to the bunker (VV) and thence to the higher bunker (from which he had come some twenty years before, but only about ten minutes in the Time of that bunker, it flashed through Arisón’s brain—apart from six or seven minutes corresponding to his journey south).

“How do they know if I’m fit enough for this job after all these years?”

“They’ve kept checks on you, no doubt.”

Arisón thought of tripping one and slugging two and doing a bolt, but the quickguns of the two were certainly trained upon him. Besides, what would that gain him? A few hours’ start, with unnecessary pain, disgrace, and ruin on Mihányo, his children, and himself, for he was sure to be caught.

“The automob,” he said ridiculously.

“A small matter. Your firm will deal with that.”

“How can I settle my children’s future?”

“Come on, no use arguing. You are coming now, alive or dead, fit or unfit.”

Speechless, Arisón let himself be marched off to a light military vehicle.

In five minutes he was in the mag-lev train, an armoured affair with strong windows. In ten more minutes, with the train moving off, he was stripped of his civilian clothes and possessions (to be returned later to his wife, he learnt), had his identity disc extracted and checked and its Relief tagend removed, and a medical checkup was begun on him. Apparently this was satisfactory to the military authorities. He was given military clothing.

He spent a sleepless night in the train trying to work out what he had done with this, what would be made of that, who Mihányo could call upon in need, who would be likely to help her, how she would manage with the children, what (as nearly as he could work it out) they would get from a pension which he was led to understand would be forthcoming from his firm, how far they could carry on with their expected future.

A grey pre-dawn saw the train’s arrival at Veruam. Foodless (he had been unable to eat any of the rations) and without sleep, he gazed vacantly at the marshalling-yards. The body of men travelling on the train (apparently only a few were Remployees) were got into closed trucks and the long convoy set out for Emmel.

At this moment Hadolaris’ brain began to re-register the conceleration situation. About half a minute must have passed since his departure from Oluluetang, he supposed, in the Time of his top bunker. The journey to Emmel might take up another two minutes. The route from Emmel to that bunker might take a further two and a half minutes there, as far as one could work out the calculus. Add the twenty-years’ (and southward journey’s) sixteen to seventeen minutes, and he would find himself in that bunker not more than some twenty-two minutes after he had left it. (Mihan, Deres, and the other two would all be nearly ten years older and the children would have begun to forget him.) The blitz was unprecedentedly intense when he had left, and he could recall (indeed it had figured in several nightmares since) his prophecy to XN 1 that a breakthrough might be expected within the hour. If he survived the blitz, he was unlikely to survive a breakthrough; and a breakthrough of what? No one had ever seen the Enemy, this Enemy that for Time immemorial had been striving to get across the Frontier. If it got right over, the twilight of the race was at hand. No horror, it was believed at the Front, could equal the horror of that moment. After a hundred miles or so he slept, from pure exhaustion, sitting up in a cramped position, wedged against the next man. Stops and starts and swerves woke him at intervals. The convoy was driving at maximum speeds.

At Emmel he stumbled out to find a storm lashing down. The river was in spate. The column was marched to the depot. Hadolar was separated out and taken in to the terminal building where he was given inoculations, issued with “walker,” quickgun, em-kit, prot-suit, and other impedimenta, and in a quarter of an hour (perhaps seven or eight seconds up at the top bunker) found himself entering a polyheli with thirty other men. This had barely topped the first rise and into sunlight when explosions and flarings were visible on all sides. The machine forged on, the sight-curtains gradually closing up behind and retreating grudgingly before it. The old Northern vertigo and somnambulism re-engulfed Had. To think of Kar and their offspring now was to tap the agony of a ghost who shared his brain and body. After twenty-five minutes they landed close to the foot of a mag-lev train line. The top-bunker lapse of “twenty-two minutes” was going, Had saw, to be something less. He was the third to be bundled into the mag-lev train compartments, and 190 seconds saw him emerging at the top and heading for bunker VV. XN 1 greeted his salute merely with a curt command to proceed by rocket to the top bunker. A few moments more and he was facing XN 2.

“Ah, here you are. Your Relief was killed so we sent back for you. You’d only left a few seconds.” A ragged hole in the bunker wall testified to the incident. The relief’s cadaver, stripped, was being carted off to the disposal machine.

“XN 2. Things are livelier than ever. They certainly are hot stuff. Every new offensive from here is pitched back at us in the same style within minutes, I notice. That new cannon had only just started up when back came the same shells—I never knew They had them. Tit for tat.”

Into H’s brain, seemingly clarified by hunger and exhaustion and much emotion, flashed an unspeakable suspicion, one that he could never prove or disprove, having too little knowledge and experience, too little overall view. No one had ever seen the Enemy. No one knew how or when the War had begun. Information and communication were paralysingly difficult up here. No one knew what really happened to Time as one came close to the Frontier, or beyond it. Could it be that the conceleration there became infinite and that there was nothing beyond the Frontier? Could all the supposed missiles of the Enemy be their own, somehow returning? Perhaps the war had started with a peasant explorer lightheartedly flinging a stone northwards, which returned and struck him? Perhaps there was, then, no Enemy?

“XN 3. Couldn’t that gun’s own shells be reflected back from the Frontier, then?”

“XN 2. Impossible. Now you are to try to reach that forward missile post by the surface—our tunnel is destroyed—at 15º 40’ East—you can just see the hump near the edge of the I/R viewer’s limit—with this message; and tell him verbally to treble output.”

The ragged hole was too small. H left by the forward port. He ran, on his “walker,” into a ribbon of landscape which became a thicket of fire, a porcupine of fire, a Nessus-shirt to the Earth, as in a dream. Into an unbelievable supercrescendo of sound, light, heat, pressure, and impacts he ran, on and on up the now almost invisible slope . . .

© 1965 by David I. Masson.

Originally published in New Worlds.

Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Irvine Masson was born in Edinburgh from a distinguished family of academics and thinkers. Although his output was small and consisted entirely of short stories, he gained a reputation as a writer of vigorous experimental SF. All of his short science fiction is published in the collection The Caltraps of Time. He died in Leeds in 2007.

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

FANTASY

State Change

Ken Liu

Every night, before going to bed, Rina checked the refrigerators.

There were two in the kitchen, on separate circuits, one with a fancy ice dispenser on the door. There was one in the living room holding up the TV, and one in the bedroom doubling as a nightstand. A small cubical unit meant for college dorm rooms was in the hallway, and a cooler that Rina refilled with fresh ice every night was in the bathroom, under the sink.

Rina opened the door of each refrigerator and looked in. Most of the refrigerators were empty most of the time. This didn’t bother Rina. She wasn’t interested in filling them. The checks were a matter of life and death. It was about the preservation of her soul.

What she was interested in were the freezer compartments. She liked to hold each door open for a few seconds, let the cold mist of condensation dissipate, and feel the chill on her fingers, breasts, face. She closed the door when the motor kicked in.

By the time she was done with all of the refrigerators, the apartment was filled with the bass chorus of all of the motors, a low, confident hum that to Rina was the sound of safety.

In her bedroom, Rina got into bed and pulled the covers over her. She had hung some pictures of glaciers and icebergs on the walls, and she looked at them as pictures of old friends. There was also a framed picture on the refrigerator by her bed, this one of Amy, her roommate in college. They had lost touch over the years, but Rina kept her picture there anyway.

Rina opened the refrigerator next to her bed. She stared into the glass dish that held her ice cube. Every time she looked, it seemed to get smaller.

Rina closed the refrigerator and picked up the book lying on top of it.

• • • •

Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Portrait in Letters by Friends, Foes, and Lovers—

New York, January 23, 1921

My Dearest Viv,—

Finally got up the courage to go see Vincent at her hotel today. She told me she wasn’t in love with me any more. I cried. She became angry and told me that if I couldn’t keep myself under control then I might as well leave. I asked her to make me some tea.

It’s that boy she’s been seen with. I knew that. Still, it was terrible to hear it from her own lips. The little savage.

She smoked two cigarettes and offered me the box. I couldn’t stand the bitterness so I stopped after one. Afterwards she gave me her lipstick so I could fix my lips, as if nothing had happened, as if we were still in our room at Vassar.

“Write a poem for me,” I said. She owed me at least that.

She looked as if she wanted to argue, but stopped herself. She took out her candle, put it in that candleholder I made for her and lit it at both ends. When she lit her soul like that she was at her most beautiful. Her face glowed. Her pale skin was lit from within like a Chinese paper lantern about to burst into flame. She paced around the room as if she would tear down the walls. I drew up my feet on the bed, and wrapped her scarlet shawl around me, staying out of her way.

Then she sat down at her desk and wrote out her poem. As soon as it was done she blew out her candle, stingy with what remained of it. The smell of hot wax made me all teary-eyed again. She made out a clean copy for herself and gave the original to me.

“I did love you, Elaine,” she said. “Now be a good girl and leave me alone.”

This is how her poem starts:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning, but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh—

Viv, for a moment I wanted to take her candle and break it in half, to throw the pieces into the fireplace and melt her soul into nothing. I wanted to see her writhing at my feet, begging me to let her live.

But all I did was to throw that poem in her face, and I left.

I’ve been wandering around the streets of New York all day. I can’t keep her savage beauty out of my mind. I wish my soul was heavier, more solid, something that could weigh itself down. I wish my soul wasn’t this feather, this ugly wisp of goose down in my pocket, lifted up and buffeted about by the wind around her flame. I feel like a moth.

Your Elaine

• • • •

Rina put the book down.

To be able to set your soul afire, she thought, to be able to draw men and women to you at your will, to be brilliant, fearless of consequences, what would she not give to live a life like that?

Millay chose to light her candle at both ends, and lived an incandescent life. When her candle ran out, she died sick, addicted, and much too young. But each day of her life she could decide, “Am I going to be brilliant today?”

Rina imagined her ice cube in the dark, cold cocoon of the freezer. Stay calm, she thought. Block it out. This is your life. This bit of almost-death.

Rina turned out the light.

• • • •

When Rina’s soul finally materialized, the nurse in charge of watching the afterbirth almost missed it. All of a sudden, there, in the stainless steel pan, was an ice cube, the sort you would find clinking around in glasses at cocktail parties. A pool of water was already forming around it. The edges of the ice cube were becoming rounded, indistinct.

An emergency refrigeration unit was rushed in, and the ice cube was packed away.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said to Rina’s mother, who looked into the serene face of her baby daughter. No matter how careful they were, how long could they keep the ice cube from melting? It wasn’t as if they could just keep it in a freezer somewhere and forget about it. The soul had to be pretty close to the body; otherwise the body would die.

Nobody in the room said anything. The air around the baby was awkward, still, silent. Words froze in their throats.

• • • •

Rina worked in a large building downtown, next to the piers and docked yachts she had never been on. On each floor, there were offices with windows around the sides, the ones overlooking the harbor being bigger and better furnished than the others.

In the middle of the floor were the cubicles, one of which was Rina’s. Next to her were two printers. The hum of the printers was a bit like the hum of refrigerators. Lots of people passed by her cubicle on the way to pick up their printouts. Sometimes they stopped, thinking they would say hello to the quiet girl sitting there, with her pale skin and ice-blond hair, and always a sweater around her shoulders. Nobody knew what color her eyes were because she did not look up from her desk.

But there was a chill in the air around her, a fragile silence that did not want to be broken. Even though they saw her every day, most people did not know Rina’s name. After a while, it became too embarrassing to ask. While the chattering life of the office ebbed and flowed around her, people left her alone.

Under Rina’s desk was a small freezer that the firm had installed just for her. Each morning Rina would rush into her cubicle, unzip her insulated lunch bag, and from her thermos stuffed with ice cubes, she would carefully pull out the sandwich bag holding her one special ice cube and put it into the freezer. She would sigh, and sit in her chair, and wait for her heart to slow down.

The job of the people in the smaller offices away from the harbor was to look up, on their computers, the answers to questions asked by people in the offices facing the harbor. Rina’s job was to take those answers and use the right fonts to squeeze them into the right places on the right pieces of paper to be sent back to the people in the harbor offices. Sometimes the people in the smaller offices were too busy and they would dictate their answers onto cassette tapes. Rina would then type up the answers.

Rina ate her lunch at her cubicle. Even though one could go some distance away from one’s soul for short periods of time without getting sick, Rina liked to be as close to the freezer as possible. When she had to be away sometimes to deliver an envelope to some office on another floor, she had visions of sudden power failures. Out of breath, she would then hurry through the halls to get back to the safety of her freezer.

Rina tried not to think that life was unfair to her. Had she been born before the invention of Frigidaire she would not have survived. She didn’t want to be ungrateful. But sometimes it was difficult.

After work, instead of going dancing with the other girls or getting ready for a date, she spent her nights at home, reading biographies to lose herself in other lives.

• • • •

Morning Walks with T. S. Eliot: A Memoir—

Between 1958 and 1963, Eliot was a member of the Commission for the Revised Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer. He was rather frail by this time, and avoided tapping into his tin of coffee altogether.

One exception was when the Commission came to revise Psalm 23. Four centuries earlier, Bishop Coversdale had been rather free with his translation from the Hebrew. The correct English rendition for the central metaphor in the Psalm, the Commission agreed, was “the valley of deep darkness.”

At the meeting, for the first time in months, Eliot brewed a cup of his coffee. The rich, dark aroma was unforgettable to me.

Eliot took a sip of his coffee, and then, in that same mesmerizing voice he used to read The Wasteland, he recited the traditional version that had infused itself into the blood of every Englishman: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.”

The vote was unanimous to keep Coversdale’s version, embellished though it might have been.

I think it always surprised people how deep was Eliot’s devotion to tradition, to the Anglican Church, and also how thoroughly his soul had been imbibed by the English.

I believe that was the last time Eliot tasted his soul, and often since then I have wished that I could again smell that aroma: bitter, burnt, and restrained. It was not only the spirit of a true Englishman, but also that of the genius of poetry.

• • • •

To measure out a life with coffee spoons, Rina thought, must have seemed dreadful sometimes. Perhaps that was why Eliot had no sense of humor.

But a soul in a coffee tin was also lovely in its own way. It enlivened the air around him, made everyone who heard his voice alert, awake, open and receptive to the mysteries of his difficult, dense verse. Eliot could not have written, and the world would have understood, Four Quartets without the scent of Eliot’s soul, the edge it gave to every word, the sharp tang of having drunk something deeply significant.

I would love to have the mermaids sing to me, Rina thought. Was that what Eliot dreamed of after drinking his coffee before sleep?

Instead of mermaids, she dreamt of glaciers that night. Miles and miles of ice that would take a hundred years to melt. Though there was no life in sight, Rina smiled in her sleep. It was her life.

• • • •

On the first day the new man showed up at work, Rina could tell that he was not going to be in his office for long.

His shirt was a few years out of style, and he did not take care to polish his shoes that morning. He was not very tall, and his chin was not very sharp. His office was down the hall from Rina’s cubicle, and it was small, with only one window facing the building next to this one. The nametag outside the office said Jimmy Kesnow. By all signs he should have been just another one of the anonymous, ambitious, disappointed young men passing through the building every day.

But Jimmy was the most comfortable person Rina had ever seen. Wherever he was, he acted like he belonged. He was not loud and he did not talk fast, but conversations and crowds opened up places for him. He would say only a few words, but people would laugh and afterwards feel a little wittier themselves. He would smile at people, and they would feel happier, more handsome, more beautiful. He popped in and out of his office all morning, managing to look purposeful and relaxed enough to stop and chat at the same time. Offices remained open after he had left, and their occupants felt no desire to close the doors.

Rina saw that the girl in the cubicle next to hers primped herself when she heard Jimmy’s voice coming down the hall.

It seemed difficult to even remember what life in the office was like before Jimmy.

Rina knew that young men like that did not stay in small offices with only one window facing an alley for very long. They moved into offices facing the harbor, or maybe on the next floor. Rina imagined that his soul was probably a silver spoon, effortlessly dazzling and desirable.

• • • •

The Trial of Joan of Arc—

“At night the soldiers and Joan slept together on the ground. When Joan took off her armor we could see her breasts, which were beautiful. And yet never once did she awake in me carnal desires.

“Joan would become angry when the soldiers swore in her presence or spoke of the pleasures of the flesh. She always chased away the women who followed soldiers with her sword unless a soldier promised to marry such a woman.

“Joan’s purity came from her soul, which she always carried on her body whether she was riding into battle or getting ready to sleep for the night. This was a beech branch. Not far from Douremy, her home village, there was an old beech tree called the Ladies’ Tree by a spring. Her soul came from that tree, for the branch gave off a smell that those who knew Joan in her childhood swore was the same smell given off by the spring by the Ladies’ Tree.

“Whoever came into Joan’s presence with a sinful thought would instantly have that flame extinguished by the influence of her soul. Thus she remained pure, as I do swear to tell the truth, even though she would sometimes be naked as the rest of the soldiers.”

• • • •

“Hey,” Jimmy said. “What’s your name?”

“Joan,” Rina said. She blushed, and put her book down. “Rina, I meant.” Instead of looking at him, she looked down at the half-eaten salad on her desk. She wondered if there was anything at the corners of her mouth. She thought about wiping her mouth with the napkin but decided that would draw too much attention.

“You know, I’ve been asking around the office all morning, and no one could tell me your name.”

Even though Rina already knew this was true, she felt a little sad, as if she had disappointed him. She shrugged.

“But now I know something no one else here knows,” Jimmy said, and sounded as if she had told him a wonderful secret.

Did they finally turn down the air conditioning? Rina thought. It didn’t feel as cold as it usually did. She thought about taking off her sweater.

“Hey Jimmy,” the girl in the cubicle next to Rina’s called out. “Come over here. Let me show you those pictures I was telling you about.”

“See you later,” Jimmy said, and smiled at her. She knew because she was looking up, looking into his face, which she realized could be handsome.

• • • •

Legends of the Romans—

Cicero was born with a pebble. Therefore, no one expected him to amount to much.

Cicero practiced public speaking with the pebble in his mouth. Sometimes he almost choked on it. He learned to use simple words and direct sentences. He learned to push his voice past the pebble in his mouth, to articulate, to speak clearly even when his tongue betrayed him.

He became the greatest orator of his age.

• • • •

“You read a lot,” Jimmy said.

Rina nodded. Then she smiled at him.

“I’ve never seen eyes with your shade of blue,” Jimmy said, looking directly into her eyes. “It’s like the sea, but through a layer of ice.” He said this casually, as if he was talking about a vacation he had taken, a movie he had seen. This was why Rina knew he was being sincere, and she felt as if she had given him another secret, one she didn’t even know she had.

Neither of them said anything. This would usually be awkward. But Jimmy simply leaned against the wall of the cubicle, admiring the stack of books on Rina’s desk. He settled into the silence, relaxed into it. And so Rina felt content to let the silence go on.

“Oh, Catullus,” Jimmy said. He picked up one of the books. “Which poem is your favorite?”

Rina pondered this. It seemed too bold to say that it was “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love.” It seemed too coy to say that it was “You ask me how many kisses.”

She agonized over the answer.

He waited, not hurrying her.

She couldn’t decide. She began to say something, anything, but nothing came out. A pebble was in her throat, an ice-cold pebble. She was angry with herself. She must have looked like such an idiot to him.

“Sorry,” Jimmy said. “Steve is waving at me to come to his office. I’ll catch up with you later.”

• • • •

Amy was Rina’s roommate in college. She was the only person Rina ever pitied. Amy’s soul was a pack of cigarettes.

But Amy did not act like she wanted to be pitied. By the time Rina met her, Amy had less than half a pack left.

“What happened to the rest of them?” Rina was horrified. She could not imagine herself being so careless with her life.

Amy wanted Rina to go out with her at nights, to dance, to drink, and to meet boys. Rina kept on saying no.

“Do it for me,” Amy said. “You feel sorry for me, right? Well, I’m asking you to come with me, just once.”

Amy took Rina to a bar. Rina hugged her thermos to her the whole way. Amy pried it out of her hand, dropped Rina’s ice cube into a shot glass, and told the bartender to keep it chilled in the freezer.

Boys came up to try to pick them up. Rina ignored them. She was terrified. She wouldn’t take her eyes off the freezer.

“Try to act like you are having fun, will you?” Amy said.

The next time a boy came up to them, Amy took out one of her cigarettes.

“You see this?” she said to the boy. Her eyes flashing in the glow from the neon lights behind the bar. “I’m going to start smoking it right now. If you can get my friend here to laugh before I finish it, I will go home with you tonight.”

“How about both of you come home with me tonight?”

“Sure,” Amy said. “Why not? You better get cracking though.” She flicked her lighter and took a long drag on her cigarette. She threw her head back and blew the smoke high into the air.

“This is what I live for,” Amy whispered to Rina, her pupils unfocused, wild. “All life is an experiment.” Smoke drifted from her nostrils and made Rina cough.

Rina stared at Amy. Then she turned around to face the boy. She felt a little lightheaded. The crooked nose on the boy’s face seemed funny and sad at the same time.

Amy’s soul was infectious.

“I’m jealous,” Amy said to Rina the next morning. “You have a very sexy laugh.” Rina smiled when she heard that.

Rina found the shot glass with her ice cube in the boy’s freezer. She took the shot glass home with her.

Still, that was the last time Rina agreed to go with Amy.

They lost touch after college. When Rina thought about Amy, she wished that her pack of cigarettes would magically refill itself.

• • • •

Rina had been paying attention to the flow of paper out of the printers next to her. She knew that Jimmy was going to move to an office upstairs soon. She didn’t have a lot of time.

She went shopping over the weekend. She made her choices carefully. Her color was ice blue. She had her nails done, to go with her eyes.

Rina decided on Wednesday. People tended to have more to talk about at the beginning of the week and the end of the week, either about what they had done over the weekend or what they were about to do the next weekend. There was not so much to talk about on Wednesdays.

Rina brought her shot glass with her, for good luck, and because the glass was easy to chill.

She made her move after lunch. There was still a lot of work in the afternoon, and the gossip tended to die down then.

She opened the freezer door, took out the chilled shot glass and the sandwich bag with her ice cube. She took the ice cube out of the bag and put it into the shot glass. Condensation immediately formed on the outside of the glass.

She took off her sweater, picked up the glass in her hand and began to walk around the office.

She walked wherever there were groups of people—in the hallways, by the printers, next to the coffee machines. As she approached, people felt a sudden chill in the air, and there would be a lull in the conversation. Witticisms sounded flat and stupid. Arguments died. Suddenly everyone would remember how much work he still had to do and make up some excuse to get away. Office doors closed as she passed them.

She walked around until the halls were quiet, and the only office with its door open was Jimmy’s.

She looked down into the glass. There was a small pool of water at the bottom of the glass; soon the ice cube would be floating.

She still had time, if she hurried.

Kiss me, before I disappear.

She put the shot glass down outside the door to Jimmy’s office. I am not Joan of Arc.

She walked into Jimmy’s office and closed the door behind her.

• • • •

“Hello,” she said. Now that she was alone with him, she didn’t know what else to do.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s so quiet around here today. What’s going on?”

“Si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam cenam, non sine candida puella,” she said. “If you bring with you a good meal and lots of it, and not without a pretty girl. That’s the one. That’s my favorite poem.”

She felt shy, but warm. There was no weight on her tongue, no pebble in her throat. Her soul was outside that door, but she was not anxious. She was not counting down the seconds. The shot glass with her life in it was in another time, another place.

“Et uino et sale et omnibus cachinnis,” he finished for her. “And wine and salt and all the laughter.”

She saw that there was a saltshaker on his desk. Salt made the blandest food palatable. Salt was like wit and laughter in conversation. Salt made the plain extraordinary. Salt made the simple beautiful. Salt was his soul.

And salt made it harder to freeze.

She laughed.

She unbuttoned her blouse. He began to get up, to stop her. She shook her head and smiled at him.

I have no candle to burn at both ends. I won’t measure my life with coffee spoons. I have no spring water to quiet desire because I have left behind my frozen bit of almost-death. What I have is my life.

“All life is an experiment,” she said.

She shook off her blouse and stepped out of her skirt. He could now see what she had bought over the weekend.

Ice blue was her color.

• • • •

She remembered laughing, and she remembered him laughing back. She worked hard to memorize every touch, every quickened breath. What she didn’t want to remember was the time.

The noise of the people outside the door gradually rose and then gradually settled down. They lingered in his office.

What lips my lips have kissed, she thought, and realized that it was again completely quiet outside the office. Sunlight in the room was taking on a red tinge.

She got up, stepping away from his grasp, and put on her blouse, stepped into her skirt. She opened the door to his office and picked up the shot glass.

She looked, and looked frantically, for a sliver of ice. Even the tiniest crystal would suffice. She would keep it frozen and eke out the rest of her life on the memory of this one day, this one day when she was alive.

But there was only water in the glass, clear, pure water.

She waited for her heart to stop beating. She waited for her lungs to stop breathing. She walked back into his office so that she could die looking into his eyes.

It would be hard to freeze salty water.

She felt warm, inviting, open. Something flowed into the coldest, quietest, and emptiest corners of her heart and filled her ears with the roar of waves. She thought she had so much to say to him that she would never have time to read again.

• • • •

Rina,

I hope you are well. It has been a long time since we last saw each other.

I would imagine the immediate question on your mind is how many cigarettes I have left. Well, the good news is that I have quit smoking. The bad news is that my last cigarette was finished six months ago.

But as you can see, I am still alive.

Souls are tricky things, Rina, and I thought I had it all figured out. All my life I thought my fate was to be reckless, to gamble with each moment of my life. I thought that was what I was meant to do. The only moments when I felt alive were those times when I lit up a bit of my soul, daring for something extraordinary to happen before the flame and ashes touched my fingers. I would be alert during those times, sensitive to every vibration in my ears, every bit of color in my eyes. My life was a clock running down. The months between my cigarettes were just dress rehearsals for the real performance, and I was engaged for twenty showings.

I was down to my last cigarette, and I was terrified. I had planned for some big final splash, to go out with a bang. But when it came time to smoke that last cigarette, I lost my courage. When you realize you are going to die after you have finished that last breath, suddenly your hands start to shake, and you cannot hold a match steady or flick a lighter with your thumb.

I got drunk at a beach party, passed out. Someone needed a nicotine fix, pawed through my purse and found my last cigarette. By the time I woke up the empty box was on the sand next to me, and a little crab had crawled into it and made it its home.

Like I said, I didn’t die.

All my life I thought my soul was in those cigarettes, and I never even thought about the box. I never paid any attention to that paper shell of quiet, that enclosed bit of emptiness.

An empty box is a home for lost spiders you want to carry outside. It holds loose change, buttons that have fallen off, needles and thread. It works tolerably well for lipstick, eye pencil, and a bit of blush. It is open to whatever you’d like to put in it.

And that is how I feel: open, careless, adaptable. Yes, life is now truly just an experiment. What can I do next? Anything.

But to get here, I first had to smoke my cigarettes.

What happened to me was a state change. When my soul turned from a box of cigarettes to a box, I grew up.

I thought of writing to you because you remind me of myself. You thought you understood your soul, and you thought you knew how you needed to live your life. I thought you were wrong then, but I didn’t have the right answer myself.

But now I do. I think you are ready for a state change.

Your friend always,

Amy

© 2004 by Ken Liu.

Originally published in Polyphony 4.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015, along with a collection of short stories.

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

The Djinn Who Sought To Kill The Sun

Tahmeed Shafiq

They travelled all day, and at night came to rest by one of the large rocks that jut from the desert. The last caveat to voyagers before the plains of windswept sand.

Here is what the boy heard:

“Long ago, almost fifty years by official counting, there was a boy named Alladin living in the alleyways of the city, a scavenger, thief, and trickster.

“When he had seen seventeen summers pass, he thought it high time he sought out his fortune. So, with all the arrogance and strength of youth at his side, he set out for the mountain caves where the sorcerers were said to live.

“When he asked to join them he was turned away. He was too young, too inexperienced. Full of anger he left, swearing revenge.”

The rest was . . . vague. The djinn seemed to have slipped into another language, one the boy didn’t know. The little he was able to make out made little sense. He caught the words “punishment” and “fools” and “beloved,” but aside from that . . .

Eventually the djinn’s tirade subsided and he continued:

“The guardians told him what the place was, who I was, but that only seemed to encourage him. He killed them, and entered the chamber. He freed me from my shackles . . . and bound me again. In a lamp. Cheap copper bought from a trader. To contain me.

“For the next forty-eight years he kept me a slave. Had me kill the magicians and build him his kingdom and win your mother’s heart. Forced to do his bidding, for . . . forty-eight years . . .”

Two hundred years in chains, overall.

The djinn looked up at the night sky to clear his eyes from the smoke. Two tears slipped down his chin to lie in the sand. My love, he thought sadly. He glanced at the boy, asleep curled up like a cat.

“Sleep well,” he said. “Tomorrow we go to kill the sun.”

• • • •

The desert stretched out before them. Waves of sand rolled across the vista under a blue, empty sky, boiling in the heat of the sun. Every breath the djinn took felt like fire in his lungs. He shifted in his saddle and glanced at the boy. He was slumped over the back of his camel as the beast plodded its way along. His lips were cracked and bleeding. If they didn’t find water quickly . . .

He looked to the horizon, ignoring the shimmering mirages, and his heart lightened as he saw a dark blot perhaps two miles away. As they got closer it became clearer: a cluster of reddish rocks shaped like a pyramid, twice his height, one side open to reveal darkness and the sound of cool, flowing water.

The boy wasn’t asleep, but he had been struck hard by the heat. The djinn made him lie down in the shade of the structure and ventured inside.

It had been made by human hands a long time ago, for weathered steps cut into the rock descended into darkness. But those would have to wait. The dripping sound he had heard came from a tiny well set into the floor. A crudely excavated hollow flung the echoes of the flowing stream upwards, one of the many that crisscrossed the desert just like the caravans. There was no bucket, so the djinn called forth the water with magic, using only the barest amount of energy required. He would need it all later. He filled both waterskins and took them to the boy.

The lad was so tired he couldn’t even sit up, so the djinn forced water in between his lips and washed his dusty face. Somewhat rejuvenated, the boy sat up and drank by himself.

“Slowly now, not too much all at once.” He took the chance to water both himself and the camels and to chew a strip of dried meat, tough as leather between his jaws. The boy ate what little he could and promptly fell asleep with his head on his chest. Let him sleep. I’ll be long enough.

He took off his cloak, covered the boy with it, and disappeared into the cave. The steps were steep and there was no light to see by, which didn’t really bother him. He’d spent half a century languishing in a prison far darker than this.

He couldn’t tell how far down they went, or how long he descended, but it felt like hours. When the steps leveled out into a long corridor, the djinn cast a small spell and summoned a little light for him to see by. A flickering will-o’-the-wisp hung suspended over his head.

At the far end there was a large stone chamber, directly below the stream he had heard earlier. A tiny trickle of water had wormed its way through and laid a sheet of water on the floor. Drip. Drip.

Standing in the center of the room was a figure that stood head and shoulders above him, and human save for two dappled wings emerging from his back. They shimmered in a translucence of rainbow hues.

Ifreet. The djinn had heard stories of them in his youth, but he had never believed them. They were all dead. Yet here one was.

The legendary being looked at him with eyes filled with yellow flames. The djinn watched as two shimmering wings spread to either side. They were so long they almost touched the walls.

But it was old. Its face was deeply lined and haggard, its beard tangled and grey, and it stood hunchbacked. Naked, its feet were longer than his and twisted backwards like the old minister his jailer had kept, the one who’d danced so nicely with the pokes from the djinn’s sword.

“How strange,” the ifreet said, “to see another of my kind here, after all these years.”

“Not your kind, old one. Your kind died out a long time ago.”

He received a soft, toothless smile. “Yes. They did. But you are my kin, are you not? The children of my children of my children’s children. How long have I been here?”

“The last of your kind died out over three thousand years ago.”

The ifreet’s eyes changed colour, the fire turning red, and the djinn felt something probe his mind, checking his memories.

“You speak the truth.”

Here was his chance. “That is why I have come. You have knowledge that is long gone. Tell me how to kill the sun.”

A dry chuckle. “Kill the sun? Has the heat addled your brain? How can you kill the sun?”

“Tell me.”

The ifreet gave him a curious glance. “Why do you want to know?”

No reply.

Its eyes flared vermilion, and its voice gained a harsher, stronger edge. “I see you, sorcerer. I see what you desire. And why.”

“I will bring her back.”

“Is that it? Is that why you want this knowledge? Or is it greed? I see you, sorcerer. Even after all this time, after your punishment? Oh, young one, have you learned nothing?”

A blast of hot desert wind rushed through the chamber, stirring the dust and, for a second, the ifreet staggered. “Still your tongue and tell me what I want to know! . . . Tell me . . . and I will free you from this place.”

The ifreet’s hollow eyes grew large in wonder. The djinn listened carefully to what it told him.

When he emerged, the sun had crept past the horizon. The blue stripe across the world was as thick and bold as a master-painter’s stroke. He checked on the animals; they were almost dead, poor things. He’d been forced to draw the energy from them to summon the wind. They wouldn’t be able to be ridden.

The djinn drew on the last vestiges of their energy to cast a spell. Then he took a long drink of water, topped up both waterskins again, and picked up the sleeping boy. He slung one pack on each shoulder and carried the boy on his back. He bunched a headcloth behind his neck to serve as a pillow. Checked the faint stars, and began to walk east.

When they were no more than a dot on the horizon, the spell began to take effect. The pyramid began to sink beneath the sands. Within seconds, what had once been the tomb of an ifreet was a sand dune like any other. Streaks of sand were silver under the moon. Only a tiny pebble remained to mark the spot, and when a gale blew and moved a fine layer of material, even that too was covered. Silent dunes were the only land under the moonwashed sky.

• • • •

It was a small town, but essential for trading. All the caravans stopped at the oasis, so it was natural that a town should spring up there. The water was strictly rationed and the food was often scarce, but the people made up for it by trading what they had in excess with what they needed from the caravans.

The boy and the djinn arrived with the latest caravan, which bore news of the king’s death. The djinn pulled the boy into an alleyway and told him to hush while he listened to what the leader was saying to the crowd that had gathered. He murmured a spell that would prevent the child from hearing what was said.

“The king and queen are dead! They were both found stabbed in the heart. All the ministers and castle guards were slain too!”

“What of the prince?” someone shouted.

“He is missing. For now, the Captain of the Guard holds the throne as Regent.” His voice fell. “Brothers and sisters, darkness has fallen over the land. There is chaos in the capital. No one knows what will happen next. I urge you all to take caution and prepare for the worst. We may be the last caravan to pass by here in a very long time.” He whipped his camel and led the procession out of the town to a restless series of murmurs and conversations.

We must move fast. The djinn broke the spell and pulled the boy deeper into the alleyway.

• • • •

The beggar was taking a nap behind a stall in the marketplace. He had his bowl in front of him, just in case, and his hat over his eyes to protect from the sun. Just when he thought he was going to get some rest, he heard the chink of coins landing in his bowl, and someone saying, “Beggar. Look at me.”

Cursing in his native tongue, he pushed his wide-brimmed hat back and squinted at the man. He was tall, with almond skin and a black, neatly trimmed beard.

“What do you want?”

As always, he received a shocked look. Qian was from fairer, and wetter, lands to the East, and the fact that one of his people was here always seemed to surprise the natives. But the man quickly became solemn again. “You speak our tongue very well,” he said. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve met one of your people.”

“So you’ve met us, eh? And no doubt you think we’re barbarians?” He scowled.

“Not at all. I admire your people deeply. When I was younger, I journeyed east myself, and I met the philosopher Kong Qiu. He was a very wise man, though we often disagreed on his ideals on family.”

“You . . .” Then it dawned on him: The stranger was telling a joke. He laughed. “You’re a funny one,” he admitted, “but don’t tell me you’ve come to make jokes.”

The stranger fixed him with a long flat stare, and then squatted to look at him in the face. He looked at the coins in the bowl, and Qian saw him mumble something. The bowl rocked to one side, as if pushed, and a rat jumped out and scurried away.

Qian’s face paled. As a child, his mother had told him stories. His grandmother had told him stories. He knew them all. But, he had never truly believed them.

“Wizard,” he breathed, unconsciously slipping into his own tongue.

“Not exactly,” the stranger replied in the same tongue, “but close enough.”

Qian had a thousand questions, but the first one that came to his lips was, “Kong Qiu? Truly?”

“Yes.”

“What . . . what do you want with me?” He was almost afraid to know the answer.

“I want the thing you have hidden in your robes.”

“This?” He held up a large lodestone. It was nothing special, just the last of his trinkets nobody wanted to buy. A child’s toy.

The stranger’s eyes brightened. “Yes. I will buy it from you. What do you want for it?”

Qian was dumbfounded. He’d come to this land two years ago, and for a while had made a living selling and trading curiosities and trifles like the lodestone. Later, when he’d had enough money, he began trading weapons, foodstuffs, spices, and jewels. He used to be rich. But six months ago he’d lost everything on a business venture that went horribly wrong. The lodestone was the only thing he’d kept, simply because its properties fascinated. They were almost like magic.

And now this stranger wanted to buy it from him. A sorcerer, as they called them here. He would use this opportunity.

“Home. Take me home.”

The stranger’s gaze softened, and he sat down beside Qian. He asked, “How long have you been away, my friend?”

“Long enough. I want to go back now. I want to get away from this place. If I were back in my village, I wouldn’t have to trade; I could simply grow my crops and live easily. I might even find myself a pretty wife, who knows? Start a family, cultivate plants, and every year I’d thank the gods for their bounty with a portion of the harvest and enough wine to drown a cow.” He glanced up at the sun, cresting its arc at the zenith. “But here, here no plants grow. What little isn’t sand is dry and arid. And no woman even wants to look at me.”

“And the wine?”

Qian shook a clay bottle. “All gone,” he said.

The stranger laughed, drawing looks from people nearby. “Very well,” he said, smiling, “I agree to your price.” He held out a hand for the lodestone.

Qian handed it over. It was a rough chunk of black stone larger than a man’s hand. When it was brought near iron, it would pull the metal towards it. Magic. But, the stranger could do magic as well. So why would he want it? Why? When he could do—

Magic.

He was no longer behind a stall in the marketplace, talking to a stranger.

He was standing on a hill, overlooking a valley containing a small village. He could see the cozy homes of the people, and the trails of smoke drifting up to the sky, vanishing against the white clouds. Cheerful sunlight fell on the fields of rice where men were working diligently to feed their families. He could hear laughter piping up from somewhere.

Home. He was home.

Qian broke into a run, dashing down the hill as fast as he could without tripping. He laughed with unrestrained joy, and leapt straight over the fence at the edge of the village. He kicked off his shoes, running barefoot in the soil of his village, and made for the largest building in the center of the town. Entering with sudden speed, he startled the men drinking inside.

Qian stood for a second in the doorway, his face red with exertion and eyes shining with tears. Then, “One cup of your finest wine please!”

• • • •

With the lodestone tucked away safely, the djinn went back to the stall where he had left the boy. The lad was looking at the toys a vendor was selling. The djinn bought him a wooden horse, and asked for directions to the Plaza of the Alchemists. He brooded as he walked.

The ifreet had told him where to find the trinket-seller, and what he would ask for the lodestone. He’d prepared the power beforehand, but still . . .

The metal is vital, it said. But I find it hard to believe something that looks so plain will help me kill the sun. And the lodestone wasn’t enough on its own—its power needed enhancement. He had the rock in his robes, could feel the weight of it as he walked. The beggar’s price had seemed just to him. He knew what it was like to pine for a home you could not return to.

There was only one alchemist in the small, walled oasis, and he made his stall in the corner of the plaza, hidden from view. Everyone knew of his reputation and he received visitors from many lands, ferrying gifts of jewels and silver in exchange for a favor: a tonic to heal the sick, some parchment bearing a spell for power, stolen from the tomb of a long-dead king . . . and for the power to turn lead into gold. He turned them all away, claiming if they wanted magic, they should see a magician. This was what he was doing when the djinn and boy approached.

A thin voice shrieked from inside the tent. “A philter?! You want me to brew you a PHILTER?! No I will not stay quiet, if you cannot woo this girl, then go to some godforsaken magician! Bah! A warrior like you, with a sword like that! And you cannot even hold your own . . . Pfah! Get out! Get out, you stupid boy!”

A young man stormed out of the tent with his face burning red and a curved sword strapped to his waist. The djinn watched him exit the plaza to the sniggers of several old men playing at stones. It seemed everyone had heard the outburst.

The alchemist emerged from his tent muttering to himself. “Love potions and beauty spells. What do they think I am?” He had on a dirty old caftan striped with stains. His beard was dirty and bushy and for all the jewels customers brought him, he did not look like a wealthy man. He caught sight of the two and said, “And what do you want? A potion to keep your hair in? A dagger that won’t rust? Something to help your wife, because you can’t . . . oh . . . oh! What are you doing here?” He took two long looks around and grabbed the djinn’s arm and pulled him inside.

It was much larger than it looked. The tent was only a place for him to meet the customers; at the back, the djinn could see a house through the flaps of cloth, presumably where the alchemist lived and did, well, whatever he did.

“Sit, sit. Please.” He waved them towards a couch in the middle of the space and left through the back, returning with a tall woman who the djinn correctly guessed to be his daughter. They were carrying two trays of food and refreshment.

“Uncle, I came to you because I—” the djinn began.

“Oh hush. You must have crossed the desert if you came from the capital. Wash your throats first. Then we’ll talk.” He perched himself in a tall spindly chair with his hands on his knees and watched them intently with his bright eyes as his guests drank wine from small crystal goblets. The boy tore his teeth into fruit and swallowed nuts, but the djinn chose only drink. The woman sat on a chair beside her father. She was very young, and not hard on the eyes. She had the alchemist’s dark brown hair. She reminded the djinn of his wife. These recollections were not unpleasant, but when he remembered how she’d died and felt a pang of grief, he was almost grateful for the sudden outburst: “Did you do it?”

“Do what?”

The alchemist opened his mouth to answer, glanced at the boy, and then changed tongues. It was a language of the people to the west. “Did you kill the king and queen?”

The djinn was not surprised that he knew the tongue. He was known as a wise man. “Yes.”

“And is that . . . the prince?”

A nod.

He sighed. “I won’t presume to judge you; I can only imagine what it must have been like. But for all his faults, he was a good king. The land will be worse without him. The Regent, is he a good man?”

“He is. How did you know me?”

“I have seen enough to know a magician when I see one. And I’ve never met a human sorcerer who could hide things with magic the way you do.”

The djinn’s face fell. Was it that obvious? He sighed and dispelled the illusion. A large purple carpet shimmered into view. There were precious stones and fabulous paintings, tapestries and rare books. All floating on the carpet three feet above the ground. All the things they could sell to start their new life, stolen from the palace.

“Remarkable,” the alchemist said. “But now, why you have come to me?”

The djinn grew serious. “I am on a search for the greatest treasure.”

The man’s face was not unkindly when he said, “The Philosopher’s Stone does not exist. It is a myth, nothing more.” He spread his empty palms. “Brimstone, mercury, and salt. These are my elements. I can shape them, mix them, and break them. But, try as I might, I cannot turn one into the other. I cannot turn lead into gold for you. I am sorry.”

“That is not what I seek: I want the secret of immortality.”

A hardness drew lines on the alchemist’ face. “The Elixir of Life does not exist either. And if it did, it is something that should remain hidden.”

“I know. And that is why I seek immortality from a different place. I go to kill the sun.”

The alchemist looked stunned. He gaped at him for several moments, and then closed his mouth. He stood and up and said to come with him. “My daughter will watch the boy, you need not fear.”

The djinn left the two of them behind and went with the alchemist. They left the tent through the back and entered the house he had noticed earlier. The alchemist kept his work in a small back room.

It was clean, with a large window to one side. Wooden benches held flasks and beakers of strange substances, and there were books everywhere in open piles, many with scribblings in the margins. A notebook lay forgotten on a bench beside a glass chamber, the pen dry and ink smudged. He took a quick peek, and saw it was written in code. There were words in different languages all mixed together and symbols he did not recognize. But he knew enough to see what the alchemist had been investigating. Quintessence, the entry read, remains beyond my grasp. I am convinced of its divine nature, my evidence is undeniable. Yet what baffles me the most is the simple paradox of its existence. How can something exist within a vacuum, yet be solely responsible for the vacuum as well?

“That’s private. I’d rather you didn’t read it.”

The djinn let it go. He opened up a thick book to a page. There was an illustration done in inks. A water bird wading in a river, wings spread before flight.

“The bennu. That’s what you’re looking for? Well I can’t say I have any idea how to kill it, but if anything has power of life and death, it would be an immortal. How are you going to kill it, exactly?” The djinn handed over the lodestone. “Clever,” the alchemist said, “Very clever. But it won’t be enough.” Very intuitive.

“Can you enhance it?”

“I don’t know. This is not my area of expertise. But have a seat and I’ll see what I can do.”

He did, and waited while the alchemist chipped a piece off the lodestone with a stone knife. He poured and distilled, mixed and dissolved and separated and heated various reagents over the fire so the room was filled with odd vapors and unusual flames. The sun dipped and golden light flooded the room while the hours ticked by. Eventually the alchemist said he could not do anything. When the djinn complained of the time he had lost, the alchemist snorted. “What did you think? I could clap my hands and turn lead into gold? Alchemy is a devilishly complex process. It requires time.

“As far as I can tell, there is nothing extraordinary about this lodestone, except where it came from. I don’t know how to enhance it, I’m sorry. But here, take this, it may be of some use to you.” The object he was handed was a cuff of stone, meant to be worn on the wrist. It was made of three broken sections spanned by chains so the girth could be adjusted, and there was a large red bead set into it. “This little bracelet will absorb heat that would otherwise damage your body. But it has a limit, so use it wisely.” When he saw the questioning look the djinn was giving him, he chewed his lip and mumbled, “Maybe I know a little magic.”

They laughed at that.

“What was it like?” the alchemist asked. “Living in the capital?”

“Enjoyable,” the djinn found himself answering.

“The castle was a thing of beauty,” he went on, “all graceful spires and marbled floors. Silken tapestries on the ceilings, huge windows that fed the breezes that came from the lush gardens on the terraces; flowers of so many colours and fragrances. Carpets and silver engravings and geometric patterns of lapis lazuli, jade and blue amber on the ceilings of the domes. It was beautiful at night, with the hundreds of lanterns glowing all over the city, and the sounds of laughter coming from the plazas with their fountains and gardens fed by winding aqueducts. The king always kept the castle smelling nice, with perfumed satin and heady incenses. To cover up the stink of the city, he said. The fruits in the market were bursting with juice and grapes were so rich and so dark that if you got the stain on your clothes, you’d never get it out.

“There were crystals the king had me design so that you could see other places in them. He’d keep them absolutely everywhere, so even the servants could see visions from steaming dense jungles and beautiful pristine islands, barely a scrap of sand in oceans that were the bluest things you’d ever seen. Storytellers used to come from all over, begging to tell the king their latest yarn for a few coppers. And traders, with all their goods, coffee and tea and furs and cotton, His Majesty wrung heavy taxes from all of them.

“It was a place of knowledge, all the scholars came to the great library to study and learn. It was a place of discipline—you should have seen the soldiers, in their polished armor and shields like sunbursts . . . Do you remember the rains two years past?”

“Yes, they were the heaviest in decades.”

“That was His Majesty’s idea. I told him I could only gather the clouds, not make them, so he told me to start three years earlier. There was so much water, the streets were muddy and flooded and the people distraught. ‘Our wares are ruined!’ the merchants said, but when the sun came out, all the dust was gone, and the city was cleaner than it had ever been. There was still muck in the gutters, mind you, and it stank worse than ever wet. But, there were all these seeds he’d had planted, you see, and there were seeds already in the ground. And they were green! So much green! Crops springing from the soil faster than they could be harvested, and flowers everywhere! In the streets and walkways. Every man, young and old, was picking flowers, for their mothers and wives and sisters and for the girl with the pretty hair, because she looked so lovely with the white ones in her hair, they said.”

“You miss it.”

The djinn realized he did: “Yes, I do.” It was a queer thing.

He let the alchemist walk him back to the tent, where the lad was asleep with his head in the alchemist’s daughter’s lap. The remnants of a meal for two were on the table.

“Can I leave our things with you? I’ll collect them on the way back.”

“Can I ride the carpet?”

He chuckled. “Of course.”

“What of the boy, will you take him with you?”

“I . . .” It would be safer. But . . .

“No. You should both go together. You’ll need the company.”

He took the boy in his arms and asked the alchemist where he might buy a camel. The alchemist said they should take the flying carpet instead. “I thought you wanted to ride it?”

“They’ll be time enough for that when you get back. You’ll need speed on your side; it’s a long journey. Don’t worry, I’ve got some spare rooms. Your things should fit.”

They transferred all the items into the rooms and the djinn lay the boy down on the carpet with some blankets and pillows the alchemist provided. He also gave them food and water and a change of clothing. “How will you find the bird?” the alchemist asked.

“By following the desert.”

His daughter said, “Come back swiftly, Uncle. He’s such a sweet boy.” The djinn nodded, thinking sadly that she even sounded like his wife. He bid goodbye to their hosts and gave them his gratitude, and cast a spell of invisibility around both of them. The alchemist was still gaping when they left them.

He waited till they were well beyond the town’s walls and dispelled the magic. He reclined on the pillows and looked up at the night sky streaking past. She might have been old enough to be our daughter. If we’d had a daughter. He looked sidelong at the young prince. If I hadn’t killed her in my folly.

• • • •

Those who came from afar, or spent their entire lives within the walls of the city, thought that the desert was mostly sand. This is false. The sandsea the djinn and the boy had crossed on their way to the oasis was only a minute portion of the desert that spanned the civilized world.

Rocks. Rocks were what made up the desert. Big ones and small ones, everywhere you looked. Even the dunes were built on foundations of stone.

Follow the desert. It was an old magic, but powerful. The phoenix was the bird of the sun, and who knew the sun better than the desert? Keep your mind blank, the ifreet had said, and look for the signs. He doesn’t want to be found, but he leaves a trail. Look for . . .

It wasn’t easy, or one simple path. It wound its ways through different deserts, which were in different worlds. The gates to these realms were open, he realized, but only because they weren’t gates at all, but the connections between the two. Like the pages of a book, they were jumping from page to page along the bindings that held them together.

There were deserts of black, lifeless sands under skies of green and blue clouds. There were plateaus that seemed to circle the globe, long bridges of crumbling sandstone that spanned two cliffs over an empty chasm, on and on and on. And there was sand.

It might have been the next day, or the next year, or a single restful blink of blistering, sand-scarred eyelids, but then they were there.

The djinn and the boy stood all alone in the sands. There was only sand, and wind, all around. And the spire.

At first it was only a pillar of rock. But as they approached, they saw it was massive; several leagues in diameter and many, many more in length. It stretched upwards into the blue, so high the djinn was sure the tips must rake the sky and extend even to the black void beyond.

It was not sandstone, or limestone or marble or any other rock or mineral either had ever seen. It was a uniform brown and red, sprouting irregular handholds that jutted out from it randomly. There were steps, too, smooth and carved right into the stones, spiraling all the way round.

They made camp by the foot of the spire, and ate the food the alchemist had been kind enough to provide them with. The djinn kept looking up at the spire. He hadn’t even enhanced the lodestone yet. He hadn’t even made a weapon of it yet!

He took it out and held it before the flames. If he shaped a blade, it would be very thin. It might even snap. But a spear would work. It would give him more reach, too.

He shaped the metal with whispered words and a gentle touch, and it bowed to his magic and flowed like water. For the shaft of the spear, he used a branch he snapped out of the air. The finished product was seven feet in length, and the spearhead sharp enough to shave with. Yet it still needed enhancing. But how? How did you kill the sun? He had a twig with a rock at the end. It needed power, something mighty and invincible. How would he put out an everburning flame?

And then it hit him. And he laughed.

The answer was all around him.

• • • •

He didn’t sleep, but sat with an excitement he couldn’t contain. Finally he decided it was time and woke the boy. “I’ll be back soon,” he told him. It was still dark when he started to climb the steps of the spire, and it was still dark when he reached the top. Round and round, ever upwards. His hand clenched and unclenched around the shaft of his spear.

The top of the spire was a plateau, much smaller than the base, but large enough to hold the entire oasis town. If there had been clouds, it would have towered over them, but even then there was sky above, a deeper, cleaner blue than he had ever seen. Even the air was thin, and he breathed deeply as if with exhaustion.

A young man was sitting on the edge, dangling his bare feet in the air. He wore a pristine white robe that left his arms and one shoulder bare, and had copper hair that stood up from his skull in sharp peaks. He was handsome and had a gold jeweled collar around his neck, set with rubies that flashed like fire and amber stones. When he turned slowly to view his visitor, the djinn saw his eyes were pure gold, with splashes of red that moved and seethed like lava. Phoenix.

“You have come a long way,” it said. Its voice was rich and beautiful.

“I have come with a purpose,” the djinn replied. “I have come here for the secret you keep.”

“I keep no secrets.”

“I want the secret of life and death.”

The phoenix’s eyes grew softer somewhat. It almost whispered, “I am sorry. But I cannot give you that. I don’t have it, it doesn’t exist. There is no Philosopher’s Stone, no Elixir of Life, no quintessence, no Master Work, no object of divinity. I can see it in your eyes, you want it for your wife. She is gone, djinn, and what is gone cannot be reclaimed.”

The phoenix sighed deeply, and looked out over the horizon again. “How did you find me?” it asked.

“I found an ifreet in a forgotten tomb who told me of you.”

“Truly? An ifreet? That is a wonder; I had though them long dead. And now you say one lives? What has become of him?”

“He is gone now, I freed him. The enchantment was the only thing keeping him alive.”

“That is sad news. But I am glad he is at peace. What did he tell you of me?”

“He told me you were one of us.”

The phoenix nodded. “Aye. I was an ifreet once, long and long ago. I was young, and foolish. I wanted to see all there was to see. I . . . I made mistakes that I should not have. There was a contraption I designed, that would take me elsewhere. And it worked, oh, it worked.

“I found myself floating in the void, with the forges of life and death all around me. I saw the stars as they were made, and planets larger than anything I had ever known spin around each other like dancers. I saw beautiful things and wonders and miracles, and in my haste and folly, I fell into the sun.

“You cannot imagine what it was like. The fire, the heat was incredible. It—it changed me. When I awoke, I was back on land, somehow, and I was no longer an ifreet. I was this; some new being that carried the waters of the sun in his veins.

“I learned quickly how to use my powers, and found that I was still mortal. Yet, when I died, I was reborn. I was a bird the first time, I think, with wings of fire. That was how man first came to know me. In the eons that followed, I have had many forms. I’ve died scores of times and been reborn in so many ways. Every time there was someone new, someone who sought to tell a story about me. That is why I am known my so many names and faces. The bennu, the phoenix, Zhu Que, I can’t even remember them all.”

“I want the secret you keep. I want the secret of life and death.”

“I do not have any such secret.”

The djinn held out the spear. “You are the secret. You are an immortal. I will cut out your heart and use it.”

There was no change in the phoenix’s posture, save a slight tightening around his eyes, and a dangerous tone to its voice when it said, “Take care, djinn,” smooth and soft as woven silk. “For I am still fire; I will tolerate no falsehoods here, not in my eyrie. Speak them, and I will burn your tongue to ash.”

The djinn readied his arm. “This spear,” he said, “is made from a fallen star.”

“You cannot kill me with simple steel, be it from this world or any other.”

“And if this is not simple steel? If it this is from the massive star that fell so long ago and rose a cloud of ash to blanket the sun? When the land was cold, so cold and barren. This spear contains within it that selfsame power, from the endless nights when you were weak and dying. You almost did die, didn’t you? Without the sun, without its fire to sustain you, you are merely a bird.”

The phoenix shrieked in anger, a thin birdlike keel that drove rocks to pebbles below far them. The djinn’s ears stung and he was momentarily deaf. The phoenix was standing now and facing him, its lips moving, but the djinn heard nothing.

There was a flash of heat, and suddenly his hearing returned. Flames roared in his ears and he closed his eyes against the brightness. As he blinked black spots from his eyes he saw the phoenix transformed, now a tall waterbird with reed thin legs and dark feathers, every feather of its wings equal to the weight of a human soul. But its eyes did not change. With another wail, it launched itself at him.

The djinn sidestepped, dodging its razor talons, and swung his spear. It should have cut, but the bennu had feathers like iron. He pulled back and jabbed at the bird’s soft underbelly, just as it rose into the air and grabbed his spear with its claws. Cursing, the djinn pulled it free and rolled out of the way.

Time was lost to him, and seconds seemed to slow as the world faded to a single moment of flashing steel, sweat, and blood. He fought with all the skill he possessed, using magic and spearplay together, yet the fight dragged on. And as he fought, it slowly dawned on him that he could not feel the sun on his back. It should have risen, but it seemed as if the heat was coming from in front of him.

It was, he realized with a start. The phoenix was giving off heat. His looked down to find his clothing scorched and burned away in places, but he himself was unharmed. It was the alchemist’s charm that was keeping him alive. The cuff was still tight on his wrist, but it was becoming looser. And the tip of his beard was beginning to singe . . .

When he finally he manage to stab the bennu, it was just below the wing. The ifreet had told him what would happen when the bird was injured, and he pulled away in time. There was another roar and a heat and wind that drove him balking to his knees, and when the haze cleared, the phoenix had changed form.

Every time you kill it, the ifreet had said, it will be forced to revert back to its previous form. You must keep fighting until you have driven it back to its original shape, then you can slay it permanently.

He lost track of how many forms there were. There were a dozen tiny birds with sharp raking claws, and a creature with the head of a dog and wings of an eagle that hocked fire like phlegm. There was a man, he remembered, with the head of a green bird and armed with a broadsword taller than he was. Its strength was colossal, and when his own spear kissed the flaming blade of his foe, he felt as if his arm would break under the force. It was only through a spell that wound grass tangles through its feet that he was able to win at all. There was a bird that resembled a peacock, in shades of vermillion and orange, with long trailing feathers that stung like acid when they touched him. Firebird, red crow, Zhu Que, Suzaku, all these names, all these forms, and both of them were growing weary.

He was bruised all over, and had broken at least two ribs. The battle was too intense for him to heal his wounds; he sealed a cut here and there when he found respite, but for the most part he was hard-pushed and weary. Once he received a cut above his eye and when the blood began to impede his vision, he grabbed a handful of grit and rubbed it into the wound. It hurt, but absorbed some blood and let him fight on.

It was only when he fought a form that was more manticore than phoenix and serpentine enough to be a basilisk that he succeeded in wounding the beast heavily. This form was slow, weighed down by its heavy plate of scales, and he ducked around its sweeping tail and stabbed downwards. It hissed and tried to fling him off as he pulled his sword free and climbed onto its back. Howling, he stabbed it as fast as he could, again and again. He felt a scale give away, and his spear plunged in so deeply his hand almost went in as well. The beast screamed, reared, and tumbled to the ground with a crash, pinning him between its scaly coils. He shrugged himself free with effort and heaved the spear out of the beast. There was no blood.

It’s over. It’s really over. I did it, I killed the—

HEAT. Heat a thousand times worse than the blazing sands of the desert at noon, fire so bright he was blind, and a force that threw him like dry autumn leaves through the air, to land at the very edge of the plateau, one arm resting over the edge.

He would have screamed if his throat were not burned. He raised a hand to his face, and it came away covered with skin. There was little blood: The fire must have cauterized his wounds or burned all the blood away. He pushed himself up on one elbow, tears forming in his eyes against the pain. He shoved his fingers into his eyes, trying to gather the precious liquid and suck it from his fingertips. The salt only fed the burn.

The cuff the alchemist had given him was broken now. His skin was free to blister and burn, and half his beard was already gone. He was going to die from the heat. It was too much, too much. Then he saw what lay before him, and his bladder released. He was too terrified to feel the cool liquid running down his legs.

The phoenix had taken its final, primal form, and stared him down in all its infernal majesty. It was a bird larger than any he had ever seen, large enough that a house could have stood in the shade of its wings. Its breast and head were scarlet, the light feathers of its belly and legs shot with gold, and the heavy swords that made up its wings ended, not in points, but in flames. Its head was resplendent: pure, virgin white, armed with a beak that could have crushed him whole. Its eyes were jet and gold. And it glowed so strongly the dark felt like day.

“You came for fire, djinn. So why do you hide now? Have your fire . . . HAVE IT ALL.”

It flapped its wings, and another wave of heat washed over the djinn. He groaned deep in his throat and tried to crawl away. The beast only pinned him down with a humongous talon. He could feel it tearing into the flesh of his back, exposed now that his clothes had burned away.

“Don’t run, little mouse. Stay and play a while.”

He felt the claw encircle him and lift him up, almost gently, so he was face-to-face with the phoenix. He stared into its eagle eyes, full of malice. It blinked once, slowly. My spear, he thought weakly, Where is my spear?

The phoenix opened its beak slowly, and for a second the djinn was afraid it was going to eat him, and then it exhaled, and his breast was awash with fire.

“Kill me, will you?” it said over his cries. “Kill the sun? You rat, you scurrying mortal, how dare you?”

Then the fire was gone, and it bent down, and touched him lightly on the forehead with the tip of its beak.

He wanted to scream then. Oh, it would have been sweet to scream, it would have been release. But the fire was now in his mind, scourging him in his most private places. He could feel the fire stripping him of his memories, burning away the very synapses that held his mental self together, a headache so powerful it paralyzed him, left him unable to move or breathe. And pain, in its pure form, without physical malady or injury. Pain was a form of energy, he realized. And it was being poured into him.

He tried to reach for his magic, but the phoenix saw his move and tossed him aside, and there was a wall between him and his magic, a wall he couldn’t reach, because the fire was burning him, burning him all over.

And then it dropped him, and he fell to the ground and broke another fragile rib. In a daze of pain he heard the bird say, “Perhaps that will teach you humility. But you mortals are arrogant by nature, it is not something you can shed easily. Yes, I shall have to find a better way, won’t I?”

It flapped its wings and rose into the sky, circling him, the flames of its wings and tail trailing behind it like the streamers of kites. Then he heard it say, in a voice that froze his heart, “Now what, oh what, do we have here?”

No.

He heard those fearsome wings flap again, and the bird screamed in triumph as it dove.

“NO!” he shouted back, anger lending strength to his lungs. He stood and cast a look for his spear. There it lay, on the far side of the plateau. He thrust out his hand and shouted a spell, and whipped around without seeing if it had worked or not—and jumped off the edge.

He was hurtling through the air, and the bird was still below him, swooping down on the boy who stood helplessly on the ground, watching in absolute terror. He could see the desert spread out before him, in all the predawn colours and the last stars faint above. The vermillion monster was the only source of light in this desert. And the little boy he had come to love so much, even if he was the son of the man who had kept him captive, all those years. The boy’s scream mingled with the phoenix’s cry as he looked up and saw a glint high above him.

The djinn spun and slashed his hand through the air and the spear shot past, looking like a pillar of fire, and slammed into the phoenix in between its two great wings. The gigantic beast jerked, and howled, and rose upwards in a violent reflex motion, and his boots landed right on its back. He grabbed the spear with both hands and shouted the spell that lay dormant within the iron, the enchantment he had hoped to use to kill the thing, and the words seemed to drive all the sound from his ears. He felt the shaft vibrate in his hands, and the bird must have screamed as it jerked and thrashed and slammed into the lone spire that stuck out from the endless desert. He had one last view of the desert, in the blues and purples of the dawn, and his second-to-last thought was whether the child would be safe, and his last sight was the eyrie of red stone, tumbling, breaking, falling, taking him and the monster down with it. I hope sand makes for a soft landing, he thought.

• • • •

When the dust cleared, the djinn was able to push away some of the smaller rocks pinning him down and get to his feet. The phoenix was still trapped somewhere beneath the rubble, but where was the boy?

“Abdullah!” he called, “Where are you?!”

“Here! I’m here, Uncle!” He was clambering up the mountain of rubble, dusty but otherwise unharmed. The djinn held him tightly. “Are you sure?” he asked, “No cuts, no bruises?” The boy said no.

The djinn sighed, and turned to inspect the scree of crushed rocks and boulders. He had to find the phoenix quickly, before it began to regenerate—

He heard a muffled scream and a large rock went sailing over his head. The phoenix pulled its way out of the wreckage, now in its human form. Its robes were in tatters and the jeweled collar it had worn was missing. The djinn’s spear had been pushed down deep, and the star-metal blade emerged clean from between his ribs, bloodless.

The phoenix staggered, and placed a hand against its chest. “What is this?” he said, panting. Its entire body had changed color. It was grey now. As grey as ash.

The djinn stepped up to him and grabbed the tip of the spearhead gingerly. “This is the magic that will finally defeat you.”

“How?”

“Can you feel it?” the djinn asked, “Can you feel the fire inside you, dying? Can you feel the connection between you and the desert now? It’s only dawn, and the sands are still cool. They will sap your fire, suck it from you, absorb it like they absorb the heat of the sun.” He leaned forward, so his words were better heard. “All the deserts, not just this one. The cold deserts to the north, the rocky deserts to the east, to the west and south and every direction there is, every bit of land, every little rock, is bound to the sword which pierces your heart. Slowly, bit by bit, the fire is dying, choked like a cookfire doused with water. Yes, even the deserts above, cold and black and airless, everything is working against you. You don’t have much time left. The desert sucks up heat quickly, don’t you know?”

He danced around and grabbed the spear from the back and gave it a violent pull. It came out cleanly, and he spun it hand over hand and shoved it back inside, neatly as a key fitting into a lock. The phoenix roared and arched its back in agony, hands clenching at empty air. It took a step forward and staggered, and looked at him hatefully. Then its eyes slipped past him, behind him, and its face lit up with glee. A bolt of red fire shot from its mouth, and the djinn heard the muffled sound of a toppling body from behind him.

He turned and ran, knees slamming into the ground as he came face to face with the boy, and cradled him in his arms. His eyes were closed and a lock of hair had fallen over his brow, and the area directly over his heart was blackened ash. It had burned straight through his clothing and skin and muscle, searing him from the inside and damaging all his vital organs in an instant. There was no chance of survival.

The djinn did nothing but stare at his blank face, till he felt the heat of an explosion wash over his naked back and heard the sound of a final, triumphant, bird-like scream. Gently placing the boy on the ground, he revolved to look at the crater. The fire had been so hot it had turned the sand to glass, and his spearhead had melted to form a depression of mirrors with splotches of silvery grey. In the center of this small hole was a red sphere that glowed dully with heat.

The heart of the sun, the ifreet had said, it is the phoenix’s true connection to fire, and it will remain for a while after it dies. You must take it while it lasts, it will momentarily bear the regenerating life-force of the bird. Use it to return your wife to the realm of the living. He had looked almost sad then, and had said, I hope you find what you seek. Then he crumbled into dust as the djinn released him from his bonds. One more prison without a captive.

The heart of the sun. It looked like a pomegranate, but when he peeled open its tough red skin there was only a single seed inside, ripe and swollen with juice.

It was his. Finally, after two hundred years of dreaming and waiting and plotting, it was his. He could feel the power through his fingers. I can take it. I can take it and become a god. His wife had died in one of his experiments. He’d been looking for a way to live forever.

And now I can. No one will ever bind me, or tell me what to do. No master. Nothing, no one, will ever control me. Nothing . . .

He looked over his shoulder at the boy.

He turned it over in his hands, whispering under his breath. He heard a new voice say, “My beloved.”

She was just as beautiful as he remembered, and stood on the glass floor in the silks and jewels she had worn on the day of their wedding. She reached out and brushed his face, and he began to cry when he felt the warmth in her fingers.

“My beloved,” she went on, “You cannot.”

“It was my fault,” he sobbed, “You only died because I was blinded by my greed. I wanted to live forever and I lost you for it. But I can fix it now! I can be with you again, you can be with me again. My sweet desert rose, we will be together forever.”

She was crying too. “I know, my sweet. I know. But it cannot be. What is gone must stay gone; it would be a perversion of nature for the dead to return to life. Please, my love. Use it wisely. The boy is near death, but he is not yet gone.”

“No, no, I won’t! I won’t lose you again!”

She smiled faintly, and in the light of the oncoming dawn her eyes shimmered with tears. She began to sing, softly. His heart nearly broke when he heard her sing. It was the song she had sung for him when they first met, the song she promised to sing to their children. “Is it me, said the rose, is it mine heart you desire? Or is it my fragrance that soothes your heart, or my petals, red as fire? For in the desert few flowers bloom, and we take what beauty we may. And live our lives on the sands, with each brand new day.”

Still crying, he pulled her close, and held her for a while. He held her till the ache in his heart began to soothe, and he realized his arms were only wrapped around empty air.

He knelt down beside the boy, and held the fruit of the sun over his lips. The djinn crushed it in his fingers, and the bright red juice dribbled down his fingers into the boy’s mouth. The boy’s chest began to heave, and he opened his eyes.

The djinn folded him in his arms, and then he was crying all over again and the boy was looking dumbfounded and asking what happened. The djinn laughed and kissed his forehead. Then the boy asked what he was holding.

All that remained of the fruit was the skin, still wet. He stared at it, wondering . . . and then made up his mind.

The djinn put the fruit back in the glass hollow alongside the leathery skin, and recited a simple summoning spell. Small pouches of cowhide materialized in his hands and he opened them and began to pour the contents into the hollow. Frankincense, camphor, myrrh, vermillion saffron and dark cinnamon, sprigs of lavender and vanilla, twigs from elder, ash and olive. Cardamom and cloves, and jewels from far-off lands that shone in colours he could not name, beaten silverleaf, the juice and oils of fruits. He poured more expensive spices and the roots of ancient trees, and sprinkled it all with a covering of fine, white sand. Then he stood, took a step back, and uttered a single word in a tongue rich in magic.

“Burn.”

The light from the blaze was reflected and thrown in a hundred different directions by the facets of glass, and it burned clean and hot and fast. And when the flames died down and the coals smoldered, a beak poked its way out of the ash. With a cry wilder and fiercer than any bird, the new phoenix rose, a falcon with a plumage of silver and wings of dusky midnight-black, and circled twice in the sky before landing on the djinn’s outstretched arm. A silver sun. It looked at him with eyes that were now white swimming in silver, and he fancied he saw a touch of amusement in them.

The djinn turned away, with the reborn bird of fire on his arm, and placed an arm around the boy. He looked out at the horizon, where the sun would begin to rise.

“Come along boy,” he said, “We have much work to do.”

© 2014 by Tahmeed Shafiq.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tahmeed Shafiq was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1998 and spent his early years in Toronto, Canada. Tahmeed now lives in Doha, Qatar, where he spends his time reading, sleeping, and watching anime when he should be studying. The pages of fantasy have been his getaway before he was even old enough to understand what he was reading, and science fiction and he have known each other a while—through movies and television—till he realized he liked it a great deal. So if you know of any good books with dragons and mechas, give him a call.

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

The Grass Princess

Gwyneth Jones

It was April, and down in the orchard the first flashing blades of the new year’s growth were pushing aside the old, worn, winter stuff. The sky was blue and very clear, but the wind was cold. So the nursemaids put the little princess down under an apple tree, wrapped in her shawls, and ran away to play tag under the twisted apple branches, to keep themselves warm. And that was when the grass took her. Why did it happen? Was it the magic-making of a distant sorcerer, offended by some slight the royal family had forgotten? If it was, nobody ever found out. Or did the grasses embrace her because they had found a sister, as new and fresh and innocent as they? Perhaps, as some authorities later claimed, it was the baby herself who made the magic.

“But never mind who did it!” stormed the king, pacing up and down beside the tree while the nursemaids wept in a huddle. “How do we get her free again? That’s the question.”

The green tendrils that were wound around her little body seemed as soft and fragile to the touch as grass blades should. But they held the child in a grip stronger than steel wire. Every cutting edge that the royal household could think of was brought down to the orchard. They tried steel, stone, bronze, and even a knife of sharpened shell: a ritual object, relic of the old days when a king succeeded not by inheritance but by the sacred murder of his predecessor. They tried fire, they tried weed-killer . . . But when the king sent for his enchanted, diamond-bladed broadsword and started to saw away, dangerously near to the child’s throat, and the baby started to scream—the queen called a halt. She protested that if all they wanted was to get the baby loose from the grass, a couple of pounds of high explosive, strategically placed, would probably do the trick. At last they decided to dig up the whole patch of grass on which she was lying, and carry it back to the nursery; roots, dirt, and all. “Look at it this way,” said the court magician. His spells had been helpless, and his nerves were all on edge. “You’re not so much losing a daughter, as gaining a window box.”

The infant had a little peace then, while messages were sent out, chasing up magical practitioners from all the lands around. She slept, and woke, and slept again. She did not cry. She did not want to be fed. She smiled and slept and woke, and the grass blades twined ever closer and thicker around her tiny limbs, until only her face and one hand remained visible. A day and a night passed. On the third day, the princess, who till then had kept up her usual baby cooing and babbling, grew very quiet. Her mother, who was watching, saw a change come over that small, familiar face. “She looks so sad,” thought the queen, and leaned closer, so that the grass blades fluttered in her breath. She put out a finger to touch the baby’s hand . . . Was it possible? Was the grip of those determined tendrils getting weaker? Yes, it was true. The springy green coils were relaxing; the brilliant sheen of life was fading from them . . . The queen got slowly to her feet. She said aloud, as if the grass was a human enemy and could be deceived, “I think I will call the maid, and go downstairs. Baby is so quiet.” She crept out of the room, and rushed down the stairs in a swirl of skirts, biting her fists in excitement. But before she could call for the servants or the king, something stopped her. I will tell no one, she decided. I will not hope, I will not be excited. I will wait . . .

It was terrible to wait, because the grass might be growing weaker just to grow stronger again in a little while. Perhaps she was missing her last chance to free the child. But the queen thought of how you might lift and tug and tear—and have in your arms a baby bleeding from ten thousand wounds. The queen did not believe in the “malign sorcerer” for whom all the king’s men were hunting. She was afraid of the grass itself. It was alive; it had, if not a mind, then at least a will of its own. It had taken her baby for its own inscrutable reasons: and it would not willingly let her go.

She said nothing. No one else noticed that the grass was fading. In the middle of the night she came into the nursery very quietly. The nurse was drowsing in her chair. What of the child? From the cradle came the very faintest of sounds, a breath of a sigh. The queen looked down at her baby. Uprooted, shut away from the sunlight and the air, in spite of the earth that had been carried with it, the grass was withering. Already the blades were turning yellow and wan, like something grown in darkness under a stone. The princess lay still. Her eyes were open. She looked up at her mother, patiently: quietly accepting the suffering that was marked on her face, with no more outcry than the grass itself . . . which was also dying.

The queen saw that it was too late. Whatever made the baby a separate being, separate from the tendrils that bound her, was lost. She was the grass. Uprooted, she would wilt and fail and die. The queen stooped and picked up the whole bundle in her arms. She was so blinded by tears that she stumbled and several times almost fell as she hurried down the stairs, through the great, still, dark rooms of the palace, and across the gardens to the apple orchard. There, standing out dark in the moonlight, was the small ragged trench where the turf had been cut away. The queen knelt beside it. She looked down into the pale, dreaming face of her lost daughter. There was no longer the faintest hint of recognition in the princess’s open eyes, or of any human expression. She put the bundle into the hole, and scratched and worked the soil until she had done all she could to make the plot whole again. Then she went to the gardener’s potting shed and came back with a can of water. It was as she sprinkled water indiscriminately over baby and grass and earth that she understood the full strength of the enchantment. For the baby stirred, and started to laugh. Looking up through the moonlit drops, she smiled as if she was greeting her mother. But it was obvious that she did not see the queen at all. As surely as Persephone, overtaken in the flowery fields of Sicily by the king of the dead, this child had been kidnapped by the powers of the earth. She was gone, she had been stolen out of the human world . . . maybe forever.

• • • •

It was a tough fight, but in the end they let the queen have her way. The king thought the whole thing made him look a fool. Within hours, the conjurors and the alchemists and the amateur heroes would be pouring into the palace grounds, eager to do battle against this wicked spell. Now the queen wanted him to cancel everything, and let well alone. The king said he couldn’t see anything “well” about it. He had a six-month-old daughter staked out like a cucumber vine in his backyard, and how could it possibly make sense to leave a situation like that undisturbed? Luckily for the queen, the bulk of magical opinion soon came over onto her side. The professionals felt that the kind of power that would be needed to break the bond between grass and baby would certainly break the baby, too. The theory that the baby herself had done it appeared, and quickly gained ground. They decided it must be necessary for the princess to be enchanted like this, so that some prince (whose identity would emerge in time) could fulfil his destiny by freeing her. “Wait until she’s older—” was the general run of advice. “Let Nature take its course.” The queen found that these wise counsellors were reluctant to look her in the eye, as they took their fees. She felt that she understood their message only too well. But the king was satisfied.

The first thing he did, when he had been forced to wind up his rescue operation, was to assemble a team of architects, and get them designing the daintiest little summer-house, an orchard palace to be built around the enchanted apple tree . . . The queen was very sorry to do it, but she had to stop him again. She knew the poor man was doing his best, and that his rather inarticulate nature found relief in action, even the most futile action. But she also knew that his dainty arbour would kill her daughter. The baby’s nature was one with the grass, and neither wind nor rain nor snow nor frost must be taken from her. She must live the life of the earth to which she was bound, or no life at all.

“What do you want me to do?” cried the king. “Go down there and tramp on her?”

“Of course not,” replied the queen. “It would upset you horribly to do that. But she wouldn’t mind, not if you trampled her into mud. She’d be back, as soon as you gave her a chance. That’s what you must understand. She is the grass. Oh, I hope you’ll be ready—”

“Ready for what?”

“When winter comes.”

• • • •

Winter came, and under the apple tree the child sickened and faded, as the queen knew she must. The king bore it very well, except for one frosty day when he was caught creeping down to the orchard, unrolling an extension lead behind him, an old one-bar electric fire hidden under his robe. But the queen’s persistence was rewarded in the spring, when the child bloomed like the loveliest of April days. All through the summer, she was well and strong; all through the winter, she faded: and so it went on, through many winters and many springs. As well as thriving and failing with the changes of the season, the princess grew with real human growth, from a baby into a girl. The grass grew with her, so that her lengthening limbs made a green girl-shaped mound under the tree—a kind of horizontal topiary. Though she never spoke, and grew entirely silent before she was a year old, her eyes were alive. They opened to the daylight, closed at night, and seemed to smile at sun and rain. Some people said she was lovely—as far as you could see. Then, just as the girl in the orchard reached “marriageable age,” the queen died. She was still young. But she had spent so many hours sitting out under that apple tree, in all weathers—and perhaps she wasn’t very strong to begin with: anyway, she died. It happened suddenly. A cold turned in a day or two into fever and inflammation of the lungs. The queen hardly knew she was ill before she found herself on her deathbed, comforting her weeping husband.

“Don’t be sad. My daughter has taught me. I am not afraid to lie down in the earth. I believe she is happy, maybe happier than any of us. But my dear . . .”

Afterwards, the king had a sneaking conviction that if she had managed to talk any more, she would have forced him to promise to leave their daughter in peace. But luckily she didn’t. So, after a decent interval, he began his preparations.

The court physician was called to a consultation in the orchard, with the king, the court magician, and a crowd of other functionaries. He gave the grass princess as thorough an examination as was possible, and told her father, looking very grave, that even if she was released, there was little chance that his daughter could ever “live a normal life.”

“And if one of these heroes of yours could somehow free her,” said the great man. “Would he want her? Have you considered that she must be horribly scarred?”

“But it is magic,” protested the king. “When the spell is broken, everything will be fine.”

“There are some enchantments,” declared the physician, “that aren’t worth breaking.”

But the court magician supported the king. Years of doing nothing about a bad magical situation on his own patch had galled his pride. He had always secretly resented the queen’s triumph, and he and the physician were old rivals. He saw the grass princess problem as opportunity—not for himself, of course, but for the prestige of his discipline.

He sighed—a wise and reluctant sigh that put the blame for anything that went wrong firmly on his master’s shoulders. “I don’t think it is possible,” he declared, “for us to accept the advice of medical science. Though we take these considerations seriously, we have here to do with a matter of destiny—a concept that ‘medical science’ cannot, with all due respect, fully understand. By my art, I have learned that the princess must and will be freed . . . by one bound as she is bound, and scarred as she is scarred . . .”

“What?” spluttered the king. He stared at the magician accusingly. He had thought the two of them were agreed. There was nothing really wrong with the princess, no reason why she should not make a complete recovery—

“Ah—” The sage blinked. He had not meant to say that. Sometimes these things happened to him. It was one of the disadvantages of his profession. Just occasionally, one was not altogether in control. He corrected himself hurriedly. “Metaphorically speaking, that is. Bound and scarred as—er—a metaphor for the heroic experience.”

The physician snorted. “I thought we were concerned about the girl, not the ‘destiny’ of some unknown youth. Well, I wash my hands of the whole affair”. He stalked off, and the consultation was over. Magic had won the day.

• • • •

Alas, it seemed that the doctor’s pessimistic estimate was shared by the eligible young princes and nobles around about. There were ten or twenty young men who should have been the princess’s suitors—some rich and handsome, some not so rich or not so handsome, all of them eager to make a good marriage. But they were not interested in the mound of grass in the king’s orchard. The king became uncomfortably aware that his daughter had become a joke amongst his neighbours’ sons. If you suggested to anyone that he should try his hand at “the grass princess job,” it meant you considered his prospects to be in very poor shape indeed.

• • • •

There came a grey, cold day in November, two years after the death of the queen. Under the old apple tree, the princess lay wan and haggard and worn. The shape of her in the grass didn’t change with the seasons now that she was grown, but in winter, her face, what you could see of it, looked like that of a sick little old woman. It was her birthday; she was eighteen years old. A young man rode into the gardens, dressed for hunting. His name was Damien. He was the same age as the princess—a rather dishevelled young man, with a look of angry unconcern. He had come dressed up for this quest, his manner seemed to say, but that didn’t mean he took it seriously. He left his horse and came down between the trees. He had been sent here from the palace office, but he surveyed the scene in bewilderment. There was something distinctly macabre going on. Two middle-aged noblemen and a pack of servants were cavorting around the dead body of an old woman . . . who appeared to have been long buried, except that her face and one withered hand had been dug up. Somebody was tying balloons in the branches above this half-exhumed corpse—

“Excuse me. Can you direct me to—”

They didn’t hear him. The whole crew had suddenly burst out singing: “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!” Suddenly the prince realised where he was and what he was seeing. He had not imagined it would be like this. Evil enchantment had a distant, romantic sound . . . He decided to leave, quietly.

“Hey!” yelled one of the middle-aged men. “Hey—you there, wait!”

He recognised the king. The other gentleman must be the court magician. The king was a friend of the prince’s family. He couldn’t escape now. He bowed, awkwardly.

“Hail, sire. I have come, if you will permit me, to attempt to free your daughter from foul enchantment, and thereby win her hand in marriage.”

No one spoke. A manservant who was holding a pink iced cake on a tray coughed. The princess’s nursemaids gaped at him, making him feel extremely self-conscious. Damien, who had few friends and was oblivious to gossip, did not know that he was the only suitor who had taken up the king’s well-publicised offer. He was unnerved by this reaction.

“So, what do I do? Do I kiss her, or what?”

He saw that there was something else showing besides a withered face. The princess’s hand lay by her grass-grown side. The fingers were bare; they looked like thin and sallow grass roots. He guessed he must take her hand. The king and the magician were still staring, as if affronted by his presence. He stepped forward and went on one knee . . .

“No, no, no—”

One of the servants was pulling him to his feet. The two older men moved, making a barrier between the grass princess and her suitor. They were dressed identically, in sober suits under dark court robes. Their eyes were smug and old. He didn’t even want the princess: but there they stood, age and authority incarnate, between Damien and all the world’s prizes . . .

“I see,” he said angrily. “I’m not good enough. Fine. I’ll be on my way.”

“Ah—” The king suddenly produced a smile. “Not so, ah, not so fast, young man. You see there are certain—ahem—requirements. You can’t expect to win the hand of an enchanted princess just like that!” He laughed lightly. “You’d better come to my magician’s office.”

The magician had devised a list of tasks. He had spent time on this, and performed several magical operations, in his dark tower away in the remote fastness of the West Wing. He was proud of his list. He felt that it reflected the importance of the grass princess affair, in the annals of magic, and that the success of the hero would also, and rightly, be the crowning achievement of his own career. Prince Damien studied the list of magical treasures that he had to secure—beg, borrow, or steal—while the king and the magician explained to him how he would be welcomed when he’d completed his tasks. There would be a newly devised and very impressive ceremony. He would be escorted in state to the orchard, where he would take the princess by the hand—and she would rise from the grass, a beautiful maiden, ready to be his bride. He must, of course, agree to complete confidentiality. No interviews, no publications except with the express permission of the palace Office of Magic.

Damien wasn’t paying attention. The first item he had to deliver was the silver sword of the Divine Huntress. His spirits rose. He signed everything they put in front of him. There were handshakes all round. The king and the magician returned to the birthday party and Damien rode away, full of hope and determination.

“Unfortunate case,” said the king, when the boy was gone. “Young Damien. The mother ran off, you know, back to her own people under the hill. But the son’s completely human. One of those things, genetics, they call it, I believe: It can play tricks. So he ended up with his father, who married again. There’s a pack of new kiddies, new wife can’t stand the boy of course, and his father is doing his best to fix the succession. It would be a funny thing if he—well, you know. I had a soft spot for his mother . . . but that was long ago.”

The magician nodded thoughtfully, but his eyes gleamed. “Fairy blood!” he remarked. “Things are falling out very well for me . . . Ah, for the princess, I meant, of course.”

Damien knew exactly what to do. The Divine Huntress is another name for the goddess of the moon. The silver sword would have to be a moonbeam. For any other young prince or sprig of the nobility, the first task might have been impossible. Moonbeams tend to slip through one’s fingers, and it was clear that the “sword” had to be a functional weapon. For once, his mixed race was going to be an advantage. His mother had lost interest in him, the way those people tend to lose interest in fleeting human affairs. But he still had friends (as far as those people can be called friends) under the hill. He rode straight away to Wild Swan Lake, where his mother and his father had first met, one midsummer dusk long ago. There, on a night of the full moon, he tapped on a certain door (invisible to wholly human eyes) in the hillside that rises from that lakeshore. He was not allowed beyond the threshold. He would never be allowed beyond, unless he consented to give up his humanity, but he spoke to someone there. The first price demanded was a strip of skin the whole length of him, but he beat the fairy haggler down. He gave up a strip of skin from around his wrist, and didn’t ask—he thought he’d rather not ask—what it was for. In return he was given a black, polished tree root shaped like the hilt of a sword, and a long sheath of birch bark, sewn with spider thread. Then he knelt at the water margin and touched the hilt to one glimmering silver ripple, which slipped into the bark sheath as if they’d been made for each other.

He returned to the palace a month after he’d set out. His wrist was painful, and there’d be a scar there for life, but he was feeling confident. The king and the magician received him in strict privacy. In the West Wing, in the magician’s comfortable study on the floor below his magical laboratory, they dimmed the lights. The magician took the fairy sheath and, slowly, drew out the sword of the Divine Huntress. The bright scalloped blade shone like silver. He laughed in delight. “Excellent! A triumph of my art—!”

“Well done!” said the king.

Damien noted that somehow his achievement had become the old conjuror’s “triumph.” But it didn’t matter. He had questing-fever now. He set out at once for the uttermost ocean, where he was to mine the yellow foam for a bushel of mer-gold. This transaction was not so simple. The Smith of the Uttermost Ocean lived in the galleries of a great cavern of green serpentine, that was half-filled by the tide twice a day, and only visited by one questing hero or so in a generation. He was a lonely and embittered minor divinity, and he insisted that Damien had to work for his gold, as well as pay for it. The Smith knew how to distil many precious and useful ores from the sea. He was an exacting taskmaster and he treated Damien like an apprentice. Damien spent two years in the damp, snakestone gloom, the roar of the waves a constant booming in his ears, learning more than he had ever desired to know about the trade of smithying and the inner nature of metals. Time and again, he thought he’d completed his task, and then the Smith, who complained that the terms of the engagement were vague, changed his mind as to what quantity of gold constituted “a bushel.” But at last, he managed to escape with his prize.

When the magician’s security guards escorted him once more to the sage’s study, he could see that the king and the magician didn’t recognise him. He himself didn’t recognise the room. It seemed larger, and everything looked shiny. He limped across to the magician’s huge desk, and dumped his burden. “That’s a bushel,” he said. “The equivalent of eight gallons of sea-foam gold, dry measure. It may seem like less, but I got the Smith to sign for it.”

They were looking at him strangely. “Are you hurt?” asked the king.

“Not exactly. It was the price of the gold. One hamstring tendon: The Smith needed it to mend his bellows; he’s lost both his own hamstrings, as you know.”

The magician opened the seaweed sack. A greenish glow oozed out. He dipped in his hand. The magic gold dust slithered over his palm. “Beautiful,” he murmured. “And all mine!”

Damien could still hear the sea rushing and roaring in his ears. It was as if an endless earthquake had taken up residence in his head.

“Very good,” declared the king. “Very good . . . You are doing a good quest, my fine fellow. And now, I believe it’s the Lost Helmet of Invisibility.”

So Damien set off in search of the Helm. He thought of going home to visit his family first, but decided against it. His oldest step-brother was now crown prince, and Damien’s presence would only open old wounds. Besides, he had questing-fever.

It took years, this time. The Helm had been lost for over five hundred years. Before he even began to look for it, he had to learn how to search: in old libraries and record offices, in museums and monasteries. He had to work to support himself as well. Since the crisis over the succession had been weathered, it was a lot more difficult getting money out of his father. Sometimes he thought of the princess. He saw in his mind’s eye that pallid hand, and wondered what it would feel like to touch it. He wondered what they would talk about, when he was king and she was queen. But the achievement was more important than the reward. When he finally returned to that orchard and freed the famous “grass princess” from her bondage, (she was famous now. The court magician had made sure of that,) he would had done something with his life, and nobody would be able to deny it.

Damien discovered that around the time when the Helm disappeared, a certain giant called Lamerish of the Crags had been a prominent social figure. He had been much more socialized than the average giant: In fact, he was a noted art collector. There had been rumours. But no one could prove—or dared to try—that he had a secret collection of stolen treasures besides those that he kept on open display. The Helm of Invisibility had disappeared from the treasury of a royal family that was now extinct. Lamerish the giant, Damien learned, seemed to have vanished from history at about the same time. The first part of the search ended when Damien established that a small, craggy piece of a neighbouring kingdom’s highest mountain range had also vanished from modern maps.

He knew that the only way to reach a place made invisible by magic was to travel there through fairyland. So he went again to the door in the hillside—a different hillside from the one above Wild Swan Lake, but the same entrance, to the same forbidden realm. The guardian of the threshold could have been the same as the person with whom he’d bargained for a moonbeam sword-blade. Damien couldn’t tell. One doesn’t see those people clearly. In this world, they are a trick of the light. He saw the shadow of leaves moving, a glint of sunlight eyes, a hint of dappled animal limbs . . . He was told that the price of his journey to the Invisible Crag would be that he would not be able to find the door in the hill again. He would be earthbound, forever. Damien accepted the bargain. Something touched his eyes lightly. He saw and felt nothing until he found himself standing knee deep in alpine snow, a terrifying desolation of rock and ice and snow rearing up around him.

He climbed to the giant’s castle. No one challenged him. He passed through the fallen gates, through snowdrifts to the great doors of the keep, where human and giant-sized men-at-arms were still standing, frozen and mummified, upright in their corroded armour. The giant must have stolen the Helm, or had it stolen: used it to hide his castle, and then discovered too late that he could not undo what he had done. Obviously he wasn’t a student of magic, or he would have known that the Helm was protected. Any thief who used it would find he couldn’t take it off again, and couldn’t return himself or anything he had rendered invisible to the visible world. Damien walked into the great hall, through ranks of priceless, mouldering artworks. The giant Lamerish was sitting there alone, in a huge bronze chair that had once belonged to an Emperor, facing the doorway with dark, unseeing eyes. He must have died, along with all his people, of hunger and thirst. The Helm was like a closed crown, the bands of magic metal set with dim grey jewels. Damien lifted it from the giant’s yellowed skull, being careful not to touch it with his bare hands. He wrapped it in his spare shirt.

The crag had returned to the real world as soon as Damien took the Helm from the skull. He set off to make the long descent. He’d been prepared, but conditions above the snowline were worse that season than he had imagined possible. By the time he reached safety, his hands and face and feet were ravaged by frostbite. It was months before he was fit to travel back to the palace.

• • • •

The magician was ecstatic. He positively drooled over the Helm. The king was excited too. He kept repeating: “Well done, well done, very good work!”—and patting his hands over his plump belly as he sat in comfort in the magician’s splendid audience chamber. They were both looking extremely prosperous, as was the whole palace.

Damien just felt terribly tired. But some profound emotion began to stir as he watched the two self-satisfied old men.

“I’d like to see the princess again now.”

“Eh? See the princess?” The king, bemused by this suggestion, looked to the sage for guidance. The magician discreetly pursed his lips and frowned. “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” declared the king. “You see, my boy, you haven’t completed the tasks—”

Damien set his teeth, and clenched his scarred fists. “I’d like to see the princess.”

To avoid a scene, they took him to the orchard, accompanied by the minimum security escort. Nothing had changed much there. The rest of the palace was full of people these days, bustling about the business of the “grass princess affair.” But the magician had wisely realised that the enchanted princess was not, in herself, an impressive object. It was better that she remained a mystery, unvisited and secret.

It was September and the grass had been allowed to grow rich and long. It had gone to seed in plumes of russet and gold. There was a humming of insects in the sultry afternoon air. A few red apples glowed between the leaves of the old tree; a single ageing nursemaid jumped up from her chair and curtsied.

The king and the magician had to wait for Damien to catch up. He limped towards them, flanked by guards, and stared down at that blurred hummock in the long grass: the weather-browned leaf-shape of her face, the sallow root-fingers of her uncovered hand. He remembered the scene he’d imagined: the delicate hand waiting for his touch, the sweet face looking up like a fallen star . . . A rush of bitterness overwhelmed him. He saw what the grass princess was. She was bait in a trap. She was the bait those two gloating, fatherly monsters had used, to lure Damien into their service. They had taken the treasures. They had taken his strength, his youth, his time, his birthright . . . And for nothing. Because suddenly he knew that he would never win. That hump in the grass would never stand up, a human girl. He’d been so naïve! It was obvious to him now that the magician hadn’t the slightest idea how the “enchantment” could be broken. The list of tasks was pure, greedy invention.

“Damn you!” he yelled. “You old bloodsuckers! Liars! Thieves!”

The guards reacted quickly. But they didn’t know how much force they should use. After all, Damien was supposed to be the hero of the story that was keeping everyone in business. The prince, lame and weary as he was, shook off their restraining hands. He flung himself on the grass. He got hold of the hand. It didn’t respond: It was inanimate as earth. He dropped it and started tugging and tearing, sobbing furiously—

“Cheats! I gave you my life! For this thing, this scrap of dirt—”

The guards dragged him off, prising loose his twisted fingers. The king was shaking his head sadly, the magician looked wise and pained.

“That won’t do, you know,” said the king mildly. “You can’t force her.”

Damien stared at them. The grass cuts on his hands were stinging. “I’ve finished,” he said heavily. “You can keep your quest.” He kept on looking back, staring with the same dull anger, as he stumbled away. The magician made a sign that the guards were to let him go. “Most regrettable,” he remarked. “Very shocking.”

“What a shame. And he had only one task left to perform. What was it, by the way?”

“Bring peace to the House of Ayi,” supplied the magician. He shrugged. “Something for the good of the community. A social service, you might say. There’s no treasure involved. I put it in—” he added, in a lapse of unusual candour, “because I felt otherwise our requirements might seem a little, well, acquisitive—to ignorant opinion.”

“Any chance that he might perform it? And come back?”

The two prosperous gentlemen glanced at each other, with almost a sly look. Secretly, the king was well aware that the quest was bogus, and that if a hero managed to fulfil their conditions, they’d have to start thinking of new excuses for why the enchantment remained unbroken . . . The magician knew that the king understood this.

“Very little,” he assured his master. “No chance at all, I’d say.” With a nod to the nursemaid, they turned to leave the orchard. “Well, Damien has failed,” went on the magician. “We must seek a new champion. There will be plenty of candidates, there’s been a great deal of interest building up.” He rubbed his hands in anticipation. “I must compose a new list.”

• • • •

Damien left the orchard where the grass princess lay dreaming far behind him. He decided to take up the usual career of a disinherited prince and become a mercenary soldier. He was strong from the years at the smithy, and he still had the remnants of his early training in his father’s castle. But he was lame and scarred, and he couldn’t raise his own troops or even equip himself well. He wandered for months through the neighbouring kingdoms without finding employment. At last, he came to a country where warfare had become a way of life. The farmlands were devastated, the people were starving. The cities were battered fortresses, struggling along from one siege-and-burning to the next . . . Damien rode into this blighted land at the beginning of winter. He couldn’t locate the armies, but one day as he was riding through the desolate fields, a woman stepped out in the road in front of him, and took hold of his horse’s bridle. She was dark-skinned, like many of the people of this country. She was dressed in ragged leather, unarmed as far as he could see, and had a bloodstained rag tied round one shoulder. She wore gold braided in her wiry hair, and gold rings on her fingers. It was dusk: The gold and her eyes and teeth shone like life in the gloom.

“That’s a fine horse,” she said.

The mare was not a fine horse. But Damien looked at the woman—brigand, beggar, or soldier, it was all the same in this country—and he loved her. He knew from the way she looked up at him that she felt the same sudden flame. “Who are you?” he said.

“I am a queen, but at this moment a beggar-queen. Will you help me?”

“And I’m a general,” laughed Damien. “Get up behind, I can give you a lift.”

The beggar-queen thanked him, got up behind and directed him across the fields, past the gibbets where the dead hung in chains, through a burned village to an armed camp. When she slipped to the ground at the first guard post, uproar burst out. Damien learned that he had met a genuine queen: Nenya the Black, who had been captured by the Duke, her brother, and had escaped as he found her—alone and unarmed.

So the prince joined Nenya’s army. He never became a general, but before long he became her lover. The other officers, a desperate crew of cutthroats, called him Hob because of his limp, and they didn’t resent his privileges. Nenya the Black was a tigress, too hot for any but this brave fool of a stranger. Damien heard her story, partly from Nenya herself and partly from one of her real generals, a grizzled old soldier called Camiero Goodwill. There had been war for generations, between the Black Ayi and the White. The Black Ayi were indeed often black-skinned, but that wasn’t how they got their name. They were devils, declared Camiero with pride. Nenya and Ester of Ayi, when they were very young, had ruthlessly destroyed the Whites and briefly pulled the whole country together. They were brother and sister, and lovers, too, as was the custom. Then the Emperor—a foreigner, explained Camiero, who for some unfathomable reason imagined he owned Ayi—interfered. He made Ester a Duke, with legal title to the whole domain, on condition that he marry his “White” cousin, a child who had been taken off and reared abroad (which was how she came to be still alive). The Emperor didn’t know or care about local customs.

“Nenya bided her time,” explained Camiero. “Until the White arrived. She nearly cut the little girl’s throat, and then we’d have had peace. But we were betrayed. That traitor Ester turned the army against us and threw us out, Nenya and her whole train—I was with the queen then already, you see. So she raised her own army, and the war began again.”

The story was told differently in the countries where Damien had been a prince and a questing-hero. But he accepted the new version, in which a blood feud made sense and Black Nenya was in the right. He forgot his old life almost entirely. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, he would remember the grass princess, and wonder if she would ever find a hero . . . scarred as she was scarred, bound as she was bound. He knew the famous words now, though he hadn’t heard them before he started the quest. The magician hadn’t been able to prevent them from passing into popular mythology. But it was not his problem any more.

One day—it was the end of another winter—Nenya took him out onto a tawny, snow-stained mountainside, to a ridge that overlooked a wide view of rolling hills. Things had been going well for the queen. She was about to begin her great attack on Ayi itself. It was a fine morning; they were on horseback.

“Do you see those towers?” she said. “The four great towers against the sky? That’s the castle of Ayi, where I was born. I will never rest until I am back within those walls.” She did not look at Damien. But he looked at her, and he was consumed with jealousy and hatred for the Duke of Ayi. After that day, the lovers began to quarrel. Camiero and the other officers—men and women both, because in Ayi Nenya was not the only tigress—looked on and shrugged and didn’t try to intervene. They’d seen this happen before. Damien was jealous, and Nenya scornful. Damien demanded proof of her love, Nenya told him he was a common soldier, and she owed him nothing. He still shared her bed. Her passion there grew savage as her forces closed in on Ayi. But Damien knew that it was the Duke’s face she saw in the dark, her traitor brother’s body she embraced.

They were preparing to attack an armed supply train. It was a minor part of Nenya’s plan, this ambush in a pass called the Scartaran Defile, but she was leading it herself. Damien had been sent off, with jeers from the queen, to guard the spare horses. He decided that this was his chance to tackle Nenya alone. He left the horses and sneaked around the lines of ragged soldiers, hidden in the boulders and the long brown thickets of winter grass, to where Nenya was sitting by herself a little way off from her officers, as always before a fight. “Nenya,” he whispered. “We have to talk—”

“No.” She jumped up and turned on him, a long knife in each hand. “I have made up my mind. I’m going to kill you. It will be your release, poor fool.”

So they fought. But it was Nenya the Black who fell, her life choking out of her.

Without Nenya, the ambush became a rout. And it was that day, after the battle, that the Duke Ester killed himself, on learning of his sister’s death. It was that same day, as Nenya lay in the castle courtyard on a wooden trestle, at rest within the walls of Ayi, that the Duke’s young wife came down—looking like a child before the crowd of war-hardened savages—with her baby in her arms, and spoke to the people, saying that the lovers should be buried in one grave, and from now on there would be peace. Damien was there, through these great events. He found that he was somehow counted responsible for ending the feud. He said all he wanted was to go home. So the Duke’s wife gave him money and a fine horse, and set him on his way. Some time later, maybe days or maybe hours, he found himself on a road somewhere, got down from the horse and ran into a wood. He was looking for the door into fairyland. He could not find it. He ran wildly into a thicket of thorns, and struggled there until he fell, bleeding from ten thousand wounds.

• • • •

When he woke up, he couldn’t see. He heard the pad of bare feet, and felt someone was bending over him. “You’re awake,” said an old, kindly voice. “That’s good. I am the Hermit of the Borderland. I found you hurt in the wood and brought you to my home. Don’t be afraid, you will not be blinded for long.”

Damien touched his own face, with his scarred fingertips. “What’s this?”

“A compress of bruised herbs. It’s a kind of wild grass. It will speed the healing.”

The prince lay and thought about that. “Grass,” he repeated. “It smells of earth.” He sighed. “I have to make a journey. One more journey.”

“In a few days.”

“No. At once.”

So they set out.

• • • •

In the apple orchard it was April again, with a wind like ice and the sun like honey. The princess who lay bound in the grass was blossoming like the trees. The nursemaid, who had once been a blossoming girl herself, playing tag in the chilly sunshine, talked to the princess quietly, while she did her knitting. She liked to talk, and no one could prove that the grass princess didn’t hear you, even if she never answered.

The Hermit led Damien, his eyes still bound. The prince heard a comfortable murmuring voice that broke off suddenly.

“Am I in the orchard?”

“Yes, sir,” said the nurse.

“The king? Is he here? The magician?”

“Oh no, they’ve all gone, I’m sorry sir. The king is on his holidays, in the Fortunate Isles. And the magician . . . if you mean the old one, he left us a while ago. You see, we didn’t attract the right kind of hero, after prince Damien failed. And our sage had a very good offer from a big ‘multinational,’ I think they call them. So we’re very quiet here now. The palace is mostly shut up. Should I show you to the reception office?”

“No, thank you.”

Damien sat down. His hands brushed the young grass. He could not tell if it was warmer where it covered what had once been the body of a girl, he could feel no pulse of separate life. He groped, and found her hand. It lay in his for a moment, like a twist of dry grass. Then the world shivered, and changed. Warm fingers grasped his. The princess stirred, sat up, and stood, drawing Damien to his feet.

“Who are you?”

Damien let go her hand and pulled the grass from his eyes. The princess was standing there, clothed in the rags of a baby shawl and her tumbling dark hair: a strong, shapely young woman, with no visible scar from her long imprisonment.

“A friend,” he said. “Just a friend.”

The nursemaid ran and fetched the clothes, the set of clothes that was traditionally kept ready. The Hermit told the new young woman what she must do to give thanks for her deliverance. Soon she was dressed. She returned to the stranger, looking shy and solemn.

“They tell me you broke the enchantment. And that means . . . I belong to you?”

He shook his head. He thought of his bitter experience, his long trials, his guilt and shame. He was stricken, scarred, and bound. He had nothing to say to this stainless creature. How could she possibly understand?

“No. You don’t belong to anyone. Walk away, princess. Forget what happened here. Be your own woman.”

So the princess walked away. But when she came to the orchard gate, she stopped. She turned and came back. Damien saw that the scars were there, after all. He saw the misery and frustration of her bondage, the silent courage and endurance, all the voiceless suffering of the years, looking out of eyes that mirrored his own.

“This isn’t the end of the story,” she said. “It is the beginning. Be my friend.”

© 1995 by Gwyneth Jones.

Originally Published in Seven Tales and a Fable.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gwyneth Jones is the author of many fantasy novels, horror novels, and thrillers for teenagers using the name Ann Halam, and several highly regarded SF and fantasy novels for adults. She’s won two World Fantasy awards (for “The Grass Princess” and for the collection Seven Tales and a Fable); the James Tiptree, Jr. award, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Children of the Night award, and the Philip K Dick award, among other honours. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband, some goldfish, and two cats called Ginger and Milo; likes old movies, practicing yoga, and staring out of the window. She blogs at boldaslove.co.uk; has done some extreme tourism in her time, but now prefers a slower pace and has given up air travel.

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

A Meaningful Exchange

Kat Howard

Quentin told lies to people for money.

Or drugs. Or kittens. Or anything, really. The particular currency didn’t matter, so long as what was being offered had value to the person who needed the lie.

Lying was Quentin’s one great talent. He enjoyed the activity, and would have told lies for free. He often did, in nonprofessional circumstances—lying was his favorite means of communication. Most people, he found, didn’t want the truth anyway. They wanted the edges smoothed off, the white, polite fictions.

However, in professional circumstances, no matter how happy it would have made Quentin to commit a dishonest act of charity, he insisted on payment. It was the payment that guaranteed the lie would be believed when someone other than Quentin told it.

Someone other than Quentin being able to successfully tell the lie was the key. Everyone needs a lie at some point, a lie that only they can tell. “No dear, I was home alone all night,” for example.

Quentin had tried to give the lies away to his clients in the early days. This had not been a successful endeavor. He would tell them how to speak, how to angle their bodies, control their breath, the widening of their pupils, everything they needed to know, but they would fail, stuttering and spattering out weak tea falsehoods. No one came to Quentin if they had their own talent for lying.

True magic required payment, so Quentin accepted—among other things—worn coins, rare bottles of wine, and, once, a rather extraordinary frock coat he never quite felt stylish enough to wear.

And he lied.

• • • •

Quentin was at a coffee shop, enjoying an excellent café Valencia—the chocolate bitter, the orange bright—when a beautiful woman slid into the chair across from him. She said nothing, not even hello. She just sat, staring.

Quentin didn’t particularly mind being the focus of attention, especially when the person doing the focusing was so attractive. He sipped his coffee, and stared back.

“How much?” she asked.

Quentin said nothing, and sipped his coffee again. It would depend on what she wanted, and she would tell him that soon enough. They always did.

She drummed her lacquered nails across the table, once. “I need a man to tell me he loves me. How much will that cost?”

“Any man? Because I could do that now, if you like. It would be my pleasure.”

“A specific man. Under specific circumstances. I need something from him. Something I can only get when he says those words.” She wasn’t smiling.

“Then I think perhaps you’ve been misled about what it is I do. I could help you convince him you loved him. Or if this mystery man, who has foolishly failed to be moved by your charms, were to come to me, and ask for those words as a lie you would believe, I could give them to him. But under these conditions, I cannot help you. Not for any amount.”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

“The one thing I don’t lie about is business, even to make a beautiful woman happy.” Quentin smiled. “Might I buy you a—”

But she pushed away from the table, and left.

• • • •

One week later, she perched, perfumed and red-lipsticked, on the chair next to Quentin at a bar. He was drinking a Manhattan this time.

“You can buy me one of those,” she said.

When she was halfway through her drink, she ran her finger around the rim of the glass and asked, “So if I bring the man to you, you can do what I need? Make him tell me he loves me?”

“Do you really need me for that?” Even as the question left his mouth, Quentin couldn’t quite believe he was asking it. He wasn’t in the habit of questioning his clients, an activity he avoided due to its proximity to suggesting they were liars. They liked to be able to tell themselves it was only this once, that if they were liars by nature they could have done the thing on their own. Quentin was a great believer in the polite fiction.

He continued, “What I mean is, there are certain circumstances in which many men will quite willingly say, ‘I love you.’ For some of them, it won’t even be a lie. Not while saying it, anyway. You may be able to get him to utter the words without my help.”

The woman finished her Manhattan, then touched her fingers to the back of Quentin’s hand. “Thank you. And I mean that sincerely. But if I didn’t need you, I wouldn’t keep asking.”

Quentin watched her weave her way though the crowd to the door, her stockings whispers of silk against each other, her fragrance a tease on the air, then ordered himself another drink. “Need you,” she had said. He doubted she did, at least for her stated purpose. She wouldn’t be so secretive if she were truly trying to hire him. Perhaps he was lying to himself, but he rather believed she was flirting with him. Still, if she needed to lie to herself in order to do so, Quentin was the last person to insist that she stick to the truth.

• • • •

The next time Quentin saw her was right after he had finished with another client. Another bar, cracked wood and dirty linoleum on the floor. The client had picked the place, and looked to Quentin as if he had taken up residence there.

“What did he want?”

“Do you really want me to expose my clients’ confidences?” Roses, Quentin thought. She smelled of roses, like a hint of springtime in Hell.

“I suppose not. It couldn’t have been that interesting of a request, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Look at what he gave you.” She gestured to the garish pink necklace Quentin was tucking in his pocket.

Quentin thought of the man who had just left. Who had given him the last item his daughter had touched before she had been abducted. He thought of the quiver in the man’s voice as he told Quentin he had kept the necklace so he could give it to the girl when she was returned, something the man no longer believed would happen. The lie he had bought it with would cause his wife to believe that he hadn’t looked away from their daughter in the shop, not even for a second, and certainly not to flirt with the pretty woman at the register. He hoped the lie would give him some small piece of his life back, he told Quentin.

“The magic doesn’t care about the monetary value of the item. It cares about what the item’s loss means to the person giving it away. The loss of the item needs to balance the gain from the lie.”

“How do you know when the person who wants the lie is offering something that’s worth enough?”

“People so rarely offer something that isn’t.” They might once, or even twice. But the people who sought Quentin out, who bought dishonesty and falsehood in order to reshape the direction of their lives, they came to Quentin because they knew what truly mattered. They knew, down to the breath, how much those lies were worth.

“Still, wouldn’t you rather be the one to decide how much the lie costs? I mean, so you don’t get stuck with useless plastic crap for your work?”

Quentin ran his hand over the necklace in his pocket, felt the worn path of someone else’s fingers. He thought of a string of pigeon’s blood rubies he had been given, the same size as the plastic beads. He thought of the woman sitting in the bench across from him, wearing nothing but those red stones. “These things tend to work themselves out. Magic generally does.”

She nodded.

“Still, isn’t there something you would rather talk about?” Quentin asked. “Really, what I do isn’t that interesting.”

“It is to me,” she said. “I want to know everything about it.”

“What about the man?” he asked. “Did he ever say that he loved you?”

She smiled, dropped her eyes. “Speaking of not interesting,” she said. “I should go.”

Quentin watched her leave. One truth he knew: She would return.

• • • •

Quentin ran into the woman a number of times after that. He learned her name was Thea. He asked her what she did.

“I collect rare and unusual things. Things difficult to acquire, and unique in all the world. It’s a talent of mine.”

“Perhaps sometime I might see your collection?”

“Perhaps.” She smiled, and there were secrets in it. Quentin wanted to know them.

Thea asked Quentin many questions, and, more and more often, he was shocked to discover he answered them with truth. He wanted to lie, could taste the words hovering on the edge of his tongue, but truth would come out. Quentin was very uncomfortable with truth. Its transmission struck him as awkward and sweaty.

Still, Quentin wasn’t worried. He could lie to anyone who bought his services. Just that morning, in fact, he had accepted a da Vinci sketch, believed by all major scholars to have been lost in the seventeenth century, from a woman who needed to swear under oath that she had not engaged in any treasonous activity. As she was still alive in the afternoon, he had conclusive proof he hadn’t lost his abilities.

And he could lie to Thea, he knew he could. He just didn’t. It was a compliment to her, he told himself, that she made him engage with the messiness of actual feelings, speak through the strange acrobatics a sentence made of truth did as he composed it.

Just because he had magic, Quentin thought, he didn’t need to use it.

He said as much to Thea, over dinner that night, as he explained his disturbing tendency to be truthful when in conversation with her.

“But how do I know you’re not lying to me now?” she asked, squeezing his hand. “It would break my heart if you did.”

The touch of her hand burned against his skin. Quentin opened his mouth, and he told the truth. “I’m not lying. I love you.”

Quentin shuddered, then removed his hand from the grasp of the woman who sat across the table from him. He had no idea who she was, and only the vaguest recollection of how he had gotten to the restaurant in the first place.

Thea watched Quentin leave, then smiled, the movement of her lips the luxurious stretch of a cat. “I know you did,” she said, and ordered another drink. She felt the lies that had once belonged to Quentin twisting through her blood, like the bubbles of champagne.

All magic has its price. In certain circumstances, it’s possible to make someone else pay it. They always offer something that’s worth enough.

Among her other talents, Thea tells lies to people for money.

© 2014 by Kat Howard.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kat Howard is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of over twenty pieces of short fiction. Her work has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, and Apex, among other venues. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, written with Maria Dahvana Headley, will be out in September from Subterranean Press. You can find her on twitter as @KatWithSword and she blogs at strangeink.blogspot.com.

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

NOVELLA

The Rule of Engagement

Sherwood Smith

I. Are You Free?

“Are you free?” King Lexan asked, it being the men’s turn to choose a partner for the dance.

“I am,” Ren Desvransa replied, wondering how many questions underlay those three words. Then she laughed at herself: And so every single female he speaks to must think! Lexan Yvansk was not just a king, he was King of Duen Lesc, one of the richest kingdoms in the world. The old saying was that the Lesci rulers did not make war, they seduced their enemies and turned them into lovers. There had never been a homely Lesci king or queen, but Lexan was a throwback to his ancestor, Mattius the Magnificent.

“What is the attraction in rogues?” Lady Tarsa murmured behind her fan as she drifted past a countess.

The countess, a woman of years and experience, murmured back, “You do not like Ren?” Fan in maladroit mode, “I thought everyone liked her.”

The Blue Moon Masque, on the full moon before harvest season, was traditionally the last spectacular court event before the aristocracy of Duen Lesc, and those fortunate enough to be the king’s guests, went home for the winter.

“Liking her is the fashion,” Tarsa said, fan sweeping outward to take in the court, who followed Lexan like flowers follow the sun.

Even that languid, black-eyed Cath Lassatar, Duke of Alavanska. Dragonfire blast him.

“I,” Tarsa added, fan flicking in rue, “am always fashionable.”

This year, summer showed no signs of ending. Curiously enough, nor did the social season. In the gallery beyond the crystal lamps floating about in the air on magical currents, the king’s own musicians poured continual music into the vast white marble room with its silver-leafed argan trees between fountains along the walls, the ice sculpture on the snowy damask-covered table, the tiny blue lamps winking in the trees on the terrace. Against the wall opposite the ice sculptures, a spectacular fall of water, controlled by magic, sent cool air ruffling across the floor.

Tarsa paused next to Lord Jarvas, who, as everyone knew, had little use for women. “What is the interest in rogues and rustics? Contrast by degree?”

Everyone also knew that Jarvas had been one of Lexan’s many youthful follies. Jarvas’s folly, Tarsa thought, was in persistence.

Jarvas leaned negligently against the dragon-scale marble carving around a fountain, from where he’d been observing Ren’s enigmatic brother, Yvo, twirling an old baroness as competently as if he’d been raised in a ballroom, not in a looming fortress.

Jarvas touched his fan to his lips, then spread it with a dash of the lace at his wrist. “Contrast,” he drawled, “to machination.”

Didn’t he mean—no, he couldn’t mean—oh, he was just a fool, in love with a king who loved not him. Tarsa curtseyed with ironic gravity and walked on.

All the guests wore blue, their masks either extravagant or symbolic. Ren’s gown was necessarily simple, she having not had time to order, much less pay for, something as spectacular as the gown of knotted silk, winking with tiny diamonds, worn by Countess Tarsa of Rezh, the jeweled headdress woven into her pale coronet of braids so elaborate that it resembled a crown.

The music struck up, but Cath Lassatar continued to lounge, idly fanning himself so slowly that not a hair of his long black locks actually stirred. Only Cath, Tarsa thought sourly, had the insolence to employ the mode of dragon’s wing, which ordinarily signaled an impending duel.

The king had also chosen to dress simply—which Tarsa had not been able to ascertain beforehand, despite hints, teases, and thumping bribes to useless lackeys. To those who led the mode, there was extra style in complementing a couple’s costumes, and she left nothing to chance if she could avoid it. His shining fall of maple-wood hair was tied back with a diamond clasp, his long, slender body mostly hidden by a many-folded robe resembling those in fashion four centuries ago, his only ornament the rich weave of double-chain.

But chance had doubly evaded her vigilance; Ren matched the king in her many layers of midnight blue gossamer. Her curling black hair swung free over her straight back and charming shoulders.

To this austere simplicity, thought Cath Lassatar, she brought as ornament her willingness to admire her surroundings and to be pleased with her company. Uncourtly qualities, but far from uncouth.

He had not moved. Tarsa drifted near, moth to flame. He was the senior duke in court: like the king, come to his title during the recent war, when so many of their elders were killed. The war in which Ren’s father and brother had played so ambiguous a role. Tarsa wished these fools would remember. Why was justice so drearily negotiable?

“A little late in the season for dalliance,” she said behind her fan. “Might it be that Lexan is more clever than I give him credit, and intends the inevitable to be blessedly short?”

Cath lifted one shoulder lazily, so the light shimmered over his midnight blue silk, molding the strength of his arm before he relaxed and the silk whispered into elegant folds.

“Inevitable?” A sardonic shadow bracketed his mouth before he flashed the fan so that all she could see were his heavy-lidded eyes. “One might counsel you to contemplate the evitable,” he retorted, his gaze resting on her decorative crown.

Tarsa schooled herself not to flush, to break her fan in a tightened grip, to reveal in any way how loathsome she found his unshakable superiority. “Evitable,” she drawled, “it seems, these days, would be the attractions of a climber who’d committed the error of respectable birth.”

“Climber?”

Ordinarily, she prided herself on her dainty figure, her little hands and feet, all in proportion; the tiny gliding steps of the courtier were ideally suited to her diminutive size. But when Cath stared down at her like that—his gaze resting on her, as on a mouse from a mountaintop—she loathed being short.

“Climber?” he repeated.

“Does a pretty face blind you, too? No, you are not blind. Alas. How about witless? In the three weeks she’s been here on this supposed embassy, I’ve seen her flattering the old people who survived her father’s duplicity in the war—flirting with everyone who flirts back—and now this stupidity about us singing in a play. Do you plan to entertain the rest of us by singing?”

“I do not,” he said. “I leave singing plays to the professionals.”

She smiled, turning her fan over in wordless mode.

“But I do intend to be entertained,” he said, laying his fingers on her wrist. They twirled into the dance.

• • • •

Lexan Yvansk’s clasp was so light that Ren could have easily whirled out of his touch. While the music lasted, the world and time ceased, and there was only that glory of flesh touching flesh in their joined hands, and the awareness of his fingers through the filmy gossamer covering her back.

It was the same, and yet not the same, for him. Only the lingering sense of necessity, of duty, kept the fire from consuming him altogether.

He said, “My cousin Najad thinks my absence at the rehearsals of your performance have slowed progress. Is it true?”

Progress. Performance. Ren reached, remembered. “You are welcome whenever you can spare the time to join us. Really, everyone has been so swift in learning their roles, and they all perform charmingly.”

“I have held you up, then. I apologize.” He glanced across the ballroom to where Ren’s brother Yvo danced, to all appearances sober and polite, despite his problematical reputation.

“But we’ve had fun. I think some will even be sorry when the performance is over.”

She knew that many of her volunteers had agreed to perform out of idleness, out of curiosity, out of a wish to not be out of the mode. Some had discovered in themselves an enthusiasm for being on stage. But wasn’t being a courtier a kind of living performance? “I know I’ll be sorry,” she finished, so he would not take her pause amiss. “I’ve enjoyed every day.”

His smile was more polite than humorous. “You have the remedy to that.”

“To do another?” she asked, the implications dizzying. He was never overt, she’d been warned. “What if they tire of me as director? Ought not one of their own be chosen?”

“Do you desire to be quit of your role, then?”

There are two conversations here, she thought.

“They could desire to be quit of me,” she said, trusting to the context of the play to mask her real meaning: Your court is divided, and that hurts you. Can you not see that what hurts you also hurts me?

“Not,” he said as they walked slowly down the room, “from what I see.”

From what you see, or what you choose to see? How can I make the two into one? “Ah, but did we not begin this conversation over duty concerning your missing rehearsal?” She turned her face to the magical breeze as they danced through it, though the warmth was from within, and she did not wish to be shed of it.

“Is that a challenge?” he asked, smiling.

“Come to the next rehearsal, and witness for yourself,” she rejoined, laughing. There, that was safe enough.

“I shall,” he promised. “But you are evading my question.”

“Surely not,” she said, winning a quick smile from him.

His gaze went diffuse for two steps, three. Always at that slow pace, taking no notice of oblique glances their way. He was inured to being constantly watched, Ren thought. Thus the formidable mental walls that she would never betray his trust by trying to breach—although she could.

“What,” he asked presently, “would you do in my place?”

The implications! Her step never faltered, but her mind sped from one possibility to another, until she sensed the pause might become a silence—with its own message—so she resorted to one of her brother Yvo’s unloved tricks, answering a question with a question: “Hold up a verbal mirror?”

He laughed, a real laugh. “I should have expected anyone trained as you have been trained would be adept at evasion.”

She smiled back, enjoying his deliberate provocation. He was richer than the ten surrounding kingdoms, his family was as old as the First Dragon, he was smart, beautiful, and she’d grown up knowing many future kings and queens, all of whom had talked about the sophistication of the Lesci court, its king most of all.

What she had discovered was that he was kind.

Are you free?

He was also a king. A crown was nothing but a royal binding.

“Let us make a pact,” she suggested. “Each of us must answer one question before posing one of our own, or we’ll begin hooting queries at one another like a pair of owls.”

He laughed. “My question stands.”

The dance was finishing up. They had reached the vast waterfall.

Trusting the muting effects of trickling water, she said, “Come to the rehearsal tomorrow, and sing, and see what your court thinks of my taste in Duen Lesci singing plays.” Her chuckle was sudden, the more enchanting because there was no sense of superiority or of calculation—despite her training having been overseen by the longest sighted person in the world.

The music stopped. His own world encircled him again. There was his marble ballroom, and his guests, some watching overtly and some covertly, and the servants who waited on the guests and watched them all for a good chat later. He bowed and she stepped away, leaving air between them. Then he looked back.

Ren’s body, obedient to the will, had disengaged, but her mind clamored for joining. Through her mind a thousand trivial questions and comments streamed, to be summarily dammed. This, too, was a common ploy of all his admirers—to keep him by their side, talking. She would not deny his access to others.

The men—all except for Cath Lassatar, but he was watching—closed around Ren. She said something that caused a laugh, covered her eyes with one hand and reached with the other. The fellows gave Najad precedence. Ren was kind to him, Lexan had observed, but he’d swear she never thought of him as a suitor. Her interactions with Cath Lassatar had been far fewer and, from a distance, tense. He could not comprehend her reaction to Cath: He knew, as one does after a certain amount of experience, that what she felt was not indifference.

Ren tripped lightly into the next dance, feeling safe enough with the pleasant, non-demanding Najad to scan the room once.

She saw, with pain, the Duchess Tarsa’s pale-faced fury as she rustled, jewels trembling, straight to Lexan’s side.

She felt a swoop of warning at Cath of Alavanska’s unwavering black gaze.

She did not see her brother Yvo’s reflective countenance as he played the role of a model guest, and watched them all.

• • • •

II. The Contemplation of Rings

The spectacle of Lexan deep in conversation with Ren during that long dance both annoyed and amused Cath. The amusement was sparked by Tarsa’s increasingly unsubtle efforts to keep them always in view, prompting Cath to use his advantage of height to dance her to the opposite side of the room and keep her there.

When it was over, he stayed away from the eager young lords clamoring for Ren’s attention, but did Tarsa take a hint? No. She rushed straight to Lexan’s side to claim him before any other lady could, the fourth time this evening. Shaking his head, he began calculating how long before he could be gone.

Tarsa kept her head high, though she watched for Ren to glance her way, eager to see the same anguish in those honey-brown eyes that Tarsa had felt during that long dance with Lexan.

Her own ended far too soon, and Lexan thanked her with a courteous air, so courteous she couldn’t think of a way to keep him at her side so he could not ask someone else. He was gone, extending his hand to the delegate from Breis.

She was left standing there, all those jewels pressing on her head. Her head ached, her eyes ached.

“ . . . dance the waltz?”

She felt the touch of a hand on her wrist, and looked up, uncomprehending, into gray-green eyes. It was that strange Yvo fellow: no title, but with his history, he didn’t need one.

She couldn’t speak, but he didn’t wait. He slid his hand over hers, and again her body moved, stiff but obedient.

He did not speak. They just danced. She became aware that the slow circles he made, the easy rhythm, were curiously soothing.

A ring on his little finger winked and gleamed like water, no, like silver, only silver seen in a fog or a dream. The ring was carved in a pattern of vines and leaves. She turned her head to watch the gleaming ring on his raised hand that clasped hers in such a cool, steadying grip.

Her eyes ached less, somehow.

“Do you like to waltz?” Yvo asked.

“Yes, I do,” she said, grateful that he hadn’t spoken until now.

“It’s probably the most enduring of dance forms,” he said. “Others go in and out of fashion, but this one has persisted throughout history.”

“So I learned when I was small,” she said. “Do you know where it originated?”

“Ah, that is a mystery. Some maintain it came from another world than ours; others insist we invented it, and took it to that world, where it also persists.” He paused, guiding her skillfully between two couples in danger of colliding. “Perhaps it is a form inevitable for humans,” he said. “Two people, the compelling rhythm. The eternal circles, described by each couple and interlocked in patterns by the group. Rings—” he smiled down at her, “—of promise.”

Yvo was one of the oddest persons to come to court. He’d appeared abruptly the week previous. No one had known what to expect, as Lexan and Yvo’s father had been enemies at one time. But he was invited to stay.

“Interesting question that probably no one can answer,” she said, feeling strength slowly return. And with it, awareness.

Remembering who he was, Tarsa considered what his words, seeming so neutral, really meant. His father was universally cried down as a villain, then lauded as a hero. He involved himself in world politics, not just jostling for rank in a single court.

“Rings of promise? Is that a jab at crowns?” she asked abruptly. “If even a small portion of the stories are true, your father could have done anything. Had anything, at the end of the war. He could have taken over Duen Lesc—I don’t think Lexan could have stopped him. Lexan said as much. I was there.”

Yvo shrugged. “Maybe true, maybe not. It’s irrelevant.”

“How so?” Strange, how easy he was to talk to.

“Because my father wanted only one thing, his freedom. Nothing else matters, though he does like comfort if he can get it. His house is very comfortable.”

“But . . . to be that powerful, and to give it all up?”

“Give what up?”

Tarsa’s mind wheeled. “Rank. Fortune. Influence.”

“He never had rank, or not in the world that we recognize. Never wanted it. As for fortune, his requirements were comfort, as I said, and also the wherewithal to carry out plans. Influence . . .” Yvo smiled. “He still has that.”

“He does? But one never hears of it.”

“No,” he said, still smiling, and once again steered them away from possible collision.

“So how can he possibly have influence?”

Yvo paused for a fast-whirling couple to pass. His eyes were shuttered by his lashes, unexpectedly long, then they lifted, his unremarkable hazel gaze steady. “If a hand moves through the still pond, do not the ripples ring out, whether the hand smites the water or dips without a splash?” He smiled again, the same sudden smile Ren had, dimples deep on either side of his strong jaw. “Can we not call them rings of influence?”

She frowned, sensing the proximity of meaning. How could anyone have influence without a position of power?

And what could one possibly get out of it, if one hadn’t the privilege of rank?

“Does he get any kind of reward?” she asked.

“Yes,” Yvo said. “Success.”

“Huh.” So he implied there was some kind of power outside of rank. Everyone knew that rank conferred power. That was the accepted definition, the universally acknowledged hierarchy.

“Thank you,” Yvo said, and she realized the waltz had ended.

She curtseyed in thanks and watched him drift into the crowd, but her calm snapped away, replaced by anger when she glimpsed Cath and Ren at the far door. They were alone.

Ren! The corrosive stream of jealousy flooded back, then cooled to interest when she saw Ren jerk her arm free of Cath’s grasp. Quick as a snake, he gripped her arm again. Ren’s chin lifted, her gown shimmered. Was she trying to pull away?

They stepped through the alcove that led to the garden, and were gone.

Tarsa turned away, smiling with contempt. The garden? The terrace was for intimate talk; the garden was where the very young retired to steal kisses.

Yet Cath and Ren had not looked even remotely like a couple bent on dalliance. At least, she hadn’t. No telling what he thought—ever. Except, of course, to amuse himself by being cruel.

It had seemed, in fact, that Ren did not want to walk with Cath. Was he, by any chance, benefiting her with an excoriating examination of her blatant flirtation with the king?

Tarsa wished her joy of it.

Still smiling, she decided to favor the king’s cousin Najad with a dance, since he persisted with that silly crush on her. Najad—cousin to a king, as if she’d ever look at him twice! Cousin to a king was about as close to power as a candle to the sun. At least dancing with Najad would keep her well within Lexan’s proximity, her generosity would be seen, and there was always the next waltz to look forward to.

• • • •

Cath of Alavanska had noticed, years before, that the patterns of movement in a ballroom resembled the ebb and flow of sea tides, a curiosity of nature he’d once witnessed while traveling away from land-locked Duen Lesc.

After the midnight bells rang, many of the older people retired. This was just another ball, another diversion in their established lives. It remained for the young and passionate, those whose lives were thriving with promise, to dance the night through.

He watched, smiling inwardly, until Lexan was busy at the far end, talking diplomacy. Tarsa was with that strange Yvo. Everyone else drifted after Lexan, leaving the waterfall to plash and thunder unseen, the alcoves unused.

Cath dealt easily enough with the young sparks round Ren, two of whom were drunk.

“Come. Take a stroll, where it’s a trifle less noisy,” he suggested, loud enough to be overheard.

“I don’t mind noise,” Ren said, but fell in beside him. He meant to emulate the courtly drift, but must have seemed too purposeful, for Ren reacted, quick as a butterfly. “Why in this direction?”

They were now almost at the extreme exit, far from other people.

“Cooler air here.”

“The air is not overly warm in this room,” Ren countered. “Nor is it stuffy.”

“Ah, but it will be sweeter outside. The gardens, after a rain, have quite a scent.”

“They will in the morning, too,” she responded, smiling a little.

“But it’s better now,” he said. “You will see.”

Four, three steps to go.

“I would rather walk about in here,” she stated, looking down at where he’d taken hold of her hand. She pulled her fingers free.

“But I arranged a surprise,” he said, and took her arm. “It will only be a moment.” He felt muscle under the smooth skin of her arm.

“Something nice, I trust?” Her voice was dubious.

“Yes,” he promised, for he believed his promise.

It was the conviction in that soft-spoken “yes” that caused her to walk with him, despite the unsettling intensity of his gaze, his insistent grip, even the way he breathed.

Alarm tingled through her, but she couldn’t believe there could possibly be danger at a ball, not with a hundred couples dancing forty paces away. She walked with him through the alcove and through the open doors into a tiled terrace, potted trees winking with tiny lights. Beyond lay the garden. The scents of woodbine and jasmine and queensblossom perfumed the air. Moths air-danced near the doorway, their wings golden-lit. No one else was there.

Her ears registered steps on the gravel below the terrace, and the soft snort of a horse. She turned her head, her eyes adjusting rapidly, and made out the shape of a horse, and a man beside it, waiting in the concealing shrubs. Not just one horse—two!

She pulled away. “What are you doing?”

He took hold of her arm again, but this time she whipped her arm out of his grip and spun away, almost out of his reach, to discover herself ringed by silent men. Quicker than thought, he closed the distance and seized her more firmly.

It was a quick, desperate fight, for she was very well trained, and knew subtle movements that did not rely on strength or size. But her fragile, exquisitely fitted gown limited her range of movement, and her loose hair got painfully in her way. He was much the stronger and quicker, but he was disadvantaged by his determination to prevail, yet do her no hurt.

Prevail he did. After a silent, swift struggle, he held her gripped against him, one hand round her prisoned wrists, the other covering her mouth. He felt her trembling against his body, and nearly laughed out loud for pleasure and anticipation.

Then came the least pleasant aspect of his plan. He bound her himself. He did not permit his lackey to do it, for he trusted only himself to find that balance between security and comfort, and he would not have any hands but his own touching her.

Silken bonds only, wrists, ankles, mouth. Then he snapped his fingers, and his liveried man silently brought forward his fastest and heaviest cross-country mount.

He carried her himself.

The lackeys ran behind as they trotted along the tiled garden path to the outskirts, between the wide-spaced peacetime guards who watched for trouble from without, not within.

They wound through the gardens to where the paths linked up with one of the main city roads. A turn to the north, away from the few buildings, to the yard of an inn where the northern road crossed the extreme boundary of the palace gardens.

There the remainder of his servants waited with a four-horse carriage. Still mounted, he glanced inside, and saw by the single lantern that all his commands had been carried out exactly.

He dismounted, lifted Ren down, set her unresisting body on the coach seat against the silk-covered pillows, and paused in the doorway, watching her angry eyes above the black sash, gleaming in the light of the lantern held by a lackey.

“We are going to Alavanska,” he said.

She didn’t blink, just glared at him. No sign of fear, of pleading, of tears. Even when he removed the gag, she said nothing at all.

He shut the door, motioned to the lackeys to take their places, and remounted his horse. The driver loosened the reins and rolled out.

All night, he rode beside the carriage, guarding his chosen lady.

• • • •

III. The Etiquette of Abduction

Ren saw four opportunities for escape before that first morning.

Each would have involved hurting someone, which—as yet—she was unwilling to do. When the fourth occurred, she cursed herself mentally for not paying attention years ago when her brother offered to teach her that point on the side of the neck below the jawbone that dropped people into unconsciousness. What use would that be to someone who took pride in using wit and good will instead of trickery and brawn?

Men! Except . . . the two successful abductions in her own admittedly strange family had been carried off, both at sword point, by women. One, her great-grandmother, was still alive.

Oh well. She’d just have to manage by her own methods.

She thought it all through as the beautifully sprung carriage rocked and rattled northward, pulled by four fast horses. Lexan’s roads were very good, she observed. So too were Cath’s horses, carriage, and his servants.

The pauses to change the horses were accomplished swiftly and smoothly. At one point, a servant poked his head in, scrupulously respectful of demeanor, and offered Ren a steaming, fragrant cup of hot chocolate.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I’ll take water if you have it. Nothing else.”

The man seemed nonplussed. He bowed, and withdrew, telltale red along his plump cheeks.

Ren sustained a pulse of regret, for the air was chill, and the chocolate would probably have tasted as good as it smelled, but she’d determined on passive resistance, to see what that occasioned.

Cath—blast his twisty little brain—had enjoyed her fighting to get free. Enjoyed it? Well, then, she’d not give him that pleasure again.

The servant returned with a brimming cup of water, which he held to her lips and she drank down. Her headache receded. She thanked him gravely, and he shut the carriage door.

The coach began rolling, and no one came near her again until well on into the next day; with the gag gone, she thought in relief, she could at least use the Waste Spell. But her stomach gurgled fretfully at its neglect.

Noon came and went, with another stop, another offer of food. She accepted only water. She looked out the window at the changing scenery, farmland and well-tended canals giving way to hills, with mountains nearing. She leaned out once, but her eyes met Cath’s gaze as he rode next to the carriage. She refused to open the window again.

On the second stop, the door opened once more and this time, it was Cath himself. At some point, he had changed out of his silk and jewels into a sturdy linen shirt under a vest, riding trousers stuffed into high spurred boots. A baldric crossed his chest, to which was attached a well-made dueling rapier.

He untied the sashes round her wrists and ankles. Glad she was to be free at last—obviously they were now deep within his own lands—she gave him no sign of reaction.

“Are you hungry or thirsty?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Will you take something? Bread? Coffee?”

“No,” she said.

He shut the door.

They rolled on very soon.

Presently, the carriage wound its way up increasingly steep inclines. They stopped more frequently. No one came to the door, and she did not open it, or try to run, for she sensed alert minds waiting nervously outside.

She had decided: She would not involve servants if she could help it. This duel was between herself and their master.

• • • •

She jerked awake when they stopped again. Excited voices now—they must have reached his citadel. The orange flares of torches outside the window shone against the pale blue of dawn.

The coach door opened a moment later. Uneven torchlight outlined Cath’s silhouette.

“Will you step out, Ren?” He held out his hand.

In silence she complied, but without touching him. He withdrew as soon as he saw her intention, and waited, still holding the door, until she stood up, shaking out her skirts and fighting against vertigo.

“Please, this way,” he said.

She paced beside him without speaking.

Looking down at his prisoner, Cath saw stony control, and the innate grace that informed her every movement, even when she stalked, even when she was grubby and tired, and hadn’t eaten for two days. Anticipation was heightened by admiration. She did not just have style, she was style. Impatient as he’d been, he discovered he did not want her to surrender too quickly.

Ren took in the massive stone lineaments of a formidable castle, not surprising for a border duchy. Clearly, it had been built for defense and to ward off fierce mountain winds, weather, and warriors.

Inside, she found the well-maintained tastes of former generations. Outmoded furnishings amused her, heavy carved chair arms and legs, stylized representations of magical beasts, the court of the First Dragon as envisioned four hundred years ago.

Down a carpeted hall, and into a room whose chill was soon banished by a new-lit magical fire in a great fireplace. Autumn came early to the mountains.

Two great wingchairs sat angled toward the fire, with a table between them. Cath indicated one, then bent to augment the light by touching candles to the flames.

He’d gotten rid of the rapier. In the golden light he looked as disheveled as she felt, mud-splashed to the thighs from having ridden the entire distance on horseback. She mentally awarded him credit for his straight back and alert, though narrow-eyed, gaze: he probably had as great a headache as she did. But she permitted no sign of hers in her demeanor.

He sank in the other chair, heedless of his mud. He stretched his booted feet before him, spurs winking in the firelight, and a sigh escaped him.

She remained standing, though she felt her effort in every joint and bone.

“Shall I summon refreshment?” He drew off his riding gloves and laid them on the table.

“Not for me,” she said.

His lip curled. “You intend to starve to death?”

“I have not yet decided what to do,” she stated in as cold a voice as she could contrive. “Until I do, I’ve no wish to touch anything of yours.”

He leaned back, hands idle on the chair arms. A ruby on his little finger winked with rich burgundy light, a steady wink: his heartbeat. She forced her gaze away.

“What are your choices?” he asked, in the voice of power humoring the powerless.

“Whether to leave or to stay, of course,” she said, her tone one of surprise.

“Meaning?” he prompted.

“Meaning either I cut my way through your people—something I contemplate with distaste—or I remain and dwindle to death, another unpleasant choice.”

“I’d rather you do neither,” he said, still humoring her. “Though I confess I’d like to see you try the first.”

“I know you would,” she retorted. “The prospect of killing your servants for your entertainment does nothing to enhance my diminishing respect for you.”

“Will it bolster my declining prestige if I admit that I don’t think you capable of killing any of my people?”

“You would be wrong.” Her steady gaze reflected the candlelight, gold within a ring of black, within a ring of gold, more enchanting a pair of eyes than any art could contrive.

His brows went up slightly. “I’m inclined to give some credence to your claims, judging from how close you came to grassing me in the palace garden.”

She remained silent.

“Which one of ’em trained you?” he asked. “Your brother or your father?”

She did not answer that, either.

His fingers drummed on the arm of his chair until he became aware of the movement, and ceased.

“Will you consider a third choice?” he asked presently.

“That depends.”

“I want to marry you,” Cath said.

“Then you should have asked.”

“And you would have said?”

“I would have refused. And the present situation is not likely to change my decision.”

“Maybe,” he admitted, smiling a little. “I was bored with court, and with waiting on the fools who surrounded you, so I decided someone needed to take action, and why not I?”

Her lips parted, but then she closed them.

He was bemused by her lack of reaction, as she had hoped. She knew that anything else—tears, fury, haughty resentment—would have entertained him. Begging would have disgusted him, but it would have disgusted her more.

“Will you tell me what criteria will affect your decision?” he asked.

“Yes. If you offer me violence, I’ll use it back if I can.”

“I will not use violence,” he stated flatly.

“Then your people will take no harm of me,” she promised.

His brows lifted again. He was too tired to mask his reactions, so she saw that he was beginning to believe that she could do what she claimed.

“And me?” he asked next, lips curling.

“You deserve whatever you get.”

“So I cannot touch you without leave, but you are bound by no such constraint?”

“I am here against my will,” she said. “I see this as a way of restoring a semblance of balance.”

“May I defend myself?” The amusement was back.

“Yes,” she said tranquilly.

He steepled his fingers. “So you’ve been trained to strike once, have you? Ah, I’d forgotten the scholarly Yvo. Or rather, your father and his sinister allies, around whom you presumably must have spent your formative years, eh?”

She did not answer.

“Interesting. So the personal risk is mine. It seems fair enough. Very well, I accept your rules.” He paused. When she remained silent, he said, “Does that mean you’ll take food and drink?”

He spoke in a plaintive tone a shade too obvious to be serious, yet she descried the concern below it.

“Yes.”

“I’m relieved.” His court drawl was back. “Would you like anything now?”

Her stomach squeezed, but she decided her point was best made if she steeled herself. “No.”

“Then I’ll show you where you’ll stay.” He smiled. “Until you choose to change that, too.” He rose, and in silence she followed him out.

Of course it was a tower room. She took a good look at access and egress, not caring if he saw her doing it.

When she was inside, he said, “I wish you a good rest.”

She did not respond, for she’d decided that the circumstances obviated politeness. She would not say please or thank you to an abductor. They had a truce, not a relationship.

When he realized she would not speak, he shut the door. She heard a lock engage on the outside.

There was a fireplace—someone had ridden ahead and a clear, warm fire burned—and pleasant if heavy furnishings that evoked masculine tastes. She wondered, as she looked at the bookcases, the fine linens on the bed, if this had been where Cath was locked up by his relations during the early part of the war, before he ran away to fight for the king.

She stepped through the cleaning frame beside the empty wardrobe. The tingle of magic snapped away the grit in hair, skin, teeth, clothing. She took off her gown and laid it aside with care, then climbed into the bed. On the bedside table was a water pitcher and glass. She helped herself, drank deeply, then burrowed into the pillows and dropped into sleep.

• • • •

IV. The Politics of Diplomacy

Tarsa lay in bed, stretching in lazy pleasure.

Ren still had to be missing, she just knew it. She glanced at the window, and laughed. How often had she woken this early? Not often.

Annoyance soured her mood when she thought of the two long, empty days she’d spent. Everything had begun so delightfully when her silly friend Mrentze bustled in and gabbled out breathlessly, “Did you hear? Ren is gone—and so is the Black Duke!”

Tarsa had seen at once how to destroy Ren Desvransa as a threat, but still not harm a hair of her pretty, empty head. Wasn’t that true queenship, to be able to think brilliantly in a moment?

“You don’t mean that Ren eloped with him at last?” Tarsa had asked, yawning behind her hand.

Mrentze’s face! She’d never forget the sight of those pop eyes, the round mouth, her oh-so-well-born nose twitching. “You knew? You knew, and you didn’t say anything?”

“That would show so little finesse,” Tarsa had murmured, finding her position stronger by the moment. She could just hear Mrentze’s voice up and down the halls of court.

“What did you know?” Mrentze looked askance. “If you say that Ren told you her plans, I say you dreamed it.”

Tarsa bit back a hot rejoinder. How dare this mere follower all but call the leader of fashion a liar?

But she had to keep the goal in view. “Tact forbade me say anything last night, when they so obviously wanted privacy, but yes, I saw them go out together, directly from the ball.”

All strictly true.

Mrentze scarcely stayed long enough to be polite, leaving Tarsa laughing as she raced into fevered preparation, so that Lexan, in coming to corroborate what she had witnessed, might find her appropriately employed when he came to seek commiseration. Or even sympathy. She’d give it, because Tarsa always thought of the kingdom first, and not just of her own pleasure—unlike Ren.

She’d whiled away two long days in her rooms, doing artistic things, twice having her maids bring in fresh flowers and throw out the old, while the hired minstrel plunked away in the alcove.

Now she rolled over, looking across her empty bed. How long since anyone had slept beside her in her cotton-silk sheets? An internal image, strong but unwanted, came: Ren and Cath together. Cath’s hands, his long black hair, unbound, drifting across flesh, so soft, the scent of it—did Ren twine her fingers through it?

Revulsion tightened her insides. How foolish, she thought, flinging herself out of bed. How weak! One drunken night, long ago, and while it had been good—very—Cath was not a king.

She dressed with care, for this would be the first time she’d emerged from her rooms. She’d even decided against attending the concert scheduled for the previous night, because she knew that nothing would be discussed but Ren, Ren, Ren.

And Cath, of course. She didn’t want to hear that either.

She sat down to her breakfast just as there came a knock at the outer door. Her chief maid came in and bowed. “His Grace the Duke of Desentis requests a private interview, my lady.”

Najad? Well, he’d certainly know what was going on, and she wouldn’t have to ask anyone who mattered. Meanwhile, he’d be a fair gauge of the atmosphere of court.

“Bid him enter,” Tarsa said.

She had scarcely finished buttering her second little roll when Najad strode in, big, brawny, terribly and tiresomely earnest, dressed in riding clothes.

“Tarsa,” he said, without any vestige of the niceties.

“Najad.” She nodded regally. “I just sat down to breakfast. Would you care to join me?”

He ignored her gesture at the other chair, and her question. He looked perplexed, compressed his lips, then burst out, “That gabbler Mrentze has spread it all over court that you saw Ren run off with Alavanska.”

He hadn’t even waited until the servant was gone.

She set her pastry down with delicate care. “Is that still the subject? I am so glad I had a headache yesterday. What of it if she chose to go away with the Duke of Alavanska?”

“Did you really see them?”

She did not like his tone of voice at all. But now was not the time to put him in his place, or what would be his place, when her rank exceeded his. “Oh, Najad,” she said in her most lachrymose voice. “The business is too painful to discuss. Why does it matter what I saw?”

He blinked, the stupid dolt. “I’m sorry to upset you,” he said finally, slamming his palm against the back of the empty chair before him, thump, thump. Before she could request him not to damage her furniture, he said abruptly, “I’ll leave.” Turned away without waiting for her answer, and stalked out, spurs ringing on her marble floor.

• • • •

V. The Duelists Engage

Ren faced Cath’s wardrobe steward, who had come herself rather than send one of her underlings. “I appreciate your effort, and I shall make certain that his grace knows that you tried,” Ren said pleasantly. “However, I will not wear anything but my gown.” Ren indicated her blue mothwing, which of course looked absurd in daylight. Wearing it would underscore the fact that she had not consented to be here.

The poor woman glanced up, then down, her mouth working. Ren smiled in sympathy, and spoke again to make it clear that the steward was absolved of any possible blame. “These gowns you brought are very fine, and under ordinary circumstances, I would have liked them very much.”

The woman bowed, then slowly folded the three day-dresses. She glanced once more at Ren, as if mentally pleading with her to change her mind, and then left.

The door shut.

Ren closed her eyes, sent out a mental feeler, and sensed the enormous armed guard posted outside the door. She suppressed a sigh, combed out her hair, and fingered it into a braid down her back. Then she worked through a full set of the unarmed combat drills her brother had trained into her as habit, which left her tightened muscles loose and relaxed.

She’d just finished when a knock came at the door.

“His grace invites you to breakfast, my lady,” came a voice.

Outside stood not just the guard in mail and fighting livery, but a sizable herald. Both looked at her with eyes slightly distended, and she suppressed the urge to snicker. Did they really expect her to take them on in a wrestling match? What had Cath said?

She was still smiling when she walked into the room with the big chairs, which she recognized as Cath’s favorite, and probably the most comfortable room in the castle. Downstairs were the great state rooms, for this was the main residence of the family, but those were vast and, at this time of year, unpleasantly cold.

“You are amused?” Cath asked, rising. “Good morning,” he added.

She did not respond to his courtesy, but sat down. “What did you tell those mountain-sized guards? They looked at me as if I’d bite them in half.”

“Ask them yourself,” he retorted. “I recommend the cheese-pasty. My cook is better than Lexan’s, at least with breakfast.”

“Now that I can’t believe,” she said, piling food onto her platter. Not just the flaky-crusted pasty, but fresh fruit and bread that must have come straight from the oven to this table, for it still steamed. A cup of fresh butter stood at the side.

“Have you thought about your rules for how to occupy your time?” he asked, with some irony. “As, I assume, I am still under threat of violence if I touch you.”

She matched his tone exactly. “You are. But I am open to other suggestions.”

“Well, you can stay here and read, or talk to my head steward. She’d like nothing more than to show you around and relate the history of the castle. Or you can ride along with me, for I’ve a number of pressing matters to see to, not surprising since I’ve been at court all summer.”

“I’d much prefer riding with you,” Ren said, “as long as I remain officially invisible. No introductions, no explanations of who I am.”

“Shall I arrange for riding clothes?”

“No.”

He frowned, rubbed a thumb across his brow. “People will think it odd—”

“They already do,” she said cheerfully. “Every single one of them, most likely. They just don’t speculate in front of you.” She grinned, and addressed the unspoken question. “I might make a spectacle of myself riding about in a ball gown, but I am an observer, not a participant in your life. Since we have this much of an understanding, I don’t intend to go anywhere until you escort me back to Alsais, everything proper and in daylight.”

“Ah,” he said, brow clearing.

She knew he misconstrued, but that was all right.

He’d find out.

• • • •

VI. The Politics of Desire

After a week, Tarsa emerged from her rooms to discover that the social season, officially ended with the Blue Moon Masque, had left the palace curiously full of people. So far, it seemed, the only departures had been Cath and Ren.

Up and down the guest wing of the palace—Risto Row to the inmates of rank, and the Fribble File to the house servants who had to look after them, although Tarsa would never hear that—doors were still closed, which indicated occupancy. When people left for home, the rooms were opened, aired, and cleaned.

So people were around, but nowhere in sight. Further, no one appeared to have scrambled together delightful parties, or outings, or even concerts or readings in order to pass the time, for no scented invitations had been slipped beneath her door. Was it possible they all waited for Tarsa to take the lead?

Time to survey the field.

She did not bother to check the fencing salle, where mornings found the younger men and the more rambunctious young women. She’d worked hard at swordplay during the war days, but had gladly abandoned it afterward, having decided that a queen did not need to impress anyone with her swordsmanship.

No one in the garden, the card rooms, even the informal dining room. Where were they? Surely not all in their rooms, dallying with one another?

She remembered that stupid play Ren had chosen and its foolish philosophizing. Was it better to be lover or beloved? Her thoughts reached first for Cath and Ren, but she pushed them away. But that left Lexan Yvansk . . .

. . . and the contrast between his neutral, benign deference, on which she had staked her entire life against the gain of a crown, and his behavior since Ren had come. Love? It couldn’t possibly be love. It was mere lust for a pretty face on his part, and for a crown on hers. Oh, for his person too, which everyone who had eyes desired. The surprise was that he had not swept her off for one of those long, door-shut intervals that had happened so frequently when they were all very young, before the war. He was kind to former partners, but never more than a friend. He had been rumored to indulge in sex in every possible human combination, but he had never once set up a lover in the sense of beloved.

And, despite Tarsa’s fears, he had not begun this summer.

Had she misjudged? No, they all had seen his eyes when he watched Ren. Lust.

After the noon bells, she went to find out, if she could, where the inner court was. Surely they were not still asleep!

Rain made it impossible to cut through gardens. She frowned at the gray sky and rounded a corner, then staggered as a figure almost ran her down.

“Oh! Lady Tarsa! I am sorry!”

It was that silly twit Dorix. The girl swept a court curtsey, her manner so humble and contrite that Tarsa nodded more graciously than she’d meant and said only, “I trust there is no emergency, no fire?”

“No, only I overslept horridly, and now I’m late. Are you coming too? Someone said you were ill.”

“Coming?”

Dorix looked as blank as that idiot Najad. “Of course,” she said, hands spread prettily. One of Ren’s gestures. “You remember: Love’s Favors Lost. Rehearsing. The king has taken over the direction himself.”

Lightning blinded Tarsa, an internal strike of white pain that had nothing to do with the summer storm hissing over the garden. She hadn’t forgotten that stupid play, but she’d assumed everyone else had. “Oh, of course.”

She followed Dorix to the king’s theater, where all the court was gathered, including Lexan. As she and Dorix entered, the rise and fall of a man’s and woman’s voices reached them, along with the strains of a full orchestra, the king’s own musicians.

The stage was filled not with professional players, but aristocrats. Practicing, just like paid players wandering the kingdom. Lexan stood in the center, a sheaf of papers in his hand.

At Tarsa’s and Dorix’s entry, most turned around.

“Ah, there you are,” exclaimed one of the Zaltans, coming forward to claim Dorix.

Najad stood behind his cousin, some kind of prop in hand. He bowed to Tarsa, his expression difficult to interpret; it was a face she’d never seen before. He didn’t speak, but walked off with a couple of the fellows, talking in a low voice.

Lexan nodded a greeting to her, and asked if she was recovered?

“Yes, sire,” she said, curtseying.

“Thank you for joining us. Your act is just finished, but we’ll return to it again,” he said, and turned his attention back to the stage.

Somehow she made it through the rest of that day. She stood on the periphery of that crowd, watching Ren’s absurd play being put together as if it mattered. She simpered and sang when asked to, and pretended an interest.

At the end, one of the sillier climbers whispered, “If you have nothing better, a few of us are going into town in mask for a little diversion.”

Although she’d never encouraged the woman’s pretensions and had despised people who went to town to seek diversion, she heard herself accept.

In mask. There were no actual masks, of course, hadn’t been for a couple hundred years. Aristocrats laid aside their fluttering, embroidered silks and donned ordinary clothing, as worn by the wealthier citizens of the capital. That meant, like the Masques, no claims of rank or precedence. Although one might be recognized, no one spoke of it, but one could not use one’s rank, either. A duchess might sit next to a seamstress’s apprentice at an inn, but if the dinner was good and the talk engaging, there was a kind of freedom in it, an escape from the fraught consequences of court.

Through the evening, she followed the noisy group from place to place, ignoring the music, the laughter, smiling and smiling though her entire body ached with anger, tension, even a kind of grief. She kept wondering why she had even come until, with some relief, she recognized that they had entered the spice-scented House of Stars, the favored pleasure house of slumming aristocrats.

She was never aware of making a choice, but somehow she found herself upstairs, with a tall young man with long black hair, who saw that she did not want to speak, and sensed her need, her very great need, and did his best to assuage it.

Even in the fires of desire and expertly awakened passion, she could not quite rid herself of the vision of Lexan Yvansk on the stage, or of that look in Najad’s eyes, the steady and distanced stare of hurt, of sadness, of disillusionment.

And so, although they returned just before dawn, she had gained enough clarity to think ahead, to once again claim her life for her own. By the time the other women had sunk into well-contented slumber, Tarsa was down in the stables, departing alone for the north.

• • • •

VII. The Perils of Fire

“I was supposed to visit Wyst that year, but war prevented my foray into worldly polish,” Cath said wryly as they sat over breakfast that next morning. “Afterward, there was too much to do for protracted absences, so I have that pleasure yet to experience.”

“Perhaps we might have met,” Ren said. “What an odd thing, to look back and wonder about such possibilities of encounter! My mother and I were in Wyst that year, before she remarried.”

“You visited the highlands, of course.” He knew it was contemptible, but pride prevented him from admitting that his family had apparently not been deemed influential or worthy enough for permission to see the Dragon Lands.

Ren’s lashes lifted in mild query. “We spent the summer there.”

He bit back the impulse to repeat, in the witless way he detested in other people, You spent the summer on the highlands? “What can you tell me about it?” Cath reached to pour more coffee into his cup.

Ren cradled her tea in her fingers. “What is there to tell? It’s big, and vast, and you scarcely ever see the dragons. But when you do . . .” She shivered. “You remember how small and breakable and impermanent humans are. The other thing is, they are loud. Everything they do is loud. I have a cousin who’s a mage, who spent fifty years as a tree. She said we don’t realize that we’re loud and horrible to creatures tinier than us.” She cocked her head, smiling ruefully. “Am I boring you? I’m afraid I was an awful chatterer when I was small. It’s still a habit.”

“I am not the least bored. I was trying to imagine spending even a day as a tree. Do go on.”

She shrugged. “I saw why they’d never let me go to the highlands when I was small. I would have been terrified witless. In truth, I was happy enough to stay in the old city when my mother went to the highlands to study. In the palace, there are so many niches and corners, every one a story! For example, on the sentry walk below the oldest tower, there are footprints supposed to be left from one of the Winged Avengers when she touched down to save the queen’s ancestor. The prints are small, and I used to fit my bare toes in when I was about four. The queen told me once they think that story is apocryphal. Not about the rescue, that’s in the records, but about her touching down when the Dragons burned the city, and making those prints. I didn’t care, it was the palace children I loved. All of them—cook’s children, stewards’ prentices, princes and princesses—over the centuries, standing just where I was standing. Looking around in wonder at the world.” She smiled. “Now I am boring.”

Cath was not bored. He was unsettled at how easily Ren Desvransa quoted queens. Not conceited or calculating, but with the comfort of long acquaintance. She didn’t seem to be aware of the effect, because it was her natural state.

He was trying to find something to say when bells rang outside, reminding him of the time. And duty.

He set his coffee aside. “Alas. Much as I would like to continue this discussion, I’ve a Name Day celebration for a liegeman’s first child.”

Ren waved a hand. “Go on. It seems a good day to sit by the fire and read.”

“You do not wish to accompany me?”

“Not the least,” Ren said with cheer.

He’d seen that indefatigable cheer when he mentioned social obligations. Since their arrival, he’d been showered with invitations, most of them intimating in the most delicate way possible that if he wished to bring company, he was quite welcome to.

He walked rapidly toward the stable, one of his scribes trotting at his side and reading off the morning’s messages, which today were more invitations. To each he said either “Yes” or “No.” At times like this, he thought with a spurt of humor after four Nos in a row, it was good to have a reputation for a caustic tongue. He went to the ones he didn’t feel he could shun; though word had indeed spread, no one had quite dared ask him questions outright.

He would rather have stayed alone with Ren. Each day he found more interesting than the last, and he would not permit himself to think beyond that.

Ah, the rules governing the civilized abduction!

• • • •

Ren wandered from the dining room with its abandoned dishes, the abandoned conversation scarcely less palpable but only in the realm of the spirit. Tedium closed in at the prospect of another day alone. Ruefully she admitted to herself that she found Cath the governor, in his plain but well-made riding gear, his attention absorbed in questions of wine trade, root drainage, and new bridges, far more prepossessing than she had Cath the courtier in elegant velvet and lace, quoting wicked poetry in the ancient singsong language of old Wyst.

Her heart would not swerve. So far, at least, there was no temptation to disturb her inner harmony. That left her with clear thought and the ability to think beyond just the two of them and to what must be said, and thought, in the Lesci court.

They had not discussed Lexan at all. Though his name came up from time to time, the subject of Lexan as person was tacitly forbidden, as was Cath’s motivation. She knew that it was not a matter of unbounded lust. There was in some wise a challenge to his royal relation, one that Lexan had not responded to, though he could have.

They both knew he could have. From brief references, and from the subtle signs of guard and watch round Cath’s castle, Ren gathered that Lexan could, and had in the past, exerted his kingly powers, and that he was all the more effective for the rarity and the expertise with which he acted when he chose to.

But no guards in royal livery galloped up to the gates demanding surrender of Ren’s person. Nor did Yvo slip tracelessly in and appear at her window, which was the possibility she’d dreaded.

She was convinced of only one thing: The matter must be resolved by her alone. And Yvo knew it. She sensed his presence, still in the Lesci capital, but he made no attempt to contact her on the mental plane, nor did she reach for him.

And so she whiled away the day, prowling among Cath’s books. His servants, obviously resigned to the vagaries of aristocrats, kept a respectful distance, appearing only to offer meals.

• • • •

Despite his late return, Cath was at breakfast when she came down in her blue ball gown, her hair in a plain braid. The silvery glow of dawn struck muted color in the fragile fabric. She was thoroughly sick of the gown by then, thought she looked silly in the blunt light of morning, but he found the spectacle quite agreeable. He also knew better than to say anything.

He rose to greet her, as had become customary, then sat down again, frowning over a letter.

“I have to ride up to my vineyards today,” he said as she helped herself to fresh-baked oatcakes and berries-and-cream. “It’s a long ride, but you might find the area of interest. It’s one of the oldest in the kingdom.”

“I’d enjoy that.”

“Do you know anything about wine making?” he asked, after studying his letter again.

“I’ve learned a few things.”

Probably a lot. But she never enumerated exactly what she’d been taught, or how much she’d mastered. He discovered things about her through tossed-off references, which made her the more interesting. “You know something about human interaction,” he said, neither agreeing to nor denying her claim. “Will you give me the benefit of your observations? This dispute is not an official judicial matter, it touches on personal concerns, and so my judgment might be at fault. I won’t say more, lest I prejudice you either way.”

“If you like,” she said. “I will listen, but not speak before your people.”

Very soon they were mounted on cross-country racers, covering difficult ground at the gallop, eight armed outriders behind them. The air was chill in the shadows, but the sun shone brightly, turning south-facing cliff sides pleasantly warm. He discovered that she rode as well as he, so they rode hard and fast, changing horses twice to spare the animals a long uphill dash.

The sun was advancing, casting extravagant shadows, when the long and acrimonious statements, claims, threats, and finally answered questions had been witnessed from angry parents, stubborn young woman, smiling harper, and steady young neighbor whose trade was making barrels. In the distance, clouds piled up over the higher peaks.

Cath told them all to wait on judgment and walked out of the parents’ house onto the porch. Ren pulled the rough wooden door shut behind her.

Cath leaned his hands apart on the plank railing. “Well?” He flicked a glance over his shoulder, unsmiling, then returned his gaze to the spectacular valley view before them—and the impending storm.

“My suggestion is to make the first offer a trade that cuts the daughter off from inheriting.”

Cath’s lip curled. “So you don’t believe in a month’s courtship either?”

“One person’s courtship is another’s flirtation—or opportunity for gain,” Ren said, her voice steady, uninflected. “A month, a moment, ten years, it’s all relative. I do not trust that harper. He grins too much, and he was so busy trying to see down the neck of my gown that he didn’t notice how much it hurt the daughter. My instinct is that his words are pretty with no meaning, except as they reveal his desire for personal gain.”

Cath grunted. “That matches what I heard.”

“I’ll wait here,” she said. “In truth, I feel for that poor barrel-making fellow. Although he loves her, has she ever returned the favor?”

“Oh, she liked him right fine, until this spring. Just like he said. Maybe she’ll like him again, once she gets the harper out of sight.”

Will he like her back? Ren thought, rubbing her hands up her arms. Does Lexan think I’m here because I want to be? Is a month just moonbeams? Would he have been happier if I’d gone home after my official duties were discharged, and hadn’t gone walking in that rose garden with him, and accepted his invitation to stay?

She turned her hot face into the cold wind; Cath reappeared, smiling faintly.

“All settled?”

“Not yet. But it will be. Soon’s our friend the barrel maker caught on, he started in with all kinds of trade proposals—offering the harper good solid work in order to help the couple get started, the only constant being the daughter rescinding heirship to her brother. The harper smiled and smiled, but I swear he was calculating how fast he could be gone. I think the negotiations will last long enough for him to discover an urgent task somewhere down the mountain.”

“Poor daughter,” Ren said, but softly. A marriage with that handsome harper would be no joy, she suspected.

“Poor daughter indeed.” Cath was going to say something more, but just shook his head. “Come on. We’ve a long ride, and we’re going to make most of it wet.”

He was right.

The rain started soon after, a drenching, chill rain that promised snow on those mountains before long. The rain lasted as the afternoon light faded and the unseen sun vanished beyond the western peaks. Cath offered her his riding jacket, which she refused, though with an inward pang of regret.

Ren had not had to exert such sustained physical control for a very long time. She managed, forcing inner warmth to kindle, and took no harm, knowing the cost would be tremendous lassitude and a voracious appetite. If she ate well and slept well, she would be fine on the morrow.

Still, never had she been so glad to see lights and civilization as when Cath’s castle appeared below them. Round, down, and into the stable at last, the animals were glad to be home, the stable hands rushing to care for them.

Ren could not relinquish her control yet; she had to dismount, and she must not fall, despite watery knees and trembling fingers. Her face had gone numb; as she followed Cath upstairs to the little drawing room, it seemed her brain had gone numb as well.

A fire waited. Its heat drew her as she gratefully stretched out her hands. Slowly, the numbness gave way to tingle, and then, at last, to warmth.

“Permit me to tell you,” Cath said, still unsmiling, “that your point has long been made, and you needn’t take such foolish risks.”

Ren glanced back. His manner was one of cool reserve, but she saw the concern beneath it. She forced herself to say cheerily, “Oh, I had a kind of wager with myself. I still don’t know if I won or lost, but I promise this: No more wintry rides until I recover my wardrobe.”

She turned back to the fire, breathing slowly, for the lassitude had hit her, but she would not give in to that, either. Gradually, she became aware of a wonderful summery scent, the precious, rare tea from beyond the Dragon Lands above Wyst.

She hesitated, not wanting to remove herself from the fire, for her gown was still rain-drenched, unpleasantly clingy and cold. The clink of porcelain on wood caused her to turn her head. Cath was within arm’s reach, his head bent, his face hidden as he poured the tea into a cup. He stepped back, pulled off his soggy riding jacket, and slung it over a table by the door.

Ren picked up the teacup slowly and sipped, eyes shut, savoring the taste of spring gardens, of summery fields full of wildflowers, utterly unaware of the striking picture she made, the gown molding every subtle curve of her splendid body, her profile outlined against the fire.

Warmth worked its way down to her toes in the now-threadbare dancing slippers, and stayed. She opened her eyes. Realized she’d emptied the cup.

She turned to thank him. The words never shaped themselves; instead she stood there, staring blankly at those steady, intense black eyes.

Warmth. The numbness was gone, leaving her senses with an extraordinary clarity. Each sound, each snap of the fire, the patter of rain against the glass of the windows, Cath’s breathing, all took on meaning beyond comprehension. Scents: the summery tea, her wet hair and gown, the faint burning-wood scent given off by magical fire sticks ablaze.

She could not look away from Cath. Hazy observations worked into her consciousness: that she had never before seen him as attractive as he was now, sitting there in damp shirt and riding breeches and high, spurred boots. His clothes outlined his lean, strong body, his sharply-etched cheeks flushed with returning color, his long black hair, usually tied back in a neat queue, hanging in wet strands across his brow and over his shoulders onto his chest, which rose and fell with each breath.

He did not speak, or drop his gaze.

The warmth had become a tingle. Not the painful needle-stab of chilled flesh, but the inward, glittering tingle of anticipation, for whatever the masks the mind chose to wear while gambling with emotions, the body’s needs were plain, direct.

His gaze shifted. She snapped into intense awareness that her most substantial garment was a ball gown made of fragile gauze, and that it was plastered over her form just as revealingly as was his clothing. The realization, the caress of his long, deliberate gaze, intensified the tingle into desire.

And despite the leap and crackle of the fire, and the rise and fall of Cath’s chest beneath his cambric shirt, the world stilled.

• • • •

VIII. Waiting

In Duen Lesc’s royal palace, light gleamed in a tower, visible through cold sheets of rain.

Yvo stood in a window alcove, looking up at that tower.

Lexan Yvansk was perhaps the most oblique subject for observation as yet encountered, if not the most difficult. Yet Yvo was certain that Lexan sat up there in that tower right now, on watch, by far-sense, while his courtiers amused themselves in various ways, and his kingdom went about ending another day. He’d been there since sunset, having sent a graceful excuse to Najad, who’d proposed an evening of music and maybe an impromptu dance.

The impulse to let Lexan know that he did not watch alone became stronger as time slipped along its remorseless stream. Yet he felt that a mind-to-mind contact would be a mistake.

Instead, he stood at a window across a courtyard from the base of Lexan’s tower. He knew the light framed his silhouette; he lifted his mental shield. Doing so carried its own risks and its fascinations. One suddenly heard, across the unending mental plane, the emotion-charged whisperings of countless minds.

Yvo’s father had first shared this experience with him years ago, explaining what it meant, showing how to sift and sort, and protecting him when a sudden, corrosively fierce intent seared one’s focus, like a thousand tortured voices shrieking in one’s ear, without the relative limitations of vocal projection, air as conduit, and one’s own physical boundaries.

Grief and isolation were no easier to bear.

At least Tarsa was gone, riding swiftly northeast, taking with her that imperfect mental shield. Yvo pitied her, but her presence grated like a fine musical instrument played continually a half-tone out of tune. He’d done what he could, but was not sanguine about how much alteration a few moments’ conversation on a ballroom floor could inspire.

Quite abruptly, magic seized him. The transfer was quick.

He found himself standing before a high window, looking through rain-streaked glass over the gold-windowed palace, beautiful at night as it was during the day. And there was the window at which he’d stood only moments before.

He turned around. Lexan Yvansk sat beside a plain wooden desk. He still wore the formal dark green over-robe, sleeves embroidered with herons in flight, which he had worn to preside over state business, but the robe was open over his fine cambric under-robe, the sash gone. These were more signs of human weariness; his long, glossy brown hair was ruffled instead of queued neatly back. More surprising was the half-empty bottle of very fine double-distilled rye sitting before him. No glass.

Yvo took these things in, then met Lexan’s ironic gaze.

“You have a lot in common with your ancestors,” Yvo said appreciatively.

Amusement banished the self-mockery in that beautiful face. Or almost did.

“The choice in . . . problematical family connections or in anesthetic?”

There it was, the first admission. Yvansks do not go to war, they seduce their enemies and turn them into lovers. What about turning them into queens? That Yvo was here at all had already been a confession.

“I’m told your famous forebear, Mattius, preferred Algyran wine,” Yvo said.

He suppressed the urge to lift his hand, to strike fire-reflection off the dreamstone ring on his hand. Let its influence be felt more subtly; Yvansk was far too sensitive on the mental plane for any overt move.

So. If one cannot be oblique, then be direct. “Ren did not go up north of her own free will.”

“So it was you, then, whose prints added to those my searchers found in the garden?”

“Yes.”

“I rather thought so. Your pardon. Go on.”

“The fact that she hasn’t escaped means she’s on some kind of crusade.”

Lexan said nothing for rather too long; Yvo realized he was listening by far-sense, and something was happening. A crisis of some kind. Taking place right then.

A pause to appreciate the magnitude of his far-sense—either that or the profound depth of his bond. Even Yvo would have difficulty hearing someone at the distance of Alavanska.

Presently, Duen Lesc’s king reached, drank from the bottle, and set it down with a frowning precision that testified to the quantity he’d already consumed.

Then he looked up. His eyes were remarkably clear, but his face no longer masked his emotions, nor did he seem to care.

What was he listening for? Yvo fought the urge to attempt to reach his sister by far-sense. His job was here, and his aspect must remain neutral. What he did not know, yet, was whether Lexan had brought him for distraction or for challenge.

“Crusade?” Lexan said, after another swig.

“I know Ren,” Yvo stated the obvious to underscore the next: “She’ll be tempted to reform your maverick, if she can.”

Lexan’s fine mouth curled in derision, and for a moment there was a striking resemblance to Cath Lassatar. Kinsmen, then? Probably, but irrelevant at this moment.

Yvo waited for disbelief, for scorn, but Lexan’s gaze diffused again while rain drummed at the window.

• • • •

IX. Grace

Ren stared for that measureless time at Cath, her nerves singing. Although Cath had contrived her presence here, alone with him in his castle, the choice at this moment was entirely hers. She had only to reach out her hand, and they could embark on an interlude of sensory pleasure for as long as she desired.

So . . . why shouldn’t she? There was no fault in shared joy, was there? Everyone back in the capital probably assumed they’d been romping in bed since their arrival.

Everyone? She would not think about Lexan, she would not, and yet even now, with her senses simmering, she remembered the sweet anguish of the very first touch of his fingers to hers.

Be true to yourself before you can be true to the world.

The truth was that the glory she felt was lust. Not love.

She closed her eyes, and now it was possible to think, for think she must. She considered what would happen if she took Cath’s unspoken offer of shared passion. When it ended, she would turn away, because in the long course of her life it would hold little meaning for her. But it was not the same for him. She knew, after these days in his company, seeing his lands and listening to his people, that underneath the cold court exterior, Cath Lassatar of Alavanska was man of honor—but—and?—he was a romantic.

There was no fault in shared joy, but there was, by her own code, in indulgence at the risk of another’s well-being. Cath was in love, or thought he was in love, and to embark on an affair would tangle them up in one another’s emotional lives with only pain as a result.

And so she breathed deeply, set down her empty cup, and walked out.

• • • •

Yvo felt the atmosphere intensify and then, quite suddenly, the tension was gone. Some resolution had been made, some crisis had passed.

Lexan Yvansk looked around as if he did not understand where he was, or how he had arrived there.

Yvo watched comprehension return, and wondered if Yvansk, in remembering his presence, would regret having revealed himself that much. Now is the time, Yvo thought with resignation, for him to ram my father into my teeth as a method of dismissal.

Instead—unexpectedly—there was that self-mockery again, but with it real humor. “I think I’ve finally solved the mystery of your presence,” he said. “Tacit approval from the formidable guardian?”

“My father knows I’m here, but not why.” Then Yvo laughed, realizing that Lexan had, in fact, meant himself. Though he was far from being Ren’s guardian.

“So you live in your father’s shadow,” Lexan murmured.

“Say rather in the light of his sun,” Yvo said, and watched Lexan sort rapidly through the implications.

“My own father used to be likened to the moon,” Lexan said at last, hefting his bottle and turning it in his hands so that the fire reflected through the liquid, gold, amber, honey. “Appeared infrequently, shed little light and no warmth.” He smiled, got to his feet, and with a sudden violent gesture flung the bottle into the fireplace, where it smashed and sent up a shoot of blue flame.

They watched the fire flare and subside.

Lexan turned his head. “Are you sitting on good advice that you simply must impart?”

“No,” said Yvo.

• • • •

X. A Duel to the Heart

Though the annoyance of steady rain after weeks of clear skies made Tarsa cold, her spirits stayed high.

She’d ridden through rain before. During the war days, she’d ridden through all kinds of weather on her missions as a messenger, and the first gift Lexan had given her—well, he’d given them all—was a rainproof cloak that she’d treasured ever since, and wore now. It was a relief to be riding to action again, while warmly embraced by Lexan’s gift.

When the capital dwindled behind her, she considered Yvo’s words at the Blue Night Masque. The kind of influence he meant might be the rescue she planned out in detail over the long days of her lonely ride.

The pleasure of that image had obliterated the uncomfortable reaction when remembering the disillusionment in Najad’s face. Strange, that. She’d never cared a whit for his devotion, but as soon as it was gone, she felt the lack. Adulation was better than scorn from a fool. More telling, it was the possibility of scorn from those who were not fools that galled.

She would be a hero, and rescue Ren in Cath’s teeth. Ren, of course, would be grateful. If, that is, she really didn’t want to stay with Cath—and if she did, Tarsa would have a different message to take back, and she’d say to Lexan . . .

She’d say to Lexan . . .

That part was more difficult to figure out. At the least, Lexan would appreciate her selfless act. She would have rescued a rival. Surely that was the action of a queen!

She reached the outskirts of Alavanska, spending the night in a roadside inn as a rainstorm battered the countryside. She set out just before dawn into a rain-washed day. The sky was clear, the air cold. She looked about with the eyes of a countess, and what she saw impressed her: villages, lands, everything well-tended.

Well-tended, and extensive. She had not comprehended how extensive Alavanska was, for Cath’s primary residence was located at the southwest corner of his lands. This duchy might be called a little kingdom. In fact, it was probably the size of some of the smaller western kingdoms.

When she rode within sight of the castle, she veered off the road to make her approach under cover of falling darkness. She would slip in, noiseless and unnoticed.

And then!

• • • •

While Tarsa smiled with anticipation, Ren was summoned from the library to supper.

She braced herself. Inclination was very much against a meeting, but she knew that was weakness. The day had passed without any communication between Cath and her. Now it was time to talk.

The amused awareness in his eyes when they met in the drawing room made it clear he felt the same way. While the servants laid dishes and food on the table between the two great wingchairs, they spoke little. As soon as they were alone, Cath sat back with his wineglass in his hands.

Ren looked at that familiar sardonic expression and knew she had the courtier back. “If you’re anticipating being entertained by recriminations or protests, you’ll have a long wait.”

He lifted his glass in a salute. “Recriminations have become a habit.”

“I think you thoroughly enjoy your reputation.”

He smiled a little. “It has its benefits, mostly at warding off fools. You have no observations to make, then, about last night?”

“I do, if you really wish to hear them.”

“Please.”

She nodded once, then charmed him anew by thumping her elbows onto the table and resting her chin on her laced fingers. “Denying the intensity of attraction would be as stupid as acting on it.”

His brows lifted in surprise.

“It won’t happen again,” she said. “Now that I know the possibility is there.”

“Then it remains . . . an unresolved issue,” he said mildly. “Where’s the wisdom in that? Certainly no pleasure.”

She shook her head. “I cannot speak for you, obviously, but for me it is resolved. It’s an attraction of the senses only, for we don’t really know one another, and although you are brave, intelligent, a good governor—”

“Spare me,” he cut in, “the consolatory encomiums.”

She grinned. “But they’re true. You’re also selfish, enjoy verbal cruelty just because you can do it, and you are able to do something like this.” Her gesture took in her presence there, in his castle. “Caring nothing for the consequences.”

“On the contrary, I care very much,” he said, faint color ridging his cheekbones, and she saw that she had mistaken his motives: The romantic in him had not permitted him to look past getting her away from the king’s dazzle, so that he could court her on his own. In his view, the risk was his own—that if she dusted off, she might very well leave him a laughingstock. He would hate that worse than fighting, even losing, a duel with swords.

She could leave. She had no ties—

Are you free?

She gave her head a shake. His brows contracted, but before he could ask a question she would not answer, she straightened up. “I grew up with kings around me,” she said, her head tipped to one side. “I learned before I ever had any interest in such matters that kings have two relationships, and the one with their kingdom comes before any relationship of the heart. I never wanted any part of that life.”

Silence, except the crackle of fire. She watched him work his way through the several meanings: that she stayed in Duen Lesc despite Lexan’s title.

That she was in love with the man.

That she was not going to fall in love with Cath, even though she felt the spark of desire.

“I don’t think you can prevent it from happening again.”

Ren said, “Do you speak generally or specifically?”

He looked wry. “Since my selfish nature is established, I’ll claim only that which pertains to myself. But with this proviso: As for the abduction, I never repeat mistakes.”

“I—” Ren’s gaze went distant, and for a short time, all the humor vanished from her face. “I dare not say ‘never’, for who can predict what circumstance will bring? I’d thought, once, that I had suffered the worst temptation of a lifetime, until now. Yet, I think I can sustain this one again, intense as it is, and the outcome will remain the same.”

“Your original temptation does not sound recent,” he ventured, watching her closely.

Her gaze was still distant as she said, “Oh, it wasn’t. During the war.” Suddenly she was present again, instead of caught in the past. There was that in the shape of her smile, and the cant of her head, that betokened remembered anguish as she added, “War stories are a bore, so I won’t burden you with the details. Suffice it to say that I won, and it was good that I did, for the consequences far outdistanced my little concerns.”

Knowing whom she had lived with, and a little of whom she had spent the war with, he suspected that what she referred to was far larger and more important than she admitted.

She drank some wine, then said, “This particular temptation won’t occur again because—for me—passion without companionship of the mind cannot last. You and I could become friends, if we work at it. We could be enemies, though I’d rather not. But we will never be lovers.” She smiled at last, a bewitching smile full of fun and challenge. “You need someone who will fight back.”

He said after a short pause, “You realize it might be to no purpose. Not,” he added slowly, “because the wish is wanting, but the exigencies of circumstance.”

“I know,” she whispered.

He reached to pour more wine for them both, then sat back again. “It’s not your worthiness. I’m beginning to believe that what I’d thought impossible has indeed occurred: that you are, in fact, not just equal to the exacting requirements of Duen Lesc’s court and country, but surpass them. But I don’t know how much my inscrutable cousin sees. Or why he does not act.”

“I don’t know, either,” she said, relieved beyond measure that he didn’t use his verbal claws to rake her heart. He could have, for she’d seen him do it time and again to Tarsa of Rezh. “If our minds do not meet, I’ll go away, and none of you will ever see me again.”

“That would be a—” A discreet knock interrupted him. He frowned, got to his feet, and went to the door in two strides.

After a whispered conversation with an unseen servant, Cath said to Ren, “You’ll pardon me?” The courtier was back, behind his mask of cold amusement.

She raised her wine glass, and he went out.

She was watching the fire glint with ruby brilliance through her glass when the door opened again, and to Ren’s surprise, in slipped Tarsa, dressed for riding, a rapier at her side.

Tarsa tossed back a lock of draggled blonde hair, then shut the door. Her smile of triumph sagged into surprise when she registered the blue ball gown. Why was Ren still wearing that?

Not that it mattered. Tarsa reclaimed her moment of triumph and said, “I fooled the servants into thinking a courier arrived. I’m here to rescue you.”

In all her imaginings, Tarsa thought she’d covered every possible reaction. Ren would either storm in helpless anger, or weep in relief, or maybe even act haughty. Disappointment, perchance, that Tarsa came to her rescue, and not Lexan.

But she never pictured what she got: cool amusement.

“Who said,” Ren spread her hands, “I needed rescuing?”

Tarsa stared. “You mean you came willingly after all?”

“Of course not. Glass of wine? You must be cold.”

Tarsa gave her head a shake. “I don’t—”

“Think, Tarsa.” Ren rose from the table and came round to face her. “Think. Would you jumble off in the middle of the night, taking no belongings, not even warning your maid, much less sending a note to your host, by choice?”

“No,” Tarsa said, furious with her shock-numbed mind. She breathed deeply, then said, “No, I wouldn’t.”

Ren turned her palms out. “As anyone who cares enough to consider the circumstances would realize.”

Tarsa bit her lip. “So it’s obvious to everyone but me that you were swept here without your consent. If so, why isn’t Lexan here instead of me?”

“I will not discuss Lexan Yvansk with you, Tarsa,” Ren said. “You would not accept me as an acquaintance, much less give me the chance to offer myself as a friend, so to share my thoughts with you now would just enable you to use them against me as weapons. Unless you’d like to convince me differently.”

Tarsa flushed, knowing it was true. Ren didn’t even sound angry, just resigned.

“All right, then. Lexan’s response—or lack of it—will remain a mystery. But if you don’t need rescuing, then why do you stay? I see no guards or weapons about.”

“Oh, we made a truce, Cath and I.” Ren, looking at Tarsa, felt missing pieces in motivations, and reactions, falling rapidly into place. The possibilities made her fizzy with hilarity. But she must step carefully indeed, for both Cath and Tarsa were quick, smart, and horrifically sensitive. “Cath would make a formidable enemy or ally,” she said at last. “I have been doing my best to work for the second prospect.”

And he listens to you? Tarsa wanted to ask, but she knew the answer: He did. Ren betrayed none of the anguish that Tarsa felt after even a brief encounter with Cath.

In short, he respected Ren.

He does not respect me. Once he did—but no longer.

She backed up a step, her throat tight, her eyes aching. There was nothing to do but leave, and concoct a story on the long ride back to court. To pack up, and retreat to Rezh with as much grace as she could muster.

She owed Ren Desvransa nothing. She turned her back and slipped out the door again. Ren did not speak or move to stop her.

Outside the room, Tarsa peered about the hallway. No one in sight. Rapidly reviewing her internal map, she slipped past the servants’ stairway, finding that full of traffic, unlike the tiled stairway that unknown generations of Lassatars had used.

She eased down to the next landing, which was softly lit by glow globes. She paused, listening, her senses alert. To? Something, something . . .

She extended a foot to descend the last stairway, and jumped as a hand closed on her arm. A strong, familiar hand, lace at the wrists, folded cuffs of blue silk.

Her head jerked around, and she stared up into Cath’s face. He looked down at her with no evidence of surprise, his most hateful smile instantly kindling her slumbering rage.

Anger, and under it, fear. She fought against the fear as he drew her a few steps into a room just off the landing, then shut the door and lounged against it, still with her arm in his grip.

“Let me go.” She tried to wrench free.

“Would you prefer to conduct this interview in the main hall?”

“I don’t want any interview,” she retorted, yanking harder.

“Did you really imagine you could prance into my land, much less my home, without my knowing?”

She stared, then managed, “Did Ren know?”

“She did not. I was curious. Did you ride all this way just to rescue her?”

“Yes.” He had let her go. She crossed her arms. “Somebody had to.”

“What precipitated this act of altruism?” He smiled again, that hateful smile that never failed to enrage her. “Not, surely, a sudden loss of prestige?”

Heat flooded from her neck right up to her hairline, and he laughed. “Ah, Tarsa, you are so predictable.”

Predictable! No one, ever, had accused her of that, in so contemptuous a tone. Reliable, yes, dashing, during the war when she’d risked her life carrying messages in aid of Lexan’s resistance to the enemy. Beautiful, stylish, attractive, choosy, even moody. Never predictable.

The enemy during the war had been clear, and was clear now, so clear that the impulse to action seized her with inescapable grip. Too long she’d repressed every passion, every emotion, toward attaining the long goal, which was gone, forever out of reach, leaving only Cath’s lounging, laughing amusement.

Giving in to reckless, glorious rage, she pulled her blade free and aimed the point straight at his heart.

He did not wear weapons in his own house, but this was his father’s old room, with crossed swords on the wall. He whirled, pulled one down, and blade met blade.

Passion is not practice. Clash, clang! She tried twice to skewer him and he blocked, then in a whirling bind he caught her blade and wrenched it from her grip.

The weapons crashed on the stone floor. She doubled her fists and launched herself at him. A wild struggle ensued. The room spun crazily, as she cried, half weeping, half gasping, but she no longer cared. Her one desire was to claw the sneer from that face. She fought, and kicked, and writhed, until he managed to catch hold of her wrists and twist them up behind her, holding her immoveable against him, chest to chest, until all the rage died away, leaving her puffing for breath.

Sanity trickled back into her mind, and with it, the awareness of proximity, of the rise and fall of her bosom against his velvet-covered ribs. She threw back her head to see his gleaming dark gaze, and a curious smile on his lips.

“Done?” he asked, tossing his head to shift the fine hair that had drifted into his eyes.

She nodded once, not trusting herself to speak, and he released her wrists.

Rubbing them, she retreated behind a massive table.

“‘You need someone who will fight back’,” he said as he righted an overturned chair and dropped down onto it. “That was fun. I wish . . .” He paused, grinning. A twisted grin, not that hateful cold, superior smile. “I wish you remembered as fondly as I do a certain spring night, not so long ago.”

“I was drunk,” she stated, and sniffed. “Why did you drag Ren up here?”

He laughed. It was so unexpected a sound it caught her by surprise. “To see who would come up here after her,” he said. “Fancy that! Lady Tarsa to the rescue.”

His voice was unsteady, pitched to provoke, but not to flay. It was not with the intention of doing damage, this time, when she uncrossed her arms and took an open-handed swing at his face.

• • • •

XI. The Other Word is Communion

When, at dawn, they emerged, they found Ren, still in her blue gown. She smiled in happy welcome. “Come along, my dears. I ordered breakfast, and everything is waiting.”

• • • •

XII. Are You Free?

Word had zapped ahead, somehow, testifying to the interest all three aroused. Not that the most prominent courtiers were as rude as the younger ones crowding the stable yard. A remarkable number of personal runners belonging to older nobles jostled with the young, who would make a fashion of remembering this day.

The three rode slowly through the gates, Cath’s entourage somewhere behind. There existed, it seemed, a shared hilarity between all three. Cath Lassatar, Duke of Alavanska, rode with languid grace with a lady at either side. He was impeccably turned out in riding clothes of black. At one side was Lady Tarsa, Countess of Rezh, also in riding clothes, her sun-bright hair bound up in a simple coronet. On the other side, Ren Desvransa wore a ball gown that looked much the worse for wear, though her posture, her smile, transformed the oddity into the glamour of adventure.

Yvo, at the edge of the crowd, took only one look, then withdrew, smiling, to pack for his journey home.

No one noticed him leave.

Tarsa was thinking: I wish Rezh were next to Alavanska. On the other hand, it makes a nice inheritance for a second child . . .

As the crowd watched, silent in amazement, Tarsa leaned across her horse’s neck to address a remark to the other two. Cath smiled. Ren laughed.

Cath was thinking: Where are you, Lexan? I need to see your face before I figure out if you were testing me, or Ren—or yourself.

They rode slowly into the courtyard, pausing only when Najad of Desentis, who was too honest to even think of pretense, dashed up and greeted them all with unaffected pleasure.

“By the Fire, we were worried! What’s toward?” he addressed all three.

Ren said in her clear, sunny voice, “Oh, it was a little wager between the three of us.”

Najad whistled. “A wager, you say?”

“Can you turn down a challenge?” Ren leaned toward him, her manner confidential, her voice carrying. “I can’t!”

Whispers rustled through the crowd: together, and wager being the key words. A wager! An aristocrat could be forgiven anything done on a challenge, especially if it was carried off with this hilarious flair.

Ren was thinking: Yes, I want you, Lexan of Duen Lesc, and if courting your entire kingdom for the rest of my life is the price I must pay, then so be it.

The three dismounted and were surrounded by friends, servants, well-wishers, all of whom observed their easy camaraderie. Miraculously, it seemed mostly genuine, though expressed through characteristics typical of each: Cath’s faint smile, sardonic at the edges, Tarsa’s ceaseless gauging of others’ gazes, Ren’s ease and delight in seeing friends once again. There was no sign of guilt, or accusation, or even the covert enmity that splits groups of people into factions when leaders become rivals.

Lexan Yvansk stood outside the ring of courtiers who were too amazed to drawl, or semaphore hidden meanings with their fans. They were talking naturally, laughing outright instead of uttering the well-bred court titter, some even lamenting having not been in on the fun.

Presently the crowd parted, and Lexan moved through his people to Ren’s side, offering his arm. People effaced themselves and withdrew to talk, wonder, laugh, drink, rest or make merry, according to their nature.

Ren rested her fingers lightly on his arm, feeling the tense muscle beneath the fine linen, then turned toward one of the remarkable fountains with its complicated jets and tiers of fine spray that threw up myriad rainbows.

She sat down on the low rim, and as a stray breeze wafted a mist into her face, she breathed deeply, smiling. “Oh, that does feel refreshing after so long a ride,” she exclaimed, and leaned forward to dip her hands in the rilling water.

Lexan sat down beside her, idly running one hand back and forth, back and forth, in the cool water. When he looked up, their eyes met, and he asked, “Are you free?”

She looked at the spray, shards of liquid sun, and at her fingers, dripping with crystalline droplets, and finally at his eyes, so true, like his heart wide and true and boundless as the sky overhead. “No,” she said, smiling. And, “Are you?”

“No. As long as I live.” Beneath the cool surface of the water their fingers met, laced, and held.

© 2008 by Sherwood Smith.

Originally published in Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah J. Ross.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sherwood Smith writes fantasy and space opera for young readers and old. Her website is sherwoodsmith.net.

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

NOVEL EXCERPTS

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Echopraxia

Peter Watts

Forthcoming from Tor Books

PRELUDE

It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

—Anatole France

A white room, innocent of shadow or topography. No angles: that’s crucial. No corners or intrusions of furniture, no directional lighting, no geometries of light and shadow whose intersection, from any viewpoint, might call forth the Sign of the Cross. The walls—wall, rather—was a single curved surface, softly bioluminescent, a spheroid enclosure flattened at the bottom in grudging deference to biped convention. It was a giant womb three meters across, right down to the whimpering thing curled up on the floor.

A womb, with all the blood on the outside.

Her name was Sachita Bhar and all that blood was in her head, too. By now they’d killed the cameras just like everything else but there was no way to take back the images from those first moments: the lounge, the Histo lab, even the broom closet for chrissakes, a grungy little cubby on the third floor where Gregor had hidden. Sachie hadn’t been watching when Gregor had been found. She’d been flipping through the channels, frantically scanning for life and finding only the dead, their insides all out now. By the time she’d cycled through to the closet feed the monsters had already been and gone.

Gregor, who was in love with that stupid pet ferret of his. She’d shared an elevator with him this morning. She remembered the stripes on his shirt. Otherwise she’d have had no idea what to call the mess in the closet.

She’d seen some fraction of the carnage before the cameras went down: friends and colleagues and rivals cut down without remorse or favoritism, their gutted remains sprawled across lab benches and workstations and toilet stalls. And with all those feeds running through the implants in her head—with all her access to all that ubiquitous surveillance—Sachita Bhar had not caught so much as a glimpse of the creatures who’d done this. Shadows, at most. A flicker of darkness cast by some solitary stalker from a blind spot in the camera’s eye. They’d done it all without ever being seen, without ever seeing each other.

They’d always been kept isolated. For their own good, of course: stick two vampires in the same room and their own hardwired territoriality would put them at each other’s throats in an instant.

And yet they were working together, somehow. At least half a dozen, confined, incommunicado, acting in sudden precise concert.

They’d done it all without ever meeting face-to-face—and even at the height of the slaughter, in those last moments before the cameras died, they had remained invisible. The whole massacre had happened from the corner of Sachie’s eye.

How did they do it? How did they survive the angles?

Someone else might have enjoyed the irony; she hid in a refuge for monsters, one of the few places in the whole damn building where they could open their eyes without risking a death sentence.

Right angles were verboten here. This was where Achilles’ heels were put to the test, a cross-free zone where geometry was precisely controlled and neurological leashes optimized.

Elsewhere, civilized geometry threatened on all sides: tabletops, windowpanes, a million intersections of appliance and architecture just waiting for the right viewpoint to send vampires into convulsions. Those monsters wouldn’t—

—shouldn’t—

—last an hour out there without the antiEuclideans that suppressed the Crucifix Glitch. Only here, in the white womb—where poor, stupid Sachita Bhar had run when the lights went out—could they dare to open unprotected eyes.

And now one of them was in here with her.

She couldn’t see it. Her own eyes were shut, squeezed tight against the butchery flash-burned into her head. She heard no sound but the endless animal keening in her own throat. But something drank a little of the light falling on her face. The swirling red darkness inside her eyelids dimmed some infinitesimal, telltale fraction, and she knew.

“Hello,” it said.

She opened her eyes. It was one of the females: Valerie, they’d named her, after some departmental chairman who’d retired the year before. Valerie the Vampire.

Valerie’s eyes red-shifted the light and threw it back at her, bloodorange stars in a face flushed with aftermath. She towered over Sachie like an insectile statue, motionless, even her breathing imperceptible.

Moments from death and with nothing better to do, some subroutine in Sachie’s head ticked off the morphometrics: such inhumanly long limbs, the attenuate heat-dissipating allometry of a metabolic engine running hot. Subtly jutting mandible, lupine as a hominid’s could be, to hold all those teeth. Stupid turquoise smock, smart-paper/telemetry composite weave: Valerie must have been scheduled for physio work today. Ruddy complexion, the bloody flash-flood vasodilation of the predator in hunting mode.

And the eyes, those terrifying luminous pinpoints—

Finally it registered: Contracted pupils.

She’s not on Auntie U . . .

Suddenly Sachie’s cross was out, last-ditch kill switch, the talisman everyone got on day one along with their ID: empirically tested, proven in the crunch, redeemed by science after uncounted centuries spent slumming as a religious fetish. Sachie held it up with sudden desperate bravado, thumbed the stud. Spring-loaded extensions shot from each tip and her little pocket totem was suddenly a meter on a side.

Thirty degrees of visual arc, Sachie. Maybe forty for the tough ones. Make sure it’s perpendicular to line of sight, the angles only work when they’re close to ninety degrees, but once this little baby covers enough arc the visual cortex fries like a circuit in a shitstorm . . .

Greg’s words.

Valerie cocked her head and studied the artifact. Any second now, Sachie knew, this nightmare creature would collapse in a twitching mass of tetany and shorting synapses. That wasn’t faith; it was neurology.

The monster leaned close, and didn’t even shiver. Sachita Bhar pissed herself.

“Please,” she sobbed. The vampire said nothing.

Words flooded out: “I’m sorry, I was never really part of it, you know, I’m just a research associate, I’m just doing it for my degree, that’s all, I know it’s wrong, I know it’s like, like slavery almost, I know that and it’s a shitty system, it’s a shitty thing we did to you but it wasn’t really me, do you understand? I didn’t make any of those decisions, I just came in afterward, I’m barely involved, it was just for my degree. And I—I can understand how you must feel, I can understand why you’d hate us, I would too probably but please, oh please, I’m just . . . I’m just a student . . . ”

After a while, still alive, she dared to look up again. Valerie was staring at some point just to the left and a thousand light-years away. She seemed distracted. But then they always seemed distracted, their minds running a dozen parallel threads simultaneously, a dozen perceptual realities, each every bit as real as the one mere humans occupied.

Valerie cocked her head as if listening to faint music. She almost smiled.

“Please . . . ” Sachie whispered.

“Not angry,” Valerie said. “Don’t want revenge. You don’t matter.”

“You don’t—but . . .” Bodies. Blood. A building full of corpses and the monsters who’d made them. “What do you want, then? Anything, please, I’ll—”

“Want you to imagine something: Christ on the Cross.”

And of course, once the image had been incanted it was impossible not to imagine. Sachita Bhar had a few moments to wonder at the sudden spasms seizing her limbs, at the way her jaw locked into startling dislocation, at the feel of a thousand bloodhot strokes exploding like pinpricks across the back of her skull. She tried to close her eyes but it doesn’t matter what kind of light falls on the retina, that’s not vision. The mind generates its own images, much farther upstream, and there’s no way to shut those out.

“Yes.” Valerie clicked thoughtfully to herself. “I learn.”

Sachie managed to speak. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, but she knew that was fitting; it was also the last thing she would ever do. So she summoned all her willpower, every shred of every reserve, every synapse that hadn’t already been commandeered for self-destruction, and she spoke. Because nothing else mattered anymore, and she really wanted to know:

“Learn . . . wha . . .”

She couldn’t quite get it out. But the short-circuiting brain of Sachita Bhar managed to serve up one last insight anyway, amid the rising static: This is what the Crucifix Glitch feels like. This is what we do to them. This is . . .

“Judo,” Valerie whispered.

• • • •

PRIMITIVE

Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might have put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.) The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.

The Bicameral Order represents a stark anomaly in this otherwise consistent landscape. Their explicitly faithbased methodologies venture unapologetically into metaphysical realms that defy empirical analysis—yet they yield results with consistently more predictive power than conventional science. (How they do this is not known; our best evidence suggests some kind of rewiring of the temporal lobe in a way that amplifies their connection to the Divine.)

It would be dangerously naïve to regard this as a victory for traditional religion. It is not. It is a victory for a radical sect barely half a century old, and the cost of that victory has been to demolish the wall between Science and Faith. The Church’s concession of the physical realm informed the historic armistice that has allowed faith and reason to coexist to this day. One may find it heartening to see faith ascendant once again across the Human spectrum; but it is not our faith. Its hand still guides lost sheep away from the soulless empiricism of secular science, but the days in which it guided them into the loving arms of Our Savior are waning.

—An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century

(An Internal Report to the Holy See by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2093)

• • • •

All animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with.

—Pete Richerson and Robert Boyd

Deep in the Oregon desert, crazy as a prophet, Daniel Brüks opened his eyes to the usual litany of death warrants.

It had been a slow night. A half-dozen traps on the east side were offline—damn booster station must have gone down again—and most of the others were empty. But number eighteen had caught a garter snake. A sage grouse pecked nervously at the lens in number thirteen. The video feed from number four wasn’t working, but judging by mass and thermal there was probably a juvenile Scleroperus scrambling around in there. Twenty-three had caught a hare.

Brüks hated doing the hares. They smelled awful when you cut them open—and these days, you almost always had to cut them open.

He sighed and described a semicircle with his index finger; the feeds vanished from the skin of his tent. Headlines resolved in their wake, defaulting to past interests: Pakistan’s ongoing zombie problem; first anniversary of the Redeemer blowout; a sad brief obituary for the last wild coral reef.

Nothing from Rho.

Another gesture and the fabric lit with soft tactical overlays, skewed to thermal: public-domain real-time satellite imagery of the Prineville Reserve. His tent squatted in the center of the display, a diffuse yellow smudge: cold crunchy outer shell, warm chewy center. No comparable hot spots anywhere else in range. Brüks nodded to himself, satisfied. The world continued to leave him alone.

Outside, invisible in the colorless predawn, some small creature skittered away across loose rattling rock as he emerged. His breath condensed in front of him; frost crunched beneath his boots, bestowed a faint transient sparkle to the dusty desert floor. His ATB leaned against one of the scraggly larches guarding the camp, marshmallow tires soft and flaccid.

He grabbed mug and filter from their makeshift hook and stepped into the open, down a loose jumble of scree. The vestiges of some half-assed desert stream quenched his thirst at the foot of the slope, slimy and sluggish and doomed to extinction within the month. Enough to keep one large mammal watered in the meantime. Out across the valley the Bicamerals’ pet tornado squirmed feebly against a gray eastern sky but stars were still visible overhead, icy, unwinking, and utterly meaningless. Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they’d first thought to wonder at the heavens.

It had been a different desert fourteen years ago. A different night. But it had felt the same, until the moment he’d glanced up—and for a few shattering moments it had even been a different sky, robbed of all randomness. A sky where every star blazed in brilliant precise formation, where every constellation was a perfect square no matter how desperately human imaginations might strain. February 13, 2082. The night of First Contact: sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin, clenching around the world in a great grid, screaming across the radio spectrum as they burned. Brüks remembered the feeling: as though he were witnessing some heavenly coup, a capricious god deposed and order restored.

The revolution had lasted only a few seconds. The upstaged constellations had reasserted themselves as soon as those precise friction trails had faded from the upper atmosphere. But the damage had been done, Brüks knew. The sky would never look the same again.

That’s what he’d thought at the time, anyway. That’s what everyone had thought. The whole damn species had come together in the wake of that common threat, even if they didn’t know what it was exactly, even if it hadn’t actually threatened anything but Humanity’s own self-importance. The world had put its petty differences aside, spared no expense, thrown together the best damn ship the twenty-first century could muster. They’d crewed it with expendable bleeding-edgers and sent them off along some best-guess bearing, carrying a phrase book that spelled take me to your leader in a thousand languages.

The world had been holding its breath for over a decade now, waiting for the Second Coming. There’d been no encore, no second act. Fourteen years is a long time for a species raised on instant gratification. Brüks had never considered himself a great believer in the nobility of the Human spirit but even he had been surprised at how little time it took for the sky to start looking the same as it always had, at the speed with which the world’s petty differences returned to the front page. People, he reflected, were like frogs: take something out of their visual field, and they’d just—forget it.

The Theseus mission would be well past Pluto by now. If it had found anything, Brüks hadn’t heard about it. For his part, he was sick of waiting. He was sick of life on hold, waiting for monsters or saviors to make an appearance. He was sick of killing things, sick of dying inside.

Fourteen years.

He wished the world would just hurry up and end.

• • • •

He spent the morning as he’d spent every other for the past two months: running his traplines and poking the things inside, in the faint hope of finding some piece of nature left untwisted.

The clouds were already closing in by sunrise, before his bike had soaked up a decent charge; he left it behind and ran the transects on foot. It was almost noon by the time he got to the hare, only to find that something had beaten him to the punch. The trap had been torn open and its contents emptied by some other predator who’d lacked even the good grace to leave a blood spatter behind for analysis.

The garter snake was still slithering around in number eighteen, though: a male, one of those brown-on-brown morphs that vanished against the dirt. It writhed in Brüks’s grasp, clenched around his forearm like a scaly tentacle; its scent glands smeared stink across his skin. Brüks drew a few microliters of blood without much hope, plugged them into the barcoder on his belt. He swigged from his canteen while the device worked its magic.

Far across the desert the monastery’s tornado had swollen to three times its predawn size, pumped by the midday heat. Distance reduced it to a brown thread, an insignificant smoky smudge; but get too close to that funnel and you’d end up scattered over half the valley. Just the year before, some Ugandan vendetta theocracy had hacked a transAt shuttle out of Dartmouth, sent it through a vortex engine on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Not much but rivets and teeth had come out the other side.

The barcoder meeped in plaintive surrender: too many genetic artifacts for a clean read. Brüks sighed, unsurprised. The little machine could tag any gut parasite from the merest speck of shit, ID any host species from the smallest shred of pure tissue—but pure tissue was so hard to come by, these days. There was always something that didn’t belong. Viral DNA, engineered for the greater good but too indiscriminate to stay on target. Special marker genes, designed to make animals glow in the dark when exposed to some toxin the EPA had lost interest in fifty years before. Even DNA computers, custom-built for a specific task and then tramped carelessly into wild genotypes like muddy footprints on a pristine floor. Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.

It was okay, though. Brüks was an old man, a field man from a day when people could tell what they were looking at by—well, by looking at it. Check the chin shields. Count the fin rays, the hooks on the scolex. Use your eyes, dammit. At least if you screw up you’ve only got yourself to blame, not some dumb-ass machine that can’t tell the difference between cytochrome oxidase and a Shakespearean sonnet. And if the things you’re trying to ID happen to live inside other things, you kill the host. You cut it open.

Brüks was good at that, too. He’d never got around to liking it much, though.

Now he whispered to his latest victim—“Shhh . . . sorry . . . it won’t hurt, I promise . . . ”—and dropped it into the kill sack. He’d found himself doing that a lot lately, murmuring meaningless comforting lies to victims who couldn’t possibly understand what he was saying. He kept telling himself to grow up. In all the billions of years that life had been iterating on this planet, had any predator ever tried to comfort its prey? Had “natural” death ever been so quick and painless as the killings Dan Brüks inflicted for the greater good? And yet it still bothered him to see those small diffuse shadows flopping and squirming behind the translucent white plastic, to hear the soft thumps and hisses as simple minds tried to drive bodies, suddenly and terrifyingly unresponsive, toward some kind of imaginary escape.

At least these deaths served a purpose, some constructive end transcending the disease or predation that nature would have inflicted. Life was a struggle to exist at the expense of other life. Biology was a struggle to understand life. And this particular bit of biology, this study of which he was author, principal, and sole investigator—this was a struggle to use biology to help the very populations he was sampling. These deaths were the closest that Darwin’s universe would ever come to altruism.

And that, said the little voice that always seemed to boot up at times like this, is so much shit. The only thing you’re struggling to do is wring a few more publications out of your grant before the funding dries up. Even if you nailed down every change inflicted on every clade over the past hundred years, even if you quantified species loss down to the molecules, it wouldn’t matter.

Nobody cares. The only thing you’re struggling against is reality.

That voice had become his constant companion over the years. He let it rant. Either way, he told it after it had run down, we’re a shitty biologist. And while his own guilty plea came easily enough, he could not bring himself to feel shame on that account.

• • • •

It had stopped being a snake by the time he got back to camp. He stretched the limp and lifeless remains along the dissecting tray. Four seconds with the scasers and it was gutted, throat to cloaca; twenty more and the GI and respiratory tracts floated in separate watch glasses. The intestine would have the heaviest parasite load; Brüks loaded the GI tract into the ’scope and got to work.

Twenty minutes later, a retinue of flukes and cestodes only half-cataloged, something exploded in the distance.

That’s what it sounded like, anyway: the soft muffled whoompf of far-off ordinance. Brüks rose from his work, panned the desert between spindly gnarled trunks.

Nothing. Nothing. Noth—

Oh, wait . . .

The monastery.

He grabbed his goggles off the ATB and zoomed in. The tornado was the first thing to draw his eye—

—That thing’s going pretty strong for so late in the day—

—but off to the right, directly over the monastery itself, a puff of dark brown smoke roiled and drifted and dissipated in the lowering light.

The building didn’t seem to be damaged, though. At least, none of the façades he could see.

What are they doing over there?

Physics, officially. Cosmology. High-energy stuff. But it was all supposed to be theoretical; as far as Brüks knew the Bicameral Order didn’t perform actual experiments. Of course, hardly anyone did, these days. It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed the experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navelgazing: to sit in the desert and contemplate whatever answers those machines served up. Although most still preferred to call it analysis.

A hive mind that spoke in tongues: that was how the Bicamerals did it, supposedly. Some kind of bioradio in their heads, a communal corpus callosum: electrons jiggling around in microtubules, some kind of quantum-entanglement thing. Completely organic to get around the ban on B2B interfaces. A spigot that poured many minds into one on command. They flowed together and called down the Rapture, rolled around the floor and drooled and ululated while their acolytes took notes, and somehow they ended up rewriting the Amplituhedron.

There was supposed to be some rational explanation to justify the mumbo jumbo. Left-hemisphere pattern-matching subroutines amped beyond recognition; the buggy wetware that made you see faces in clouds or God’s wrath in thunderstorms, tweaked to walk some fine line between insight and pareidolia. Apparently there were fundamental insights to be harvested along that razor’s edge, patterns that only the Bicamerals could distinguish from hallucination. That was the story, anyway. It sounded like utter bullshit to Brüks.

Still, you couldn’t argue with the Nobels.

Maybe they had some kind of particle accelerator over there after all. They had to be doing something that sucked a lot of energy; nobody used an industrial vortex engine to run kitchen appliances.

From behind, the metallic tinkle of displaced instruments. Brüks turned.

His scasers lay in the dirt. On the bench above them the gutted snake watched him upside down from its dissecting tray, forked tongue flickering.

Nerves, Brüks told himself.

The discarded carcass shivered on its back, as if the gash down its belly had let in the cold. Flaps of tissue rippled along either edge of that wound, a slow peristaltic wave undulating along the length of the body.

Galvanic skin response. That’s all it is.

The snake’s head lurched up over the edge of the tray. Glassy, unblinking eyes looked this way and that. The tongue, red-black, black-red, tasted the air.

The animal crawled from the pan.

It wasn’t having an easy time of it. It kept trying to roll and crawl on its belly but it didn’t have a belly, not anymore. The ventral scales that would have pushed it along, the muscles beneath had been sliced apart, every one. And so the creature would manage a half twist every now and then, and fail, and resort to crawling on its back: eyes wide, tongue flicking, insides emptied.

The snake reached the edge of the bench, feebly wavered a moment, dropped into the dust. Brüks’s boot came down on its head. He ground it deep against the rocky soil until there was nothing left but a moist sticky clot in the dirt. The rest of the creature writhed, its muscles jumping to the beat of nerves jammed with noise and no signal. But at least there was nothing left that could possibly please-God feel.

Reptiles were not especially fragile creatures. More than once Brüks had found rattlesnakes on the road hours from the nearest vehicle, spines crushed, fangs shattered, heads reduced to bloody paste—still moving, still crawling for the ditch. The kill sack was supposed to prevent that kind of protracted agony. You turned the animal’s own metabolism against it, let lungs and capillaries carry the poison to every cell of every tissue, bringing a quick and painless and—most of all—a complete death, so that it would not wake up and fucking look at you, and try to escape, an hour after you’d scraped its insides away.

Of course, there were zombies in the world now. Vampires, too, for that matter. But the twenty-first century’s undead were strictly Human. There was no reason anyone would want to build a zombie snake. This had to be another contamination artifact; some accidental genetic hack that shut down the MS receptor sites, maybe triggered a rogue suite of motor commands. Had to be.

Still.

He’d really hoped the ghosts would be easier to handle out here.

• • • •

There weren’t nearly as many ghosts in the desert, for one thing. For another, none of them were human. Sometimes he wished he could feel half as much for the thousands of people he’d killed.

Of course, basic biology explained that particular double standard as well. He hadn’t had to face any of his human victims, hadn’t looked into their eyes, hadn’t been there when they’d died.

The gut was not a long-range organ. Its grasp of culpability degraded exponentially with distance; there’d been so many arcane degrees separating the actions of Daniel Brüks from their consequences that conscience itself entered the realm of pure theory. Besides, he’d hardly acted alone; the guilt diffused across the whole team. And their intentions, at least, had been beyond reproach.

Nobody had blamed them, not out loud, not really. Not at first. You don’t pass judgment on the unwitting hammer used to bash in someone’s skull. Brüks’s work had been perverted by others intent on bloodshed; the guilt was theirs, not his. But those perpetrators remained uncaught and unpunished, and so many had needed closure in the meantime. And the distance between How could they and How could you let them was so much smaller than Brüks had ever imagined.

No charges had been pressed. It wasn’t even enough to revoke his tenure. As it turned out, it was only enough to wear out his welcome on campus.

Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgments, didn’t care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence. She only cared about what worked and what didn’t. She welcomed everyone with the same egalitarian indifference. You just had to play by her rules, and expect no mercy if things didn’t go your way.

And so Dan Brüks had put in for sabbatical and filed his agenda, and headed into the field. He’d left behind his sampling drones and artificial insects, packed no autonomous tech to rub his nose in the obsolescence of human labor. A few had watched him go, with relief; others kept their eyes on the sky. He left them, too. His colleagues would forgive him, or they wouldn’t. The aliens would return, or they wouldn’t. But Nature would never turn him away. And even in a world where every last sliver of natural habitat was under siege, there was no shortage of deserts. They’d been growing like slow cancer for a hundred years or more.

Daniel Brüks would go into the welcoming desert, and kill whatever he found there.

• • • •

He opened his eyes to the soft red glow of panicking machinery. A third of the network had just died in his sleep. Five more traps went down as he watched: a booster station, suddenly offlined.

Twenty-two beeped plaintively a moment later—proximate heat trace, big, man-size even—and dropped off the map.

Instantly awake, Brüks played the logs. The network was going down from west to east, each dead node another footfall in a growing trail of dark ragged footprints stomping across the valley.

Heading directly for him.

He pulled up the satcam thermals. The remains of the old 380 ran like a thin vein along the northern perimeter, yesterday’s stale sunshine seeping from cracked asphalt. Diaphanous thermals and microclimatic hot spots, dying since nightfall, flickered at the threshold of visibility. Nothing else but the yellow nimbus of his own tent at center stage.

Twenty-one reported sudden warmth, and disappeared.

Cameras lurked here and there along the traplines. Brüks had never found much use for them but they’d come bundled as part of the package. One sat on a booster that happened to be line of sight to number nineteen. He brought it up: StarlAmp painted the nighttime desert in blues and whites, a surrealistic moonscape full of contrast. Brüks panned the view—

—and almost missed it: a slither of motion from stage right, an amplified blur. Something that moved faster than anything Human had any right to. The camera was dead before Nineteen even felt the heat.

The booster went down. Another dozen feeds died in an instant. Brüks barely noticed. He was staring at that last frozen frame, feeling his gut clench and his bowels turn to ice.

Faster than a man, and so much less. And just a little bit colder inside.

The field sensors weren’t sensitive enough to register that difference, of course. To see the truth from heat signatures alone you’d need to look inside the very head of your target, to squint until you could see deltas of maybe a tenth of a degree. You’d look at the hippocampus, and see that it was dark. You’d listen to the prefrontal cortex, and hear that it was silent. And then maybe you’d notice all that extra wiring, the force-grown neural lattices connecting midbrain to motor strip, the high-speed expressways bypassing the anterior cingulate gyrus—and those extra ganglia clinging like tumors to the visual pathways, fishing endlessly for the telltale neural signatures of seek and destroy.

It would be a lot easier to spot those differences in visible light: Just look into the eyes, and see nothing at all looking back. Of course, if it ever got that close you’d be dead already. It wouldn’t leave you time to beg. It wouldn’t even understand your pleas. It would simply kill you, if that’s what it had been told to do, more efficiently than any conscious being because there was nothing left to get in the way: no second thoughts, no pulled punches, not even the basic glucose-sucking awareness of its own existence. It was stripped down to pure reptile, and it was dedicated.

Less than a kilometer away now.

Something inside Daniel Brüks split down the middle. One half clamped its hands over its ears and denied everything—what the fuck why would anyone must be some kind of mistake—but the other remembered the universal human fondness for scapegoats, the thousands who’d died thanks to dumb ol’ Backdoor Brüks, the odds that at least one of those victims might have been survived by next of kin with the resources to set a military-grade zombie on his trail.

How could they.

How could you let them . . .

The ATB hissed beneath him as its tires inhaled. The charge cord pulled him briefly off balance before tearing free. He plunged through a gap in the trees and down the scree, skidding sideways: hit the base of the slope and the desert spun around him, slimy and frictionless. The stream nearly took him out right there. Brüks fought for control as the bike one-eightied, but those marvelous marshmallow tires kept him miraculously upright. Then he was racing east across the fractured valley floor.

Sagebrush tore at him as he passed. He cursed his own blindness; these days, no self-respecting grad student would be caught dead in the field without rattlesnake receptors in their eyes. But Brüks was an old man, baseline, night-blind. He didn’t even dare use the headlamp. So he hurtled through the night, smashing through petrified shrubs, bucking over unseen outcroppings of bedrock. He fumbled one-handed through the bike’s saddlebags, came up with the gogs, slapped them over his eyes. The desert sprang into view, green and grainy.

0247, the goggles told him from the corner of his eye. Three hours to sunrise. He tried pinging his network but if any part of it remained alive, it was out of range. He wondered if the zombie had made it to camp yet. He wondered how close it had come to catching him.

Doesn’t matter. Can’t catch me now, motherfucker. Not on foot. Not even undead. You can kiss my ass good-bye.

Then he checked the charge gauge and his stomach dropped away all over again.

Cloudy skies. An old battery, a year past its best-before. A charging blanket that hadn’t been cleaned in a month.

The ATB had ten kilometers in it. Fifteen, tops.

He braked and brought it around in a spray of dirt. His own trail extended behind him, an unmistakable line of intermittent carnage wrought upon the desert floor: broken plants, sun-cracked tiles of ancient lakebed crushed in passing. He was running but he wasn’t hiding. As long as he stayed on the valley floor, they’d be able to track him.

Who, exactly?

He switched from StarlAmp to infrared, zoomed the view.

That.

A hot tiny spark leapt against a distant slope, right about where his camp would be.

Closer, though. And closing fast. That thing could run.

Brüks swung the bike around and kicked it back into gear. He almost didn’t notice the second spark sweeping across his field of vision, it was so faint.

He saw the third clearly enough, though. And the fourth. Too distant to make out shapes on thermal, but all hot as humans. All closing.

Five, six, seven . . .

Shit.

They were fanned out along the valley as far as he could see.

What did I do, what did I do, don’t they know it was an accident?It wasn’t even me, for chrissakes, I didn’t kill anyone, I just—left the door open . . .

Ten kilometers. Then they’d be on him like ravenous wolves.

The ATB leapt forward. Brüks pinged 911: nothing. ConSensus was live enough but deaf to his pleas; somehow he could surf but not send. And his pursuers still weren’t showing up on satellite thermal; as far as the skeyes could see he was alone down here with the microweather and the monastery.

The monastery.

They’d be online. They’d be able to help. At the very least the Bicamerals lived behind walls. Anything was better than fleeing naked through the desert.

He aimed for the tornado. It writhed in his enhanced sight, a distant green monster nailed to the earth. Its roar carried across the desert as it always did, faint but omnipresent. For a moment, Brüks heard something strange in that sound. The monastery resolved in the gogs, huddling in the shadow of the great engine. A myriad of pinpoint stars burned there against a low jumble of stepped terraces, almost painfully bright.

Three in the morning, and every window was ablaze.

Not so faint anymore: the vortex roared like an ocean now, its volume rising imperceptibly with each turn of the wheels. It was no longer stuck to the horizon. StarlAmp turned it into a pillar of fire, big enough to hold up the sky or to tear it down. Brüks craned his neck: over a kilometer away and still the funnel seemed to lean over him. Any second now it would break free. Any second it would leap from the ground and slam back down, there or there or right fucking here like the finger of some angry god, and it would rip the world apart wherever it touched.

He stayed on course even though the monster ahead couldn’t possibly be made of air and moisture, couldn’t possibly be anything so—so soft. It was something else entirely, some insane Old Testament event horizon that chewed up the very laws of physics. It caught the glow from the monastery, trapped that light and shredded it and spun it together with everything else that fell within reach. A small gibbering thing inside Daniel Brüks begged him to turn back, knew that the creatures stalking him couldn’t be worse than this, because whatever they were, they were only the size of men but this, this was the very wrath of God.

But that hesitant little voice spoke again, and this time the question lingered: Why is this thing running so hard?

It shouldn’t have been. Vortex engines never really stopped, but at night they weakened in the cooling air, diffused and idled until the rising sun brought them back to full strength. To keep a funnel this size running so hot, so late at night—that would almost draw more energy than it yielded. The vapor from the cooling cells would have to be verging on live steam—and now Brüks was close enough to hear something else against the jet-engine roar, a faint creaking counterpoint of great metal blades, twisting past their normative specs . . .

The monastery lights went out.

It took a moment for his goggles to amp back up; but in that moment of pure, illuminating darkness Daniel Brüks finally saw himself for the fool he was. For the first time he saw the pinpoint heatprints ahead of him, closing from the east as well as from behind. He saw forces powerful enough to hack surveillance satellites in geostationary orbit, but somehow unable to blind his antique Telonics network to the same heatprints. He saw a military automaton, ruthless as a shark, fast as a superconductor, betraying its own approach from kilometers away when it could have avoided his traplines entirely and killed him in his sleep.

He saw himself from high overhead, stumbling across someone else’s game board: caught in a net that closed around but not on him.

They didn’t even know I was here. They’re after the Bicamerals.

He pulled to a stop. The monastery loomed fifty meters ahead, low and black against the stars. All windows abruptly shuttered, all approaches suddenly dark, it rose from the landscape as though born of it: a pile of deep rock strata breaching the surface of the world. The tornado loomed beyond like a whirling gash in space-time, barely a hundred meters on the other side. The sound of its rage filled the world.

On all sides, candles closed in the darkness.

0313, his goggles reminded him. Less than an hour ago he’d been asleep. It wasn’t nearly long enough to come to terms with your own imminent death.

YOU ARE IN DANGER, the gogs told him helpfully.

Brüks blinked. The little red letters persisted, hovering off at the corner of his eye where the chrono readout should be.

COME ON, THEN. DOOR’S OPEN.

He looked past the command line, panned across the darkened façades of the monastery. There, ground level: just to the left of a broad staircase that underscored the main entrance. An opening, barely big enough for a man. Something burned there at body temperature. It had arms and legs. It waved.

MOVE YOUR ASS, BRÜKS, YOU SELF-ABSORBED IDIOT.

SEALING ENTRANCE IN 15S

14S

13S . . .

Brüks moved his self-absorbed idiot ass.

© 2014 by Peter Watts.

Excerpted from Echopraxia by Peter Watts.

Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Watts is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Blindsight and has been called “a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive” by The Globe and Mail and whose work the New York Times called "seriously paranoid."

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Clockwork Secrets: Heavy Fire

Dru Pagliassotti

Forthcoming from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing

Chapter One

The rifles’ percussion rang in Taya’s ears and a cloud of acrid gunpowder drifted through the air. Blood trickled over the snow-powdered courtyard.

She wished she were home.

“There, Ambassador.” Il Re Quintilio Agosti waved a hand toward the bodies. “I trust you will assure your decaturs that Alzana has brought its traitorous officers to justice.”

Cristof’s silk-covered fingers tightened on Taya’s arm.

A year ago, watching men being executed would have made Taya sick. Now what made her sick was its pointlessness. Nobody in the small prison courtyard believed that the dead men had masterminded the invasion, and nobody believed their deaths would prevent a war between Alzana and Ondinium. The two nations enacted their thousand-year-old script like creaking automata in a traveling stage show, each line and gesture predetermined.

“Are we finished here, Your Majesty?” she asked, her words tasting like ash.

A small smile played beneath Agosti’s well-groomed beard. He knew she was disgusted, and he took pleasure from the knowledge. It was the only pleasure he’d get from their assembly. Cristof’s emotions were unreadable beneath his ivory mask, and Lieutenant Amcathra and his lictors would be content to stand in the snow for hours if it meant watching more Alzanans die.

“Would the ambassador like to see more?” Agosti countered. “I could arrange to have other criminals brought before the firing squad, if it would amuse him.”

Taya tensed. Cristof tapped her forearm.

Enough.

“The ambassador has seen enough,” she said, her voice tight. “These executions weren’t among our demands.”

“But they were necessary, nevertheless.” The king’s expression remained complacent. “A lesson, if you will.”

For whom? Taya wondered. She glanced past the king toward the sullen-looking group of aristocrats who’d accompanied them, her gaze inexorably drawn to the cold, hostile glare of Lady Fosca Mazzoletti.

Fosca noted Taya’s inspection and her lips pulled back in a grim, humorless smile. There was no way the woman could know that Lieutenant Amcathra had killed her twin brother, Gaio, to save Taya and Cristof, but it was clear that she suspected something. Taya looked away, pulling her heavy fur cloak closer around her shoulders. The other nobles’ cold, flat expressions offered no relief. Even the soldiers in the execution squad seemed resentful as they shouldered their rifles.

King Agosti’s middle-aged daughter, Rosa, and his sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Liliana, huddled a little apart from the rest of the group. His thirteen-year-old grandson, Pio, studied the corpses with morbid fascination. The young principe was still in school, but the brass buttons and military cut of his coat indicated that he’d eventually follow his oldest sister into the army. That sister, Major Pietra Agosti, hadn’t attended the execution; she was away with her company. Meanwhile, the king’s youngest grandson, Silvio, lay in bed with a cold.

Il Re Agosti glanced at the sky. “It’s starting to snow again. If the ambassador doesn’t wish to see more, we should return to the palace.”

Cristof’s fingers moved. King meet me after.

“Thank you, Your Majesty.” Taya said. “The ambassador hopes to resume our talks this evening. We have much left to discuss.”

“Yes, we do, but surely we wouldn’t want to disturb our digestion with business.” The king patted her arm with careless intimacy. “We’ll resume our talks tomorrow.”

Say Council end talk soon.

“As you wish,” she said, hiding her distaste. “However, the ambassador wishes to remind you that the Council will grow impatient if we don’t reach an agreement soon. The decaturs acquiesced to this truce at your request, Your Majesty, but their deadline is almost upon us.”

“Indeed, indeed.” The king laughed, but no amusement reached his eyes. He leaned closer. “Now that my enemies know where I stand, we should be able to proceed more expeditiously.”

Taya reviewed his words twice before deciding that they weren’t a threat. Not to her, anyway. She reassessed the hostile expressions on the Family leaders’ faces.

What? Cristof inquired.

“The ambassador is pleased to hear that, Your Majesty,” she said, shooting her husband a neutral look. “We look forward to discussing the situation with you tomorrow morning.”

“Splendid.” The king’s expression collapsed into a sneer as he turned and regarded his entourage. “Sergeant! We are finished.”

The sergeant barked orders. His men saluted the king and marched off, leaving the corpses behind.

“Ambassador.” Il Re Agosti gestured to the line of towering steam-powered carriages waiting on the parkway before turning to his family.

Taya repeated the king’s comment to Cristof as they began their slow walk across the snow-covered cobblestones. Lieutenant Amcathra remained beside them as his seven lictors ran ahead.

You trust him? Cristof tapped as they reached the carriages. The lictors were scrutinizing the steam engine’s dials and checking their readouts against a chart. Il Re Agosti considered the tall, smoke-bellowing carriages standout symbols of Alzanan’s modernity, but Amcathra monitored their operation with open suspicion.

“No, not really,” Taya said, waiting for the lictors to let them enter. The Alzanans were already climbing ladders up to their Family carriages. The royal carriage was particularly tall and ornate, painted silver and sky-blue and surrounded by flamboyantly uniformed Alzanan soldiers standing at attention.

“Today’s demonstration may have been intended to intimidate dissenters,” Amcathra speculated, his rifle cradled in the crook of one arm. “Several of the executed officers belonged to Families in attendance.”

Cristof’s fingers moved. Dangerous.

“He says that sounds dangerous.”

“Indeed.” Amcathra inspected the chart and allowed his lictors to lean a ladder against the coach’s towering eight-foot-tall wheels. “Exalted.”

Taya helped Cristof climb and slid into the cabin beside him. Amcathra closed the door as his lictors secured the ladder beneath the vehicle.

Taya drew the curtains and untied Cristof’s blank-featured ivory mask. She smiled at her husband’s thin, careworn features and pale gray eyes and brushed a wayward strand of black hair away from his forehead. When he wasn’t wearing his glasses, the new scars around his left eye were clearly visible.

“How are you feeling?”

“Less pleased than I ought to be, considering there are five fewer Alzanan officers in the world.” He rubbed his face against a silk-covered shoulder. The coach jerked into motion, shaking and rumbling over the cobblestones. “What about you?”

“I’m all right.” Her smile faded. “I must be getting used to violence.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I hope the king is finally planning to settle down to our negotiations,” she said, avoiding the compassion in her husband’s eyes. “I’m ready to leave Alzana.”

“One way or the other, we’ll be gone soon.” He rested a fabric-draped hand over his ivory mask as she set it in his lap. “It’s late winter, and the Council will want to attack by spring. We need to be back in Ondinium before that.”

“You’re assuming we’ll fail.”

“Did you think we’d succeed?” His crooked smile was humorless. “These negotiations are just a delaying tactic, love. Alzana is rushing to outfit whatever other dirigibles it has in hiding and the Council is rushing to pull more . . . more machines out of storage. This war’s inevitable; you and I are just the intermission entertainment.”

“Well, our work wasn’t entirely in vain,” Taya said, trying to cheer them both up. “The other nations have agreed to remain neutral, and I don’t think they would have if their ambassadors hadn’t met you in Mareaux. Showing them a face instead of a mask made a difference; they aren’t as intimidated by Ondinium as they used to be.”

“No, nobody would call me intimidating,” Cristof agreed. She made a face at him. He raised an eyebrow. “Anyway, you’re the one who’s done all—”

The coach swayed as something struck the front panel with a sharp report.

“Ambush!” Amcathra roared.

Taya leaned over her husband and tore open the curtains, heedless of propriety. They were paralleling the Capitoli River on the statue-lined Grand Avenue that divided the civic sprawl from the wealthy Family estates. She didn’t see anything suspicious, but Amcathra’s heavy boots thudded on the roof as he barked commands to his lictors.

“Taya!” Cristof exclaimed. She abandoned the windows to help him pull off his incapacitating public robe. The heavy garment and his ivory mask dropped to the carriage floor. “Where are my glasses?”

“In my reticule.”

He grabbed her velvet purse as she returned to the windows and lifted the pane, twisting her head out. A group of black-clad men on horseback was charging down the wide avenue toward them, shouting and brandishing pistols. Each man bore a black stripe running down the side of his face.

“Lictors!”

“What?” Cristof slid his glasses on. The carriage stopped as Amcathra’s lictors fell in around its towering wheels, aiming their rifles at the horsemen.

“We’re being attacked by lictors!”

“Impossible!” Cristof looked over her shoulder. “The Council—”

He was interrupted by a barrage of gunfire. Taya flinched and Cristof pulled her down between the seats, wrapping his arms around her. Screams, shouts, and shots filled the air. Then Lieutenant Amcathra yanked the carriage door open, balancing on a tall wheel as he hooked the long ladder to its rings.

“Get down,” he snapped.

Taya pushed Cristof in front of her. He stumbled over his crumpled robe and discarded mask, shot her a dark look, and clambered down the ladder. Taya grabbed his mask by its strings and followed.

“Other side,” Amcathra ordered, stepping from the wheel to the ladder and sliding down its vertical rails. Cristof started to say something and the lictor grabbed him by the shoulder. “Now!”

Cristof pulled up his inner robes, revealing the black trousers he’d worn beneath for warmth, and ducked under the carriage. Taya hiked up her skirt, wishing she had trousers underneath instead of lace-trimmed drawers, and followed suit. She crouched beside the wheel, squinting through the gunpowder smoke. King Agosti’s soldiers had run forward to meet the attackers. The avenue looked like a battlefield where the riders and royal guards clashed, but Amcathra’s lictors remained still, holding their fire.

“They can’t be lictors,” Cristof muttered next to her ear. “The Council would never do something so stupid.”

“Exalted.” Amcathra appeared from beneath the coach and handed Cristof a needle pistol, then pulled a bone-handled knife from his boot and held it out. “Icarus?”

Taya hesitated, then handed Cristof his mask.

“Don’t lose that,” she ordered, taking the knife. “You’ll need it later.”

“I think this diplomatic mission is over,” he said tautly, tying the mask inside his robe. He raised his voice over another barrage of gunfire. “Are those really lictors, Janos?”

“It is unlikely. Few lictors ride.”

“Don’t you know for sure?” Taya demanded.

“The Council does not tell me all of its plans.” The lieutenant turned to the nearest lictor. “Jager, find a safe route into the city.”

“Yes, sir!” The woman saluted and tapped the three nearest lictors, jerking her head toward the river. They slung their rifles over their shoulders and jogged off.

Amcathra grabbed the carriage’s towering wheel and pulled himself back up to the roof. He lay flat, swinging his rifle around. A horseman broke through the melee, aiming his pistol at the carriage. Amcathra fired and the attacker pitched over the back of his steed, but more assailants were approaching on foot and on horseback. Their lictors opened fire. Taya cringed as one of them jerked and crumpled, his rifle clattering on the stone road, but several of the attackers dropped, too, sliding out of their saddles as their horses bounded away from the fighting.

Cristof ducked out from under the coach and knelt by one of the fallen riders, running his hand across the man’s castemark. Black greasepaint smeared his fingers.

“They’re not real!” he bellowed. “Janos, it’s a frame!”

Amcathra didn’t answer, but Taya saw the lictor next to her bare her teeth as she snapped off a shot. The lictate didn’t appreciate imposters.

A high-pitched scream rose behind them. Attackers had swarmed the king’s carriage, shattering the windows and tearing open the door. Taya grabbed Cristof’s sleeve.

“Look!”

“Who cares?”

“Cris!” The king’s daughter and grandchildren were pulled out of the tall carriage and thrown to the ground. They landed hard, Principe Pio clutching his wrist with an anguished howl. Principessa Liliana scrambled to him as their mother Rosa pulled herself to her knees. Their royal guards were nowhere to be seen. “They’re attacking the children!”

Taya drew Amcathra’s knife and ran toward them. Her husband muttered under his breath, then grabbed the fake lictor’s pistol and followed, a firearm in each hand.

Il Re Agosti was hauled out of the carriage next, struggling and shouting. His disaffected aristocrats surrounded him as he lay sprawled on the ground, kicking him in the ribs and jeering. With a shriek, Rosa threw herself at the nearest assailant, trying to pull him away from her father. Ducking her blows, an Alzanan aristocrat turned and shot her in the stomach.

Wails of horror arose from Agosti’s grandchildren. Cristof skidded to a halt and fired.

Steel needles tore into the shooter’s chest. The man staggered back and collapsed, the mob parting in alarm. Cristof shot again, holding down the trigger and sweeping the needle gun from left to right. A spray of slender metal spikes drove the well-dressed attackers back. Several lost their nerve and ran. Taya sprinted for the king.

“Ambassador!” Lady Fosca Mazzoletti shoved herself forward, wielding a gold-chased, long-barreled pistol. She aimed it at Taya. “Put down your gun or I’ll shoot her.”

Taya hurled her knife at the woman’s face. Fosca’s eyes widened. She twisted away from the blade only to find Taya grabbing her wrist and forcing her pistol upward.

“I am not going to be a hostage again!” Taya spat. The two of them grappled, their feet sliding over the snow-covered street. Somebody grabbed Taya’s shoulder, but a moment later she heard a loud bang and the attacker collapsed next to her. Fosca used the distraction to claw her face.

Jerking her head back, Taya kicked Fosca’s knee. The taller woman shifted her weight, throwing Taya off-balance as she muscled her gun closer to Taya’s face. Taya struggled to stay upright. She heard an exchange of gunfire and Cristof shouting her name, but the rest of his words were lost in the uproar around her.

Suddenly Principessa Liliana landed on Fosca Mazzoletti’s back, screaming and pulling at the noblewoman’s hair. The gun went off and Taya jerked back, deafened. The girl’s fist tangled on a golden chain around Fosca’s neck and pulled it taut. The aristocrat dropped her gun and reached into her sleeve, pulling out a stiletto.

The chain broke, leaving the principessa off-balance, holding the necklace and a handful of dark hair. Fosca grimaced, stabbing backward and missing. Taya took the opening to swing her elbow against the side of the woman’s temple.

“Let’s go!” one of the Alzanans shouted, running up and grabbing Fosca Mazzoletti’s shoulder. “Agosti’s dead and the lictors are coming!”

“Kill the girl,” Fosca snapped, clutching the side of her head.

The Alzanan raised his pistol. Taya tackled the girl to the ground, flinching as the pistol’s hammer fell on an empty chamber. A rifle fired and the Alzanan collapsed into an ungainly heap in the street not far from where Taya lay huddled. A horse thundered past, its hooves throwing snow and mud over Taya’s face. She pressed the principessa’s head down next to hers, listening to gunfire.

“It’s all right,” she whispered in Alzanan. “It’s all right.” All she could see was the snow beneath her cheek and the bleeding bodies sprawled around her, and all she could feel was the girl’s rapid breathing—or was it sobbing?—under her arm. At any moment she expected Fosca Mazzoletti to put a bullet into the back of her head.

“Icarus!” Someone was shouting in Ondinan. “Are you hurt?”

Taya looked up. Fosca had fled and one of their lictors, Helvi, was kneeling beside her. Cristof stood a few feet away, his concern melting into relief as he saw her move.

“Let’s go.” Helvi swung her rifle around. Taya pulled herself to her feet and held out a hand for the principessa. Blood spattered the girl’s face and dress.

“You’d better come with us,” Taya said in Alzanan.

“Pio . . .” Principessa Liliana’s face was white with shock as she lifted herself up, her gaze fixed behind them. Taya turned.

The girl’s little brother had been shot in the head; his skull a bloody, shattered mess. Taya’s stomach heaved. Not far away, their mother lay in a huddled heap, her stomach soaked with blood. And behind her lay Il Re Quintilio Agosti himself, slashed and shot and beaten to death by his angry vassals, a number of whom now lay dead or dying around their victim. Cristof and Helvi had clearly done all they could to avenge the doomed family.

“Oh, Lady.” Taya grabbed the principessa’s hand and drew her up, wrapping an arm around the girl’s narrow shoulders. “I’m so sorry. Come away.”

“No—please!”

“It’s all right—we’ll keep you safe. I promise.”

“Taya, we need to go.” Cristof had pulled a dead Alzanan’s coat over his silk robes and scrounged new percussion pistols from the fallen. With his long black hair falling out of its ornate pins and clasps and his wave-shaped castemarks starkly visible on his naked cheekbones, he looked like the Oporphyr Council’s worst protocol nightmare.

“Just a minute.” Taya released the girl and ran forward, sweeping up Amcathra’s boot knife and looking one more time for any sign of Fosca Mazzoletti. Seeing no sign of the noblewoman, she turned and took Principessa Liliana’s arm once more. Cristof and the lictors fell in around them, firing at anybody who came too close. The principessa was pale with shock.

Lieutenant Amcathra was working on their steam carriage’s boiler while one of his men covered him, keeping the false lictors at bay. Amcathra pointed a gloved hand toward the three-foot-high wall that divided the avenue from the snow-covered expanse that led to the Capitoli River. Two of the four lictors he’d sent out earlier stood at the top of the riverbank, their rifles at the ready.

“Follow them, Exalted,” he shouted over the gunfire, screams, and pounding hooves.

“Agosti’s dead,” Cristof reported, also raising his voice. “So’s his daughter and grandson. We have Principessa Liliana with us.”

“Who killed him?”

“The Families—I think Fosca Mazzoletti was in charge.”

“Is she dead?”

“I missed.”

“Too bad.” Amcathra pointed again. “Go.”

They climbed over the short wall and ran toward the river. Taya risked a glance over her shoulder and saw royal soldiers and fake lictors shooting each other while bloodstained aristocrats and frightened commoners fled. Wounded humans and horses screamed with pain in the middle of the chaos.

Then the Ondinium steam carriage lurched into motion, barreling into the carriage in front of it. Lieutenant Amcathra and the other lictor vaulted over the wall, holding their rifles in both hands, and charged toward them. The false lictors ducked around the mechanical collision to continue firing at them. Taya winced as bullets whistled past her ears and one of the lictors next to her cried out.

“Down!” Amcathra bellowed. “Get down!”

Taya threw herself and the principessa flat. Cristof and the lictors sprawled next to them.

Two heartbeats passed. Taya was about to look up when an explosion thundered around them. She only had a second to register fresh screams before a second explosion followed. Something heavy and searing hit her calf. She shrieked and yanked her leg beneath her, reaching down to make sure her skirt wasn’t on fire.

“Taya!” She looked up. Cristof was on his knees, reaching for her across the principessa. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.” Her skirt was scorched and a steaming, twisted chunk of metal lay next to her, but her skin had only been scalded. “Principessa?”

The Alzanan girl mutely lifted herself to all fours, then to her knees. She seemed alive and unharmed. One of the lictors wasn’t, though—Taya could tell that from Helvi’s grim expression as she leaned over her castemate’s body.

Behind them, fire crackled across Grand Avenue. The walls and statues close to the carriage had been blown into rubble, and body parts lay scattered along the street partially obscured by a haze of smoke.

Lieutenant Amcathra and the other lictor joined them.

“We must go.”

“Cael’s dead,” Helvi reported. “Shot in the back.”

“Bright, carry him,” Amcathra ordered. Helvi took the man’s rifle as Amcathra’s companion grabbed the corpse and hoisted it over his shoulder.

“What did you do with Jordan and Hind?” Helvi asked, standing.

“Their bodies were inside the carriage.”

Taya paled. If that was Amcathra’s idea of a cremation . . .

“Go.” Amcathra jerked his head toward the river. “Run.”

The lictors led them away at a jog. They followed the Capitoli River for several minutes and then, when it was clear the Alzanan rebels had lost track of them in the smoke and chaos, they cut back to a narrow pedestrian access tunnel that ran below Grand Avenue. Jager and another lictor huddled inside, guarding each end.

“Sir, this leads into the city, but there are people all over,” Jager reported, her eyes flickering to Cael’s body and then back again. They heard another explosion; a third carriage had blown its boiler.

Amcathra turned. “Principessa Liliana Agosti.”

The young Alzanan shrank against the wall.

“Principessa, the Families are in rebellion,” Amcathra continued in Alzanan. “Do you have any allies whom you can trust to keep you safe?”

The girl shook her head, wide-eyed.

“Please think again. It is in our best interest to deliver you safely to Family Agosti loyalist—you are the only Agosti left who can attest that we did not kill the king.”

Lady! He was right, Taya realized. The princess’s testimony could salvage this diplomatic disaster. But tears filled the girl’s eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

“She’s in shock.” Taya patted the girl’s arm. “Let’s find someplace to hide, and then we’ll figure out what to do.”

Amcathra looked displeased, but he turned and began giving orders. His lictors smudged mud and blood onto their faces to hide their stripes and opened their jackets and shirts to disguise their uniforms. Cristof wiped ash across the castemarks over his cheekbones. He wanted to remove his telltale robes and go bare-chested under his pilfered coat, but Taya and Amcathra both vetoed the idea, unwilling to risk his health in the middle of winter.

“You know that Mazzoletti—or whoever was behind this coup—has done a marvelous job of framing us,” Cristof said as he buttoned his coat to his neck. “We’re going to be shot on sight.”

“Anybody who inspects the bodies will discover that they are not real lictors,” Amcathra said.

“But what about—ah.” Cristof nodded toward Cael’s corpse. “That’s why you’re not letting them collect our fallen.”

“Correct.”

“It won’t make a difference. Nobody will get a chance to touch the bodies, and most will believe whatever the rebels tell them.”

“Cris.” Taya touched his arm. “What about Jayce and the rest of our staff? They’re still in the palace.”

“I’m sorry, Taya.” He clasped her hand between his palms.

She recoiled. “We can’t just leave them!”

“There’s nothing else we can do.”

“But—but they’ll be killed!” She stared at him in disbelief. They had come to the palace with a staff of six, including their tailor Jayce, who was her best friend Cassi’s nephew and a friend in his own right. She and Jayce had survived poisoning and a train crash together, but now . . .

“I’m sure the Alzanans will keep them alive as bargaining chips,” Cristof said, striving to sound confident. Taya looked away. Maybe so, but Ondinium’s decaturs viewed their nation as a giant machine and its citizens easily replaceable cogs and springs. They would never pay ransom for a group of lower-caste diplomatic staff.

She didn’t know what she was going to say to Cassi if she ever got back to Ondinium.

© 2014 by Dru Pagliassotti.

Excerpted from Clockwork Secrets by Dru Pagliassotti.

Published by permission of the author and EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dru Pagliassotti is a professor of communication at California Lutheran University, where she teaches media theory and practice. She published and edited The Harrow, an online literary magazine for fantasy and horror, from 1998-2009, and she currently runs The Harrow Press, which publishes horror anthologies.

NONFICTION

Interview: Christopher Moore

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Christopher Moore is the author of eleven novels, including the international bestsellers, Lamb, A Dirty Job, and You Suck. His latest novel is The Serpent of Venice, his second novel featuring Pocket, King Lear’s Fool.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and his guests discuss various geeky topics.

Your new book is called The Serpent of Venice, and it features the return of your character Pocket, who first appeared in your 2009 novel, Fool. Tell us about Pocket.

Well, Pocket is based on the fool from King Lear. Anybody who’s familiar with King Lear knows that the fool disappears more or less in the middle of the play. But otherwise, he’s pretty prominent, and of all of Shakespeare’s fools, he is the one who speaks the most truth to power. He’s in the most actual danger for being the fool, which was what I was going for. I originally wanted to do a book about any fool, a generic fool, because of that very reason. I met with my editor in New York and said, “Look, I want to do a book about a fool, but I don’t know whether to do just any fool or Lear’s fool.” She said, “Oh, do Lear’s fool,” which sent me into three years of learning Shakespeare’s canon. Pocket is tiny, he was raised in a nunnery, and he’s extraordinarily foulmouthed. So not only is he not very powerful politically, he refers to himself physically as a bit of a soggy kitten. There’s that contrast of him being very articulate and the master of any conversation because he’s so witty, but pretty much being the least powerful character on stage at any time.

When you say that he’s foulmouthed, could you give us an idea of the sorts of things that he might be prone to say?

God, I love the internet. If this was radio, you’d be standing on the delay button. When I wrote this, I wanted to use a lot of British slang, and the Brits are much freer with words like “twat,” the c-word, and “bloody buggering bollocks.” A word I coined was “fuckstockings.”

At any given time, he will go off on an obscene rant at any given character. In the first book, he calls King Lear “dog-fuckingly old,” and in this book, that’s his mentality. It really would have been how fools in the Middle Ages would have behaved. They may have been very smart and very quick, but they were not high-minded and the sense of humor was not high-minded. That’s about the best I can do off the top of my head, but there’s profanity all over the place in this book.

You mentioned that Fool is your take on King Lear, and now this book is a mash-up of Shakespeare’s plays Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado.” How did you get the idea to combine those particular stories?

Essentially, I started with the premise. I was in Venice; I had gone to literary festivals to do an appearance, and I stopped over in Venice and while wandering through the city, I thought, “This is the perfect setting for a monster story.” I always make a note of everything because you never know when something’s going to be an idea that can develop. When it came time to come up with a new idea for a book, I thought, “Well, maybe I could set a monster story in Venice.” I always try to see what stories have been told that were set in Venice because you don’t want to step on someone’s toes. Immediately, I thought of a horror story set in Venice—“The Cask of Amontillado,” where a fool is walled up in a dungeon. I thought, “Well, I have a fool,” and then I thought, “Well, what Shakespeare plays are set in Venice?” And it’s The Merchant of Venice and Othello. It took off from there. It started with the setting and moved into what I could do with these other works. Then there has always got to be some weird supernatural thing going on, and therefore, the serpent. So it was just trying to figure out how to make all those elements come together.

History really worked to my advantage because I had set Fool in the late thirteenth century and what was happening in Venice in the late thirteenth century was really interesting. Politically, the Venetians had made a lot of money by being the facilitator for the Crusades. They became the power of the Mediterranean because they could ship soldiers, goods, and weapons to the Holy Land. In the Fourth Crusade, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, they really became a maritime power. There were a lot of things going on that resonate with our time, what with wars in the Middle East being perpetrated by people who are going to make money on them, as well as the element of a black general, a black Moorish general. He was the head of a navy and a military force that was about to go to war against a Muslim force. Then a Jewish moneylender. So to have all those things in one story in that time period was the best of all worlds when you’re trying to foment conflict.

Why don’t you talk a bit about what sorts of changes you had to make to the respective stories, even if just to fit them in to the same chronology?

Shakespeare doesn’t give a specific time, but if you look at the events that he mentions, particularly in Othello, it’s happening in about mid-sixteenth century. That’s when the Venetians were at war with the Turks, and that’s where Othello, as the general, is sent to Cyprus to fight the Turks. Cyprus and Rhodes, I think. Setting it two hundred and fifty years earlier changes that quite a bit, and at that point, the Venetians are at war with the Genoans. Toward the end of twelfth century, their navy was almost completely wiped out by the Genoan navy—down to forty ships. If you’re the maritime power of the Mediterranean, that’s really not enough ships. I was able to wonder, “How does this Moor, this outsider, become the general?” I was able to explain it in that he was hired as a mercenary, and he distinguished himself in defending the city of Venice because in that war, the main islands were never attacked. They were able to hold the Genoans off; otherwise, Venice would have fallen. I just give that credit to Othello.

By the same token, taking The Merchant of Venice, which sort of focuses on the merchant world of Venice, and this moneylender, Shylock, I was able to move that into the thirteenth century. Jews had been persecuted in Europe back to the first century. That’s a theme you’re going to have in any play or in anything you set if you have Jewish people in it. But it was a bit harsher in the thirteenth century than it is in Shakespeare’s sixteenth century. Moving Shylock to be a moneylender at the time when there was a holy war with the Muslims, I thought there was a great conflict going on there.

Making the plots work together—it was difficult. There were a lot of sliding pieces, but I don’t think that’s very interesting to talk about. There is an enormous number of characters; I think there’s thirty-eight named characters in the two plays and that’s way too long for a comic novel. As I started to see who I could cut and who I could keep, I could see that Shakespeare was writing for a troop of actors. You go, “Well obviously whoever played Portia is also Desdemona, and whoever played Antonio is also Iago.” In each of the plays, there’s a counter-character that would obviously be performed by the same person. So in many of those cases, I was able to make those characters a single person.

You said that Venice is the perfect city for a monster story. What is it about Venice that makes it so perfect for monsters?

Well, it’s very old, and some of the streets are so narrow that I literally had to turn sideways to get through so my shoulders didn’t hit either side, and yet it’s a marked street. The buildings are buttressed to keep from caving in on each other at the top. Then there are these wellheads everywhere you go because Venice is often below sea level. The fresh water wellheads are these raised concrete or brick things—some of them are as high as six feet—and they have big iron lids on top of them. That is for when Venice floods every winter, so the salt water doesn’t get into their fresh water supply. And I thought, “Well, something creepy is going to come out of there for sure.” The idea that if there was something in the water, it could go anywhere in the city unseen and pop up, attack somebody, and then be gone again, and no one would know because the water in the canals of Venice is not clear. You can’t see six inches underneath the water there.

So that was what really made it so creepy. Also, it maintains this Byzantine-medieval look to the city even though most of what’s left was built in the Renaissance. There was a point where Venice was part of the Byzantine empire or basically owned the Byzantine empire because they took Constantinople. That part of the architecture is maintained there. You don’t find that in other Italian cities. It’s a city of water, and if you’re going to have a monster in the water, he can get around pretty well.

The monster can show up anywhere, so for example, the book opens with this scene we mentioned out of Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” where Pocket is chained to a wall, except in your version, this monster comes up out of the water and performs sex acts on him. How did you come up with that idea?

This is what happens when you never throw anything away as far as ideas go; I’m a hoarder as far as notebooks go. Years ago, a woman named Michelle Schlung asked me to contribute a story to an anthology she was doing of sexy horror stories. I came up with the idea of a guy who was chained in a dungeon that the tide came in and out of. Something had come into the water, which he couldn’t see, and it got him off. At the end of that story, he realizes that this is just a baby creature in the water and it’s going to grow teeth, and that’s the end of the story. I never wrote the story; I had a nice exchange with the editor. I was on deadline for a book, and I said, “I don’t have time to do this. I don’t know if it’s even a good idea.” But when I started writing about a fool being walled up in a dungeon, I thought, “That’s really not enough. And I want a monster in this.” What made it occur to me was just going back through my old notes from the late nineties for a short story that I’d never written.

I imagine that when you start off a book with interspecies bondage sex, you expect to maybe lose a few readers. Do you think that’s the case?

Don’t care. The way I look at it is there’s really a genre now of monster sex. That whole paranormal romance thing—there is a lot of intermonster boning going on. I had been told this because I’m sort of on the edge of that. I did a series of vampire books that I started in 1994 before, evidently, vampires were a thing, and it was normal people trying to date a vampire and dealing with normal lifetime things like who does the laundry and “wait, I don’t use toilet paper, why should I have to buy toilet paper?” I wanted the whole comic aspect of it. But I picked up this audience, probably about 2004 or 2005, of these romance people, and having not been to that section of the bookstore, I didn’t know the whole paranormal genre of romance had arisen. They said, “Well, yeah, our book club is reading your book this weekend.” I did a couple of events with Romance Writers of America and stuff like that, not that I had ever intended to write romance, but people said, “Oh yeah, monster boning is the thing now.”

It’s as tastefully done as you can do interspecies bondage porn. I wrote a book in the late nineties called The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove where it’s a hundred foot sea monster and this retired B-movie actress. They have a thing in which she uses a weed-whacker as a sex toy (for lack of any better term). That was way weirder than what goes on in this book. That was nearly fifteen years ago. I already lost those people a long time ago; I’m not worried about losing them now. In that book, we just know that something happened, the weed-whacker was used, the monster got off, and they were both lying side-by-side, smoking cigarettes. It says right in that book, “What happened right after that was just none of your business.” That’s sort of the way this one works, too. There’s no graphic description of what’s going on. You just know that something really bizarre has gone on.

Speaking of that kind of bawdiness in Shakespeare, when I was in college, Shakespeare in Love came out and one of the girls in my class said, “There’s a random scene in that movie where Christopher Marlowe walks in on the theater owner having sex and they have a casual conversation. It’s so out of place to have this random sex scene in a story about Shakespeare.” That seems completely wrong to me. To me, it seems totally appropriate to have this sort of bawdiness in Shakespeare because Shakespeare was a really bawdy author.

I tend to not apply too much history from Shakespeare’s time, but when we’re having this conversation, I think it helps to realize that Shakespeare is basically writing in a time where there are Pilgrims [Puritans] becoming a dominant political force in England. They are going to be so straight-laced and so freaked out by anything that they’re going to get thrown out of the straightest, most Christian nation in the world and sent to the U.S. where they can turn into school boards in Mississippi. Shakespeare was working within a pretty strict format. His practices and standards were tougher than they are at NBC, and yet he got away with a lot. There’s a couple of scenes in Love’s Labour’s Lost where the character Rosaline keeps going on about a fool who needs to “hit it, hit it good.” Clearly, they’re talking about spanking and bawdy, light S&M sex. It’s only if you have closed your mind to that possibility at all that you would miss that as part of what Shakespeare’s having fun with. In the beginning of Othello, even Iago yells out, “Even now, the black ram is topping your white ewe,” and screaming to Brabantio, who is Desdemona’s father. There’s a lot of “stallion in your white horse” and all this “black guy boning your daughter” kind of screaming among the crowds, which at that time was probably about as bawdy as you can say it.

I did want to mention that Othello and Merchant of Venice are the two Shakespearean plays that deal with prejudice. Could you talk about how you chose to deal with that in your book?

I wanted to enlighten the reader a little bit about the medieval history of the persecution of Jews all through Europe. Just prior to the setting of this book, all the Jews were expelled from France and England. This is in the eleven- and twelve-hundreds. With all these different countries where Jews were forced to not live, they ended up in Venice because they had no land. Venice was not a fiefdom; by the twelve-hundreds, they had already been a republic for four hundred years with representative senators from each neighborhood. That’s pretty progressive for the times, and they prided themselves very much on that. Even though they weren’t that great to the Jews, they were much better to them than other countries had been. You see that in the play. The characters in the Merchant of Venice are real dicks to Shylock. That’s happening almost three hundred years after my book takes place.

So I wanted to give details to that; I wanted to show that even in those times, the Jews were forced to wear yellow stars sewed on their clothes—the thing that we think originated with the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazis, didn’t. It originated in the Middle Ages, and Jews were often accused of poisoning wells in England. Jews were not allowed to own property, and so one of the reasons that you have the prefix “gold” in a lot of Jewish names is because they became jewelers and held gold—they couldn’t hold real estate. They became moneylenders because they couldn’t hold real estate. I didn’t know that before I did research on this, and despite it being a comic novel where the biggest concern is to entertain and to make people laugh, I thought it would be interesting to them to see how Shylock became a moneylender. Well, he became a moneylender because he didn’t have any choice.

In Othello, there’s a conventional scholarly wisdom that it is not a story about race. It’s a story about an outsider where the person who refers to Othello’s color most often is Othello. Iago and Roderigo, who are the bad guys of the play, are blatantly racist. Later on, Iago develops his hatred toward Othello, and he is the most mustache-twisting villain in all of Shakespeare. He and Richard the Third are the two worst sociopaths in the entire Shakespeare canon. It makes it fun. Othello may get the name of the play, but most of the lines go to Iago talking about all the people he doesn’t trust and how specifically he doesn’t trust Othello. It’s almost incidental that Othello is black. So, it’s addressed, and I just underline it a little bit.

I try to say less about the race and more about the complete, ridiculous lines that people draw. Pocket, because he’s in the midst of the action making fun of everything, takes advantage of that. He points out to the Venetians their own prejudice, and at one point, he has one of Antonio’s men convinced that out on the Judaica—which is the island where all the Jews are not exiled, but forced to live; it’s called the island ghetto of Venice, and it’s still there—he convinces Antonio’s men that he’s trained thieving monkeys that only understand how to communicate in Hebrew. They completely buy it because it’s so foreign to them. No gentile would ever set foot on the Judaica, so whatever goes on out there becomes almost mythical.

That’s the most important thing to the play; the prejudice is always about the other, and it parallels what we’ve just gone through in America. I originally wrote Fool because I thought I wasn’t hearing any political truth from anybody except comedians, and I thought that’s what a fool does. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher—those guys are fools, the ones that will tell you “Oh, no one really gives a fuck about Flight 370 and nobody really cares about Benghazi.” That’s true, but you’re not going to hear that from people whose interest it is to foment these stories and froth up all these things that aren’t really true.

So you say that Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher are speaking truth to power in their capacities as comedians, and you are in that same position. Do you feel that your books change people’s minds at all on these sorts of issues?

I don’t think so. I think they are a little bit too far removed, to be honest with you, and I’m okay with it. I don’t want to say a lot, but I have quite a few readers who will say, “I love your books but I don’t agree with any of your politics,” because I’m more outspoken in social media about my politics than my books. I’m fine with that. It’s not so much that I don’t want to address those issues; there’s just no shelf-life to political humor in fiction. My first book came out in 1991, and all my books are still in print. If I had really focused them on contemporary politics at the time, they would be sort of meaningless at this point. I know a lot of your listeners are into science fiction. It’s the way the Twilight Zone used to talk about McCarthyism and racism in the early 1960s. If you remember the episode where everyone looks like a pig—the girl we would think is gorgeous, she’s different, and the whole “not one of us” theme goes through the body snatchers. That’s basically science fiction commenting on current politics, but you can still watch these things today because they’re still enjoyable. They’re not specific to the time. As the people who were writing those, like Matheson pointed out, they could do that when nobody else could. Shields were going to go up as soon as somebody started to talk about something that they disagreed with, which is much more manifested in people like Maher, Stewart, and Colbert than it is with people who write fiction. Basically, I don’t want you to have to have read Shakespeare to enjoy these books, but if you have, it enriches it. You get some of the inside jokes, but if you don’t get them, it should still be a fun story. That’s how I feel about any political commentary. If you see parallels in there, if you get a perspective because you’re coming at it from an oblique angle, that’s great, but if you don’t, you should still be able to enjoy the book.

I’m just curious—what do you think about Colbert taking over for David Letterman?

I think it’ll be interesting. I haven’t seen Colbert out of character very much, but I’m old enough to remember when Letterman first started showing up and doing guest hosting on Johnny Carson. He seemed so harsh compared to Johnny Carson. Then as time went on, he seemed like the goofy guy who lives next door to you and swims at the Y. I think the seminal part of what Letterman was good at was he never stopped enjoying being a goofy guy. I think he’s an ethically nice guy, and I think Colbert is as well. He’s clearly very talented, and if he can bring that talent and apply that talent in a format like The Late Show the way he did with Colbert and The Daily Show, I think it will be terrific. Look, we could have ended up with Carson Daly or Ryan Seacrest or some haircut doing it. I’m grateful that there’s somebody who has got some talent. I don’t get to see Letterman very often, but I like him a lot. I don’t know what the politics were behind it. I don’t know if they looked at Craig Ferguson, who I love, but he’s almost meta. He’s so self-referential and talks about the process a lot. I like that, and he’s fun, but that show needs to be a little more show-y than that. We’ll see. I hope Colbert does well. I’ve had friends that have gone on the show and said that he just couldn’t be a nicer guy when you meet him in person. I always hope for a lot of success for people who are decent human beings.

Well, you mentioned Richard Matheson. I actually saw that when you were first starting out, you wanted to be a horror writer and were influenced by Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and authors like that.

Absolutely. Those were the guys I learned from. When I was first getting the idea that I wanted to be a writer, those were the people whom I read constantly. Everything I could get my hands on by Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson, and then the guys who were writing stuff on the edge of the Cthulhu mythos like Frank Belknap Long. I really liked Fritz Leiber, but it was the short story guys who wrote those twist ending stories like Bloch and Matheson that I really cut my teeth on. Then Ray Bradbury, of course. Every time there would be an anthology and one of those guys would have a story in it, I would be over the moon about it. As craftsmen, they were brilliant, and if anything speaks to how brilliant Matheson was, he’s got to have sold more short stories into film and television than anyone ever. I don’t know how many Twilight Zones he wrote, but it had to be close to half of them. He was a brilliantly talented guy that understood structure and convention, and he took you into it in a really economic way. When you’re trying to learn your craft, that was a great thing. The problem was that people laughed at my horror stories when I would read them at conferences, and I thought, “Wait a minute. Maybe that’s what I do.” But I did, I really thought I was going to write those types of stories when I was coming up.

Do you still read much in the way of fantasy and science fiction short stories?

Not much. It’s really a time thing. If I was just left to my own devices, and I was doing some other job like I’ve often done, I probably would read more. I don’t read that many short stories just because I don’t seek them out, and I don’t write them for economic reasons. I quit writing short stories a long time ago because I thought if I was going to make a living off of this, I had to write novels. I don’t compartmentalize or multi-task well; if I’m working on a novel, I’m usually not working on anything else. Coming up with a short story takes just as long, so I tend to read things that are either research for my writing, of which there is a lot, or novels. I probably should read the “World’s Best” every year, I used to really enjoy those. They do a great job of finding the gems and I miss reading them, but that’s not their fault or the writers’ fault. I just don’t get to it. I’ve almost lost my vocabulary for short stories and that was so critical in learning how to write.

We have some listener questions for you. Jason Wells asks, “What is the best use of the phrase ‘heinous fuckery most foul’ you’ve ever heard?”

I don’t want to be self-aggrandizing, but I think since I’ve had it in my vocabulary before anybody else, it probably had something to do with Congress. It doesn’t get used that much outside of me using it. It’s not like you’re flipping channels and all of a sudden, Ellen is going “Well that’s heinous fuckery most foul.” You probably couldn’t get through a good episode of the nightly news without finding a very appropriate place to put “heinous fuckery most foul” in there. To answer the question in the short manner, you really don’t hear it used that often, but I’m all for promoting the phrase.

Kelly C.A. says, “If you could be any Viking, living or dead, real or fictional, which one would you be and why?”

I can name maybe three Vikings. I would say the head guy on the show Vikings; I don’t even know what the character’s name is. He seems to rock the hatchet pretty well. Hagar the Horrible, I don’t know. Tony Curtis in The Vikings, from whenever that was made.

I think I would say Leif Erikson because that’s the only Viking’s name I know.

Exactly, it’s the only one, and Erik the Red. He was old school, so you want the rocking revolutionary Leif Erikson Viking. Unfortunately, the fact that their written language didn’t survive too much means there’s not a lot of famous Vikings.

Marissa asks, “Fuck socks? Why three? I mean, why not five?”

For the uninitiated, when I was writing a book called You Suck: A Love Story, I was going to have this goth girl character, and at the time, it was the golden days of MySpace. What that meant was that everybody was writing blogs because the format of MySpace was the blog. All over the internet were these specific sites that were goth blogs. A few of them still exist, but they’re not nearly as prolific as they were in those days, so I would pick up the idiom from them. I didn’t want to be the creepy old guy hanging out where the goth kids were and eavesdropping, although I did that a little bit. I would lurk like a creepy old guy on these goth blog chat sites and pick up the vocabulary. The thing that cracked me up was one day, a kid wrote, “Oh, fuck socks, I got to go to the PTA meeting,” or something like that. So I had my character use that.

People wanted me to start making merchandise, and I said, “I’ll do it but only for charity because I don’t want to be in the t-shirt business. What should I make? What do you guys want?” Everybody said, “Make fuck socks a real thing.” I happened to have a friend who had this company called Throcks. His idea was to sell socks in threes so that when the dryer ate one or wherever your socks disappeared into, you always had a spare. I have to tell you that never works; I have a bunch of pairs of throcks, which are these three socks in a package, and always two of them are lost now. When it came time, I thought, “Well, okay, if I make fuck socks, I don’t know how to make socks. I don’t know how to contact anybody to make socks, and I’ll talk to Edwin Heaven, who invented throcks.” I said, “Can we make fuck socks?” He says, “Yeah, but I’m only going to do it if it’s throcks.” That’s how they ended up being three of them. He would only make them in threes even though it was not economical really. When we were selling them, all the proceeds went to MS research. I was always encouraging people if you buy two, you end up with three pairs because there’s three in a package.

I just got a whole bunch of the medieval version, which is what Pocket came up with—“fuckstockings”—and I just bought the last of those that were left. I’m going to try and give them away at my events for this book tour.

After this interview, I’m going to be discussing the recent movie Noah with two Bible scholars. You’re practically a Bible Scholar yourself as the author of Lamb, which is being taught in seminaries now. I was wondering if you had seen that movie, and if you have any opinions about it?

No, I really dislike Russell Crowe in the extreme. I’m sure he’s a lovely Easter-bunny-like person, and bless his heart. I just don’t like watching him. So I didn’t go to see Noah. Let me say this: I’m somewhat skeptical about the flood. I’m even more skeptical that all seven million species of animals were put in a box of which the dimensions are incredibly specific in Genesis. My thought on the rough math is it wasn’t a big enough fucking box.

Yeah, it would need to be at least twice as big for that story to be plausible, right?

Yeah, having written about a lot of religions that sort of start up, or having introduced myself into them to see if they make sense (Lamb’s certainly is the most specific), I’m okay with it. A long time ago, I said to somebody, “A myth is just someone else’s religion you don’t believe in.” What we look at as Greek myths or Norse myths were somebody’s religion at one time. You just don’t believe it. That’s how I look at Noah. I’m sure these guys you talk to this afternoon are going to tell you that prior to whatever existing copies of the Old Testament we have that have survived, there were Greek myths of mass deluges. Those themes occur through history over and over again. It was Joseph Campbell’s life work to identify those themes, and Nietzsche and Jung said these are themes that are hardwired into us. I think Jung called them archetypes.

The entire science of folklore talks about motifs that exist in cultures that have never had any contact that we know of or couldn’t have possibly had contact historically, and yet they have the same myths, like Lot looking back and his wife turning to a pillar of salt. The Chinese have one where a guy is told “Don’t look back”—he looks back and his wife turns into a mulberry tree. Those motifs reoccur.

In short, I’m sure it’s fun to watch people get washed away by a giant flood, just like it is to watch them be crushed by giant sandworms, but I don’t believe in either one of those things as having really happened.

Do you want to talk about any other recent or upcoming projects you’ve got going on?

I can’t really think about much other than the fact that I’ve got about six weeks to tour for The Serpent of Venice. I’m adapting the play of Fool for the stage with Joe Disher, who’s a prominent stage director and actor. The next thing I’m going to be doing is a sequel to my book Dirty Job, which is where the guy gets the job of being Death, and he runs it out of a secondhand store in San Francisco. I want to apologize that this interview wasn’t that funny. I leave it all in the books; it’s all in the books. The books are much funnier than I am.

Best of luck on your six-week book tour, and I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, David. I really do appreciate it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast hosted by David Barr Kirtley. David is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Interview: Elizabeth Bear

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Elizabeth Bear is a multiple-award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy, whose recently completed Eternal Sky trilogy was called “the most significant epic fantasy published in the last decade” by Tor.com. Her most recent novel, Steles of the Sky, was released April 2014.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and his guests discuss various geeky topics.

Your new books are the Eternal Sky trilogy. Do you want to tell us how these came about?

I should say that these are what a friend of mine calls “silk road fantasy.” They’re an epic fantasy set in Central Asia and Eurasia, not our Central Asia and Eurasia, but a parallel one, a different history but a similar part of the world. I wanted to do something that was a little bit different from the sort of standard, generic European fantasy setting. Part of that is because my very good friend, Asha C. Srinivasan Shipman, who is obviously of Indian descent and had mentioned to me that she wished she could find more fantasy that reflected her heritage. It turns out that on my side, through my Cossack ancestors, because I’m Ukrainian on my father’s side, and on her side, we’re both descended from the Mongol hoard. In fact, she is a many-times-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan, and this is actually historically documented. Of course, apparently twenty percent of humanity is also descended from Genghis Khan, so it’s not that rare. He got around.

So I thought it would be really neat to write a book for her and for her sons, and also just reflecting that common heritage that she and I have. That was the thing that first put me into it. Then I started reading extensively about the history of the Mongol empires and various other empires, the Tibetan plateau, and what is now Kazakhstan, and this amazing, sweeping, deeply storied part of the world, and got very captivated by it.

When you were dreaming up this setting, what sort of research did you do? Were there any books that were particularly helpful?

There’s actually been a renaissance in the Western study of Mongolian history in the past fifty years, in part driven by the fact that a document called “The Secret History” was uncovered. It’s a family history written by someone in Genghis Khan’s household. A copy of this document was found in China, and it’s basically like an intimate personal portrait from an insider. This has spawned a whole plethora of books, some better than others. There’s a book called The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, which talks about his daughters-in-law and granddaughters-in-law, who did a lot of the work of keeping the empire going after he died. I don’t even know. I read so many books. I want to stress that this isn’t a historical fantasy. It’s a historically inspired fantasy. I’ve written rigorously researched historical fantasy set in our world, and this is not that.

Why don’t you give us an idea about what aspects of the book are drawn from the actual history and what are invented?

The societies in the book, and there are a number of them, are loosely based, or I wouldn’t even say based, possibly inspired, by various Earth cultures, although some of them are really invented out of whole cloth. This is a world where, because of a historical event that hasn’t been revealed yet, but maybe I will get the chance to write about some way, there essentially is no Western Europe, so there’s a cognate to the British Isles, and there’s a cognate to Scandinavia, but essentially the continent of Europe ends roughly around Prague, which means that basically all of those cultural and historical influences in our world are just nonexistent. There are no Romans. There really are no Greeks. Which leads to a very different cultural path and historical path. The Abrahamic religions don’t exist in this world. None of our major world religions exist. The closest thing that they come to is one theocracy that is the Caliphate, the worship of the scholar god who is the closest thing that they have to what we would consider an Abrahamic god. The inspiration for my protagonist’s life story is basically that he’s a younger son of a cadet branch of the imperial family, and there’s been a civil war going on for some time when the first book starts. His entire family has been wiped out, and he wakes up on a battlefield, and he decides, “This is it. I’m out of it. I’m going to go be a farmer. I’ve had enough of this.” History and fate being what they are, he’s not really allowed to pursue his quiet life as a sheep-herder for very long.

The author being who she is.

Yes, the author being a horrible troublemaker, he runs afoul of a necromancer who is the theocrat of a minor sect of a different religion who very much wants to put himself into a position of political power, and because he doesn’t have a lot of temporal power, how he decides to do this is by manipulating and controlling other people.

You said there are necromancers and there’s all sorts of magic in the book. Maybe we should talk about why is it called the Eternal Sky trilogy?

My training is as an anthropologist. Especially in the Victorian era and the Edwardian era, anthropology made so many horrible, horrible mistakes, and was used as a justification for just incredibly awful human rights abuses. The discipline and the science these days is profoundly self-conscious of those mistakes, and is attempting to inculcate its students this idea of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism and how the habits and prejudices of your tribe are just that: basically, teaching people that what they were raised to believe were sacred and inviolable truths are actually just the habits of your tribe. I thought it would be really neat to create a world in which not only is magic real and there are actual gods who actually have sway over various spheres of influence and various geographical areas, but that there was an external, physical manifestation of that. So literally, when you move from the sphere of influence of one god to the sphere of influence of another, the sky changes. You are under the sky of a different god. The sky is a different color in this world. When I first thought of it, I thought, “This is a really cool thing. This is flashy. It’s an eyeball kick. It’ll be so much fun,” and then I realized that it was incredibly emotionally important, not just to the characters but also to the readers, and that there were emotional beats in those moments when you came home to your own sky. In our world, we have a lesser version of this. I grew up in New England and moved to the Nevada desert for about seven years, and then came back to Connecticut, and I remember when I moved out there just being impressed by how it really seemed like a whole different sky. It doesn’t seem like they can be contiguous, the sun and sky of Nevada and the sun and sky of Connecticut. They don’t seem like they’re the same thing, even though they are.

It’s interesting because to the protagonist, Temur, the sky is almost like a newspaper or something for him because it gives him very personal news updates.

Yes, because the sky in that cognate reflects the composition of the royal family, so you can sort of check in on your relatives. And because it’s a slightly sexist society, it only reflects male relatives because they’re the ones who are in line to be heirs to the throne. But yes, the heavens actually do take an interest in you.

So that’s Temur, the protagonist, but there are a bunch of other characters in this book. Do you want to tell us about some of the other characters?

My personal favorite character is probably Hrahima, who is a giant anthropomorphic, badass tiger monk. An atheist tiger monk because she’s broken up with her god, which is hard to do when your god has an objective reality, but she’s bitter about some things that happened to her in the past, and she’s not talking to her deity anymore. Then there’s Samarkar, who is a former princess of the high plateau society that is sort of cognate to the Tibetan empire. I took a lot of liberties in when and where various empires happened because the Tibetan empire predated the Mongolian empire by a whole bunch of centuries, but in this reality their cognates are coexisting. Samarkar is actually one of the people who is most closely based on a real historical figure. Her backstory is very close to what happened to the Tibetan princess Samarkar. Although the Tibetan princess Samarkar did not go on to become a wizard. [Laughter] “Screw you guys! I’m going to wizarding school.” But I think she probably would’ve if she had the opportunity.

Tell us about the wizard school, because in this book, this is not exactly Hogwarts.

There are a bunch of different traditions of wizardry. Pretty much every culture has its own type of magic so the Qersnyk, the people of the Khaganate, have shamans. And the Rasani, who are the people who are most closely based on the Tibetan empire, their wizardry is a craft that involves a lot of science. They have attempted to understand things like how gunpowder works, and how plants grow, and how disease works, and for their time period they have fairly advanced knowledge of surgery, for example, which is useful because the way you come into your power as a wizard in this particular tradition is by giving up your power to generate life, to have children. So spay or neuter your wizard, essentially.

With the giving up your ability to have children to be able to do magic, could you just talk about how that idea came to you or how you developed that idea?

That was one of those things that came up in conversation with a group of friends, fellow writers. We were talking about the idea of magic through sacrifice, and one of the common tropes is that magicians, especially female magicians, have to preserve their virginity or chastity in order to create magic, and we were like, “What would be the biggest reasonable gamble that somebody would take?” because the way that this initiation works is they go through the training and then they have the neutering surgery, and then they have to go through an initiation to see if they actually get any power. So even if they survive the surgery, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to gain magic. That seemed like one of the biggest gambles you could possibly take, but also if you were trying to get out of a dynastic situation, which Samarkar, the female protagonist, is trying to do—she’s trying to remove herself from the succession so that she won’t be a royal pawn—then getting rid of your ability to have children is convenient.

It seems to me that a lot of times in fantasy, the ideas that have power are things that relate to people’s actual lives, and certainly for a lot of fantasy writers I know, this is a very real issue, right? Can you pursue your artistic career and have kids at the same time, in terms of money and time? I think for everybody there’s just sort of this balance between work and family and can you have both. Were you thinking of that at all when you were writing?

I was not thinking about that at the time, but it’s something that I’ve thought about for myself as a woman and as a professional. I made the decision not to have children personally. That’s really interesting. I hadn’t actually thought of that before. Good on you. Smart critic.

Thank you, thank you. I also wanted to talk about . . . how do you pronounce this name? Hrahima.

I think pretty much anything you do with a human mouth and tongue is going to be inaccurate. You should hear me trying to pronounce some of these names. I do not have a particularly good ear.

Actually, even just the title of the third book I wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce, to be entirely honest with you (Steles of the Sky). But speaking of this anthropomorphic cat character, I wrote a story a few years ago featuring an anthropomorphic cat character, a bunch of them actually, and I was really surprised at how strong people’s reactions to that were. Both, I got a lot of love from the furry community, and then just a lot of the opposite of love from other quarters. I was wondering if you had experienced any of these strong feelings that people have toward these animal characters?

I have yet to have anybody complain about Hrahima. I’ve had some complaints about the magic pony because, full disclosure, these books do have a magic pony. She’s a very sarcastic magic pony even though she doesn’t have any actual lines of dialogue. But no complaints about the kitty that I’ve seen. I did, in writing her, try very, very hard to keep her from ever being cute and to always bear in mind that, even though she talks and communicates on what would be sort of like a human level, she still is a five-hundred-pound, eight-foot-tall, bipedal carnivore, and sort of always keep that in mind and try to show the physical respect that all of the other characters have for her—because really I can’t think of a whole heck of a lot that’s scarier than a tiger with human cognition. They are an incredibly impressive predator. Right up there with polar bears. Most large predators look at human beings and go, “Well, okay, that’s another large predator. We’ll achieve detente and stay away from each other,” but tigers and polar bears are looking at you and doing mental conversions to see whether it’s worth the calories to chase you down.

So who would win in a fight between a tiger and a polar bear?

Probably the polar bear, I think. Unless the tiger got surprise. Even a big tiger is not in the same weight class.

What if it was like a bantam-weight polar bear versus a tiger?

[Laughter] A bantam-weight polar bear and a really big tiger, I think the tiger would probably win that. Cats are extremely well designed predators.

You mentioned the horses, and I did actually want to talk about that because obviously if it’s a Mongolian-style culture, horses play a huge role in the society. Could you just talk a little bit about the role of horses in this book?

Well, they’re absolutely necessary to the livelihood of these people. If you don’t have a horse, you’re dead. First of all, I am incredibly fortunate in that my editor and my very good friend and frequent co-author, Sarah Monette, are both horsewomen, and while I have worked in a stable and I have worked around horses, I haven’t been around them extensively in twenty years. I had the backup of people who actually knew horses very well and could tell me when I was making a mistake, when I was goofing something up.

What’s an example of something that you might goof up without the horse consultants?

One of the magic ponies gives birth to a foal at one point in the second book, and I had done a whole bunch of research on horse labor and how it works, but my editor went through and corrected like five or six tiny little mistakes that added up to a big mistake, and increased my verisimilitude massively. Occasionally she would point out things like, “Well, a horse wouldn’t do this,” or “A horse wouldn’t react this way in this situation.” Horse psychology is interesting because all of the other domestic animals with which we have real partnerships, like dogs and cats, are predators, or at least omnivores in the case of dogs, and the psychology of an herbivore is very different from the psychology of a scavenger or an omnivore. Their entire brains are structured differently, and having Beth Meacham, my editor, to remind me of those moments, when she would point out, “The horse is acting like a dog here. You need to fix that and make her act like a horse.”

Just reading reviews, a lot of people really loved this pony character that you were mentioning. Could you just talk about a horse like an actual character that people connect with even though it doesn’t have any lines in the book?

The thing to remember is there are four horses that are at least secondary characters that have a fair amount of screen time, and their personality and actions have some impact on what happens in the story, and some of it is just remembering that they’re not all the same. They’re characters. They do have different personalities. There’s one mare who is a little flightier and snappier than the other. There’s Bansh, the magic pony, who’s sarcastic. And having worked around horses, horses do have a sense of humor, and when we talk about a human being having a horsey sense of humor, it’s a very accurate description because horses really delight in pranks and prat falls and making the monkey look stupid. We had one mare at the stable I worked at where you had to be very careful about walking behind her stall because she wouldn’t kick, but she liked to pee on people, and mares pee backwards like cats, and they can get some actual distance. [Laughter] That is not a splash zone you want to be in. So this particular horse is a little bit sarcastic, and especially since none of the human protagonists of the books realize for like the first 300 pages that they’re dealing with a slightly supernatural animal here. I was having a great deal of fun with having them invent justifications for whatever had gone on. It was also kind of fun because occasionally she could serve as . . . you know, the thing about all the problems with The Dark Knight Rises and all the various plot holes and complaints that people had, and then there was the one, “Well, how does he get back from the middle of nowhere with no money to Gotham City when it’s been walled off?” Well, he’s Batman! There were a couple of moments in the book where I had the great fun of, “How do we get out of this? Well, the pony is Batman.” But you have to set that up before you can use it. You don’t get that for free.

Speaking of movies like that, and possibly problems with movies like that, I recently watched you and Scott Lynch reviewed The Hobbit Part Two while drunk.

Oh dear, I think I’m still hung-over.

[Laughter] It sounded like it. Do you want to talk about what that was and how that came about?

Our buddy, Pat Rothfuss, has this little, tiny charity event he does every year (that was irony) called Worldbuilders, where he raises a whole bunch of money for Heifer International which is an absolutely great . . . I’m 100% behind this charity. Basically, what they do is they buy livestock for economically challenged people in farming communities, and teach them how to tend to that livestock, and in doing so attempt to create wealth for the entire community. Worldbuilders accepts donations and then has stretch goals in a sort of Kickstarter-like fashion. Scott and I were asked to provide a stretch goal. We were thinking about it and thinking about it, like, “Oh, god, what can we do?” It’s supposed to be something whimsical or fun or ridiculous, and at some point, I think we had just gotten back from seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and being somewhat disappointed, like many of our peers, somewhat feeling a little letdown. And one of us said, “We could just do an audio review of The Hobbit.” And the other one said, “I’d have to be drunk.”

So we emailed Mariah, who is the person who runs Worldbuilders for Pat, and we said, “What do you think of this?” And she’s like, “Oh my god, do it. And provide cocktail recipes.” So we did. There were even more cocktail recipes in the original draft, each more whimsical and ridiculous than the last. I think The Smaug was my favorite, which is a shot of Goldschläger drunk while it’s on fire. We do not recommend actually trying this.

It’s funny, I haven’t seen The Desolation of Smaug because I didn’t like the first Hobbit movie at all, but after it came out we had Corey Olsen on the show, he’s the Tolkien professor, and he gave an amazing defense of it. He was like the F. Lee Bailey of the Hobbit movie. I’d be curious to see what he has to say about The Desolation of Smaug because you guys were not big fans, definitely.

No. I really was able actually to forgive a lot of the first one. There were many, many things about the first one that I liked; there was some stuff I didn’t like. But the second one, I didn’t just feel it was a failure on an adaptation level, I felt like it was a failure on a narrative level, like as its own thing it didn’t work. Too many luge rides on molten gold.

One thing I really wanted to ask you about is, as a teenager, I was absolutely obsessed with the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game.

Oh my god.

I was just looking at your Wikipedia page, and according to that, your first ever short story publication was in Amberzine 11.

It’s not actually my first short story publication. There were some other earlier ones. (One of which I disavowed because it was a really terrible story. We don’t talk about that.) I played Amber DRPG for a long time and ran a campaign and attended a number of Ambercons. Met my ex-husband at an Ambercon, actually. Still have an enormous number of friends in that community, and the hysterical thing is the number of professional writers who have come out of that tiny little Ambercon community.

Who are some of the other ones?

There’s Doug Hulick, L. Jagi Lamplighter . . . of course, now I’m going to forget.

We interviewed Jim Butcher, and he got his start doing an Amber online kind of thing.

It’s not really so much a gaming system as a vague framework, and I think that was what made it really excellent for those of us who just wanted an excuse to get together and play make-believe with our friends.

What about your story “The Devil You Don’t”?

Now I’m going to out myself as the giant nerd I am because the character who I later repurposed as a protagonist in her own non-Amber world, Muire, started off as one of my Amber characters. That particular story is basically a character contribution. As you know, but I’m explaining it to the audience, one of the ways that an Amber campaign works and that you get more points for your character is by doing some sort of “character contribution,” and I was writing little short stories for my game master. In this particular story, this character rides into a Wild West town and gets embroiled in basically a mash up of the plots of the American murder ballads “Duncan and Brady” and “Stagger Lee.” It’s Roger Zelazny by way of Sergio Leone.

What did that turn into when you made it non-Amber?

The character. I actually fairly often repurpose stuff from games I’ve run in completely different ways into fiction. That character wound up being recast from a minor third generation Amberite, I think she was a granddaughter of Llewella if I remember correctly, being recast from that role to being the littlest Valkyrie who survived Ragnarök because she panicked and fled the battlefield and is now stuck wandering around a post-apocalyptic, post-cyberpunk universe in All the Windwracked Stars and its sequel novels.

You said you have other characters that people might recognize that are drawn from your gaming sessions?

Oh sure, the basic idea of the character of Jenny Casey from the Hammered books came from a Cyberpunk 2020 game, along with several of her co-characters/supporting characters. The book itself is very much not a Cyberpunk 2020 setting, but I put a lot of time into developing my player characters and NPCs, and sometimes it’s nice to give them a little life beyond the end of whatever gaming system they were in. Jacob Dust, who’s a character in the book Dust, surprisingly enough, was the antagonist of this weird Amber/Courts of Chaos play-by-email game that I ran back in the 1990s, and I had so much fun with him that I didn’t want to give him up. Basically, I’m a gigantic nerd.

Well, you’ve come to the right podcast.

[Laughter] I’m an enormous nerdy nerd nerd, and I keep reusing my player characters and favorite NPCs because I love them and don’t want to let them go.

Another thing I wanted to talk to you about was, I was reading over your blog for the past year or so, and when I joined the Science Fiction Writers of America, I logged into the SFWA forums for the first time.

I’m so sorry.

I was so repulsed by all the vitriol that I literally never logged in again. I was struck that you had kind of a similar experience.

Apparently the old SFWA forums have been spun off. They’re the ones at sff.net, which is where a lot of the toxicity got concentrated, I think. No longer part of SFWA, they are no longer SFWA forums. They are simply a bulletin board system and SFWA does not endorse or sponsor them anymore. The new SFWA forums on the sfwa.org site are, I understand now, being a little more closely moderated, and there are a number of people who are attempting to create a more collegial, less toxic environment there. As you know, I am a huge proponent of the positive changes that have been going on in SFWA over the last five years in attempting to make it a more welcoming environment. But from my blog, I mean, my apology to George Martin is I assume the entry that you’re talking about.

I actually was just this morning holding a copy in my hand of the shiny, new, post-kerfuffle SFWA bulletin, and it looks amazing. It’s suddenly full of articles on how to manage your social media presence, and effective strategies for self-promotion, and effective strategies for self-publishing, and how to negotiate the career line between self-publishing and traditional publishing. Suddenly it’s like there’s useful information in there. It’s amazing what a change it is. So I think that we’re moving in the right direction.

Do you maybe want to explain for listeners why you were apologizing to George R.R. Martin?

The reason I was apologizing to George Martin is that when I first joined SFWA, I too went to the SFWA forums—this was the old SFWA forums, back before there was a new SFWA forums—and I started talking to people, and trying to learn my way, and somebody on the forums asked the question, “Why aren’t young writers joining SFWA?” I’m like, “Well, I know the answer to that.” I was thirty-three at the time, and I didn’t know any better. I said, “Well, the reason that young writers aren’t joining SFWA is because SFWA has a reputation among my . . .” —For those of you listening, a young writer is anybody under forty-five, honestly, because it takes ten years to get to the point with your skill where you’re professionally competitive, so if you start writing seriously when you get out of college, you’re going to be lucky to be breaking in as a novel writer by the time you’re in your early thirties, which is exactly what happened to me and what happens to a lot of people. There are a few annoying geniuses who break in in their twenties, like my boyfriend. We give them a lot of hell.

This is Scott Lynch, just in case people don’t know that.

Scott Lynch, yes. The awesome Scott Lynch. I’m sorry, I was ranting.

So I said, “Well, the reason that a lot of young writers don’t want to join SFWA is because a lot of the writers in my cohort are women, people of color, or queer people, or trans-people, or feel marginalized, and there is a perception among them that SFWA is not friendly to marginalized groups.” There were two distinct responses. There were a number of people who were incredibly kind to me and really supportive and very sensible and listened to what I had to say, and even if they didn’t agree with me, were like, “Okay, you are reporting what you hear, and this is a valid opinion, even if it’s not my experience of SFWA.” Among those people were Harry Turtledove and Tamora Pierce, in particular, that I recall. This was almost ten years ago now. Other people were also extremely kind to me. I just remember almost being moved to tears by both of them.

And then there were a whole bunch of people who basically just didn’t want to hear it. I engaged in the traditional science fiction writer pastime of quitting SFWA in a huff. I heard later that year or the next year on George Martin’s Livejournal, he was talking about SFWA and said, “This is the reason why people should join.” And I said, “These are the reasons why I’m not a member.” And he attempted to educate me, and I was still too butt-hurt to be moved, essentially. And in the intervening eight or nine years, I have come to realize that he was absolutely correct, that there are a lot of good, valid reasons to join SFWA, and that the way to change it is to get involved and be the change you want to see. It took me eight years to grow up enough to make a public apology, but oh well, live and learn.

We’re running a little short on time here. Do you just want to highlight some of the other projects you’ve got going on? Stories, books, whatever.

Emma Bull and I are currently hard at work on the series finale of Shadow Unit, which is a serialized, online, quasi-realtime, quasi-interactive, episodic narrative that she and I and six or seven other writers have been doing since 2007, and we’re coming up to the big finish. There are two more episodes now, and a lot of things are going to blow up. All available for free at shadowunit.org or you can get the first ebook for free, and the others, I think, are $2.99 at your favorite online ebook retailer. I have just handed in a book called Karen Memory which is a Wild West steampunk novel starring the heroic hookers of a city that is not quite Seattle and not quite San Francisco in the 1870s. That’s so much fun. This is one of those books where I was giggling to myself as I was writing it.

I think our producer, John Joseph Adams, would want me to mention that you have a story coming out in his Dead Man’s Hand Weird West anthology.

Yes, which is actually the story that grew into the novel Karen Memory; that story is “Madam Damnable’s Sewing Circle.”

Sarah Monette and I are working on the long-delayed third book in the Iskryne series. The first book was A Companion to Wolves. This one is called An Apprentice to Elves. Sarah had some health problems and the book has been delayed three or four years, but we’re a fifth of the way done with the first draft. This is very promising. I’m very excited. And I just sold two space operas to Gollancz, which should be out starting in 2016, and they’re sort of Big Idea, Iain Banks-y, and high-risk galactic exploration books with aliens.

I’m sure you know, since this is a podcast, a lot of our listeners might be interested to check out the SF Squeecast, which you’re a regular cast member of. What’s been going on with Squeecast lately?

New format this year, actually. We used to do a sort of show-and-tell format, where everybody brought something awesome to talk about. The Squeecast is a podcast that is myself, Lynne Thomas, Michael Thomas, Seanan McGuire, Cat Valente, and Paul Cornell, and various guest stars. The object of the Squeecast is to talk positively about stuff we love rather than being all critical and negative, because we can do that on Twitter.

Or YouTube.

Or YouTube! But to just really get excited and talk about awesome stuff in the best geek fashion, and we were doing a sort of show-and-tell format for two years. This year we’re shaking it up and doing more of a panel discussion of awesome stuff. So, we’ve talked about our Hugo nominations. These are the things I really loved in the last year. And since we were a two-time Hugo-winning podcast, we have recused ourselves so it doesn’t become the “Best Squeecast Award for Best Squeecast.” So obviously everybody should be voting for you this year.

Unfortunately, since we’re a professional podcast, we’re not eligible in the podcasting category. But they can nominate us for Best Related Work, but that’s a rough category.

That is a rough category. That’s tooth-and-nails clawing up a pile of corpses. “Best everybody we don’t have an award for.” Well, I tried.

I appreciate that. We’re pretty much out of time here, so I’m going to thank very much Elizabeth Bear for joining us on the show.

Thank you, David.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast hosted by David Barr Kirtley. David is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Artist Gallery: Vitaly Timkin

Vitaly Timkin works as an artist for the games company Wargaming. His projects include the World of Tanks game. He lives in Minsk, Belarus. His works can be viewed at vagrantdick.deviantart.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Vitaly Timkin

Henry Lien

Can you explain the difference between 2-D and 3-D art for our readers?

These days, it does not matter much, 2-D or 3-D. 2-D is painted with brushes and oil. 3-D is molded in special programs as a sculpture, which allows you to create an object in a 3-D space. The main factor impacting quality is time. That is the same regardless of 2-D or 3-D.

Your work seems to sometimes combine imagery from different times and places in unexpected ways. For example, you have one landscape that is filled with architecture suggesting that it is a high fantasy setting, but the sky shows multiple planets and moons. The Geologist is a futurist science fiction image, but the suit worn by the figure seems to have echoes of 1960s and 1970s space/aeronautics styling. What were you trying to achieve with these anachronisms?

It is interesting for me to create a story, which gives the chance to reflect and think about the world where this might happen. Linking contrasting elements helps that process by creating a huge flight of fancy. The story is what fills in the gap between the contrasting elements.

Do you feel that there is any particular aesthetic flavor to artwork coming out of Belarus, or do you feel that science fiction/fantasy artwork is post-geographical now, in the early twenty-first century?

These days, it isn’t important where the artist lives. The Internet unites all of us in one information space.

Your work seems very cinematic in composition and feel. Does cinema influence your work? If so, what are some of the films that have influenced your work the most?

I am attracted to cinema’s brevity and central focus on the main object. The movies that inspire me include Alien, The Terminator, RoboCop, The Matrix, and Oblivion.

Much of your work seems to show the beauty of destruction in war. Do you have a particular interest in war imagery?

Not per se. However, I am attracted to the opportunity to work with a dynamic plot. Obviously, war creates lots of opportunities for plot.

The landscapes and vistas in your works are often startling. Can you discuss how you created them technically? Are they based on photographs of existing locations?

My landscapes are not based on existing locations, but I do base my work on moods I find from existing inspirations. I create landscapes in these stages: (1) search for a plot; (2) compose a sketch; (3) prepare basic elements of the piece; (4) create a photo collage; (5) do final color correction.

What is your dream project?

I would love to do concept art for film.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry Lien is an art dealer in Los Angeles (www.glassgaragegallery.com). He represents artists from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. His artists have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, Juxtapoz, the Huffington Post, and Time Magazine, and been collected by and exhibited in institutions and museums around the world. Henry has also served as the President of the West Hollywood Fine Art Dealers’ Association and a Board Member of the West Hollywood Avenues of Art and Design. He is also the Arts Editor at Interfictions. Henry also has extensive experience as an attorney and teaches at UCLA Extension. In addition, Henry is a speculative fiction writer. He is a Clarion West 2012 graduate. His work has been published in Asimov’s, Analog, and Interfictions, and been nominated for the Nebula. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Author Spotlight: An Owomoyela

Jude Griffin

“Undermarket Data” has a noirish feel to it—what are joys and pitfalls of this genre?

You know, I never considered this to be a noir story. I’m not sure I can speak intelligently about the joys and pitfalls of the genre, as I don’t have a lot of experience in it—reading, writing, or watching.

I actually set out to write a cyberpunk story, when I sat down to write this. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I set out to write a story that would appeal to the sensibilities of a friend, who happens to enjoy cyberpunk stories, among other things. As cyberpunk is another genre in which I have read less widely than I ought to have, I’d hesitate to say that I set out to write a cyberpunk story. More like a vaguely cyberpunk-flavored story about data and privilege.

Fortunately, this is not a novel, and doesn’t need to be marketed according to subgenre. Unless someone starts linking to the story with a line like “Check out this cyberpunk story by An Owomoyela!”, I shouldn’t have to worry about readers coming in with that genre’s expectations and being completely disappointed by what they find. Hopefully.

I frequently don’t pay attention to the genre of a story when I’m writing it. (To occasionally hilarious results: I have a short story I’m working on right now, and I honestly don’t know if it’s science fiction or fantasy. On the one hand, it’s on another planet, there are aliens, and one of the major arcs of tension involves the politics of energy management. On the other hand, the main character is very clearly a lightning mage whose work involves creating lightning spells. If I ever manage to finish it, I’m going to have an interesting time deciding which markets I can send it to.)

This means that I can, apparently, write myself into genres without realizing it. That’s a little odd, but I guess it’s a neat skill to have!

The ending gives the impression that the story of Jace and Culin is still unfolding—will we see more from you in this world?

If all goes as planned! I did specifically write the ending to leave myself an in for further goofy buddy cop movie adventures between Jace and Culin, and there’s a lot about the collaborative and crowdsourced aspects of the Undermarket that I want to continue exploring. I also have a story in the works right now about an Upcity hacker who gets involved in a conspiracy surrounding falsified energy market reports.

Energy as a public utility seems to be one of the themes I’m fascinated by, at the moment. Other themes I’ve noticed cropping up in a disproportionate number of my works include generation ships and their effect on culture, and power distance/hierarchical interpersonal dynamics. I’m also hoping that someone will come along and write pykrete-punk naval fiction so that I won’t have to.

You’ve said that you know an xkcd for every topic: Which ones relate to the ideas in this story?

Hah! You know, I think there’s a lot of xkcd that has thematic resonance with this, but there’s at least one that deals explicitly with Markov chains: “Swiftkey” [xkcd.com/1068]. (Though that Markov chain is considerably more coherent than many.) Though for autonomous bits of code running rampant on networks and complicating matters, I’d have to recommend “Network” [xkcd.com/350].

Recently, I’ve been devouring the new xkcd “What If” articles as they come out, and those frequently prod you to think about data and language in a new way. For example, the Twitter “What If” [what-if.xkcd.com/34] answers the question of how many unique tweets exist, but also hits on information density in English and how the information content of written English words shows a direct correlation with how much a text file can be compressed by a file compression algorithm. It also contains this bit of insight:

“This example hints at a very deep idea, which is that information is fundamentally tied to the recipient’s uncertainty about the message’s content and their ability to predict it in advance.”

. . . which is more or less what a Markov chain is all about.

Somewhat relatedly, there’s a party game for parties attended primarily by writers, wherein everyone writes a paragraph of a story and passes it to the next person, who writes the next paragraph—and then folds the paper over, so that only their paragraph is visible before they pass it on to the next person. The end result is a Markov-chain-like story where any two contiguous paragraphs make sense in the context of each other, but the story as a whole is usually hilariously incoherent.

Any progress on your green dystopia story idea?

Like most of my stories, the end result seems to be deviating quite a lot from the idea seed [magistrate.dreamwidth.org/36170.html]. I’m having a great deal of fun with the worldbuilding—the current idea has a planet with high concentrations of radioactive minerals in the crust, which supports a dense jungle that can take energy from photosynthesis at the canopy and radiosynthesis at the roots. The only practical places for human habitation are places where the geologic strata have broken in such a way that the radioactive materials aren’t present where people are trying to build. Which leads to several small-land-area cities in places like beaches and valleys, largely isolated geographically from each other. I’m also thinking of ways that cities could be built out into/onto bodies of water, given that water works well for radiation shielding [what-if.xkcd.com/29]. I need to work out how readily available the materials of industry would be on this planet. I suppose that if you squinted and looked at it at an angle, you could call it the prequel to a green dystopia.

What I haven’t actually come up with . . . is a plot. I should probably find one of those at some point. I am reliably informed that stories with plots fare better than stories without.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

I’ve been having a lot of fun with algorithmic creativity aids recently. For example, I whipped up a creative prompt bingo generator [an.owomoyela.net/fun/bingo_generator] a while ago, and I’ve been adding on to it as more and more people get interested and want to see additional features. (Prompt bingos are popular in fanfiction circles [allbingo.dreamwidth.org/profile] as a kind of gamified way to generate a lot of stories/art/etc. in a communal way: Everyone gets a bingo card with different creative prompts in the squares, and they try to make a bingo by creating works which engage with the prompt. They’re tremendous fun.)

Having done that, I decided to start working on a demographics generator [an.owomoyela.net/fun/demographics_generator], which is turning into a multi-purpose random sets generator. The original idea was that you could set up a list of, say, genders, ethnicities, and personality types, and spit out a randomized cast of characters you could play with. Then I realized that I could do things like throw in a list of tropes and word counts and challenge myself to write ultra-short fiction exercises. (Given that I have difficulty writing anything under 4000 words, 100-300 word challenges are something I’ve been playing with to teach myself economy of prose.) And then I realized that I could take the randomly generated sets of tropes, word counts, and fictional universes, and generate bingo cards with them [magistrate.dreamwidth.org/38138.html], so I built in functionality to port the generated random sets into the bingo generator.

The demographics generator is still in alpha, the underlying code is a mess and needs to be reworked, and I’m not sure anyone derives quite as much delight from it as I do. But whatever.

I keep thinking about creating a random plot generator where you could feed in parameters for what kinds of protagonists you want to have, what family of plot events and plot contrivances you want to play with, and what basic plot arc you want to fill in, and then it would generate an extremely sketchy outline of a story that you could flesh out, play with, subvert, or do whatever people do with outlines as writing prompts. I also keep thinking about developing a fiction-writing AI, but I’m fairly certain that’s beyond my skill level . . .

As for fiction projects, my writing process is chaotic enough that I could list off two dozen things I’m working on (for some value of “working on”), but I have no idea which of them will be completed at all, let alone which you should be looking out for.

One project I want to start in on is ideological: a set of works in shared worlds [an.owomoyela.net/fiction/shared_worlds], released under a Creative Commons license designed to keep commercial control of individual works with their creators but allow other artistic folks to expand on those canons and publish their work commercially. It’s an attempt to tap into/support the kind of community-based writing that supported and nurtured me while I was learning the craft. Of course, like a lot of my projects, the limiting factor seems to be that I don’t write nearly as quickly as I wish I did.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Gardner Dozois

Jude Griffin

How did “Morning Child” come about?

I started “Morning Child,” then an untitled fragment, about ten years before I finished it. I wrote a few pages, then lost steam on the story and put it away in a file drawer. Ten years later, I was going through old files, happened to pick up the fragment and looked at it, and suddenly saw how I could finish it. A couple of days later, I had. This shows you why authors should never throw anything away. You never know when an abandoned fragment or draft is going to rekindle and grow into a completed story, even years later.

The unfolding truths about John are handled so delicately and so beautifully: Can you talk about the challenges of the pace and nature of the revelations in the story?

The key to this story is misdirection. I wanted to plainly give you facts that are valid at the moment but that will become subject to a different interpretation in the light of new knowledge you’ve gained by the end of the story. In the original story fragment, the first couple of pages, which survived into this draft almost unchanged, the old man is really an old man and the boy is really a boy. In the final draft, I started playing with assumptions, having fun with the idea that although everything I’d said was the truth at the moment I’d said it, nothing was really as it seemed, and it was all going to turn out to be totally reversed by the end. All the assumptions you make when reading the opening turn out to be “wrong,” or at least turned on their heads, by the end. The story has to be paced carefully, so that your recognition of that doesn’t happen much before you hit the actual end of the story itself, for maximum effect. Ideally, the reader won’t understand what’s really going on until a few paragraphs before the end of the story, on the last page. Has more impact that way.

Did your vision for the story change during the writing of it?

Yes, quite a bit. In the original fragment, it was the story of a man and a boy surviving out in the woods after a traditional atomic war scenario. That may be why I ran out of steam on it—it was too familiar a scenario, with nothing to be done with it that hadn’t been done before a dozen times. In the final draft, I made the war a lot stranger, weirder and more bizarre, not just your typical After-the-Bomb scenario, which made it a lot more interesting to write about, and which also provided a moderately “scientific” justification, or at least a rationalization, as to what happened to the boy to make him the way he is. As a consequence of exposure to some unimaginable, alien, high-tech weapon or procedure, it’s acceptable enough to get you through the story, whereas there would have been nothing to explain it or justify it if it had been the standard After-the-Atomic-War scenario.

The other thing, the major thing, that changed between the first draft and the final was the inclusion of the time-shifting gimmick, which wasn’t going to be part of the original story, where everything was straighforward and the boy was really a boy and the old man was really an old man. The time-shifting thing came to me as an image in a dream, of a boy growing old and then growing young again; the dream faded when I awoke, taking with it any concept of what was happening that might have existed in the dream, but the image lingered. A day or so later, when I was looking through old story fragments, I chanced upon the fragment that became “Morning Child,” and saw how I could use the existing fragment as a vehicle to allow me to present the dream-image, and express it in story terms.

“Morning Child” is the embodiment of what you’ve said you most enjoy about short fiction: “The brutal efficiency. A short story delivers one hard punch, fulfills one purpose, and then stops.” What are some other stories you feel do this well?

Hundreds, too many to possibly list. It’s the main reason why I’ve always been someone more comfortable working in short fiction than in novels, which often strike me as padded, sometimes to the point where they become boring. There aren’t too many modern novels that I couldn’t cut at least a hundred pages out of without losing anything of significance. With a good short story, every word should either drive the plot, establish character, or create the setting, and it should be next to impossible to cut anything out without making the story unworkable. No fat, no padding, no words that aren’t absolutely needed.

Does this story still stay with you over the years? I think it may haunt me in the way some Bradbury stories do.

I do think it’s one of my most effective stories. It’s one of my trickiest stories, in that I’m misdirecting the reader throughout and diverting their attention from things that are hiding in plain sight, and sometimes stories like that come across as emotionally cool and uninvolving. But because this one deals with the relationship of a father and son, which almost everyone can relate to and which evokes an emotional response in almost everyone, “Morning Child” manages to be slyly tricky and emotionally involving at the same time. A difficult thing to pull off, needing very fine balance, and one that I could have easily ruined at any time with a few wrong words in the wrong place. So I’m pleased that I was able to walk that tightrope successfully and make it work.

How has your writing style evolved in the thirty or so years since you wrote “Morning Child”?

I have no idea. Ask a critic. After I’m dead, somebody will be able to explain it all, I’m sure.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

My latest projects are two more anthologies edited with George R.R. Martin, a cross-over anthology called Rogues, and a retro-SF anthology called Old Venus, a companion to this year’s Old Mars. I also have two tribute anthologies coming out this spring, Microverse: Exploring Poul Anderson’s Worlds, edited with Greg Bear, and The Book of Silverberg, edited with William Shafer. And, of course, my The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Thirty-First Annual Collection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: E. Catherine Tobler

Jude Griffin

How did this story come about?

“A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman” hit me out of the blue.

I was supposed to be working on something else, a story with a deadline, and wouldn’t you know, this completely different story started chatting me up. I had absolutely no idea where it was going, unusual for me these days, and wrote the first draft in a single sitting.

At the same time, my writing group was holding a flash fiction challenge and I wrote what I thought was a stand-alone piece, set in this story’s universe. And then I realized that both stories were part of the same thing, so I wove them together to arrive at the final draft.

What were the challenges/rewards in structuring the story as you did, with the sudden scene breaks, the unreliable narrator memory?

The way this story came, it’s hard to say the structure was a challenge, because it was just there. The unreliable narrator, for me, tied into the idea of being a teenager on summer break, and everyone always asking what you did during those weeks. Would anyone ever believe you if you had a fantastic adventure—would you believe you, or was it just something you made up to pass the time while you mourned your aunt in your endless summer backyard? I think the unreliability gives the story something different, something for readers to question and ponder.

Your short stories contain a variety of POVs: first, second, third, even one that feels first person plural-y (“(R + D) /I = M)”). Is this deliberate or do the stories arise for you with a strong POV already?

It hasn’t been deliberate, but I would say it’s certainly becoming more common in my work. Voice and POV tend to be joined at the hip for me, so when the initial voice/image of the story arrives (usually later than I like as I noodle about with plot concepts), I try to go with what presents itself first, even if it’s something unusual. I’ve had more success at this than I expected, but it’s all very much experimentation. Sometimes, a different POV doesn’t work; many editors cite second-person as problematic in their rejections, and I know many readers who don’t enjoy it. But, the more I write, the more I like to play with POV!

Whose short stories do you re-read and who is a recent discovery you want to see more from?

I return to K.M. Ferebee’s work a lot. She is someone I admire because her stories are always full of layers. You can read them more than once and discover all the things you missed the first time around. I consider myself lucky that I’ve gotten to explore her work as both a reader and an editor.

I read Molly Gloss for the first time in the June Clarkesworld. “Lambing Season” blew me away. This is the kind of science fiction I love, and so I’m eager to see what else she’s done.

Does working as an editor for Shimmer make it harder to disengage the editor brain when in early drafts?

I think this is why I often have such trouble starting new stories. I spend a lot of time looking for the right way in, and the unusual path to saying what I’d like to say. I often get seven pages in and realize the story doesn’t start until page five, so I cut everything that came before, start over and—it can be difficult to shut the editor up and allow myself to just write, which is one reason “A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman” is unusual and dear to me. This voice was just there and I let it take me where it would. I’d like to do that more often! On the flip side, editing Shimmer is also never not inspiring; it reminds me of why I wanted to write. We see so many good stories and so many authors who never give up.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

The trade paper edition of Rings of Anubis just came out from Masque/Prime Books, and I’ve got another book with them this fall, Watermark, which ventures into fairy lands!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: David I. Masson

Rich Horton

David I. Masson was born in Edinburgh in 1915 to a family full of distinguished academics, and lived to be ninety-one, dying in early 2007. He read English Language and Literature at Oxford, and spent his career as a librarian (shades of the great poet Philip Larkin). He wrote academic articles on sound-patterning in poetry, with a particular interest in the work of Rilke, Yeats, and Shakespeare. This demonstrates an interest in the effects of language that was reflected in some of his fiction. His focus as a librarian was on special collections, particularly the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. He retired at a fairly normal age (sixty-four) and lived on in Leeds with his wife, who survived him (after fifty-seven years of marriage). This, I suppose, is the sort of career and life his family might have expected.

Probably they wouldn’t have expected him to become, in middle age, a leading light of the New Wave of a lightly regarded form of literature. But, to be fair, his modest but influential and original contributions to SF seem to represent the sort of intellectually provocative but somewhat obscure sideline that could be called donnish. His first story, “Traveller’s Rest,” appeared in 1965, when he was fifty. His first seven stories (clearly his best) came out in Michael Moorcock’s groundbreaking magazine New Worlds. As such, Masson was considered a “New Wave” writer, despite his age and despite his fairly traditional prose and plots (the ideas, however, were not traditional at all!).

I first encountered “Traveller’s Rest” on reading the Wollheim/Carr anthology World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966. (It also appeared in Judith Merril’s The 11th Annual of the Year’s Best SF, making it one of only two stories Wollheim/Carr and Merril agreed on in the two years their books overlapped.) But I confess I don’t remember it from that reading. Several years ago, I came back to it, buying Masson’s only story collection, The Caltraps of Time (still available from David Langford’s Ansible Editions). I was astonished then—a truly remarkable story.

My first comparison was to Ted Chiang. It seemed to me then that Masson and Chiang had careers of superficially similar shape: only a few stories, almost every one unique and “mind-blowing.” That comparison is less apposite now, as Chiang, though still far from prolific, has continued to write with some regularity. But the “mind-blowing” comparison still applies, as does the “unique.” Both writers in their best stories introduce truly stunning and unexpected central ideas—not necessarily plausible in terms of our physics, but internally consistent—and they both allow us to wonder at the cool ideas, but also to care for the characters in these worlds.

To my mind there is no real doubt that “Traveller’s Rest” is Masson’s best story, which is a bit sad in a way, but the rest of his work is still extremely interesting, especially “Lost Ground,” about weather consisting of literal “emotional fronts,” and also about time displacement areas (reminiscent of Gordon Dickson’s novel Time Storm); and “A Two-Timer,” about a man from the seventeenth century stumbling on a time machine and visiting our day (that is to say, the ’60s). That story and several others show Masson’s interest in linguistics. There is also “Mouth of Hell,” a deadpan investigation of something that might be a gateway to Hell (shades of Chiang again, foreshadowing perhaps both “Tower of Babylon” and “Hell is the Absence of God”), and “Psychosmosis,” which turns on a simply wacky central idea.

Because of Masson’s limited output, he is not widely known anymore, but, as “Traveller’s Rest” surely demonstrates, his work remains fresh and inimitable, and very much worth the time of any reader.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rich Horton is a software engineer living in the St. Louis area, working for a major aerospace corporation. His job sometimes has a science fictional side, but he’d go to jail if he told you why. He also writes a monthly column for Locus Magazine, and columns and reviews for Black Gate, SF Site, and other publications. He edits The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy series of anthologies for Prime Books, as well as such other anthologies as War and Space: Recent Combat and Superheroes.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu

Christie Yant

Welcome back, Ken! I think “State Change” may be the first reprint I’ve had the opportunity to ask you about. Looking back at this piece, originally published a decade ago, are your first thoughts about the story, the past-Ken who wrote it, the experience of publication, or something else?

Delighted to be back, Christie. It’s always a pleasure to be back in the pages of Lightspeed.

This is a surprisingly poignant question for me.

“State Change” was written back when I was a published finalist with the Writers of the Future Contest. For the workshop with Tim Powers and K.D. Wentworth, we had to write a complete short story in twenty-four hours, and Tim started by walking around the room, designating random objects as prompts for each of us. When Tim stopped by my seat, he saw a half-finished glass of soda and the melting ice cubes inside, and so he picked one out and told me that was my story. I must have looked fairly dismayed, but K.D. told me that sometimes prompts that didn’t give one obvious ideas at first made better stories.

Writing “State Change” was an intense experience. I’d never written a story in such little time, and the entire time I felt on the edge of failure. However, the story was well received by my classmates, and one of them, Jay Lake, after giving me an insightful critique, said I should submit it to Polyphony, the anthology he was editing with Deborah Layne, after I was done with revisions, I did, and he bought it. And that was my first sale after WOTF.

I’ve had to write stories under tight deadlines many times since then, but none of them were as scary to me as “State Change.” Being able to perform under pressure and meet deadlines is something that has served me well in my career—some of my best stories were written under such circumstances—and I credit that workshop for giving me the confidence to take up such assignments.

After WOTF, Jay’s career took off, while I had trouble selling anything for years and years. But Jay helped me several times during that period, offering encouragement and support though he was incredibly busy. I’ve tried to follow his example.

K.D. and Jay are no longer with us, and I miss their generosity and insight.

“State Change” is very different thematically from much of your more recent work; whereas you often write stories inspired by scientific papers, here you’ve drawn on literal interpretations of classic literature—with a nod to science at the very end, giving the story its title. Are we witnessing a step in the evolution of your creative process in this story?

That’s an interesting analysis. I think I’m the least qualified person to talk about my own creative process, as so much of it is instinctual rather than analytical. Because I think of fantasy as being about literalizing metaphors, I view “State Change” as a good example of the kind of fantasy I write. My more recent works might be less literal in their approach, but the core technique I think is the same.

Did the literary references come together for you on their own, or did you have to go searching for things that would fit your theme and structure? Of the pieces used in your story, do you have a favorite?

I had just read a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay before the workshop, and the letters written to and by her quoted in the biography were uppermost in my mind. The idea for the story really took shape around “My candle burns at both ends.” After that, it seemed that whenever I thought of a favorite passage by a writer I liked, a soul emerged.

The obvious question, of course: What shape does your soul take, and has it been through a state change?

You’re not going to believe this, but I honestly have never thought about this question, not while I was writing the story, and not after. I’m kind of glad it’s not obvious to me—maybe it makes for better stories.

Your career is about to undergo a state change, from mastery of short fiction to published novelist. What can you tell us about your forthcoming novel, The Grace of Kings, and what we can look forward to after its release?

The Grace of Kings is the first in a planned silkpunk epic fantasy series. You can see the cover reveal here [io9.com/take-an-exclusive-peek-at-the-most-anticipated-scifi-im-1591612349].

It’s based on a loose re-imagining of the historical legends surrounding the rise of the Han Dynasty in a new fantasy archipelago setting. My wife Lisa and I did a lot of the worldbuilding together, and I had a lot of fun writing the book. This is a world of politics and intrigue, of love purified and corrupted, of rebelling against tyranny and seeing one’s ideals compromised, of friendships forged and sundered by the demands of war and statecraft. There are vain and jealous gods, bamboo airships and biomechanics-inspired submarines, fantastical creatures of the deep, and magical tomes that tell the future written in our hearts. I hope readers have as much fun reading the novel as I did writing it.

A prequel to the novel is my Lightspeed story “None Owns the Air.”

Saga Press, my publisher, is also putting out a collection of my short stories—including at least one new story.

Thanks again for having me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton), Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

Author Spotlight: Tahmeed Shafiq

Liz Argall

Your story draws on many mythological creatures and references quite a few stories. If you had to pick one mythological creature and one story, what would it be and why?

Well, when I decided I wanted to do a story centering around a phoenix, I started to patch a lot of different phoenix myths together. But my favourite is the most common one. The medieval phoenix, resembling a predatory bird, that dies and is reborn again from its ashes. I guess I’ve Harry Potter to thank for that.

I am intrigued by the orphaned prince, who spends much of the story unconscious. What do you think becomes of him when he grows up/wakes up to his situation?

He’s just a kid, really. No more than seven or eight. So it would probably be very strange and confusing for him, and no doubt a bit frightening. When he grows up, he will probably try and take up his father’s mantle, but I’ve never really given it much thought. I didn’t him give much focus, I’m afraid.

The Djinn says at the end, “We have much work to do.” Do you envisage this short story as the beginning of a series? Or is this a more mythic walk off into the sunset?

If it were the beginning of a series, it would be the start of the djinn trying to pick up the pieces of the realm, maybe get the prince on the throne when the time was right. But for the most part, it’s a brand new dawn and a brand new world. A new beginning for both of them. So I could continue, but I’m not planning on it. I’d like to leave this cycle open-ended.

I love the idea of the desert having the capacity to kill the sun. Was that something you’d always planned or did it come to you as you were writing?

That was actually one of the first ideas I had regarding the story. I had a big, badass phoenix to kill and I needed a really cool way to do just that. If felt very fitting, having the desert smother the sun.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working a bundle of shorts, of which this story is the first. I like that. Both a beginning for me as an aspiring writer and for the stories I want to tell. And there’s more to this dawn than meets the eye, I guarantee you that. Who knows? If I like the way those shorts come out, you may just see me back here in Lightspeed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and writes love songs to inanimate objects. Her previous incarnations include circus manager, refuge worker, artists’ model, research officer for the Order of Australia Awards, farm girl, and extensive work in the not-for-profit sector.

Author Spotlight: Gwyneth Jones

Laurel Amberdine

I very much enjoyed this fairy tale—somewhat modernized and occasionally humorous. What fairy tales do you like best, and did any particularly influence this story?

I love fairytales, myths, and legends. I read the Andrew Lang and the Oxford collections over and over when I was a child; I’ve also always liked Hans Christian Anderson stories, because they are so cruel. If I name a favourite, it would have to be the story sometimes called “The Seven Swans,” but originally (I think) from Morocco, and called “Wudei’a Who Sent Away Sudei’a” (The Girl Who Sent Away Seven). It’s the one about a little girl who believes she’s an only child, until she discovers at the age of twelve or so that she had seven brothers, but owing to their childish bad behaviour when she was born (something about being sent to the well for christening water, and breaking the jug), her father cursed them and they flew away in the form of Seven Crows. It’s my favourite because my father used it as the base for the epic, serial fairytale he told us over years when we were small. “The Grass Princess,” and other stories in the collection Seven Tales And A Fable, were influenced by several English twentieth-century fairytale writers, maybe not so well known now: Eleanor Farjeon, Barbara Leonie Picard, and particularly the melancholy, ironic, slightly sinister tales of Nicholas Stuart Grey.

You can find out more about my fairytale backstory online here:

homepage.ntlworld.com/gwynethann/7TalesIntro.htm

steelthistles.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/fairytale-reflections-23-gwyneth-jones.html

Why grass? Does that have some symbolic meaning?

Grass is ordinary and relentless, like the domination of the family and the rules of everyday life. It ties things (and princesses) down, with countless tiny, tough threads, a mass of them, almost impossible to sever, and even if you break free, these tiny threads leave scars.

You state that “nobody ever found out” why the grass claimed the princess, but do you have an idea who or what was behind the magic, or are you happy to leave it as a mystery?

In the story, I’m happy to leave it as a mystery. In the light of what I think the grass means (see above), I suppose “nobody ever found out” is ironic. The people who “never found out” are the people who form that relentless imprisoning net of ties that bind, without ever being conscious of what they’re doing.

I noticed that no one in the princess’s kingdom is specifically named, not even the princess herself, while minor characters in other realms seem to have more of a solid identity. What was your thinking behind this choice?

I first wrote this story a long, long time ago: I’ve revised it since, but some of the original features (like this odd absence of names) seemed like they shouldn’t be changed. I think probably the answer is that this is Damien’s story. Characters in his adventures get names. Characters in the framing story, like “The King,” “The Magician,” “The Queen,” and even “The Princess” don’t get names.

Despite the title, the story revolves around Damien. He’s tricked into futile-but-lucrative quests by a greedy magician, and only coincidentally saves the princess after he’s badly hurt and has given up. He doesn’t even want to claim his “reward.” But both the princess and Damien are equally scarred at the end. What are you saying with these contrasting ordeals?

Nothing too complicated. Just that the fairytale hero who has all the adventures and the fairytale heroine locked in a tower all her life (or similar) may not be as poorly matched as they look. Likewise, the fairytale heroine who loses her lover and has to take on the Glass Mountain challenge, etc. (in different versions of the Cupid and Psyche story), and the prince who stays at home, deceived by villains, until she wins him back in the end.

At the end, the princess says the story is only beginning. Do you have any idea what happens next, and would you consider writing that story?

I have no idea what happens next, or whether the princess and Damien were even happy together. I would not consider writing their story. What I’d hope for them is that, whatever happens, both of them always remember that moment (the eucatastrophe, as Tolkien calls it) when everything seemed right.

Are there any projects you’re working on that you’d like to share with our readers?

I’m looking forward to seeing my novella “A Planet Called Desire” come out in Gardner Dozois and George Martin’s Old Venus anthology next year. I’ve just finished re-editing my pseudonym Ann Halam’s backlist of ghost and horror stories, which are now available as ebooks, including the Children Of The Night award-winning The Fear Man. That was a lot of fun. There’s also a new book in the Bold As Love world in the pipeline, but this time for Young Adults. Right now I’m preparing a pre-show talk on The Time Machine, for a local theatre, and then I’ll be getting started on a story for Lynne Jamneck and S.T. Joshi’s Lovecraftian anthology.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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 recently moved to San Francisco with her husband, and is enjoying its vastly superior weather. Between naps she’s working on polishing up a few science fiction and fantasy novels, and hopes to send them out into the world soon.

Author Spotlight: Kat Howard

Lee Hallison

You’ve talked about your interest in Greek mythology before. Did you consider the Greek gods and their relationship to lying when you were generating this story?

Actually, I didn’t consider Greek mythology at all while working on this one. Another one of my interests is mentalism and close magic, and the idea for this story came from doing some reading on those topics. I was interested in the idea of magically making people believe a lie, even one that isn’t so attractively presented as great mentalism is.

The idea of magical lying is delightful. How did you come up with Quentin’s gift—are you a liar or have people lied to you?

The very first spark that turned into Quentin’s gift came, like so many good things, from Twitter. I believe it was the excellent writer Elizabeth Bear whose biography used to read, “I tell lies to people for money.” And it’s such a great description of part of the writer’s job (the other part, of course, being that we tell truths to people for money) that it stuck in my head, and made my want to do something with it.

And of course I’ve told lies—even outside the world of fiction—and been lied to. That’s the way of things. I think being able to only speak the absolute, brutal truth is as much of a curse as dropping snakes and toads from your mouth every time you speak. Not that people should be pathological about it, but there are times when stepping sideways from the truth is kinder.

The title refers to a meaningful exchange—tell us more about what Thea has given Quentin in exchange for his magic.

Oh, that is an excellent question, and one I’m going to leave as an exercise for the reader.

What are you working on next? Will you revisit the world you’ve sketched here, or this idea, in a future story?

At this point, I don’t see myself coming back to the world of this story, even though I find Thea very compelling. But I don’t like to completely rule it out, and risk making myself a liar.

In terms of new projects, I have a novella coming out from Subterranean Press in September. It’s called The End of the Sentence, and I co-wrote it with the brilliant Maria Dahvana Headley. If you like deathless prisoners and mysterious letters and monsters and ghosts and love, you might enjoy it. I’m always working on new short fiction, and I have a novel in progress as well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.

Author Spotlight: Sherwood Smith

Patrick J. Stephens

This novella was excerpted from a longer work. Could you go into how you pursued excerpting this and the process you went through in maintaining the story in regards to the larger work?

I see novels as intersecting arcs. This particular arc I thought might lift away from the much bigger work; however, in order to help it stand alone, I changed some names and situations.

You have a history of creating incredibly diverse and unique cultures and worlds. For “The Rule of Engagement,” what was the inspiration for this particular plot?

The novel that it is a part of is the culmination of several stories. I don’t know that I can identify inspirations, other than that which you get after years and years of reading history, memoirs, letters, as well as novels. My process is more like a movie going on in my head, or rather a TV serial. The set of novels this is a part of are a season in the show, and this story is an episode.

In accordance with your keen sense of creation, your characters are very vibrant. Which character do you identify with most, and which was the most fun to write?

Oh, they are all fun to write. I don’t really identify with characters. I’m the watcher at the window. They have been cavorting in my head for decades and I love them all dearly, especially the ones with the most warts.

This story was originally printed in an anthology called Lace and Blade, by Deborah J. Ross. In the description for the anthology, the stories are equated to swashbuckling stories such as the Three Musketeers and the Scarlet Pimpernel. What do you feel “The Rule of Engagement” brings to these types of stories?

I guess it is the mannered side of those tales, in which wit is as significant a weapon as steel. I like both comedies of manners and swashbucklers, and mixing them together gives me maximum fun.

What can we expect from you in the future?

That set of novels that I mentioned! And outside of that, a sort of urban fantasy set in Los Angeles, which focuses on old women getting powers. The first story in that (also separated out as one arc) came out summer 2014 in Athena’s Daughters. The novelette is called “Commando Bats.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick J. Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

MISCELLANY

IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF

Coming up in September, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Saundra Mitchell (“Starfall”) and Sam J. Miller (“Boy on the Rocks”), along with SF reprints from the new anthologies Monstrous Affections and The End is Now.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sarah Pinsker (“No Lonely Seafarer”) and Matthew Hughes (“Under the Scab”), and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard (“Prayers of Forges and Furnaces”) and Rhys Hughes (“Eternal Horizon”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with authors Mary Robinette Kowal and Diana Gabaldon.

For our ebook readers, we also have “Giliad,” a novella reprint from Gregory Feeley and a pair of novel excerpts.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a lot of great short fiction to share. We’ll be featuring work by writers new to Lightspeed such as Megan Kurashige, Steve Hockensmith, Nik Houser, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Will Kaufman, Vajra Chandrasekera, Joseph Allen Hill, Shale Nelson, Marie Vibbert, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, and Sunny Moraine. And naturally we'll also be featuring the return of some folks who have appeared in our pages previously, including Kat Howard (another one!), Maria Dahvana Headley, Damien Angelica Walters, Matthew Hughes, Jeremiah Tolbert, Marissa Lingen, Caroline M. Yoachim, Sarah Pinsker, Megan Arkenberg, and Brooke Bolander.

Then, in October, be sure to check out the next two installments of the Women Destroy! series of special issues, with all-women written and edited double-issues from the our sister magazines, Nightmare and Fantasy (coming out of retirement for this one special issue!).

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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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 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

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 $25 (about $11 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) 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!).

ABOUT THE EDITOR

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and six World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.