MYTHIC

A Quarterly Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine

ISSUE # 3 WINTER 2017

Copyright © 2017 by Founders House Publishing LLC

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

All Contents are copyrighted to their respective authors

and used here with their permission.

Cover art copyright © Grandfailure/Dreamstime.com

Published by Founders House Publishing LLC

MYTHIC: A Quarterly Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine

is a project and publication of Founders House Publishing LLC.

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This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional,

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INTRODUCTION

Onward, Dear Readers

Shaun Kilgore

WELCOME TO ANOTHER ISSUE of MYTHIC, dear readers. We are starting our second year of bringing all of you a great selection of entertaining and thought-provoking science fiction and fantasy stories. The Winter 2017 issue is packed with quite the variety of tales and I hope you like them.

AS we head into 2018 with our second year of publication, I’m excited about the future of MYTHIC. I’m even more excited to see what the writers out there have to share with us. My special thanks go all of the writers who have heeded the open call. This magazine, naturally, would not exist without you. I hope that in the new year you keep bringing the same level of storytelling. I know our readers and subscribers would certainly agree.

I’m still learning and growing as an editor As I said in the last issue, “There have been a few bumps along the way, but I’ve managed to get past many of the missteps and technological learning curves to make sure that another issue makes it to publication. As I’ve noted, given the small budget of my publishing company, I end up wearing many hats to get things done. I’m the editor and the book designer for MYTHIC (and a great many other book projects) and that all keeps me very busy. But, it is all rewarding and very fun.”

I will take all of that experience and learning and do my very best to improve on what I’ve accomplished so far with this publication. If you have any comments or questions, I would welcome them. You can contact me by visiting www.mythicmag.com and using the contact form.

Thanks again for joining us with this latest issue of MYTHIC: A Quarterly Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine.

CAUGHT TO THE DEATH

John Michael Greer

THE DOOR OPENED, AFTER what seemed like months. Alan tried to raise his head far enough to let him see his rescuer, but the muscles of his neck wouldn’t respond; nerveless and voiceless, he lay where he’d fallen, sprawled all anyhow across the steps below the porch.

“Well,” a voice said somewhere above him. He heard footsteps, then: “Well, indeed. Half a moment.” The footsteps receded, returned, and as they stopped he felt something like sand scatter across him. That broke part of the spell, or seemed to. After a short time, he tried again, managed to lift his head.

“You’ll have to do more than that,” his rescuer told him Eyes framed in wrinkles and round lenses considered him, and a long skirt shabby from wear twitched a handspan from his nose. “Crawl if you must, but you’ll have to get yourself inside. It’s thirty years at least since I had the strength to drag something your size.” She pushed the door wide, turned back to him.

“You’re Alan Kern, aren’t you? Well, indeed. I’d wondered if it would come to this.”

SALT CRUNCHED BENEATH THE pestle; back to him, the old woman worked at her craft, while Alan huddled in the ladderback chair she’d assigned him. Another sprinkling of blessed salt had taken away some part of the weakness, but not enough to make him certain he’d done more than delay the inevitable.

“Oh, yes, I’d heard,” she was saying. “Calendar Lake’s not so far off that word of her hadn’t reached me.” She glanced back over her shoulder at him. “As word of me reached you, I don’t doubt.”

He managed to speak. “I talked to a truck driver up from Carweddin.”

That earned him another glance. “Did you indeed? That was wise. The drivers know more than you’d expect.” The pestle kept grinding. “Trefoil,” she went on, putting something into the mortar.

It took him a moment to realize that the last word hadn’t been directed to him. “He gave me a ride as far as Ender’s Corner.”

“Ah. That’ll be why nothing caught you for so long. The drivers know things, as I said. Vervain.” She paused, though the pestle didn’t. “In their trade, they have to. Too many strange things travel the roads, even now.”

For a time the sound of salt being ground was the only thing that kept the parlor from silence. “John’s-wort,” the old woman said then. “But yes, I’d heard of your mother. A sorceress of the worst sort: clever as well as strong, and strong as well as wicked. Pah.” A twitch of her shoulders told him what she thought of that. “And of you as well. Tales travel with the wind, as they say.” She glanced back at him once more. “As I heard it, the two of you were screaming at each other right there on Front Street. Dill.”

“She did most of the screaming,” said Alan.

The old woman poured the mortar’s contents into a little bag of red cloth, dropped in as well a bright nail bent near the tip. “That I can well imagine,” she said, tying the bag shut. “And cursed you up and down on the spot, I was told.” She crossed the parlor, handed him the bag; it had a loop of cord tied to it, sized to fit around his neck. “Put this on,” she told him. “Why’d the two of you fight?”

Memories stirred: scent of candles, sick taste of fear. “I lived with my father’s folk until two years ago. They’re decent people.”

“Meaning they don’t blight their neighbor’s crops on a whim, or sicken their children.” She sighed. “Well.”

He put his head through the loop, slipped the bag down the front of his shirt. “Will this stop the spells?”

“It ought to bear the brunt of them. Most likely you’ll still feel them.”

He stared at her, dismayed. Swallowing: “I’m not sure if I can bear much nore of this”

The old woman regarded him for a long moment, long enough that he began to feel ashamed of his words. “I don’t see as you have much choice,” she said. “When I was a girl there were still gunfighters to be found, and one of them could’ve seen to this with a silver bullet. But—“ She shrugged. “That was a fair while ago. Nowadays there’s the slow way, or nothing.”

He’d thought of another way more than once: quick, and neither a gun nor a rope would have been hard to come by. Still, he’d turned from that even when he hadn’t known there was another choice. After a short time, he nodded.

“Then it’s the slow way. Not as quick as a bullet, and not half so sure, but it’ll have to do.” She turned, went back to the table. “The rest of the salt, now.”

PAIN JOLTED HIM OUT of the first decent sleep he’d had in a month, clamped tight about his head. He screamed, clutched his temples with his hands. The path mounted. He cried out again, babbled, “My head, oh holy aeons, my head—”

Footsteps sounded in the hail, and the door opened. Then, without warning, a blow landed across his mouth. That startled him into silence; through eyes blurred with sleep and sudden tears, he saw the old woman standing over him, finger to her lips. Twin flames wavered in her glasses, mirrored from the lamp she held.

The pain rose to a peak, stayed there for a time, began to fade. Through it all, he managed to stay silent, though it was as much fear of another blow as anything else that kept him that way. The old woman sat at the foot of the bed after a little while, waited. Finally, when the pain had faded out entirely, she asked, “Done with?”

Alan nodded.

“Don’t ever react to spells,” she told him. “Not by voice, nor gesture, nor even thought. Never.” She stood up, went to the door. “That’s where the most part of their strength lies. Remember that, if you don’t remember anything else.”

The door closed behind her and let the night return.

THE NEXT DAY SHE set him to simple chores, dishes and the like, while she received guests: farm folk from the villages nearby, mostly, who called her “Miss Marianne” and went away with charms and bundles of herbs. Some of them noticed him as he went bck and forth in the kitchen, and nodded him a greeting but did not speak. Others hurried in and out with fear painted on their faces, and seemed to notice nothing at all.

Over supper that evening, he struggled with a question, finally asked it. ‘The people who came to see you—were they all...” He stopped, fumbled for words.

“Caught by sorcery?” Her eyes crinkled. “Good powers, no. If there were that many sorcerers in the world, we’d none of us have an hour of peace. No, it’s little ills and ill-luck that bring them, for the most part.” She sipped tea, considered him. “It’s one in a hundred, maybe, who’ve fallen afoul of sorcery or of spirits, though there’s a good number more who think they have. Folk remember stories of the old days a little too well sometimes.”

In the pause that followed, she reached for the bowl of string beans, put two spoonsful on her plate.

“One in a hundred,” she repeated, and shook her head. “Not many caught so deep as you are, I grant.”

Alan glanced up from his plate. “She told me I was caught to the death.”

“Did she now.” The old woman didn’t seem surprised. “Well, there’s caught and there’s caught. We’ll see which way it comes out.”

He stared at her for a long moment, but couldn’t find the courage to ask her what she meant.

DOWN THE ROAD A few miles was Ender’s Corner, a town on maps but not much more than a bend in the highway to Carweddin in fact: a general store with alcohol-pumps out front, a big wooden hall shared by half a dozen fraternal lodges, four houses, an old post inn, and a little temple of gray local stone set back fron’ the road behind a well-trimmed lawn. Two Perfects came down from the hermitage on White Mountain once a week to see to services at this last. So Marianne told Alan, at least, as they walked that way on his second morning under her protection. She’d said as well that the blessing of the Perfects would be worth having when there was sorcery about, and that offered a certain amount of hope.

Still, he felt no noticeable gain from the rite. Afterwards, a bleak mood on him, he walked beside her along the dusty road back to her house. Along the way she gathered herbs and gave them to him to carry, naming them and their virtues all the while (for his benefit? For her own? He could not tell).

The point of the gathering escaped him, for the aeons knew she had herbs enough growing in her garden; still, he carried the bundled plants and listened, mostly for want of anything else to do.

“Ah, and soldier’s yarrow.” She bent, cut the stems close to the root with a little moon-shaped knife. “Herb of Venus, though you wouldn’t guess it from the name. Inside or out, it stops bleeding, and three stems knotted together will turn a ghost or a sending, or—“ She stopped. “Now here’s a rare one, and just as well. You ought to know it.”

“Jimson-weed?” he replied after a glance. “I—“ Then he, too, stopped, and looked away. “Yes, I know it.”

The old woman handed him the yarrow, regarded him for a moment, then shook her head and chuckled. “Oh, I’d heard,” she told him. “She’d have to teach someone her art soon or late -that’s the bargain sorcerers make with the archons, isn’t it, to pass on the tvil ‘fore they die? Folk who know about such things were more than a little grateful when word came that you’d left her; one less sorcerer in the world is a gain for everyone.”

He glanced back to her. “And if she gets me again?”

“Is that what you’re going to let happen?”

To that he had no answer at all.

BUT THE HEADACHES GOT worse, and worse still. They came at all hours, suddenly, so that the first surge of pain itself was most often the only warning he had. Through the pain, too, came something subtler but no less threatening: the cold coiling of despair. That came on gradually, so much so that it took him the better part of a day to recognize it as something from outside his own mind. The recognition, when it came, sent a chill down him, for he knew the spell; had seen it, more than once, drive its target by slow degrees to suicide, murder, madness.

Did she intend one of those for him? Alan thought not. Still, during the times of peace he had between attacks, doing chores or talking with Marianne or lying in the narrow bed in the back room waiting for sleep to come, he wondered. The sending, when it came, would answer him, but the aeons knew when that might be.

The aeons, and his mother. Thinking about that, he fumbled his way more than once through an awkward prayer.

IT TOOK A WEEK, all told, for the spell to take that final step. There, too, he had no warning at all.

He’d gone out back to get the morning’s eggs from the henhouse. Clear morning light streamed down into a few last wisps of fog there in the garden; the clatter of the screen door as it swung shut behind him, the crowing of a rooster somewhere off toward the Carweddin highway, came through the hush like the first Word at time’s beginning. Basket in hand, he’d started up the path to the henhouse between neatly tended beds of herbs.

He’d crossed maybe half the distance when the world went crazy.

The garden seemed to spin around him, and the ground felt as though it was about to open beneath his feet. Voices screamed at him out of the empty air, urging or demanding or pleading that he run and save himself. Through them overwhelming, came a wave of stark shuddering terror; a second, of despair; a third, somehow worse than either, of wild hope that he could escape by fleeing the place.

He froze. Another might have started running in that first panic, and been lost, but the fear froze him to the spot. A heartbeat or two later the paralysis began to pass, but by then he had realized what was happening. He was still terrified—shaking with fear, dizzy with it—but being terrified had become a state familiar enough to him that it lacked a little of its force.

The voices and the fear howled at him to run, but that was hte spell, had to be the spell. He drew in a shuddering breath, tried to think. If he took a step, he knew, he would start running, and if he ran the spell would drive him straight to her: that was plain enough. The only act he could call to mind that might frustrate that was to sit down there in the path, but his knees were like water; the trembling threw his balance to the winds as he tried anyway; he flailed uselessly and fell.

Herbs broke beneath him as he landed, hard, half across one of the beds. Breath knocked out of him, he lay there for a while as the world spun crazily and the voices screamed. A familiar scent rose from the crushed greenery beneath his head. After a time, memory pushed its way through the fear and confusion, and then he was fumbling at the plants with shaking fingers, twisting, yanking tight.

The spell vanished as though he’d cut it with a knife. Around him, unbroken, the morning hush reached away. For a few moments, dazed, he lay there without moving, and then slowly raised himself on one hand; the other still clutched three stalks of soldier’s yarrow tied in a clumsy knot.

Marianne was standing in the back door, looking down at him with just the smallest trace of surprise. “Well,” she said. “That was nicely done.” She gestured to him. “Brush yourself off and come in. You’ve got some time and some choices you didn’t have before, but not enough of either to waste.”

TEA SPLASHED INTO THE little porcelain cup. “She’ll have her hands full,” the old woman told him. “Turn a sending like that, when it’s at its full strength, and it goes back on the one who sent it.” She pushed cup and saucer across the table to him, started filling another for herself; he managed a word of thanks.

“But that means you’ve won yourself two or three days before she can get clear enough to start on you again, and longer than that to build an attack to any strength. That gives you some freedom to act, and as I see it you’ve got three things you can do with that.”

He nodded, sipped the tea.

“First off, you can stay here.” She raised one finger. “That means going back to where we were once she gets quit of the sending. It’s still a fight that can be won, but I can’t say I’d call it your best choice.

“Second—“ She raised another finger. “You can head down to Ender’s Corner, flag down a truck and ride on into Carweddin. By the time your mother could call up anything to block your way, you ought to be safe across Carweddin Narrows, and once you’re there I don’t imagine anyone living could harm you by magic. There are warding-spells on the city against every kind of sorcery, have been since Michael Vail’s time.”

She lifted her teacup, drank. After a moment, when she’d shown no sign of going on, he asked, “And the third?”

By way of answer she reached into the pocket of her apron, took something out and tossed it to him. He caught it awkwardly: a bright iron nail. “There’s your third choice.”

He looked at it, at her with round frightened eyes.

IT WAS THE WISEST choice, Carweddin. That much, at least, he was sure of.

The seat shook beneath him as the driver downshifted to take the curve. Engine-roar in the cab made conversation next to impossible—the truck was twice Alan’s age or better, and patched together with prayers and baling-wire as well—but the glint of light on water off through the firs to his right told him the thing he’d most likely ask anyway.

He’d heard much of the city here and there, from travelers and folk who had been there: tall buildings of brick and stone looming over the harbor, fishing-boats of the local fleet and big freighters from foreign ports, shops and markets and the Gaden ironworks, and the old stone bridge across the narrows, heart and beginning of the whole. He’d heard that there was work to be had there, and rooming-houses a day laborer’s wages would cover.

A last row of firs went rushing by in a blur, and then water the color of hammered silver reached away from the rocky beach below the road’s edge. Forest blanketed the hills on the far shore. Not much farther, Alan told himself.

With Carweddin Bridge behind him, with open water and old spells between him and the worst his mother might do, he could close his mind’s door on the two years past, the memories and the guilt—and that argued for Carweddin as well, argued maybe more forcefully than anything else.

Another tremor set the cab rattling, and gears ground somewhere underneath; the driver swore, though his words vanished somewhere in the noise, then slammed the gearshift over and forward. The old truck slowed, lurched to a halt.

“Here you are,” the driver said. “I don’t go into town on this run’s if I can help it, but it ain’t far.” His grin was short several teeth. “Good luck to you.”

‘Thanks,” Alan replied, meaning it. “And to you.” He opened the door, swung down to the pavement.

It was the wisest choice. He had no doubt of that.

The door thudded shut, the engine roared out of idle, the truck sprayed gravel and rolled off in a cloud of exhaust Still, eyes open, he’d chosen otherwise. Ahead of him, maybe a quarter mile down a road lined with houses, the brick buildings of Calendar Lake stood back from the Shore, brown against the dark mountains beyond.

HER RED TOLLERY TWO-DOOR was parked out in front of the Lake Five & Ten. He’d more or less expected that—she did her shopping on Mercury’s day as most folk did, and he’d guessed the rebound from the sending wouldn’t be enough to turn her from her habits. The sight relieved him nonetheless. His plan, if it could be called that, depended on finding her in town, away from her farm and the protections she had there.

He crossed Front Street, started down the sidewalk toward the store. In his coat pocket, his hand curled around the cold iron of the nail. His heart was racing, but that and the fear behind it somehow felt far away, meaningless. During the hour or so he’d spent waiting at Ender’s Corner, chewing over the choice he’d made, he’d thought of everything wrong that could possibly happen, and some things that most likely coudn’t, but that was done with: he knew what he meant to do, and why. Despite the fear, that was enough.

Sooner than he’d expected, the blue awning of the store was over his head. He slowed, came to the door, saw his own face—tense, wide-eyed—reflected in the glass. He drew in a long uneven breath, then, and pulled the door open.

Inside, lights gleamed off cellophane and gaudy cardboard, formed dull puddles on the linoleum floor. Was she there? A first glance missed her, but then he caught a flash of red hair moving above one of the back shelves, headed toward the counter and him. He ducked behind a display of toy cars, kept out of sight while the three customers waiting at the register found somewhere else to be and the clerk stammered his way through a greeting. She said something in reply; what it was he could never remember afterwards, but the casual contempt in her tone stirred memories, awoke old anger, gave him that last push he needed to set him moving.

He came around the other side of the shelf, crossed the few paces between that and the counter, took hold of her wrist. She turned, fast—he had half forgotten how quickly she could move—but by then the nail in his other hand was scratching down her arm, leaving a track of welling crimson beads behind it.

No one moved for a moment. She opened her mouth, but no words came out. She yanked her wrist back, trying to free it, but Alan tightened his grip and held on until she stopped. Then, in his own time, he let go.

He tried to think of something to say, but nothing came, nothing at all. In the end, he simply faced her as she gave him one lst angry and desperate glare, then watched as she turned abruptly and hurried out of the store.

“Damn, Alan,” said the clerk; there was amazement in his voice, and just a trace of fear. “Damn.”

“ANY SORT OF SPELL makes a link,” Marianne had said, there in her parlor over steaming cups of tea. “That’s its strength, but the sorcerer’s weakness, because a link always goes both ways. That’s what makes wars between sorcerers such terrible things. Bring one of the oldest powers into such a link, though, and do it in the right way, and all the sorcery flows out and leaves a husk behind.”

“The oldest powers?” he’d asked.

“Fire. Water. Blood.” A nod indicated the nail in his hand. “Iron.”

HE NEVER DID FIND out where she’d gone. Plenty of folk had seen the Tollery go up Front Street at a pace that would have sent Calendar Lake’s one police car after anyone else, but if any of them saw which way it had turned at the crossroads past Bonner’s Feed—east, west, north—no one admitted to it. That didn’t surprise Alan much. The townspeople had spent years learning not to notice her presence, and by the time word spread that those disciplines could be set aside the last echoes of the Tollery’s motor had long since gone wherever the winds take such things.

Still, in the first hours afterward, as the crowd on Front Street went from hushed to jubilant, he wondered about that. With the power gone out of her, and years’ worth of debts and old hatreds ready to follow wherever she fled, where could she go?

Later, he thought he knew, but no one ever found her body.

RAINWATER SWEPT A SCRAP of last week’s newspaper along the Front Street gutter as Alan pushed his way out through heavy glass doors. Cold as it was, the rain felt good after two hours in a stuffy fourth-floor office signing papers and sorting out what was left of his mother’s affairs. That was done with, so far as it concerned him; her creditors - there were dozens of those—had eaten up any estate there might have been and were squabbling over the table scraps, but that was their business now, not his.

He stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, started back toward the rooming-house where he was staying: beyond his means, if the landlady hadn’t offered him a week’s stay free. He’d started a letter to Marianne that morning, and it needed finishing, though no doubt she’d already heard any news he might have to tell.

When he came in through the door, though, a big man in farmer’s overalls got up from one of the parlor chairs. “Mr. Kern? I’m Tom Bonner. I’d like to talk with you, if I could.”

“Sure,” Alan said, wondering why. There were Bonners all over Calendar Lake, and he thought he remembered that this one owned a dairy out toward the North Fork valley. He motioned toward the chair, took another for himself. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, it’s this way.” Bonner sat down again, and started into a story of troubles among his cows: odd things, though small. Alan listened, trying not to look too baffled, and then abruptly realized what the man wanted.

The idea put cold horror down his back. After two years in the company of a sorceress, after fighting free of that and then of the spell she’d sent after him, to deal with magic again?

Caught to the death, she had said.

He thought about Marianne, herbs, blessed salt. Tom Bonner was still talking, about some illness that had gone through his herd; his broad face looked anxious, almost frightened. There was—yes, there was a charm to drive that illness away, and another to chase off the ill-luck that had brought it in the first place.

Caught to the death. Was that what Marianne had meant?

He nodded, slowly, as Bonner’s tale wound to its end. “Well,” he said. Fear waited between him and the next word, the old barrier standing despite everything; he pushed his way through it, though it still took an effort. “I think there’s something I can do.”

Bonner brightened visibly.

Caught, yes. He drew in a breath, went on.

About the Author

Born in the gritty Navy town of Bremerton, Washington, and raised in the wastelands of mid-twentieth century suburbia, John Michael Greer has been writing since about ten minutes after he figured out how to hold a pencil. Hie is the author of more than fifty books on a range of subjects from the future of industrial society to Druid nature spirituality, and currently blogs at www.ecosophia.net. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife Sara.

AFTER VICTORY

Kathryn Yelinek

OLIVIA JANCZAK UNCORKED HER bottle of scrying oil. Its sharp tang filled her small ship cabin, and she shivered, uneasy at the smell. She’d failed on her two previous trips to Europe to find her father’s family, lost amid the waves of refugees left behind after the defeat of the Fuhrer’s armies. For this crossing she’d learned to scry. All of the worrying, the rationing, the fear and anger and cursing at the Nazis would be worth it if, when she scried into her mirror, she found them.

A shout rose in the corridor. She gripped the smooth cork, annoyance at the interruption warring with her unease. It was hard to hear over the rumbling engines, but that sounded like Anthony, who never shouted.

“Olivia!” Fists pounded on her door. “We need you!”

Alarmed, she corked the bottle and abandoned her mirror on the hard bunk. She yanked open her door to find Anthony looking as pale as the industrial gray walls of the corridor.

“On deck,” he gasped, motioning her to follow.

“The horses?” She hurried behind him up the corridor. She was responsible for maintaining calming spells on the three hundred and fifty horses crammed into the ship’s hold. Each horse would go to a Polish farmer who had lost his in the war.

“Just come,” Anthony said.

She climbed the stairs to the steel deck with dread. Anthony had become her friend during her two previous humanitarian trips. Together they had searched for her father’s family through the spell-devastated streets of Warsaw, past women with rags for shoes and children’s bodies still half-buried in rubble. Compared with those horrors, what could be so awful that he refused to speak it?

On deck, she squinted against sun glare on calm, gray water. She followed him around lashed-down crates, breathing in the smell of diesel smoke, glad for her corduroy slacks against the stiff breeze. Nothing looked amiss, nothing out of place. What had Anthony so upset?

As they wound towards the bow, one of his horse lads rushed up. “Anthony!” The lad pointed to No 2 hold, where many of the horses were held. Only then did Olivia hear their screams.

Anthony whirled to face her. “Go to the captain.” He pointed towards the bow.

“You’ll need me.”

“Talk to the captain first.” He forced a smile, more alarming than reassuring, and dashed off.

She watched him leave with foreboding. Then she scrambled across the deck until she came to where Captain Holloway, several sailors, and half a dozen horse lads crowded around a body.

She skidded to a halt. The magician, Theodora Rowe, lay in a vast puddle of blood, her body shredded as if passed over by a swarm of knives. Even worse, the puddle around her hummed with dark magic. A chill spread over Olivia at that hum.

The veterinarian Dr. Keller, the only medical man onboard, stepped over to make room for her. “It looks like an animal savaged her. Nothing onboard could’ve done that.”

A murmur rippled through the crowd, and a few sailors peeled off, no doubt to spread the news. Olivia knelt to have a closer look. Mage Rowe had had little to do with her, a civilian and mere hedge witch, but Olivia had respected her tremendously--after a respite in the States, she’d been returning to Europe to help clean up the magical scars from the war. It scared her to think what could have cut the mage down and left such a hum.

And if it had killed Mage Rowe, what might it do to the horses? Or to Anthony?

Captain Holloway glared at Olivia. “Was it magic?”

Olivia rose to her feet, refusing to be intimidated. “Yes.”

Captain Holloway flinched. For a moment, despite the crispness of his uniform, he looked like a lost child. That, more than the presence of dark magic, made Olivia’s stomach churn.

With Mage Rowe gone, she was the only magic-handler onboard. And she taught only simple spells and cantrips at a junior college.

Still, the horses kept screaming so she kept talking. “May I go to the hold?”

Captain Holloway held up a stalling hand. “What might we be dealing with here?”

“Impossible to say. It could be any of hundreds of heirloom monsters, or any one of the new ones developed during the war.”

Captain Holloway sucked in his cheeks, considering. He stepped aside as two sailors draped a white sheet over Mage Rowe’s body. Behind them, the horse lads bowed their heads. They came mostly from pacifist, church-going folks, doing their duty to rebuild Europe.

Olivia itched to join Anthony. She took hope when Captain Holloway asked, “Has anyone reported back from the hold?”

“No—” a sailor started.

Anthony dashed up, gasping. “Whatever it is is still in the hold with the horses. And there’s blood. Mage Rowe must have been there when she was attacked.”

Suddenly, everyone moved at once. Sailors scattered. Horse lads bolted for the hold. Anthony darted back, too, Dr. Keller and Olivia a step behind him.

A baby-faced sailor stood guard by the hold’s ladder. As Anthony set foot on the top rung, Captain Holloway said, “Joe, go down first.” He pointed to the baby-faced sailor.

Anthony nodded and made way for Joe. Olivia gave Joe a brief smile. As a woman, she’d avoided getting to know the crew, but now she welcomed anyone unfortunate enough to join them in the hold.

Plus, she was secretly relieved that he would climb down first. Whatever was down there, she didn’t want to meet it.

The climb down seemed to take forever, hard steel rung after hard steel rung taking her away from sun and wind and fresh air, down into the dimly lit hold. Usually it was a subdued place, the distant roar of the engines interspersed with the munching of horses, the jingle of a halter, a friendly whinny. Now she could barely hear her own shoes strike against the metal rungs. The panicked screams of horses set the hairs on the back of her neck on end. Just as bad, overpowering the earthy smell of horses and manure came the stink of hot, fresh blood.

How many horses must already be dead?

She sent down a seeing, a demand for magic to show her the source of the horses’ panic. It bounced back at once, the response streaming into her mind’s eye. But instead of some nightmare creature, her mind gave her an overwhelming sense of malice and death.

Her foot slipped. For a moment, she teetered, overbalanced, the fall into the hold stretching behind her.

“Olivia!” Anthony shouted.

She grabbed hold of the ladder and hung on tight, tucking her chin over a rung. She clung there, breathing deep, aware that below, something watched her.

At last she set foot on the lower deck beside Anthony and Joe. The ship reverberated reassuringly underfoot.

“You all right?” Anthony asked.

She nodded—a lie—and turned to face the enormity of the task before them.

Four rows of horse stalls filled the hold. Hastily built of untreated timber, the stalls created two central corridors over which the horses faced each other. Bare light bulbs hung overhead, casting deep shadows where anything could hide.

How could they find the creature before it found them?

Overhead, her fairy lights flittered. On any other day the lights would have calmed the horses into drowsy docility. This afternoon, she felt the spine-creeping shiver of dark magic watching her. No wonder the horses screamed and kicked their stalls, their necks straining against the ropes tied to their halters. The noise was enough to render her deaf and mask any creature’s footfalls.

Only, not every horse screamed. No horse thrashed in the nearest stall. The square above the door stood ominously empty.

Agreeing with a glance, Olivia crept forward beside Anthony, Joe behind them. As much for her own sake, she whispered the calming spell toward the frantic horse in the next stall. To no avail. It kicked at its door with desperate savagery, splinters flying. Her own nerves jangled.

She kept her back to the stalls, alert to any movements in the shadows, while Anthony peeked over the empty stall door. His lips pressed into a hard line at odds with his usually serene features. “Not much left.” She guessed more than heard his words.

“Killed the same way as Mage Rowe?”

“Probably. It’s hard to tell it had been a horse.”

She scowled to hide her fear.

More empty stalls down the corridor glared at her accusingly. The horse next door kicked its stall, and she flinched, her brain churning to come up with some explanation for the attacks. So much damage had been done in ten minutes, did that mean it was a new monster created during the war? If so, how could she stop it?

And where was it?

She glanced at Anthony and Joe. “Do you feel watched, too?”

In response, Joe screamed. He threw himself in front of them, one arm raised. Something dark and lithe knocked him to the ground.

For the space of one long moment, she had time to marvel at the power and ferocity of the creature. Then her brain caught up and named the thing: guerrewolf.

Its front paws, larger than any horse’s, pinned Joe to the deck, straw flying like dust around them. He yelled, one hand clawing at the guerrewolf’s eyes. It ignored him. Its jaws locked onto his throat.

“No!” Olivia screamed.

With a single twist, it ripped out Joe’s throat.

Olivia clapped her hands over her mouth, the breath gone from her body.

The guerrewolf’s head came up. It was black as coal, as night, the wolf of every nightmare and children’s story. There was nothing canine or tame about it. Joe’s blood stained its muzzle. Its ears swiveled to find her. Then its yellow eyes locked on her.

Even as Anthony stepped in front of her, she screamed the most powerful spell she knew, intended to uproot trees.

The guerrewolf stumbled back, its lips pulled back in a snarl.

Olivia grabbed Anthony’s arm and bolted. She gasped a protective spell over the remaining horses and the two of them. Then she scrambled up the ladder, Anthony behind her. As she went, she prayed the guerrewolf would be slow to follow.

On deck, she stumbled away from the ladder, wanting to get as far away from the hold as she could. She sucked in fresh, salty air.

Captain Holloway blocked her path. The sun shone behind him, making him seem wreathed in flame. “What was it?”

“Guerrewolf.” Her voice sounded high, not her own. I’m in shock, she thought dimly. Her ears rang, an after-echo from the din of the horses.

“Where’s Joe?” Captain Holloway demanded.

She heard Anthony respond, though she missed the individual words. Then Dr. Keller took her by the arm, and she stumbled beside him up a flight of stairs, and into a room fronted by windows.

The wheelhouse, she realized. She found herself in a padded chair with Dr. Keller beside her, urging her to drink a glass of water. Only then did she notice the splatter of blood tracing an arc across the front of her slacks.

She gulped the water, her hands shaking. A bitter aftertaste suggested that Dr. Keller had stiffened the drink for her.

When she was done, Anthony knelt beside her. “You did well down there.”

“Not well enough.” She wrapped her fingers around the smooth glass so she had something to hold. She felt alone in her shock, even with Anthony and Dr. Keller beside her. The windows gave an unimpeded view of the ocean around them. No ships, no land, nothing but water for miles. Even if they called for help, for now they were on their own.

Captain Holloway planted himself in front of her, his hands fisted on his hips. “You’re certain it’s a guerrewolf?”

“Yes.”

His face grew stricken. Beside her, Anthony asked, “What exactly is a guerrewolf?”

At least a half dozen faces turned to Olivia. It had gotten quite crowded in short order, with men squeezing in amid equipment and cabinets. Captain Holloway must have brought as many of the horse lads in as he could, plus a few sailors, for safety.

“The Brits are rather secretive about it,” Olivia said, trying to clear her mind to think straight. How surreal to talk about something she’d only read about in professional journals. “They were preparing some advanced spells before Normandy. Somehow, a bit of that battle magic leached away and took animal form. Now we have guerrewolves.”

“Isn’t someone trying to—I don’t know—unspell them?” Anthony protested. Captain Holloway stepped away to confer with the crew.

“Teams are working to find them and destroy them. That might be what Mage Rowe was going to work on. But that takes time, and some spells inevitably get missed.”

“How did it get here?” Anthony asked.

She glanced at her hands, clenched around her glass. Reluctantly, she said, “My guess is that Mage Rowe helped make it. Now that we’re close enough to Europe, it sensed her and came to kill its maker.”

A quiet descended, broken only by the captain’s hushed conference. Olivia felt tired, stunned by shock and grief, and her own inability to fight the guerrewolf. The most powerful spell she knew had done little more than knock it back a few steps.

They needed someone of Mage Rowe’s caliber.

Anthony chewed his thumbnail. Quietly, calmly, he said, “It’s killed two of us and who knows how many horses. Is it safe to assume it won’t stop until it’s killed every living thing onboard?”

She sighed, dreading her own answer. “A guerrewolf is war itself. To it, everything is the enemy. It preys on the innocent and defenseless as much as any fighters. It will never stop, and I certainly can’t wield the spells that would destroy it.”

Her throat closed as she spoke. As the only magic-handler left, she was a target. As soon as it left the hold, she might be dead.

Captain Holloway caught her eye, and Olivia went cold. Surely he wouldn’t expect a mere hedge witch to face a guerrewolf.

“All right,” Captain Holloway said. All conversation instantly stopped. “We no longer have a master mage who could destroy this thing, and the nearest one is over a day away. But we do have a magic-handler.” He tipped his head to Olivia. “Miss Janczak, what do you need to at least slow this thing down?”

Her mind churning, Olivia surveyed the frightened faces turned to her.

The quiet lengthened. Into it, Anthony asked, “Can we at least get it away from the horses?”

Captain Holloway ignored him, marching up to Olivia. “Give me something to fight it. Now.”

She smelled his acrid fear. “Fight war itself?” She glared up at him. “With a skeleton crew, a handful of pacifist lads, and one hedge witch?”

“Yes.”

All she could think of were the guerrewolf’s yellow eyes fixed on her. She shivered, cold to her core. With effort, she focused on the impossible task at hand. “Maybe we could move the horses to another hold. Then we could trap the wolf there.”

“All right. Good. Trap it how?”

How indeed? More to the point, how could she move the horses without alerting the wolf to their plan? She couldn’t instantly transport a hundred horses. “Let me talk on the wireless with the closest mage. Maybe she could--”

The first pop of gunfire in the corridor made Olivia jump.

Of course, the captain would have set guards.

The next round brought her to her feet. “Are you crazy? Guns can’t stop it.”

Captain Holloway threw her a dark look. The door crashed open, and the world narrowed to the dusky form of the guerrewolf slinking in.

Its feet padded silently. Its muzzle gleamed with blood but not, Olivia thought, any of its own.

One brave, foolish red-headed sailor stepped in front of it, blocking access to the rest of the wheelhouse. At the corners of her eyes, Olivia saw the rest of the crew taking cover behind tables and cabinets, even the wheel, anything that provided cover. Dr. Keller grabbed her arm, pulling her down behind her chair.

The redhead raised his pistol. He fired. The bullet tore into the guerrewolf’s right eye, ripping a hole in the yellow pupil.

The wolf blinked and shook its head. In that instant its eye showed whole and uninjured. Its lips curled up in a wolfish grin.

Guns can’t hurt it, Olivia screamed silently at the redhead.

In that moment, he must have accepted this truth. Eyes wide and panicked, he stood resolute, his hands steady. When the guerrewolf lunged, he smacked it hard across the muzzle with his pistol. It was his last effort. The guerrewolf tore out his throat before he could land a second blow.

The smack of body and wolf hitting the floor was lost amid the shouts of outraged shipmates. Olivia found herself dragged to her feet, pushed towards the open doorway by Anthony. He motioned for her to escape while she could. The stink of blood hung in the air.

The guerrewolf advanced towards the captain, who lured it away, step by step, from the wheelman. How unmovable that man looked, standing firm by the wheel.

Anthony hissed something she couldn’t hear and shoved her, hard.

She stumbled, but she wouldn’t bolt. Not again. Not without him. Not when she was the only one with any magic onboard.

A growl turned her innards hollow. A dark flash resolved into the guerrewolf dashing across the room, blocking the doorway through which she could have escaped. She smelled it now, a dank mixture of blood, gunpowder, and musk. Its yellow eyes fixed once more on her.

“Stop,” she shouted, the only word that formed in her panicked mind. She hurled the tree toppling spell.

The wolf batted it away. It was learning and, based on the way it grinned, proud of its new skill. Olivia’s heart quaked. She backed up inch by inch, trying to get out of pistol range for the sailors, but the wolf stalked her tread for tread.

Bullets don’t hurt it, her mind shouted. She looked desperately around for something to snatch up. The crew, too, seemed to be compiling a makeshift arsenal of wire and broken chair bits.

Would that work? Or would the guerrewolf shrug off their damage, too? What would stop it if neither weapons nor magic could?

“Over here!”

Anthony strode past her. His loyal following of horse lads scrambled out after him. As one, they linked arms and faced the guerrewolf.

“We won’t fight you,” Anthony said, calm as always. “As pacifists, we ask that you leave this ship and never return.”

Behind him, the captain gestured frantically. Olivia, too, wanted to grab Anthony and his lads and haul them to safety. She wanted to save them from their own desperate bravery. But Anthony would not want that. Instead, she ducked down behind her chair.

Only the guerrewolf didn’t attack. It cocked its head, staring at Anthony as if puzzled.

Anthony grinned, a gentle, patient smile bestowed upon the guerrewolf, which whined and retreated a step.

In response, the horse lads advanced.

At once, the guerrewolf growled. Its tail came up. It leaped and tore away the life of the nearest horse lad.

Walt, Olivia thought, naming him through her shock. The rest of the lads scattered, Anthony’s scream lost amid the pandemonium. Olivia realized belatedly that she, too, was screaming.

The wolf rounded. “You,” it cried, pinpointing her behind her chair.

Her jaw snapped shut. The bridge descended into silence.

The guerrewolf sniffed, long and loud, its nostrils quivering. “I’ve killed your tribe before. Outside Warsaw.”

She felt trembly. The wolf didn’t mean her tribe of magic-handlers. It meant her father’s family, who had lived outside of Warsaw.

“You lie.”

“Jan, Agnieszka, Ewa, Tadeusz, Wiktoria,” it chanted, sing-song. “I ate them all. Now I will eat you, the last of your line.”

Her body jerked at the litany of names, outrage mixing with fear and shock. “But the war is over!” she screamed.

It blinked. For a moment, it froze, its legs stiff.

Then it shook its massive head. The hairs of its ruff swayed. “You lie.”

“The war’s over,” she said desperately. “They signed the surrender at Rheims. There’s no place for you.”

It shuddered. As if sensing its weakness, Captain Holloway shot to his feet. “They gave up, the whole lot of them!”

The guerrewolf’s ears went back. It whimpered, cringing away from him.

The crew and horse lads joined in, declaring the end of the war at the top of their lungs. At the onslaught, the wolf cowered, its head jerking from person to person to person.

But it wasn’t enough. Their words held the wolf at bay but didn’t destroy it. They needed something more powerful and authoritative, something that would dissolve it completely.

Olivia dredged up the words of the newspaper articles she’d read, proclaiming the end of the war. Words from “The Times,” “The Herald,” and “The Daily Scroll.” Crisp, refined words that shaped her world as she knew it. With a spell, she scrawled these words on the walls. The text scrolled like vines, climbing ever higher on the walls until they circled the room like a fence. Then the words slid across the floor to the wolf.

It hobbled back, its tail between its legs. Around her, the sailors and lads were on their feet, cheering her on.

Finally, the words caught up to the guerrewolf. They swarmed up its front legs, the words white against its black fur. At their touch, the wolf whirled to face her. With a choking growl, it lunged. She flinched, but it only hopped a step and sank to the floor, weighed down by the force of the words.

It threw back its head and howled. The mournful cry filled the wheelhouse, but Olivia felt no pity. When the words reached the wolf’s face, it collapsed. Folding in on itself like a crumpled piece of paper, it vanished.

The wheelhouse erupted in cheers. Anthony beamed. Captain Holloway grabbed Olivia by both upper arms, hauling her to her feet. “Well done!” he said, pounding her on the back.

She nodded, feeling numb. Her back smarted. She was relieved when Anthony and Dr. Keller pulled her away to check on the horses.

“All this, when the war’s already been over for a year,” Anthony lamented as he helped Dr. Keller sew up the cut on a horse’s neck.

“Amazing what damage can come even after victory,” she agreed. She cast another cleaning spell in a vain attempt to wash away a bloodstain.

Late that night she finally emerged from the hold and returned to her cabin to find her mirror and scrying oil where she’d left them. Wearily she sank onto her bunk. The sharp smell of the oil pricked her nose. Then she began the sad task of scrying for the mortal remains of her father’s family.

About The Author

Kathryn Yelinek lives in Pennsylvania, where she works as a librarian. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, NewMyths.com, Metaphorosis, and Deep Magic, among others. Visit her online at www.kathrynyelinek.com.

JACK’S LANTERN

Gregg Chamberlain

ONE AUTUMN AFTERNOON, A smith named Jack was working away at his forge when a well-dressed stranger walked up. He led a horse, black as smoke, and it followed him with a noticeable limp.

“My horse has thrown a shoe,” the stranger said, flicking out a fine silk handkerchief to mop his swarthy brow, “and I’m in an awful hurry to attend to some business. How fast can you re-shoe him?”

Now Jack did tolerably well but he could have been doing better. He was clever enough but he was also a bit of a lazy rogue. Business had been a mite slow for awhile and Jack, being a fellow with a liking for good things, had found his purse just a bit pinched of late. He eyed the silver buttons marching all in a row down the front of the stranger’s coat and took quick stock of the tall gentleman’s hat perched atop the other’s head, like what the city dandies wear. He calculated a moment then, “Well, I ‘spect I could do ‘im tolerable quick to get you on your way, maybe bit longer for a really good job. But pretty quick for sure, an’ he don’t put up a fuss.”

“He won’t,” promised the stranger.

So Jack named a price, a fair bit over what was a proper charge for shoeing a horse. The stranger agreed without a word said against it and led the horse over to where Jack did his shoeing work. Jack took hold of the horse’s foreleg and, when the horse lifted it up, he guided the leg over onto the rest. He took up a rule, measured the hoof then went over to a shelf and selected a shoe to match. Jack filed the roughness away from the hoof, slipped on the shoe and then, with a few quick strokes, tacked all of the nails in and clinched them fast. Jack watched as the stranger led the horse around in a couple of turns to gauge how well the re-shoeing had gone.

“Fine work,” said the stranger. “I’ll make my appointment in good time. Here’s your fee,” he said, dropping a few coins into Jack’s outstretched hand.

“And,” the stranger said, his eyes suddenly glowing a bright smouldering red, “for such speedy work, I’d be inclined to offer a bonus if you hadn’t already tried to weasel a bit more than is proper for the job. But never let anyone say that the Devil does not admire an enterprising man, especially one who cheats me, so I’ll offer you a deal. Your soul for whatever you want, no strings attached, and I collect the day you die whenever that may be.”

Now Jack was not lacking in nerve. Bargaining with the Devil, well, that was all in a day’s work as far as he was concerned.

“My soul for just the one thing seems a bit of an uneven trade to me. Let me have three wishes on the tick and I’ll consider it square.”

The Devil smiled. “Three wishes, you say? Well, I s’pose but then it’s only fair if I tack a rider onto that deal. Three wishes for your soul and I lay claim in three years. “

“Done,” says Jack and they shook hands on it like gentlemen. The Devil took out a small notebook and flipped it open to a blank page upon which Jack saw his name slowly appear, letter by letter, big and bold as you please, followed by the words ‘three years due’ and the collection date. But, Jack noticed, no mention of his wishes. Which just goes to show that, while the Devil’s stock-and-trade may be in souls, as a businessman, he does lose track of the details sometimes.

The Devil motioned with a claw-like finger for Jack to hold up his hand then the ol’ boy flicked a sharp fingernail across Jack’s index finger, drawing a big drop of blood. With that drop of blood Jack made his mark in the Devil’s notebook.

Then the Devil pointed a talon at Jack and bade him name his three wishes.

Jack pondered a moment then pointed over to the big old anvil set in the floor near his forge. “Anyone other than myself who lays a hand on that anvil, let him remain stuck fast until I say he can go.” He gestured over to the forge. “Anyone takes hold of the bellows, save myself, may he pump and pump and pump until I say he can stop.”

Then Jack stepped outside and pointed over to where a lightning-blasted oak stood with bees flying in and out of a hole in the trunk. “Let those bees make as much sweet honey for me as I care to take without any fuss or bother from them but let anyone else try to take so much as a drop and may they swarm and sting him until I say stop.”

The Devil grinned. “Done. I must say I’m disappointed in you, Jack. I would have expected a smart man like you to ask for a big purse of gold or a bottle that never empties but you’ve asked and I’ve answered so we’ll leave it at that. Now,” he said, mounting into the saddle, “I’m off to tend to my business. See you in three years.”

He tossed Jack a two-finger salute, tapping a stubby little horn peeking below the brim of his gentleman’s hat. Jack nodded and smiled in reply. That dark horse trotted off down the road, wisps of smoke rising out of the prints it left behind in the ground.

So the Devil rode off about his business and Jack went back to his. A year passed, then two, and Jack was doing tolerably well though he could have been doing better. Come another year and Jack was working one autumn day at his forge when the Devil rode up on a horse black as coal.

Now Jack recognized the ol’ sinner in his fancy hat but he made as though the fallen angel were no more than a common stranger. “Hallo there,” he said to the Devil. “Something I can do for you?”

“Yes,” answered the Devil, “you can make good on our bargain of three years past.” He took out his little black notebook and flipped it open to show Jack his name and the bloody mark he made. “Your soul is mine if I need to remind you.”

Then Jack’s eyes widened and he pretended to stammer and stutter but the Devil held up a hand and said, “Never you mind, I’ve heard every excuse and a bargain’s a bargain so let’s get on with closing this deal.”

Jack sighed and muttered, “Well, if that’s the way it is then that’s the way it is. But it’s a sorry thing for me to go and leave a job unfinished. “ He pointed to the forge where there was a big piece of iron sitting on the coals. “I’ve got this wagon wheel to finish but my apprentice has done taken off somewhere, curse the little rascal, and it’s hard to keep a proper heat in the forge when there’s just me to work the bellows and also beat the iron.”

“Hmmpf,” said the Devil. “If that’s all that’s delaying you then you haven’t got much to worry about.” With that he grabbed a hammer and began to bang away at the piece of iron while Jack pumped away at the bellows. Jack, however, for some reason could not keep a steady rhythm for fanning the flames and the iron grew cold and dark and stiff as the Devil beat on it.

“Damn me own self, Jack!” cursed the Devil. “Here, let me show you how to work the bellows.”

So they switched places and the Devil started pumping away like sin at the bellows. As he did this, Jack went round to the forge and started turning that big piece of metal and beating at it with his hammer until it was long and stretched out and ready for wrapping around a wagon wheel for a rim.

Then Jack, he went over and got some more iron and tossed it on the coals.

“Here now,” cried the Devil, “you’ve finished your job so let’s be going.” But when he tried to take his hands off the bellows he found them stuck fast. He tried to stop pumping too and found that his arms wouldn’t do what he wanted. Hellfire eyes widened too late with surprise as he recalled the terms of his bargain with Jack.

So the Devil he pumped and Jack he hammered and the two of them spent the whole day that way. Jack got a lot of work done, more than he ever had before. The Devil, he sweated, and he swore, but he kept on pumping those bellows. His arms ached, his arms burned, but his muscles just kept heaving up and down on the bellows.

At last Jack was done with his work. He took off his leather apron and put his tools away. The Devil, he watched but he still kept on pumping those bellows.

“Hey!” he said. “What about me? You ain’t going to leave me here, are you?”

Jack looked at the Devil and he grinned. “Well, seems to me to be a fine job you’re doing and I’m loathe to see you quit when you’re just getting the hang of things. But I s’pose I could see my way to letting you off. For a consideration.”

“Name it!” begged the Devil.

“I recollect you mentioned once about a bottle that never empties,” said Jack. “Now that seems like a fine thing to me as long as I always had a choice about what poured out of it.”

“Done!” cried the Devil, and a twin-handled jug appeared on the floor of the forge.

“That’s grand,” said Jack. “But I’m thinking it’s little good having such a wonderful jug and not having time enough to enjoy its contents. Maybe you could see your way to reconsidering my leavetaking just now?”

“Fine!” cried the Devil. “You can stay this time. But you still owe me a soul and I’ll still come back in three years to collect it.”

Well, Jack, he allowed that was fair enough and, nodding, he told the Devil that he could stop pumping. Well, the ol’ boy’s arms just dropped to his sides once he was granted his release. He glared at Jack with future vengeance smouldering in his eyes but didn’t say a word. Just strode over to his horse. The Devil, he winced some as he raised his arms and lifted himself into the saddle, but he did it.

“See you in three years,” he said to Jack in a voice that promised their next meeting would be anything but a pleasant one. Jack waved good-bye, picked up his jug, uncorked it and took a swig of the finest whiskey he’d ever had the pleasure to taste. He spent the evening sampling different varieties of whiskies, ales, porters, and a good many other fine drinks from that jug.

Now a year passed, and another one after it. Jack did tolerably well though he could have done better. Come the third year, one autumn day, Jack was working at his forge when the Devil came riding up on a horse black as midnight.

Jack recognized him by the silver buttons adorning the Devil’s coat, but pretended he didn’t. He just set down his hammer and walked over towards the big anvil embedded in the floor of the forge.

“Where you think you’re going there, Jack?” said the Devil, waving his little black notebook in the air. “You and me have got business to finish.”

“And I’ll be happy to accommodate you, sir,” said Jack, “just as soon as I get this here anvil moved over to where there’s more light and I can see what I’m working at.”

Well, Jack, he heaved and he hawed, he strained and he struggled, but even the Devil could see that it was a big anvil and reluctant to budge from where it had sat for so long.

“Oh, devil take meself!” fumed the ol’ sinner. “Here, let me do it or we’ll be all day here.”

So the Devil he laid hold of the anvil and his hands stuck fast to it. He tugged and he pulled and he couldn’t lift so much as a finger from the anvil nor even shift the anvil an inch from where it sat. His horned head bowed in disgust as he recalled once more, too late, the terms of his bargain with Jack.

“‘Pears to me,” said Jack, letting go of the anvil and stepping over to the forge, “that you have a bit of a problem letting go.” His gloved hands picked up a long bar of iron, glowing white at one end. “Lemme see if maybe I can knock you loose.”

The Devil’s eyes widened and he screeched and strained but he stayed stuck fast. Jack commenced hammering away at the Devil with his iron bar. There was a scorching and a sizzling and the sulphurous smell of skin burning but over and above all that was the Devil yelling and hollering bloody murder.

“Stop, stop, stop! Stop hitting me, Jack, and I’ll give you anything you want!”

Jack, he gave the Devil a few more whacks just for good measure, then set his iron bar back in the forge to heat up again. “Well,” said Jack, “I recollect you once mentioning a big purse of money that never empties. Seems to me like a fine thing to have.”

“Done! Done and done! “ said the Devil. With those words, there was a thump and a clink and a big fat sack landed on the floor of the forge, coins spilling out of it.

Jack rubbed at his chin. “Thing of it is,” he said, “having that kind of money and no time to enjoy the spending of it, well, doesn’t seem right, don’t you think?”

“Fine!” said the Devil. “You can stay this time. But you still owe me a soul and I still get to collect it in three years time!”

Well, Jack agreed that that was only fair and he told the Devil he could take his hands off the anvil if he had a mind to now. The Devil, he glared at Jack then tottered over to where his horse stood by the forge door. Groaning and moaning, he slowly mounted, being careful of all his bruises.

“We’ll meet again in three years, Master Jack!” The Devil gave a look that promised a great deal of eternal unpleasantness in store for our Jack before he rode off, slowly, wincing at every single step his mount took.

Jack, he smiled and picked up his sack of coin and headed over towards the inn where he ordered up the finest meal possible, paid the rounds also for everyone there, and caught the eye of a pretty lass who stayed by his side that evening and well on into the night.

Well, another year is gone by followed by one more. Jack did tolerably well and perhaps he could have done better. Come the third year, one autumn day, Jack was sitting on a stool outside of his forge, smoking his pipe, sipping at his wonderful jug, and slicing with a knife at a loaf of bread.

The Devil came riding up to the forge on a horse black as sin. He looked down at Jack and he’s holding up that little black notebook clutched in one clawlike hand and his lips stretched in a smile without laughter in it. “Now then, Jack, I’m here to collect what’s long overdue me. Let’s be off then and none of your tricks this time.”

Jack nodded, “Yes, I suppose it’s time.” Then he took a bite of his bread and pursed his lips in a frown. “Ah, but that’s dry stuff. Excuse me,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’ll just get me a bit of honey from the tree to sweeten this, if you don’t mind, it being my last meal and all.”

The Devil kicked his horse into stepping over to block Jack’s way. “A last meal’s fine,” he said, “but never you mind stirring a foot. You just stay where I can see you. I’ll get your honey for you and then we’ll be off. I’ve got a special fire burning just for you.”

So Jack sat back down. The Devil, he slid off his horse and walked over to the old oak tree. He reached inside the hole in the lightning-blasted trunk and dipped his hairy fingers into the pool of honey inside. As soon as he did, out buzzed a great cloud of bees to swarm about the Devil and commence to stinging him left, right, and centre, up, down, and all around.

The Devil, he cursed, he flailed his arms, he ran this way, that way, the other way. All in vain. The bees stung him here, there, and everywhere until his devil-may-care self was all over with welts.

“Stop, stop, stop!” cried the Devil. “Call them off, Jack, for the love of,” and here the ol’ sinner near choked but he managed to blurt out the word “Heaven “ before a bee stung him right on the lip. “Anything you want, Jack, anything, just make them stop.”

Jack got up and ambled over to the oak tree, dipped his bread inside the hole in the trunk and brought it back out dripping with honey. “Well,” he said, taking a bite, and watching the Devil dancing about with the bees. “I’m puzzled as to what I might want from you. I’ve got my jug of drink and I’ve got my sack of coin and that’s all very fine. Still, I suppose good liquor and lots of money ain’t really worth that much without the time to enjoy them. So here’s what I propose. Let’s call everything quits between you and me. If I let you go then I get to keep my soul and I live ‘til I die. Now what do you say to that?”

“Yes, yes, yes! “ screamed the Devil. “Anything you say, anything!”

So Jack asked the bees to leave off and they flew back into their home inside the oak. The Devil, his face swollen so much that his beady greedy little eyes were near shut from all the bee stings, he weaved over to where his horse stood waiting by the door of the forge, slowly climbed into the saddle, wincing and weeping because of his welts, and rode off without even a glance back at Jack nor a single, solitary word.

Jack, he lived the rest of his life pretty much as it pleased him. He did tolerably well though perhaps he could have done a good deal better before the end. Then one day, Jack up and died and was buried and his soul rose up to Heaven. Which is where and when his troubles began.

St. Peter frowned when he saw Jack in line at the gates of Heaven. He pointed a finger at a page in the big open book before him. “Says here you’ve been dealing with the Devil,” he tells Jack. “We’ll have no truck with the likes of you here.”

So Jack, with many a sigh, turned about and walked down through the grey mists of Limbo to the other place. When he got there he knocked at the iron door of Hell. A shutter slid back and an imp peered out. “Who’s there and whaddya want?” the little devil demanded.

Jack told the imp his name and his purpose. The imp slid the shutter closed and went to report Jack’s arrival.

When the Devil heard who was at the door, he shuddered and shivered and shouted, “No! Not a chance in Hell am I letting that Jack inside.” Then he scoops up a pail of hot embers from one of eternal fires, goes up to the door himself, whips it open and heaves the burning flinders into Jack’s face, scarring him something fierce. “There,” said the Devil, “now we’re even! Get yourself gone from my door and don’t come back!”

So there Jack was. No room for him in Heaven and Hell won’t have him.

He gathered up a few of the still-glowing embers that the Devil had thrown in his face, found a big pumpkin ― though there’s them as says it were really a large turnip ― hollowed it out and put the embers inside. Then he cut a hole in the side for to make a lantern to light his way through the mists. The scars on his face still smarting from the hellishly hot coals that burned him, Jack turned his steps back again to Limbo, looking for a place where his weary soul might find rest.

Jack wanders all over now with his lantern, looking for a place to stay. He may very well walk the whole wide world searching until long past the Judgment Day.

About the Author

Gregg Chamberlain offered his skewed view of the Superhero Fiction genre with "In Business to Protect and Serve" in Mythic 2. He lives with his missus, Anne, in rural Ontario, with a clowder of cats who allow their humans the illusion of being in charge. Gregg enjoys his writing life and his other works are available in Daily Science Fiction, Apex, Weirdbook, SciPhi Journal and a host of other magazines and anthologies.

A PHASE TRANSITION

dave ring

THE SNOW PHILOSOPHY IS a hexagonal lattice, cold-forged by opportunity and environment, incapable of surviving contact with its inevitable conclusion. It isn’t a school of thought that pretends to have grand designs on the biggest questions that we face about time, or life itself, or some other far-reaching concept. It is a philosophy of temporal desire. Of decisions. It is a way of looking at oneself in the moment, in that moment’s context, and acknowledging the beauty of circumstance that propels one towards oblivion. Because all of us, I realize now, must make that inevitable progression, even me and my kin.

If you’d asked years ago if I’d ever thank the Chaure Set for anything, I’d have called you a fool. I would have spat on the ground and called them vipers. And I was right, their ideas are insidious. At the time, they seemed juvenile. Too pat. Honestly, the claim that each of us has only three reasons to hold back from the crushing light of the last dawn—three great works, only three—well. It seemed ludicrous. Why such a paltry number? What was the significance of three?

And even if I considered it to have a scrap of truth, it couldn’t bother me at first, because I thought I’d only ever completed two.

The first work should be obvious, even to you. It towers over the square, iconic and strange amidst its neighbors. A building that gestures to traditional structures, from the capitals of its columns and balusters, but takes those gestures to a place of inspired whimsy—decorative post-Jacobean crenellations, striated alloys and hyper-vernacular architecture. The work of three generations, they said.

It took me five lifetimes, from start to finish.

We’re not chosen by a person, Sophie tells me, to have this life that keeps unspooling in front of us, shimmering and new, like a moebius strip. It’s something else, some other happenstance of the universe, that makes us wake up young again one morning, lying in the sloughed off remains of our skin, which has turned paper-thin and already on its way to becoming dust.

It was bewildering, as you’d expect. I knew right away that I should keep my nature from others. Through feats of paperwork and administrative legerdemain, and in the eyes of the law, I became my own daughter so that I could inherit my own estate. Several signatures and a hasty, ill-attended funeral later, I left the town of my first life to start my second.

My second life is when I came into my own. A numbness that I barely noticed before then began to fade, and in my growing confidence and self-awareness, I learned a lot about myself. I remember vividly the motel room I used to stay in, before the tower was habitable. The rug was an awful pattern of purple, orange and grey that somehow managed to obscure all but the most heinous stains. The bathroom tiles were a putrid sort of moss color. And the full length mirror opposite the bathroom door was particularly cruel. I’d avoided mirrors for the majority of my first life, particularly towards the end, and I’d told myself that I was a vain creature that didn’t like to see the effects of time writ across my skin. But one evening, after an interminably long day staring at plans and building orders, that inescapable mirror made me confront that, at the heart of me, I’d never truly felt like a woman. Perhaps the self-realization was nascent before then, but that second life soon brought out in me a permissiveness to act as I wilt. I cut off my hair. I bound my chest. I found myself studying the way I walked, determined to change my gait and the way I’d been socialized to carry myself. And if my voice still elicited an uncertain “Ma’am?” from strangers, I was just as often called “Sir” by new drivers or by doormen. It was enough for things to feel right.

Years passed. It was lonely at times, but I busied myself. I thought I’d been discreet about the effects of my will and estate, and in the manner in which I picked up my affairs where I’d left off, but there was still much I didn’t know about discretion. Isabella was the first to find me, and later Sophie.

Isabella presented herself to me at the first gala we held at the tower. “Monsieur Yndigoyen,” I remember she called me, but it was just a joke then. I had lived another life and been reborn a second time, long enough ago that I was once again in my prime. She was a young-looking thing, all clavicles and piercing eyes. She’d worn a crystal-encrusted cocktail affair, just a touch shorter than convention would have recommended, and her dark hair was beaded and worked into hundreds of twists. We’d danced, though we’d known there’d be talk, and that dress sent scattershot rainbows bursting throughout the room whenever she spun herself across the floor. I didn’t realize until later that she was one of my investors, or that she’d had me sussed long before we quickstepped.

“You’ve been shepherding this project for a long time,” she’d said. “To be honest I was surprised you got hold of the planning permissions from that beast Longhart.”

“He was prepared to act reasonable after a fine vintage of cognac,” I’d confessed, still dancing.

“Of course,” she’d said, returning from a spin. “He did always enjoy eaux-de-vie.”

It was only then I’d remembered that Longhart had been dead in the ground for decades.

It was certainly a striking introduction—she’d confirmed a particular quality of her investment and I, well, I was smitten. I was only at the beginning of recognizing how truly I enjoyed the attentions of women, so I pursued her in earnest. But it was a flame that by necessity guttered out quickly. I hadn’t yet realized that Izzy was, in the vernacular, a hard ace. She’d already lived five lifetimes content in her own company. When I finally believed her, after a disgracefully long period of skepticism, we settled into a truly great friendship.

When Sophie came into our lives, I’d crested another dawn and Izzy was entering her next twilight. We’d taken to running by the river in the mornings, before it got too warm. Izzy has always been the better athlete of the two of us, but youth had its virtues, and we were keeping apace. There was a cafe we liked, beside the poplar trees. I ordered a latte, Izzy the mint tea. And at the table beside us, in a derby hat, was a woman made up of sharp lines and nervous energy. It was Sophie. She had her satchel with her, the huge one with all the notebooks. She never stopped carrying it, even when I offered her the most expensive tablet that money could buy. She looked at us, and asked if we were Beatrix Yndigoyen and Isabella del Taup.

“Beau,” I’d corrected her, without a beat, though it had been literally more than a hundred years since I’d gone by Beatrix, or even Bea.

Izzy had already stood up from the table, prepared to tackle her or flee, I wasn’t sure.

Sophie had nodded, made a note on her paper. “I’ve been admiring your work,” she’d said. Izzy and I’d just looked at each other. Then Izzy sat back down and called out for another pot of tea.

Sophie was younger than both of us, but something about being what we wee had taken to her, and the persistence with which she sought out answers was such that Izzy and I often spoke of how her work must have more to do with shepherding distracted artists like the two of us than the history she always purported to be writing. She interviewed both of us for hours with questions that we’d never really thought about. Like how it felt when death’s twilight came, and what was in our thoughts when we entered the new dawn. I have some of her notes here, although I’m not sure what good they’ll be. I think the biggest surprise from that first meeting was how little Izzy and I had examined our unusual states and had instead simply stoked the fires of obsession and gotten to work.

All this time, I continued construction on the tower. I’d installed both of my new kin in suites as soon as the first wing was habitable, and upgraded them as the project matured, as one might expect. The sculpture garden was built to please Isabella. Her room was on the ground floor, with a separate door that looked like a service exit, tucked between two seemingly undulating buttresses. Sophie took her rooms beside my first suite, on the first penthouse floor, before I’d create d the alloy innovations that allowed final construction on the minarets. Not that Sophie was often present in her rooms, but I knew I’d find her when she came into the capitol. The roundels were a gift to her, a nod to a time she was particularly fond of.

I adored looking up at the minarets, especially with her beside me, on those rare occasions I’d find her in my bed. Thin spindles, gleaming with an opalescent gloss, darkened or translucent depending on the decisions of their residents. But seeing them also sparked a sadness in me after the Chaure Set arrived, even with Sophie breathing against my ear, her leg thrown over mine. So poisonous were the vipers that they disturbed even perfect moments like this. The tower was complete, after five lifetimes of mine. Was its completion also hastening me towards a final twilight?

Both Sophie and Izzy told me that I was being maudlin, as if they’d forgotten when we all lost Marco a decade ago. But though I can still summon the heart of him when I go to hear his music, I miss him. I miss him deeply. Greatness came too readily to his fingers, to his compositions. Marco was only reborn twice before he saw his last dawn. It felt like the deaths of my youth, when mortality loomed constantly. Marco and I should have had so many more years of squabbling over his terrible parties and the constant parade of doe-eyed youths that he seduced and cast off and seduced again. So many more piss-poor lagers in dank bars and clandestine meetings on the roof to smoke cigars where Sophie wouldn’t catch the reek of us.

If the tower was not enough for me, and after the snow philosophy had been trapped in ink and released via torrent, I had to be wary of how often I should see my other reason to live: you, dear Yosef. It was a revolution that had brought your mother and I together. She’d chained herself to the wall in front of the tower. A young woman had been killed. The murderer kept saying that he had a right to kill her, because she’d lied to him. Because she ‘wasn’t really a woman.’ I can still picture Carolina on that wall, long hair streaming down her back and fist raised to the sky, telling the crowds about that young woman’s name, and her life, and what she would have done if she’d been allowed to live.

I carry that woman’s name in my marrow.

Some leaders have a fire in them that cannot be denied, cannot be ignored. Carolina had that. And I was far from immune. When she and I laid together, we had no sense that we were creating a life. I had been living as a man for decades, uterus notwithstanding, and we didn’t think that she might still carry seed. I didn’t, anyway. But we conceived. It was a foolish thing, perhaps, to carry you to term. I could never explain to you what I was; I had promised secrecy to Sophie and Isabella. Or then, I couldn’t. I’m clearly telling you now. Carolina took well to motherhood as soon as you were born and your gestation in me rather than her stopped making her feel like a liar. As much as I’ve never really cared for gender, Carolina adored it, and to extremes. On my own I’d once worn silks or pastels or even makeup, but there was something about Carolina that made me want to be more of a man. The pregnancy made that difficult, but ultimately easier for me to do what was necessary.

It was a pity she couldn’t make me want to be a father. It was an inconvenient time to die, after having you. A false death had to come with a reason, and that meant scrutiny. It wasn’t part of my usual cycle, where the trappings of age and the accompanying expectations were there to ease the hearts of those I left behind. Instead I simply insulated myself from the world through wealth and technology until it had forgotten me enough that I could re-emerge.

Carolina wore black to my funeral and forever after that. Of course, you know. You might not know that she dressed you in black as well that day, a tiny black onesie, or that you cried throughout Amazing Grace, which is usually the best part of my funerals. This ceremony had a much more urgent tone than I preferred, and so many attendees. It was both vexing and gratifying, considering how circumspect I’d tried to be when it came to making friends. But my brilliance attracted admirers and more than that, Carolina was well-loved. Somehow, you seem as unconvinced of my architectural greatness now as you did during that funeral, which is more unnerving than you know. Even a cursory attempt at rectifying your knowledge of the field should show you my impact on the form, but I won’t digress.

I knew you’d never want for anything. My will has made sure of that. And if there was anything the centuries had taught me at this point, it was the importance of a strong legal document. I know sometimes Carolina suspected things were not as they seemed. I’m not proud to say that at first I had her keystrokes logged and scanned regularly by a program that Sophie had written. I’m sure the coincidences at times grew daunting. Carolina had more than her fair share of conspiracy theories. They distressed me, so I confided in Izzy, who promptly made me transfer the codes to her, since she didn’t think that I could be impartial if I learned that Carolina had discovered our true nature. Besides which, she said, the paranoia distracted me from my art.

I tried to forget you and Carolina that day. I think I would have succeeded if it wasn’t for a chance encounter we had, years later. A coincidence utterly without artifice. You’d placed into one of the gifted programs that I funded, through the corporation, and as part of a spot check, I caught sight of your face. Carolina’s glossy hair, my cleft chin, and a fierce expression all your own. Your freckled tan seemed some sort of negotiation between my dark brown skin and her olive complexion. I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know you were mine. The recognition was immediate. When I pulled up your scores and saw your aptitudes, I fast-tracked you and kept tabs on you from afar. It was no accident that you entered my classes seven years later.

Do you remember your first day in class with me? I looked for anything that could be recognition in you, but saw nothing. I still wore the same skin that had carried you for eight months and twenty seven days, that had stretched and grown to feed you, that had born you screaming into a cold winter night. Did Carolina not have photos on the walls, I remember wondering. You continued to delight, at first. Classes were still pure whimsy then, playing with 3-D models and cultivating authorial vision. It was only later, when you showed technical prowess but no innovation, that I grew disappointed. After showing so much initial promise, it was difficult for me to see you level out. I still gave you passing marks, because I thought that perhaps you might dig up some hidden spark. Eventually my teaching aide questioned me directly about the decision to keep you past the third week, when the other subtalented students were sent home. She asked it without malice, as if there were some quality in you that I’d seen and she had overlooked. I snapped at her, defensive, but truth rose up in me like a swell and I had to apologize. Then I had you struck from the roster.

With that, I lost the ability to see you in person every day, but still I followed your path. I thought your college essays were lovely, particularly the one about Carolina. I grieved when none of the programs you sought were quite the fit you’d hoped. It was not that much of a stretch to found the Center for Architectural Sound and Structure. Oh. I think I see something in the look you’re giving me. But know that I wanted you to thrive. I thought you knew, to be frank. I wasn’t as circumspect as I should have been. And was it so wrong? I wanted my son to have a chance at greatness in one lifetime. I cannot undo it now, and please don’t think that you didn’t put your own mark on it. You did. I just helped you.

My plans were ultimately not that subtle. Sophie reminded me almost daily during her visits that our nature could not be groomed or bestowed. I believed her in my head but perhaps not in my heart. When your mother was dying, I nearly told her what I was, and why I had left her. I actually passed you in the hospital the night I visited her—it was difficult not to greet you. Do you remember, perhaps? I was wearing a grey duster and a terrible beige hat that Izzy claimed gave me a dashing veneer. The snows came so early that year that everything was always cold and smelled of wet wool. Even now, I always associate that fragrance with her hospital room, a strange connection between all those softly beeping machines and damp merino. I can almost smell it now. When I arrived at her room, she recognized me, not as a sort of immortal or whatever I am, but instead as a ghost. Or an angel. She murmured both and would not hear otherwise. She hadn’t talked of gods or God once while we’d been together, so this surprised me, but I suppose even stronger souls than hers had sought out such solace as their life waned, so it probably shouldn’t have.

Did you know I funded the statue of your mother in the east square, even sculpted it with my own hands? That pose is how I first saw her—one arm stretched towards the sky as if she was about to call down thunderbolts and the other in a deathgrip on that busted megaphone. I am not a sculptor. It is not a great work. But I made it with love.

In the end, I didn’t tell her. It broke my heart, but I couldn’t take away her miraculous vision, her visit from the angels. It was petty of me, maybe, but I wanted to give her that, since I’d taken away so much else. Still, I don’t think it was the right decision. I’m here now because I can't bring myself to make the same mistake with you.

My tower has been finished for what, sixteen years now? I’ve taken such pride in seeing your name on the board of trustees these past few years. I hope it gave you some fraction of the joy I got from it. It has meant everything to me that the tower is as much a place of art as it is of business, of living as it is of learning.

I wanted to love your children as much as I loved you. But it broke my heart when you chose your son over your work, while he took the best years of your life. You won’t hate me, I hope, when I say that I wasn’t displeased about the accident. It brought you back to yourself. No distractions.

For a little while, as I’ve alluded, there were more of us here. A veritable colony. The vipers themselves: Simone and Garrett and Abdoulaye. And Lancaster. Plus Marco, and Sophie and Isabella. But where Marco, Sophie, Izzy and myself had found some equilibrium, the Chaure Set (that’s what we called the others when feeling charitable) had a sort of gloom that was difficult to shake off if you spent too long with them. I glossed over this with Marco earlier, but he’d grown closer to Lancaster than I would have liked. And it cost him. It cost all of us.

Sophie had been so pleased with herself when she’d put together the dots, realized that they were of our sort. She extended the olive branch. But it is my tower, so I was always meant to play the host. Lancaster had built the government in Chaure from scratch, empowered it first through a beautiful coup and later through a painstakingly precise tricameral legislature. Now it stands a shining monolith of communications and hope.

Before that he’d designed the first inverted pipe organ. And before that, the lucid sky framework that replaced Euclidean geometry and is part of the bedrock of my own designs for the tower.

But then he was done. A guttering flame. And he’d come to us to flicker out.

We figured it out, inevitably. He was one of us, yes, but he had no work. It was tragic, but we didn’t realize how much so. We didn’t realize he would take Marco with him.

I always said that I didn’t believe him or his dire portents. After all, what was so special about the number three? He had no proof, only suppositions. Sophie and Izzy were no use discussing it—Sophie’s work, her histories, was only the first she’d embarked upon. And Izzy’s inquiries seemed boundless whenever she pushed up against the edge of it.

And so aloud, I scoffed, as I completed my tower. Then again, after the many feverish tomes that I filled with the snow philosophy and its applications, the rituals of introspection and difference. It was a chance remark by a scientist called Hallet in a dry text that struck my fancy unexpectedly: “A snowflake’s final shape is a history lesson of how the thing grew,” they said. That kernel of an idea became so much to me. The philosophy evolved from a feral creation that took monstrous shape as it embodied its own history. I truly didn’t expect for it to crystallize so sharply or so quickly. There is a part of me that wonders if it will be of use in a time other than this one, or if it is so of itself that it can only shine briefly. But brightly, since by doing so it would ultimately prove itself.

This bores you, I think, but it is important. See, applied to myself, I could not ignore the discovery it brought me to. Which was you. I couldn’t deny it. You were my next work.

And my third.

It wasn’t unheard of for us to have concurrent projects, but it was rare enough that I didn’t consider it possible, even as I invested so much energy into engineering your growth from afar. What could you be but that, I decided after I thought about it thoroughly. It was as if I’d torn aside the thin curtain of denial from my eyes. It’s never been done, Sophie tells me endlessly. But no one had wrought a symphony that trained neurons to fire before Marco and no one had built a tower that defied possibility before me. Our kind was made to defy limits. If there was a way to instill potential, to transfer the essence of my kind, I would be the one to achieve it and you might be such a candidate to attain it.

Izzy’s been overwrought and refused to see me these past few weeks. But if it works the way I think it will, you must go to her. You’ll be weak at first, soft. She’ll take you in.

It’s coming now, I think. When you’ve died a few times, you learn to recognize the signs. It’s all here in Sophie’s notes. Light blooming on one’s retinas, breath starting to come with unexpected labor.

The declining of your measurements, the fading of those persistent electronic background noises, they may alarm you, but know that when I felt the same all that time ago, I emerged whole. With many lifetimes ahead of me.

You see, the alignment of our skins could not be more perfect. My preparations are well-considered, I promise you, but I should say that the future speaks to no one but the present. If my work is true, you will greet the dawn anew. If it is false, well, then tomorrow I shall face the vipers in their nest.

I’ve sent away the nurses and the doctors. The glow coming through the window is the coming dawn. So literal. It is almost too much like poetry. I’d like to hold you, like we’ve never had the chance to before—but you’re shaking. Perhaps I have not earned the right. I will stay here, on this side of the line. I’m pulling the plug now. When the weariness comes, let it run though you, let it burden your bones. Just when you feel like you might fall, welcome it. Fall into yourself. And in the moment of falling, perhaps you will rise.

About the Author

dave ring is the co-chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ Literary Festival in Washington, DC. He was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow and has a handful of publishing credits in magazines and anthologies. He is also the editor of Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was, an anthology forthcoming from Mason Jar Press. Learn more about him at www.dave-ring.com.

GHOST WITH A MACHINE

Scott Beggs

[STILL WORKING?] APPEARS on his screen with a Google ding as Martin flicks his bedroom light switch on and off, up and down, watching the room brighten and dim. Without realizing it, he's begun matching the tempo of the reverberating bass beat of Kriss Kross telling everyone to jump almost as loudly as they can.

He types [Everything works.], pressing send and taking a sip of coffee that went cold an hour ago.

When he stole it from the train station this morning, he'd needed something to convince him that the empty streets of Amsterdam weren't a dream. Martin had shuffled through cobblestone bridges stretching over the canals, catching ten-foot whiffs of stale pot smoke every hundred meters and listening to the creaky scream of the gulls. A city of eight-hundred-thousand, and they were the only ones talking.

He checks his cell for the time and thinks about calling Danique long enough to think himself out of it.

If the empty streets were a dream, the coffee hadn't worked.

[CRAZY!]

[Dude you can turn off the caps.]

[SORRY I'm excited. This is insane!]

[I'm just glad you're okay.]

Martin's little sister, Gail, is at SUNY Cortland, taking great pride in having a red dragon on every piece of clothing she wears. Freshman enthusiasm he hoped would wear off but knew wouldn't.

[How many people are you with?]

[online? you mack and lindsay. in the dorm...all solitary here big bro]

[Are Mack and Lindsay on campus?]

[negatory. skiing somewhere for break]

[Do you think mom remembers how to use Skype]

[LMFAO]

When Martin was in college, he'd swung a visit to the anechoic chamber in Syracuse, its walls and most of the floor made with hard foam spikes. Like an iron maiden. The design meant to devour sound.

The intern who took him in explained that people went crazy inside. Some can only last a few seconds before the sheer totality of emptiness sends barbed wire strands into their nervous systems. Fight or flight malfunctions. Their brains start to boil over, but they talk about it like an alleyway acid trip when they get out into the safety of noise. That comfort and stability. We're so enveloped by sounds that we stop noticing them. They become ghosts. The sinking buzz of power lines, the infinite tiny echoes of concrete, traffic from miles away. The commotion in the background. Always behind the thing that's behind the thing that's right in front of us.

The intern said that some people lose it as soon as the door closes. They don't even get comfortable enough to let their heartbeat contort into a subwoofer. Some said they could hear the blood flowing in their veins. Some said they could hear their own thoughts. One man swore he could hear himself sweating.

That's what Martin felt like walking the deserted streets of Amsterdam that morning.

[brb got an idea, big bro!]

Martin tosses the corpse of his coffee into the sink and stomps to the living room where he cranks up the volume on his speakers, hoping that someone will bang on their ceiling, knock on his door, or call the police. It’s Sunday, and he’s disturbing the peace.

When he gets back to his laptop, he's missed a Skype call from his mother.

"Mom, are you all right?" he says, the grainy image of her face sharpening into existence.

"Oh, Martin. Thank God! What's happening?"

She'd been crying.

"I spent an hour trying to get this damn thing to work, but you know I don't know what button does what, and it said it needed to update, and after that I didn't understand how to log in. I called, and you didn't answer."

"It's okay, mom."

"You didn't answer. You weren't there."

"I'm fine. Gail is fine. We've been on Gchat for a while now."

"G-what?"

"Don't worry about it, mom."

"I'm scared, Martin. It's so good to hear your voice."

He's never heard her like this. The woman who made star-shaped pancakes when they were kids. The woman who stood her ground when dad wanted to take them to the other side of the country. The woman who worked two jobs and still managed to be mother and father and jailer and guide. She'd spun around the house all morning, trying to call people, and getting dead signals. When she dialed 911 and heard static, she'd burst into tears.

"I'm alone,” she says.

"I am, too, mom. But we'll figure this out. There must be an explanation."

"And you're on the other side of the world, baby. I'm so sorry."

"Don't be. Take a deep breath and be glad I can see your face."

[back! it's a little cold out there lol]

[Where did you go?]

"Mom, Gail's back online. Do you see her on Skype? On your contacts?"

[lindsay and miriam dared everyone to go streaking last month but I was chicken]

"Gailbear98? Is that her?"

[so I figured now is the best possible time to go! lol]

[You just ran through the quad naked?], he types, hoping Gail can sense his disapproval.

"Yeah, that's her."

"What's she saying?"

[it was a rush big bro!]

"She's reading her biology textbook, waiting for someone to figure out what's going on."

"I keep waiting for the TV to tell me what's happened, but all the channels are gone," his mother says, shifting in her chair to look across the room at something Martin can’t see.

"Huh. That's a good idea, mom. Hold on a second."

Martin skims through a handful of government websites. The White House, FEMA, Homeland Security.

When he walked the streets this morning, he told himself that it was an explainable fluke. There were fewer tourists in the post-Christmas cold, and it was early enough for everyone to still be in bed. He kept imagining that he'd just missed seeing a jogger by a block, that he simply couldn't hear the rumbling of a garbage truck over the sound of the gulls.

He’d passed beside row houses reaching up to the sky in stony silence and a playground where swings creaked without laughter. He’d passed by a bakery that should have been open, then finally emerged onto a block where the main train station stood in full view, tomblike and hollow. There was no rationalizing after that.

"Sorry, mom. I couldn't find anything. No one's updated."

[Hey Gail. Imagine for a second that everyone else is in the same situation we're in.]

"Yeah, okay, dear."

[ya ok]

[You're the president, and you want to send a message to everyone else.]

[i’d be the best prez]

[If the internet is working, why wouldn't you post something online?]

[hahaha lol you think the president knows how to update a website?]

[Shit. You're right.]

[he could send an email to it though]

[it?]

[I.T.]

[So, we're waiting for the people in charge to realize the internet works, figure out they can send emails back and forth, and then figure out they can send a message to the guy who updates the site. Perfect.]

"What's all that typing?" his mom asks

[brb lindsay might have sour patch kids in her room]

"Just talking things through with Gail," he says, trying to stifle his growing irritation. "Mom, can you do me a huge favor?"

"Of course."

"Do you have Aunt Julia's email address?"

"Somewhere."

"Send her a message, work out a plan to go to the A&P on Bradford at a specific time."

"To see if we meet up. Got it," her voice steadies. Nothing like a task at hand to harden his mother's resolve. "I'll try to pump some gas, too."

"Brilliant. You know what will really be wild?"

"What?"

"If you can take home the same groceries she can. I'll wait for you here. Maybe the government will find its asshole by then."

"Language, Martin. What if I can't call you back?"

"I'll leave the video open. It'll be fine."

Lights blinked and cascaded everywhere inside the train station, lying about the trains being on time. Store fronts were blocked off by thick, metal rolladens. The food court smelled like soil and marble. Martin made his way all the way to the back, where he stepped across a covered street and stood on the river's edge. Usually there was a ferry here to take people and bicycles and tiny cars across the steel waves of the IJ. Usually there were a billion bodies slamming through the train terminals, waiting impatiently to get across the river, or standing dumbstruck -- cameras in hand -- as the stunning, palatial spires of the Gothic station loomed overhead. Usually the city wasn't completely empty.

Eyes adjusting to emptiness and sea spray, Martin had decided he needed more coffee to shatter the dream and bring everyone back, so he’d hopped the counter at De Brooodzaak and helped himself. After leaving a few euros on the counter, he’d headed back to his apartment, briefly stopping to consider what would happen if he stole a canal boat and took it for a spin.

[back no sour patches. imma go down to the bookstore. they have em there]

[Hold up. Before you go looting, I need a favor.]

[wut?]

[Mom's emailing Aunt Julia back home. I need you to go on the Cortland message board and see if anyone's posted there. Make a post yourself.]

[yeah, smart]

[I'll post something on Reddit.]

[why not email danique?]

Martin hesitates for a moment, swirling potential words in his mouth like motor oil.

[We broke up. It was messy.]

[messier than this?]

The question is so obvious that it had escaped him. A defensive pride swells in his gut.

[Just check the school message board, please.]

[martin?]

[Yeah?]

[it’s evolution.]

[What’s evolution?]

[this. what’s happening. we're reading a book about it in class right now. there's this guy bonner who theorized in like the 1940s that the environment evolves along with us. specifically in tune with how we're evolving.]

[So what?]

[i'm just saying maybe we've been training ourselves for an existence where no one else is around but everyone is still online.]

[Whatever the reason, we'll fix it. Someone will know what to do.]

[it makes me worry about mom.]

[Yeah. I know.]

[do you think i'll have to learn to farm or something?]

[Go loot stuff]

[aye aye big bro]

Martin pushes back from his computer desk and makes enough laps around his apartment to memorize exactly what he would write to Danique. He thinks about how funny it is that context means everything. How a bad grade on a term paper can disappear from your mind after graduation. How the biggest worry about your little sister going to college can evaporate in a single morning. How you can't remember what caused that final fight.

He types fast enough to fool his nerves and clicks send.

Shuffling into the living room, Martin adds another log to his fire and turns the volume down on Neil Diamond serenading his sweet Caroline.

He imagines breaking into the Rijksmuseum to see “The Night Watch” without another soul in sight and all the soul-revving things he could do without the maw of the crowd. All the boats and row houses and mansions and zoos he could live in. All the time he had to build whatever life he liked.

Then he thinks about a blonde pixie cut, and a sour glass of wine that made them both crack up laughing, and a day in Vondelpark where it felt like they invented the sun. He thinks about the last time he held Danique in his arms, but it was months ago, and the memory is already starting to retreat. To become a ghost. The thing behind the thing behind what’s in front of him.

His fire is almost out by the time he hears his mother's voice coming through the computer.

"Hi, mom. Any luck?"

"As much food as I could hope for, but Julia wasn't there. I'm emailing her now."

As they speak, Martin gets his own message. A response from Danique pops up in his inbox.

"Mom, I've gotta go. I'm gonna try to find Danique."

He rides his bike through the cold, passive streets of the city, eyeing the Van Gogh Museum without a block-wrapping line out front. He makes a mental note riding past the Concertgebouw to sing on its enormous stage to an audience of none. He pushes on. It takes him a little over an hour, but he makes it past the Albert Cuyp Market, thinking about her message.

"I'm at home. Waiting for you."

When that intern was leading Martin out of the anechoic chamber in Syracuse, Martin asked him why certain people were bothered by it while others seemed to tolerate a lack of external sound. The intern explained that it was only a matter of sensitivity. Some people are designed to withstand the loss of something invisibly familiar while others can't bear to lose it. None of that really matters, though. After a while, everyone cracks. The record was eight minutes. The intern said that the tingle in your spine grows so loud that it won't let you be shut off from the world.

Martin goes to chain his bike to a rail, but then abandons the idea with a laugh, letting it lean up unprotected from thieves against the metal. It’s cold, and a soft rain begins to fall when he climbs the steps to Danique's house, straining to hear if there’s any life inside.

He knocks on her door, waits, and listens.

About the Author

Scott Beggs knows you don't disappear when you close your computer. He writes about movies and culture for Nerdist, Slashfilm, and other fine sites, and his short stories have previously appeared in Mulholland Books' Popcorn Fiction. He lives in California with his wife and two dogs named after enigmatic Tom Robbins characters, and he wants to be Buster Keaton's best friend. Follow him on twitter @scottmbeggs and visit http://www.scottbeggs.com for more.

WAKE

Mike Adamson

THE SNARK WAS DEAD.

It’s a funny old custom, partying over the departed, and it goes back to the 19th century when families and friends would hold vigil over a dead body for days, or until it started to stink, just in case the doctors were wrong—as apparently they were in those days enough of the time for the custom to evolve—and the cadaver should wake. We still call it the same thing, all these centuries later. Odd.

Mauritzio’s was the Snark’s favourite boozer, so we held his send-off there. It’s nothing special, just a dockside tavern near the cargo wharfs on Changi Island, back of the New Singapore spaceport on Oceanea. The day was sultry, we were waiting for the afternoon rain to go through from the ocean that covers most of the planet, and in between the thunder of ships overhead, the Snark’s old friends and competitors gathered as the day turned dark.

I hung my weather jacket on the racks by the double entry of the dimly-lit bar, whose doors shut out the humidity, and slapped hands with shipmates. Joey Syntasio from the gutters of Gagarin’s World, I shipped with him on the old Nordenstern, our first commission. He’s not worn well, too much bashing around the Middle Stars. Luce Quantrell, now there’s a hard one. I’ve seen her knock teeth across a bar, but that’s not how she got her own freighter. She’s never yet told the story… Chen Chaoyun, true as they come, all the right stuff in a tiny package which makes her twice as deadly because people underestimate her. Wilf Tayburn, ex-Fleet, keeps to himself mostly but knows his way round the stars the way few do. Lots more, they arrived in ones and twos, and messages flashed in on my wristie, apologies from those outbound or off-planet.

The Snark was Oceanean born and bred, just like me. This soggy town is my home, I watched the starships rise from the spaceport, and from the New Vulcan drydocks over on the east side, all my life and knew by the time I was six I was going with them one day. It’s a big universe and it makes you feel small to become aware—really, genuinely aware—that the whole history of human colonisation beyond the Near Heavens, the region of space we have come to call the Middle Stars, represents a minute fraction of one per cent of the cubic volume of the galaxy. You can’t afford to think that way too much of the time or you’ll realise you’re a dust mote adrift in a sea of nothingness.

On the bar someone had set up a small holo and a 3D image of the man floated in the air for all to admire. Tough as old guts, wore his forty like fifty used to be, with a scowl on his face he cultivated in gutters the length and breadth of the Middle Stars. He had a not-unhandsome face, a shock of bronzy hair that had just begun to retreat, he was a tall bastard and he prided himself on keeping fit. No limp-dick luxury shit for him, though he had no time for the military either, and just told folks he would relax on the day he reju’d, and that would be the day the universe beat him. Meaning probably never. Of course, “Snark” wasn’t his name, just an allusion to his sarcasm. “Martin Sparkman” was not much of a moniker for one who styled himself a rogue of space, and when someone called him Snarky Sparky for his tongue it kinda stuck and The Snark was born.

Luce had bought the first round already, a smart move to line them up before everyone was there, it could save a bundle. “Hey, Duke! Catch!” She sent a glass along the bar to me and I saw the human barkeep wince as I fielded it with split-second timing. He knew what kind of piss-up was coming, but the wharf taverns were used to it. New Singapore’s Finest were as close as a call if our celebrations really got out of hand, and I raised my glass to the security pickup in the black dome in the corner of the ceiling. I took a long pull of the local suds, belched and studied the glowing holo of the man of the hour through the fluid in the glass.

Duke—that’s what they call me, and I appreciate it. I really do. My parents were classics teachers and, this being an ocean planet, they must have thought they were being clever naming their son for the Ancient Greek’s answer to Noah, survivor of the flood—Ducalion. Ducalion Winters. Now you see why I prefer Duke, as well as the nickname slapped on me in the Merchant Astra, Frosty. I rubbed a hand across tired eyes that had seen too much, and wondered when any of us would admit we were getting along toward reju. Everybody did it, there was no call to wait, except for a perverse machismo among the jocks and jockettes on the boot-end of space.

“Here’s to The Snark,” I roared out, sloshing the last 5cm in my glass as I raised it to the holo. “Augered-in before he ever let reju catch up with him!”

A chorus of approval went around and Chaoyun raised a finger. “How did he go? I never heard…”

“Ah, therein lies a tale,” Luce said, jumping in to tell it for what must be her tenth time. We all reckoned she was regretting not sampling the man at closer proximity, at least we weren’t sure if she had, but that’s another story. She flicked her blond mane back and held our attention with a stare like granite. “He was on a mercy flight.” Looks of mock disgust went up and down the bar as the doors banged shut and a couple of new arrivals hung their jackets. “Yes, odd as it is mixing that word with his name, he was running a cargo of medical supplies to the famine zone on Gagarin’s World. The famine is all about the insurrectionists and the government has the zone locked down, so running supplies under the radar makes you an enemy of the state. Nobody has been too quick to criticise so far, what are we going to do, send ships and fight New London to clean up its act? Ten thousand dead in the zone isn’t enough to make it anybody else’s problem yet.” She shrugged and drained her glass. “It seems ol’ Snarky hit paydirt, a very handsome deposit to get a hold full of drugs, scanners, robo-docs and what have you to the rebels.”

“This is what comes of taking sides,” Syntasio said morosely.

“Maybe the rebels have got it right,” Chen said with a dark, hard look that told us where her sympathies lay, and I raised a hand.

“No politics,” I said softly.

A moment’s silence later Luce blew out her cheeks and spun her glass on the bar. “They shot him down. Oh, not at first, apparently it was his third run.” We laughed and hammered the bar. “Yeah, the lucky sod did it three freakin’ times. Flew in there, right through the planetary defences, through the military cordon of the zone, landed his cargo and got out. Any sane sonofabitch would have called it quits at one, two at the most, but he just had to go back a third time.” She spun the glass again. “Maniac. The money is nice, but…” She shook her head and a look of regret flickered across her face, haunted in the blue glow of the holo. “Maniac,” she whispered again.

I raised my now empty glass. “Here’s to the Snark, who went out in a blaze of glory instead of a whimper of retirement.” All glasses were now empty and Syntasio bought the next round. The newcomers were tall, black Holly Jenkins from the freighter Camargue, out of Aquarius, another old classmate from the Merchant Astra academy, and Vassily van Dortman, out of Fleet with the demob now the Sendaaki had given up trying to annihilate us. They slapped hands all round and we pulled a couple of tables together. Pitchers arrived and soon we were sinking suds.

“Of course he got up to more in his years than the rest of us put together,” I said, enlarging on the theme of the moment. “Big stuff, outrageous stuff, the kind of stuff that makes you unwelcome in whole star systems.”

“Stuff of legend,” Tayburn grunted, chinking glasses with van Dortman; they had shared a ship years back in the endless battles of the Acrasius sector. “I heard he carried a cargo for an independent mining syndicate into the belts of the Shamash system. Tough bastards, out that way, running on starburst blue and loanshark games, they chew men up and spit ‘em out. Well, ol’ Snarky did his share of business out that way, probably played both sides of the fence, ran blue for the workers stacked on top of fine booze for the bosses. But—and this was so typical of him—he made profit on both legs of the trip, by carrying back workers who wanted out. Okay, it cost them most of what they had, but they got to keep their lives. And it didn’t matter how little they had, he’d take three quarters. I hear he once gave a man 25 demicredits change out of a credit.”

We didn’t know whether to laugh or toast him again. “What about the Orion Arm run?” I piped up, happy just to listen for the moment.

“Hell, yes,” Holly said with a smile, her beautiful dark face alight with the tremble of neon over the bar. Oceanean steelbeat thrummed in the air and we were concentrating through the booze now. “The word is he ran passengers to a planet called Khlorifane. Not many humans have been that far out. A few sociologists, linguists, diplomats, but he took the adventurers. They knew it might be a one way trip, nobody knows what they’ll encounter that far out, but when the stars call, there’s no turning back. He took his time coming home, and he was full of philosophy. Talked about skies more colours than you can name, cities crammed with more races than you could imagine. He even talked about things like peace and harmony…”

After a moment’s silence, Syntasio shrugged. “Better than the shit he was usually full of.” We all howled and the pitchers went round again. “Look at him, up there,” Joey went on, pointing to the holo. “I mean, just look at him. Cockiest bastard you ever met, and the worst thing—or maybe the best—was he could back it up. He could fly like a sonofabitch, take a trash-hauler through hell and high water, time his subspace transits to perfection, thread the needle between twinned stars. That’s not even supposed to be possible.”

“I can vouch for that,” Chen said with a deep nod. “I was running a load with him, paired ships, I told him he’d get us killed, but the profit on taking a load through the warzone to cut two days on the way to Ericson’s World was just too good to turn down. He programmed the jump through the overlapped gravity fields of the A and B stars of Vogrion Major and passed my comp the numbers. We went through there like a watermelon seed in wet fingers, Fleet interceptors after us never got close.” She shook her head, then spoke softly. “Damn, I miss the guy.”

“Snark,” I said softly, my glass half raised, and the others didn’t cheer. Maybe the booze was making us morose, or we were really missing him.

“The Earth run,” Luce said and raised an eyebrow around the group.

A few more had ducked in from the sultry, darkening evening, but between the sauce and the flickery lights I wasn’t sure who we had until one leaned into the light over the table and slapped hands all around. It was Cleavon Pastromos, one of the few skippers who wore the skull and crossbones on his jacket, his helmet and his hull—ostensibly because during the war he had taken on a Sendaaki ship and survived, but we all knew the pirate flag meant he engaged in commerce contrary to the interests of any colonial government he disliked. He was broad as an airbrake, built like an ox, his massive, bare arms glistening with raindrops. He swept his cap off as a glass was passed to him, and grunted through red whiskers, “the Earth run, did somebody say? I was with the Snarky bastard.”

“Tell us,” van Dortman said softly.

The other arrivals stood back a little out of the light, one with a hoodie up, powerful arms folded, the other hanging back only until a couple of chairs were thrown over by a waiter as another pitcher was ordered.

“Earth… Why would you want to go there? That’s what they all said. Nothing but space cities and colonies trying to re-terraform the mess they made in the old days. They’ve almost finished, there’s about half a million more species to reintroduce. Last count there’s half a billion people back on the surface. But he heard about this incredible score. Some weird nostalgia among colonials for the old world, they’d pay a fortune for a box of dirt. Yep, dirt. He put the word around it was possible to obtain a strictly limited amount—read, tons of the fricken’ stuff—for a premium price. Now, there’re strict rules about moving biota between systems, and we knew the dirt had to be rendered biologically inert, which was where my expertise came in, thus the partnership. We’d never have got a permit to move it, it’s a stupid idea in spades, but rich old colonials with a tear in their eye for their genetic origins wanted a box of dirt from Australia, Poland, China, Scotland, Canada or wherever. Yeah, right, like we’re gonna fly all over the planet, picking up a hundred grams of dirt in each spot.”

He rolled his eyes and took a long pull at his beer. “We burned in there on some pretext, I don’t remember what it was, landed in the back blocks south of … Moscow, I think … shovelled shit like there was no tomorrow, then got on with our legit business. Then we spent the whole time back to the Middle Stars making up hundred-gram sealed packs, irradiated for sterility, and served up in these fancy little presentation boxes he’d picked up cheap on Utopia on the way over.” Pastromos shook his head and sank most of the rest of his glass in one more hit. “I’ll never forget the straight face on him as he delivered the goods and they forked over a fortune. The fact is, fools and their money deserve to be parted.”

“Good for you, Snark,” Jenkins said softly with a toss of her red-streaked mane. Glasses were raised all round and his memory toasted. It seemed we had reached a punctuation point as either the booze slowed us down or we were running out of choice anecdotes. But I’d been saving one, and I knew it was a beauty.

“Of course, the greatest thing he ever did was the ‘slipstream’ trick,” I said quietly, and heads wagged in appreciation, some eyes widening as details came back.

“Your turn,” Luce said as she sent the nearest pitcher round again.

I accepted a refill and sighed with a raise of my eyebrows. “Slipstream—the holy grail of barefaced cheek. Getting faster than light performance out of a sub-light vehicle. It’s more risk than calculation and it can have some weird spinoffs, but the crazy sod did it. He may be the only one ever…”

“Wasn’t it a Fleet trick?” Chen wondered.

“Maybe,” I said with a shrug. “If it is, they don’t talk about it, but I wouldn’t put it past him to come up with it himself.” I grinned hard as I took up the peanut bowl and held it to represent a vessel, then plucked out a single nut and nestled it up against the bowl. “Big ship heads out, engages stardrive, dimensional compression comes into play, you get your subspace bubble and you’re off. But if you can slip up alongside, so close you can shake hands with the crew, you can hitch a lift by being inside the bubble when it forms.” I ate the nut and put the bowl down. “The story goes he was flying a decommissioned fighter he’d bought from some shady broker, it had to be some craft with the legs to stay with a ship as it accelerated toward transition point. In theory, all you need to be is close enough, the big ship’s stardrive just scoops you up and takes you for a ride. But the risks…”

“Getting fried, for one,” Syntasio agreed with a nod.

“Yup.” I tapped the dish again. “You need to be right in their baffles to avoid detection, hard up against the EM horizon of the sublight drive efflux, stray too far one way and sensors pick you up, too far the other and you’re toast. Once you’re into starflight you can just grapple the hull and enjoy the ride, the host ship’s computers will sense the parasite only indirectly by a change in the relative energy consumption of the flight due to greater than expected mass, and there’s nothing they can do about it anyway. At the other end, the parasite has to get the hell outa there by riding back down the drive efflux, then making a sharp break and running like stink.” I shook my head again. “I wouldn’t try it. Past all that, there’s the weird stuff. You’re tickling the barriers of relativity in one direction and quantum mechanics the other, and you can get squeezed, dimensionally arrested, shunted forward or backward in time relative to the host, you could get spat out of the effect, crushed flat and three days in the past. You’re dancing on the edge of self-generated black hole dynamics, and it would take a lunatic to try. My god, I saw the numbers on it when I ran a sim for the hell of it, there’s a quantum reflex effect in which you can be temporally duplicated. One goes into the effect, two come out.”

“The universe isn’t ready for two Snarks,” Luce said with a shake of her head, and drained her glass again. Someone began to croon one of the man’s favourite dirty songs and the rest joined in by ones and twos, but I excused myself to stumble off to the pisser and let go the suds—the prostate needs a reju more than the rest of me. I listened to the muted throb from the bar as I felt the swimming effect of the grog and hummed along with the tune, just feeling the universe was the poorer for a light like the Snark having gone out. I thought, we all thumb our noses at The Establishment, whatever the hell that means in this day and age, and there’s always the next star, the next cluster to explore. I didn’t quite know what I was rambling about at that moment, but what I saw when I came back to the bar rocked me back for an instant.

The tall guy in the hoodie had not cosied up with the crowd and he was looking straight at me over their heads. In the shadows I saw a shock of bronzy hair and a face I swore I knew, eyes that glinted with a devil’s mirth, and he uncrossed powerful arms, to turn to the rack and pull on his jacket. In moments he was leaving, and almost against my will I followed, banged through the double exit into the soupy evening as I shrugged into my own jacket and looked up at the warm rain out of the now indigo evening sky over the dingy industrial blocks.

I looked up and down the street. On the other side, further up, were a group of the white robes of the Seastars—People of the Sea and Star, the homegrown cult of Oceanea, harmless dreamers, and these were chanting in a circle under the awnings of a delivery yard. A few passers-by had stopped to listen, but the one I was after was under a scrappy tree on the corner, past the doors of the front bar. I strode after him and those eyes met mine again.

“It can’t be…” I whispered.

“Of course it can,” came the local accent, and the hood was slipped back just far enough for me to take in the square-cut features, the narrowed eyes, the broken nose. “You were right, Duke.”

“Snark?”

“The original and the best. But reports of my death are by no means exaggerated.” My face must have been a mask of incomprehension, despite the fact I was suddenly stone cold sober. “As I said, you were right. About the slipstream effects. Getting into the energetic wake of a vessel travelling at supra-light velocity can do all kinds of weird shit, and it did. I pulled the trick a few times, I found I could run very small, very valuable goods in a re-stealthed ex-Fleet fighter, hitching to destination and back on other ships that never knew I was there, while my ship, registration and all, stood for all to see in a rented berth somewhere obvious. ‘I was never there, officer, see, I was on a different planet the whole time…’ It worked, too. Ah, but the effects…” He grinned, stuffing big hands into his jacket pockets. “Snark II was the temporal duplicate. He came out of the bubble right on my wingtip, we flew the identical escape pattern. He was me, down to the last memory. And us, being us, recognised the value of the situation. One of us could pull a run while the other staged the alibi, and we switched every job.” He shrugged with a massive sigh and stared off at the Seastars for a moment.

“What happened?” I asked softly in the patter of the rain that glowed in the streetlights.

“What can I say? Either he got greedy, or we both did. Or we were not exactly the same after all. He flew the first run into Gagarin’s World, and after thinking about it very hard I ran in as well. I couldn’t talk him out of going back, and he bought it. Maybe he thought having come into existence as a freak effect of temporal physics he was either indestructible or his existence was irrelevant. Whichever, he exists no longer, and I learned a helluva lesson to watch him go.”

“What was that?” I asked, knowing the answer instinctively as I did so.

The words were whispered. “Know when to let go.” The Snark looked up at the rain, but kept his face away from street cameras with the skill of a lifetime. “That was the day the universe won, Duke.” He smiled, nodding frankly. “I’m done. And I’m going with the freedom of the grave.”

Silence, the crackle of raindrops in the tree, on the sidewalk, the flicker of neon on the wet road… “So what’s next?” I asked, wondering if the universe could ever be the same.

“Spend the fortune. I’ve picked out a mansion in the hills above the city. Reju, a new face, a drop-dead gorgeous android companion I can trust to watch my back to the end of my days. All sporting aside, it’s what it was all, always, about.” I nodded silently, an admission no other would have extracted from me.

“Why come here, if you’ve got anonymity?”

“Every performer wants to see the reviews.” He grinned. “I liked them. So go on back and tell a few more, drink ‘em under the table if you can, and in the morning you’ll think this was all just alcoholic poisoning.” He melted into the shadows as he spoke. “One last connection to the old life, that’s why… If you need me, you can find me. Other than that…” He spread big hands with that cock-sure smile, and turned to stride on, cross the road and make his way into the halo of lights through the rain.

That was the last time I ever saw The Snark, but I’m glad to know he’s still out there—that our breed can make it in the end, the universe makes room for you if you’re smart enough, tough enough and bloody-minded enough. Yes, I went back in, yes we drank a lot more, but no, I never forgot.

And I never let on to a soul.

About the Author

Mike Adamson holds a PhD in archaeology from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, Mike returned to study and secured degrees in both marine biology and archaeology. Mike currently lectures in anthropology, is a passionate photographer, a master-level hobbyist and journalist for international magazines.

BRAVE NEW NIGHT

Andrew Reichard

CLAIRE TOOK THE CALL halfway through its first vibrate, stood and went to the east window with the cell pressed against her ear. Her wife’s voice on the other side saying, “It’s happening again.”

“It’s all right, Gina. It’ll be all right,” Claire said.

“I just want to be on the phone until it blows over.”

“Boss isn’t in today. I’ll watch with you.” Claire didn’t touch the glass. She stood a foot from the upper story window on 9th Street and stepped out of her heels and watched the sky over New York City begin to crack.

Behind her, the Mergers & Acquisitions office where she answered calls and entered six-digit figures into Excel sheets hung quiet. CNBC murmuring financials into an empty lounge space. The coffee press burped. The business phone on its pedestal: a silent, black comma. Out over Times Square, buildings began to fall from the sky.

“Where are you, Gina?”

“I’m at home.” Her voice gravel-rough like she’d been smoking, but she hadn’t in years.

“That’s good,” said Claire. “Pour some Malbec. You don’t have to watch.”

“I can’t drink when the city does this. I can’t move, Claire. It’s like I’m paralyzed.”

“You could lie down. It might help. Just, maybe step away from the window if you’re feeling—” queasy wasn’t the word she wanted. In her office, from her window, Claire took an involuntary step back.

The desk phone rang. She didn’t answer.

Skyscrapers like she had never seen. At first as if a mirror were falling slowly toward its subject, except that these new structures weren’t anything she recognized. They were narrow pylons shedding scaffolding, internally lit like New York at night. But it was day. The night city collapsed, casually, atop the actual; dazed photons rendering their confusion in chiaroscuro: abrupt destruction-worship like those slow-motion videos of a bullet passing through an apple. Reminiscent of art deco. V-shapes shrinking as the appearances warped into Manhattan.

As for the sound. There was nothing beyond the ordinary. On the streets, traffic seized, distended, groped along under unfazed traffic lights. The city was being assaulted by nothing more than images, as if some giant projector satellite hung above them. This time like all the times before. Something in the air that presented itself as visible destruction. Renderings.

It wasn’t real, but Claire closed her eyes and imagined coughing smoke and siren symphonies. She imagined Gina lying in her bed, covers pulled to chin and an unread book lying open between her breasts. These two images so incongruous, yet they made a sort of diptych sense. A logic of contour alone.

She opened her eyes again. The oppressive images cast upon the skyline had vanished—were now doing the whole thing over: spire-sharp buildings falling languorously again, on repeat.

Claire asked into the phone, “Are you…are you all right?” She didn’t like the way her voice left blank moments in the center of questions like that.

Gina said yes.

“Are you really?”

“Yes, I’ll be fine. You’ll be home late again?”

“I think so. Don’t stay up. Lie down a little now,” Claire told her. “And open the Malbec. I love you.” She ended the call as her boss, Galen Turner, arrived.

“Claire, Claire—Oh where is Claire. Hey girl, I called, but no answer. That’s a strike.” He saw her by the window. “And, well, it’s raining buildings out there. Been in the parking garage too long. Been making money in the land of echoes and concrete.”

Another prismatic phalanx coming down. Turner slid over to watch with her, forgetting her. The images were unraveling of their own accord—now more scaffolding and glass than anything—but still so total they couldn’t be ignored.

Turner clapped his hands together. “Ok. I need that BrandSynch sale write-up on my desk by three. It’s working hours. Can’t be putzing about just ‘cause Armageddon,” singing, “Mon-ey to be made!”

“I emailed it to you, Galen. Just before I took a break.”

“Oh, fine. Fine then!” he said. “Always hoping that one of these days you’ll realize you like men after all and come into my office for a chat.” He winked: a joke.

Claire caused her lips to smile. He didn’t mean it as the antagonism it was, and though his intentions meant nothing to her, it did decide her response. He would have been amazed had her reaction shown any emotion aberrant to the secretarial co-conspirator that he assumed her to be.

He picked up the remote and channeled to CNN while she returned to her chair, the desk between them. “Weird weather, they’re still calling it.” He made the quarter-note farting noise of an extremely tight sphincter. “What a joke! The meteorologists point at the environmentalists who point at the government who accuse the Russian government who are scratching their asses. What a mess! Now they’re fobbing the whole thing off on Holly-fucking-wood. Too many movies about New York getting screwed by doomsday. The city’s sentient now—it’s developed a mind or something. Re-projecting the images of its end. Tell me how that works, how ‘bout you?”

Claire only watched him. It seemed manic to her when people repeated what the news was saying while the news was saying it, but then Galen had always been manic in his need for the normal. His panic came out as winking confabulation.

“But hey, I’m not that full of it,” he promised. “Just because I don’t personally understand how it works doesn’t mean it ain’t so. Kind of like you and your woman.”

“You don’t understand how Gina and I work?”

He pulsed his palms. “And I’m saying that doesn’t mean it doesn’t. Work, that is.”

What is it that confuses you? But she knew. She knew because every time she and Gina wanted to hold hands on the sidewalk it became a juggling act between affection and defiance, between a personal display of love and a public demonstration. She felt an odd solidarity with the city itself because of this.

Galen shook his head and turned the screen off, cutting the reporter mid-sentence. Claire almost cringed. The abrupt shutting down of a television startling to her.

“Are people still leaving the city?” she asked.

He rolled the shoulders of his suit. “Everyone who was thinking about leaving has already. We’re the stalwarts. It’s perfectly safe. Animals don’t even notice it. You’re not planning on leaving, are you? I need you. Can’t replace you. You’re invaluable.”

Claire looked at the screen. “Could you turn that back on?”

“To what, hon?”

She didn’t care.

There was baseball. Mets against Braves. In Atlanta. No incorporeal buildings falling there. Claire went back to her spreadsheets.

“Um-Claire?”

She looked up from her desk ten minutes later to see Galen poking his rectilinear head out of his office suite.

“Sorry. What I said wasn’t very appropriate. You know—earlier.”

She made some motion: a wave with a shrug. At a different moment it might have been a flinch. Galen Turner took it as acceptance, but he then looked out the window and turned on her a brave smile that seemed almost meek.

Between two people—even in the interaction of a lukewarm apology—the city had to be acknowledged. It was like that now. Rationales bled into each other. Everything was interrupted by the fact of the occurrences they called renderings.

Claire had been in high school in 2001, and she remembered the way everything warped toward that black hole named Ground Zero. Her teachers had worn flats instead of heels in case they needed to run. Every gesture, every disruption, soaked through the window of the city’s disbelief. All cruelties, all kindnesses, had somehow to be motivated by that window, which had been left wide open as it was now. Everything came through.

And now, New York City was ensnared by a meditative sort of hysteria (In Galen’s case it was genial and moronic). Harlem-sized illustrations on the skyline, in the streets. People living their lives under this. Somehow still conducting their own successes and maneuvering around their own failures within the dome of an intelligent horror strobing across the membrane of normality.

That New Yorkers tried to think of these manifestations as a kind of weird weather was not a surprise. They quickly became a fact of this city’s life, like rain. Galen tried to laugh at them. Gina was terrified by them. And Claire was strangely, breathlessly excited. Apocalypse pressed at reality’s seams. Manhattan made visions of its own death: cityscape havoc-dreams dissolving on the air, touching nothing but people’s eyes.

BY THE END OF the day, Claire had spent much of it staring out the window. With the sun setting, she got up and drew the curtains slowly on the skyline like on a stage. Galen had still not left his office, and none of the other partners had shown or called, and she went to the door and knocked and stabbed her head inside.

“Going home.”

He sat hunched over the laptop with his tie tugged loose. At the interruption, he took his glasses off and rubbed at his eyes. “How do you separate a city from its people?” he asked in the most straightforward manner she’d ever heard from him.

Claire opened the door wider, stood on the threshold, but she held back from him. “What do you mean?” Her question sounded cold, appeared to have startled him.

He looked at her, glasses still in his hand. “You know what I mean,” he whispered.

“The city—”

“Yes, the city,” agitated, “what do you think it’s doing to us? Tell me that; I don’t care what you say, I just want your opinion. Gimme anything. Don’t you think the city is the people in it? What else would it be if not us? So how is it acting apart from us, you know? Since when did man-made environments veer off in another direction than man?” He shook his head.

He was making her uneasy, this sudden genuineness, chauvinistic though it still was. Somehow, she didn’t want to believe that Galen was going through similar doubts that she and Gina were. “If you have something to ask me about work, I can stay, but I really need to get home.” She waited and then stepped back and closed the door, observing him through its window. He had gone back to his work. Maybe he knew she was still standing there, and maybe he didn’t. A moment later, Claire saw him take up his glasses in both hands and snap them in half.

PUBLIC TRANSIT SUFFERED MOST from the renderings, but cab drivers were recovering their bygone prestige. Many people trusted them above the buses or, God forbid! an UBER. Here comes the yellow cab, carapace of the city’s inertia, its driver surely honest-eyed and over-worked and as dogged as the day. Despite this romantic reinforcement, New York’s streets, like its poorly hidden psyche, had still run feral.

Claire walked wherever she could, ensconced among the other pedestrians beyond the sidewalk regions where barricades had been thrown up along curbsides to protect against distracted drivers. Tonight, it was late, and the gyro from the delicatessen across the street churned in her stomach with the dread, and her feet had blisters from walking a block. She had joined the wearied taxi-seeking mob, hands like semaphores, when another illustration fell upon them.

No warning this time, just a drop cloth of shadow coming down on an ant colony. The crowd turned. From the direction of the piers came a wave: an impossible tsunami from out of the west. At the sight of it, people made jungle sounds. Whoops, hollers. Cars halted at green lights. Down the street a grown man shrieked, and someone else laughed.

Despite themselves, they backed up. Claire shuffled with them, staring up at the white crest rolling toward them, forty stories tall. The wave ambushed their eyes; it looked so real, coming toward them.

A woman Claire didn’t know clung to her arm as the ghost wave crashed. People ducked, unable to help it.

In such a moment, every gesture seemed the harbinger of limitless meaning. It was the end of the world and yet it wasn’t real, so meaning was the remainder; which found, in everyone’s minds, outlets elsewhere. An old man picked up his cane in both hands and touched his sagging cheek with it and set it gently on the concrete again. Claire: fascinated with the ponderousness of that, trying to parse out its significance.

Then they were all underwater. Except that it was silent, it looked so real. The water moving rapidly and Claire finding herself leaning forward to fight the image of it. Light and motion hiccupped abysmally in underwater tumult. Coruscating madness, shimmering phantoms and emergency light, and nothing but nothing felt so much as a drop. Buildings, cars, people should have been swatted away, but weren’t.

Claire held on to the hand of this stranger and tried not to look at her face because it might have been easy to imagine that the woman was drowning.

AN HOUR LATER, SHE found Gina in the bedroom. Lying on her back fully dressed with her arms at her sides. Claire sat on the bed beside her and placed a palm to Gina’s forehead.

“I don’t have a fever, babe, but I’m sick. I know I am. Did you see the wave tonight? Did you see it?”

“I was standing in it.”

Gina had eyes that were so alert they could cause pain.

“I stood right there while it washed over me.” Claire held her arms out to either side to show that she wasn’t…that she hadn’t been… “Nothing happened,” she said. “Everyone flinched, and we all held on to each other, and then we went our own ways again under this…this optical illusion. Someone near me said it was beautiful; I heard him say it. Gina, listen. People are going to be fine. We’re going to be fine because nothing is happening. It’s like the whole city is stuck in a dream—”

“A nightmare.”

“A dream. And the only thing we can do is…is to. Did you open the wine?”

Not waiting to hear the answer, Claire raced to the kitchen and found the unopened bottle of Malbec and uncorked it, bringing it back into the room without glasses. She sat again, pulling one leg up on the bed, letting the other hang over the side. Still in her business suit, she took the first sip. Administered the second to Gina.

“Stop that, I’m not your patient.” Gina giggled, tried to take the bottle and sloshed a little on the sheets. Both of them inhaling at the stain like little girls, they raised their eyes to each other, burst into laughter.

“My boss asked me how we work today. As in,” pointing at pelvis, “mechanics.”

“Your boss is an uncircumcised dildo.”

“He said he was sorry.” Claire laughed again, but now Gina was mad and looking at the window. Though the curtains were closed, the city was there, on the other side, in a way it never used to be.

“Do you think it will ever stop?” Gina asked.

“It might.”

“Did you see the jets?”

“What?”

“Earlier today,” said Gina. “Fighter planes. They went through the sky, and I thought, ‘this isn’t real,’ and then I realized I wouldn’t know if something like that was actually happening or just an image. It’s like we’re living in a movie. A 3D, IMAX, the whole nine yards.”

“What would they do if they were real?” Claire asked about the jets.

“Not a clue.” Gina set her dark head on Claire’s shoulder, and Claire found herself wishing it would rain. Let the sky produce something natural, and they might be able to sleep tonight. Against her shoulder, Claire felt Gina begin to cry. Soft tears.

Claire closed her eyes, holding on, seeing the eerie white light from under the wave move off beyond the blackened buildings, turning them off and replacing them with silhouettes. She knew all of Gina’s tears. These. These were produced from the evaporation of a day, a soft appeal to fatigue, her own soft rain.

IN THE MORNING, IT was drizzling blood. There could be no forecast for this weather; it just happened. People had spilled out into the yellowing hallway of their apartment building, some still wrapped in night robes, others dressed for work. Everyone hesitant to peer out on the nauseating scene: red precipitation.

Claire put an arm on Gina’s to steady her. She was looking down to the end of the hallway where the window was.

“It’s not real,” Claire said.

“But if it looks like it is, does it matter that it’s not?” Gina wanted to know.

An older woman overheard them. “It’s not even touching the ground. My husband went out there and said it was falling to about his knees and vanishing. People are lying down out there—looking along the space where it doesn’t fall.”

Claire said again, “It’s not real.” She led Gina back into their apartment and told her she could go in late today and they could spend the morning eating pancakes and making love.

But Gina looked sick and shook her head. “It’s so morbid. This is so morbid.”

Affronted by the suggestion that she was being morbid, that she was somehow not taking this as seriously as she should, Claire said, “People are working, Gina. What are you doing? Lying in bed all day, staring at closed curtains.”

Gina looked as though she’d been slapped.

Claire said, “They say on the news that the city is…is “replaying man-made renditions of its destruction.” A quote she’d memorized. “It’s as if…as if the city itself—the city itself—is performing poetry or—” They had both moved back to the bedroom, their fortress, while Claire tried to talk herself into an understanding. Maybe she could bury what she’d said while apocalypses overwrote each other in palimpsestic ruin. If she apologized now, she told herself, it would sound as weak as Galen’s false regret.

“I don’t know what’s happening, Gina, but you’ve got to remember that: It’s. Not. Real. It’s not real, and images shouldn’t be able to keep us from…you know what I mean.”

“No, I’m not sure I do.” Gina was always the calm one when it came to fights and sex. In these territories, Claire was driven by passion, lost within it.

“The images shouldn’t be able to keep us from…from enjoying ourselves,” Claire stammered desperately. “Ever since they started, you’ve moped and sat at your computer and not taken any work, and I’m tired of coming home every night and lifting you up because… because…”

Claire sat on the bed, but in her confusion she knocked against the side table. The half-empty bottle of Malbec, left there from the night before, overturned and broke on the floor, spilling. Both of them stared at it. Glass, thought Claire, how did it always break like that? It comes apart as teeth.

The wine was pooling against the oval rug, soaking into it, and it was Gina now on her hands and knees with a rag from the laundry, cleaning up the mess.

“I have been taking some work,” Gina said, while her wife watched her from the bed. “I get migraines though. I get nauseous every time I look outside. I can’t look at a computer screen for long before I’m dizzy.”

She was halted by the light. Red coruscations assaulting their shades. Claire bolted up and peered out while Gina stepped back.

She looked out on molten streets. The city rendering a volcanic river. Most of the cars had stopped in their tracks; people stood waist deep in lava, gaping at themselves. A woman stood beside the sunken handle of a stroller, holding her babe out of the fire, but both of them were fine. Claire stood, enthralled, breathless. She blinked, and it was all gone; the stupefied streets stopped in its many-wheeled tracks, but otherwise unchanged. The woman holding her sleeping child stood in the sidewalk and sobbed, and strangers moved about her, comforting her, and there were tears in Claire’s eyes, looking down from her window.

She had known—they had all known—that it wasn’t real, and yet it still brought everyone to a standstill, and Claire knew not just that that baby was alive and fine, but that she was alive too. She was filled suddenly with a tremendous, pounding lust. She wanted to melt into Gina’s body and for Gina to melt into her’s.

“It can’t go on like this,” Gina said.

“Can’t go on like what? There are people down there embracing in the streets. It’s…it’s—” But she couldn’t say beautiful. She wouldn’t allow herself to say it in Gina’s presence. “It’s mysterious. There’s something about it that’s not all horrific. It’s almost—well, I think it’s almost artistic. Is that possible?” Her entreaty for Gina to understand her sounded weak. She knew it did.

And there was Gina, kneeling in the spilled wine and looking up at her. “This sort of thing can’t be sustained, Claire. An end will come eventually, and that will be that, but this city keeps on ending and then retracting its end and ending again. We’re trapped in a loop, stuck on a repetition of our own obsessions, our own cinema dreams. I don’t understand how it’s happening, but I know this isn’t art, Claire. It’s pornography.”

“Pornography. The city’s making a porno? You’re not making any sense, Gina.” She pecked her head with grouped fingertips, a gesture she’d unconsciously lifted from the man she worked for.

But Gina was tired, frustrated. She wouldn’t be argued with, and she wouldn’t argue.

Claire hovered about, feeling that the moment had burst like a balloon. “I have to go to work.”

Gina was still bent over, carefully lifting the pieces of glass from the carpet one crystal at a time when Claire went out into the hall.

OUTSIDE IT HAD BEGUN to rain. Real rain. Independent of that other weather. People talked excitedly about molten streets and blood and plagues, and Claire found herself walking extra blocks, hoping something else would happen. She told herself she wouldn’t pause this time. The end of the world wouldn’t even slow her down.

All alone, she wanted to prove to Gina that the renderings wouldn’t hurt. But even though she had flirted with it, she couldn’t tell her partner the truth. How could she tell Gina that it had been Claire who had said on the street that the wave was beautiful? She—Claire—had come home late on purpose and stood longer than she had to holding the hand of a strange woman who needed Claire for just the balance. And Claire had said to this stranger that it was all beautiful. It was a thing she could tell anyone except for the woman she loved, and she couldn’t tell if that made it wrong or if it just made them different.

She was still within sight of her building when the sun: it went off like a broken bulb. Abrupt black stopped her in her tracks. Someone plowed into her, and she fell against the pavement. She heard the entire city scream then: cars, people, everything. It had all been blotted away.

The first headlights came on a moment later. Other lights: lights from buildings, from phones. A thousand separate acts of light from such perfect dark that it paralleled creation. She wasn’t the only one who’d fallen. She could see that now; people on their knees as if darkness were another, heavier gravity. Someone helped her to her feet.

“Gina?”

The stranger—a man—peered into her face, waving the blue light of his phone in her eyes. Claire looked up to New York City outlining itself with light. At the end of the block where she had come a taxi had run up against a fire hydrant and caused a geyser. A child was lying in the street. People stumbled out of an accordioned bus, spilled out of lit shops, peered from balconies. Someone broke a shop window and stepped through the aperture as if no one was watching.

Claire was fascinated with these aspects of destruction; she held them to her eyes like trinkets. What was she doing? Assimilating apocalypse? Soaking it into her skin like rain? She hadn’t felt like a phantom until…until now.

“We’ll all have to leave after this,” said the man who had helped her. Only his voice seemed dazed; his eyes were clear. “No one can stay after it goes and does something like this.”

“I know.”

“Here. You’re bleeding.” The man took off his tie and put it into her hands. He’d been on his way to work when it happened: the image of the sun vanishing.

Claire ran her thumb along the smooth fabric of the tie in her hand, looking at him.

“Your forehead,” he said. He pointed at his own head where her cut was.

She started to cry.

IT WAS GINA WHO found her. Gina, who had ventured out into that ersatz night to walk the streets with a little red flashlight like a kid in the woods. In truth, she hadn’t needed the flashlight. The city glowed, and they saw each other from some distance, Claire still sobbing.

The man was gone. He had a family and could see that she would be all right. Gina had found her wife standing alone among crash victims and emergency vehicles.

“Tell me you weren’t on that bus. Claire, tell me you weren’t in the street.”

“No—I mean, I wasn’t.”

“You’re hurt. Who gave you a tie?”

“A man.”

Gina held her. Claire knew that Gina was physically the stronger of the two, but she had forgotten somehow and was now reminded. “I’m sorry.” She was crying into Gina’s shoulder. “I made you come outside during one of them.”

“No,” softly, “no, no.”

“I made you come out looking for me.” Over Gina’s shoulder she saw pigeons. The birds hadn’t noticed; they were still pecking about the trash cans or the tiny squares of littered dirt that were allotted to the city’s trees. Still in oblivious sunlight.

New York City reflecting the curiosity of only its human inhabitants. And Claire had been entranced by a reflection of what humanity had projected onto the space around them, wandering spellbound through unexplained doom and disaster that never touched Earth. The realization terrified her now. It scared the hell out of her.

She held on to her partner. “They’re saying we’re going to have to leave,” Claire said. “Everyone’s going to have to leave until they can sort this out and figure out what’s going on.”

Gina cupped her cheek with a hand, eyes vivid. Her eyes bright with love as they sometimes were with tears. Gina’s love: it came fully down, touched all the way to the grass and pavement of Claire’s soul.

Claire opened her mouth to say something; she hadn’t yet discovered what. At which point they were caught blinking because the sun was back. When their eyes had adjusted, they looked up to find the streets teeming with riot police and army vans advancing toward them. Loudspeakers told everyone to do what they were all already planning to do. There was no turning back now. It was to be an evacuation. They should have left a long time ago, before they all realized that the city didn’t want them there any longer. If the element of mimesis in the crowded air could produce total darkness, what then was keeping it from manufacturing complete light, removing the need for visions from then on? The renderings weren’t harmless, they could add and subtract from humanity’s idea of reality, and, like a mind contemplating death, they were going a little further each time.

Gina took Claire’s hand, began to lead her back to their apartment where they would, she supposed, start packing. “I can take work with me. We’ll be all right,” said Gina.

Claire believed her because she’d had an irrevocable thought: “Maybe, when everyone retreats, the renderings will just stop.”

“What makes you think that?”

Claire shook her head. She didn’t know if she could tell Gina what she thought: that it was humanity, and not the city, that was the cause. “We haven’t been…we haven’t been…” This penchant for ellipsis: it was muting her, inserting a stammer into the lucidity of her thoughts. But perhaps all original ideas were difficult to unlimber for the first time. They stuck in the mouth as they had first in the mind. “We haven’t been…hopeful enough,” Claire forced herself to say.

Gina squeezed her hand. In love, in defiance. In amazement. The two of them making their way down the disaster-clad street together. For the last time in neither of them knew how long.

About the Author

Andrew Reichard works in the marketing department at a publishing house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His short fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in journals such as LampLight Magazine, Columbia Journal, Crack the Spine, Into the Void, The Airgonaut, and others.

BLESSINGS TO LEAVE THE WORLD IN RUIN

Chris Pearce

IN THE CATACOMBS BENEATH Eresh, the First City, a child lay dead, claimed by no one, his body given over to the priestesses of the Mistress Beneath the Earth. They had placed his corpse in the hall of the unhonored dead, leaving his skin unwashed and his face unpainted, where his body would be left to rot until he was nothing but bones to line the ossuary. Such is the fate of all who die without a name. Such is the fate of those who die alone and unclaimed.

But the boy was not alone. A woman stood among the bones, the hue of her skin grown sickly by time spent beneath the earth, shading it yellow like the parchment flesh of the bodies hidden there. Her veil was pale blue like the lips of a corpse, stains of dusk red and soil brown crawling their way up the sleeves of her dress, fabric worn thin and folded over itself again and again like a scroll fallen from its place and quickly gathered back up again. She walked to his body, warm hands on dead skin, and kneeled down next to him.

“Awaken,” she whispered into his ear, a hand over his heart as another wiped the blood from his mouth. The room was silent, her words echoing out through the hallway, but nothing else stirred in the chamber. She brought her head close to his chest, listening to an unbeating heart, and whispered again—”Awaken.” The boy’s eyes flickered open; they had clouded over from his death—all he could see—hear—feel—was darkness. The boy was still dead; no magic could change that, for the will of the Mistress is absolute.

“Child. My name is Ashta. Can you understand me?”

The boy’s mouth went wide, an empty scream, his lungs devoid of air. Ashta placed her hand upon his face and closed his lips for the dead have no words to speak. He tried to breathe but no air reached his lungs and he grasped at his throat, his fingers reaching through his neck and out again, no blood staining them as they did. He began to shake, his hands running up and down his body, trying to calm a chill that was not there when Ashta took his hands in hers and forced them down, waiting for him to stop; his gasping slowed, a second death rattle, and then he was silent.

“You are dead, child. They found your body in the streets, near the harlot’s quarter,” said Ashta, running her fingers across his neck; as she did, the boy felt a flash of pain, the memory of uncaring steel sliding across his throat. She lifted his head up by his chin, looking into his eyes; they were heaven gray, storm gray, the color of the banners that hung on the temple of the Emperor of the Sky. “Come with me. Serve me and live again. I can find your name. I can find your death,” said Ashta, her lips against his forehead, his head cradled in her arms as she placed her word beneath his tongue. She let go of him and he rose from the ground of his own will and she took his hand in hers and led him to the place between the bones that lined the walls, where the halls of the dead gave way to soil yet unoccupied. The earth closed in on them as they walked, growing so near that Ashta was forced to her knees, then lower still as the boy crawled behind her, until at last the tunnel gave way to black sky above. Ashta pulled him from the ground, lifting him up with ease as the weight of life had left his body before swaddling him in her robes and hurrying towards the alley that led back to her home.

Her manor stood apart from the others in the noble’s quarter; no guard stood at the gate, no fires burned to light the way, though when they approached the entrance Ashta placed her hand on a brazier and it lit aflame, the fire casting out its light wide enough to light the path through the garden to her home.

In the parlor sat two women wrapped in veils like Ashta’s, though theirs covered their faces completely. They were sitting next to each other on a divan, one’s face close to where the other’s ear would have been, when Ashta and the boy entered the room. They rushed over, their robes billowing from absent breezes as they dropped down to greet the boy, rubbing gloved hands across cold skin, wordlessly cooing to one another and to the boy. They lingered on his neck, and on the bruises newly born rising up from under his skin, on his temple and his arm and his chest. The boy did not flinch at their touch; their hands seemed to press inward against themselves when they caressed his skin.

The boy did not sleep. He would walk the halls of Ashta’s home while she worked, meeting with men who still breathed, reading the scrolls in her library and eventually falling asleep on one of the divans in her parlor. He lingered by the door to her chambers, looking through the veil; nothing stirred within. When he would finish looking through the rooms, he would return to the parlor and sit by the divan where Ashta slept and lean against it; he would close his eyes and mimic the slow breathe of sleep. Ashta would sometimes let her hand fall onto his head, and she would stroke his hair before she finally slumbered.

The boy was not alone in her manor. The veils of the ladies in waiting unwound and revealed nothing underneath, sand and dust and air until they spun themselves back again. The guards did not breath, and the red of their cloaks hid the red that still seeped from their wounds. Her cup bearer had skin like marble, as cold and as empty as stone and when she opened her mouth the boy could see the blood that Ashta had filled her with. And past the veil of her chamber, someone laid in her bed, unmoving and unbreathing.

The boy was not alone in her manor. But Ashta, it seemed, was.

At night she told them stories, for the dead have no stories to tell. She told them stories they had already heard, of how the Mistress Beneath the Earth and the Prince of the World had grown jealous of the Emperor of the Sky; and since they could not strike at him themselves, they sent biting flies and pestilent wind to torment his servants. The high priest’s pain grew so that he begged an acolyte to strike him dead. The acolyte, seeing how his master suffered, ended his life; the Emperor of the Sky, angered at how his servant had died, struck down the postulant, and declared his wrath would fall upon anyone who slew one of his priests.

She told them of the gods beneath the earth, beneath Hell itself, the Lamiae who had never known life so they sought to snuff out everything that did—Gorgo the Many, He-Who-Devours, the Conqueror Worm, and countless others, waiting to split the earth in half, to drag the living and the dead down with them into the deepest part of Hell and rule over them evermore. Only the priests of the Emperor of the Sky did not fear them, so great was their power. They reigned over so much of the world, why should they fear the dregs of the underworld? They had imprisoned the Lamiae beneath Hell with their magic—all but one, it was said, and they had hidden her name, destroying all record of it so that she could not be called upon to walk the earth again.

Ashta would take the boy with her when she went to the market, first anointing him with perfume and washing the gravedust from his skin, then dressing him clothing she cut and stitched from her own robes. The people in the streets would turn their heads as they walked by regardless, so they did not notice how the boy’s eyes stayed open, no matter how hot the wind blowed or how many flies crawled upon his face. Ashta would find a corner where the city guards were not making their rounds, and then she would sit against one of the walls and hold out a bowl. Occasionally, someone would walk by and drop a coin into it; sometimes, a merchant would come and chase her away, or fetch the guards, and then she and the boy would disappear into one of the alleys and beneath the streets. As the sun would begin to set, she would take the money she had earned and buy a little bit of food—and whatever she had left after that, she would find the merchants who sold books and scrolls and paper and ink and bargain with them for whatever scraps she could afford.

One day, in the market, while Ashta was speaking with a scroll merchant, trying to get him to part with a half burnt piece of paper, there came the sound of brazen horns, and every living person in the market was as silent as the boy. They all turned to see the soldiers marching past them, clad in armor like dragon’s scales with shields adorned with the spokes of broken wheels, heading to the city gate—and behind them, the sound of horns, the priests of the Emperor lifted high on their litres, announcing the blessing of God.

Ashta turned her head away as the sky priests’ procession advanced, shuffling the boy behind her as they approached. They wore the light of the sun on their brows; to even gaze upon them was to risk polluting them, the laity’s unclean thoughts like drops of oil in the water of life. They cast their blessings on the path the soldiers had followed, anointing it with holy water and coins taken from the Holy City of Selaphem. One of the priests, a lesser acolyte who was not yet too holy to gaze upon walked towards Ashta; she looked away regardless.

“The Emperor’s blessing,” said the priest, as he pressed a coin into Ashta’s begging bowl. “From Selaphem. Soon the city will fall, as the high priest has decreed.”

“Is he your son?” said the priest, looking down at the boy; Ashta took his head in her hand and drew his face close to her chest, averting his eyes from whatever holiness the acolyte might have possessed.

“If you take him to the temple, I will see if I can grant you a stipend,” said the acolyte. “We are all bound to the sins of this world. Even the greatest among us.”

Ashta said nothing; she waited until the priest turned his back and the sounds of the trumpets faded, and then she threw the coin onto the ground, crushing it into the dirt with her heel before taking the boy’s hand in hers and leading him from the street.

“In Selaphem,” she said, as she guided him back to her manor, “the dead are not buried. They drag their bodies into the desert, to be fed upon by vultures. All are nameless. All are forgotten. They have no honor; all are equal in death.”

Sometimes at night Ashta would go out and leave the boy behind in the manor; he would wait in the parlor, sitting in the cracked marble of the floor, waiting for her to reappear, the hours and days uncounted. When the lights of the braziers would leap to life, he would rise from the floor, pulling open the veil of the room to let her enter unimpeded—she was never alone when she returned from the empty nights, carrying bodies in her arms, her words embedded in them just like they were in the boy.

Ashta had two guards when the boy had arrived in her, their faces obscured by their helmets, only the tips of their beards giving hint as to who they had been before they served her. The new guards were stronger and their faces were smooth; they took the place of her first guards, who joined the ladies in waiting in the parlor. And soon there were more of them, two in every room, then four, then more, growing smaller with each set that she brought into her manor. One of them was a small as the boy, decked in armor of bronze that shone like the sun except for the mark of red stains that drizzled down from the center of the armor’s chest.

Ashta did not let visitors into her house. When messengers would come to her manor she would stand at the threshold, making sure they could not see past her into her home; whatever they asked for or demanded she would give to them, as long as they did not try to see past the doorway. But one day a messenger came and when Ashta read his missive she hurried to prepare her home for a visitor.

She painted over the boy’s wounds, covering his neck with chalk and flour and dressing him in a high collared shirt. The boy could barely feel the fabric on his skin but he could not feel the stones beneath his bare feet or the wind in the air either. All he could feel was Ashta’s hand, wrapped around his, and her words, lodged in his stomach. Ashta found a veil—the last one that she had not cut to pieces to make clothes for her servants or soiled crawling among the graves beneath the city—and wrapped herself in it, while her ladies in waiting worked to clean the parlor and her guards stood watch in front of her chamber; there were some places even this visitor would not be allowed to wander.

“Lady Ashta; so good to see you again,” said her guest—a merchant, wearing robes of purest white, fine cotton from before the field of Medige had burned. He took Ashta’s hands in his and pressed them against his forehead, before stepping pass the threshold into her parlor. “Such rumors I had heard. I am glad to see that they were untrue.”

“Of course not,” said Ashta, her face stone until he sat upon one of her divans and looked back up at her. She sat on the divan across from him, and took the tea her lady in waiting offered her, who then bowed to her and the merchant before fleeing from the room to her companion. The boy followed after the lady; she had forgotten to offer the merchant tea, so he took the pot from her and scurried back into the parlor. “So you have obtained the book?”

“I have,” he smiled, accepting the drink from the boy; he did not leave the room but backed into the corner, watching the man as he spoke with Ashta. “A strange book for a widow to seek,” he continued, sipping the tea. “People would wonder, if they knew. Idle tongues, Lady Ashta, idle tongues. I had heard that you were seeking unsavory books—”

“And you were disappointed that I did not come to you first?” said Ashta; the merchant laughed, nearly dropping his teacup, and one of the guards shifted and stepped towards them; Ashta looked up at him and he stepped back, straightening up against the wall before Ashta continued the conversation.

“I will pay whatever is necessary, of course,” she said, looking over to the boy and nodding her head. He disappeared into her bedchamber, returning with a sword inlaid with precious metals. Its blade was dulled from some long ago battle but the filigree of gold and copper still shone beneath the iron like veins under the skin. The merchant’s eyes went wide as he took the sword from the boy, weighing it beneath his hands as if it were a precious stone.

“I am surprised you managed to recover it; and in such good condition,” said the merchant as he held the sword up to the light; the gold was stained with dark copper though the merchant did not notice this flaw. He ran his thumb along the length of the blade; it still drew blood despite the dullness of its edge.

“A pearl of great price,” smiled Ashta. “I believe this will be payment enough for everything I have asked?”

“Of course, my lady,” he said as he strapped the sword to his belt. From the folds of his robe he produced a scroll; its pages were pages were black and crumbled at his touch, leaving smears like ash on his hands; Ashta held her breath as he handed it to her, its outer shell breaking away and revealing white flesh beneath.

Ashta waited until the merchant had left to unfurl the scroll, breaking away the last of its black skin to reach the words inside it. The boy could not read but he watched as Ashta mouthed the words written on the front of the scroll: “The Book of the Destructions of the Dead.” He looked up at Ashta watching as she read, her face as unmoving as his was save for the tears streaming down her face. And then she started to laugh, holding the scroll close to her heart before she hurried to her chambers, alone.

That night, she spoke to him of the Lamiae again. She told him of the greatest of their number, She-Who-Mourns, the demon who wrapped her hair between the stars, a creature of a thousand mouths and a thousand tongues, one for every soul living and dead that still walked on the earth. Alone among her fellows She-Who-Mourns had not been imprisoned beneath Hell. Alone her power could be felt among mortals, snatching breath from children and the old alike. The magic that could call her had been forbidden; the priests of the Emperor and the Mistress and the Prince had forbid it, sending armies to destroy the Library of the Archons, where all the written words of the world had once been held. The fire had burned for seven days, and the rain was stained black with ink and the priests of the Emperor declared the day holy for at last the Lamiae had truly been defeated.

Ashta’s manor, once nearly empty, had grown crowded; no longer could the boy idle by the divan, feigning slumber under Ashta’s hand. She had many tasks for him—sharpening weapons and polishing armor, whittling arrows and scribing black marks into the skin of the dead. On the forehead of each of the soldiers, he and the handmaidens and Ashta herself wrote a single word: Ubissa.

A sound like thunder rang in the sky above Eresh. In the temple of the Emperor of the Sky the high priest of the city sounded the horn of war; the city’s armies would meet on the fields of salt; soon, Selaphem would fall and the plain of Medige would be fertile once again—when it was watered with the blood of all the soldiers and citizens of the Holy City. Soon.

“It is time,” Ashta said to the boy, taking his hand in hers. “My children will walk and claim what is theirs. Take my hand; we are going to the temple.”

The dead spilled out from her manor like larva from the corpse of a mother insect, falling into the street, a cold legion in the warm city night.

As her soldiers fanned out into the city, Ashta followed after them, heading to wherever the screams did not die out. When she came upon survivors who had not yet found safety she would tend to their wounds, making sure that they would be able to make it to the city gates and spread word of the invasion, whispering to them a single name as they went: “Ubissa.”

Even her cupbearer and her ladies-in-waiting followed her into the city, though they bore no arms and had no memories of the arts of war from their lives. Her ladies unwrapped their veils, revealing nothing underneath, winding their way in the air until they came to rest around the necks of whoever they found, choking them and cooing as they died. Her cupbearer stayed close to her; when blades fell across her flesh it was as if they were launched again unfeeling stone. The cupbearer opened her mouth as if to laugh whenever she was struck, blood spilling out as she did. Ashta left her as she choked the life from a man who was running from the manor where her body had been found, left bleeding in the street, her tongue cut out.

And even though the throng of the city was pushing itself towards the gates Ashta continued onwards, towards the temple of the Emperor of the Sky. There were still guards at the temple gate, yet none had yet sought refuge in the most holy of places. She took the boy in her arms and smeared dirt on her face before approaching.

“This is holy ground,” said the guard. “Go. Avert your eyes and go.”

“Please,” said Ashta, holding up the boy. “Look at his eyes. You must let us in. The dead walk the streets and slay the living.”

“Then you should flee with the rest,” said the guard, again turning his back on Ashta.

“Something is coming. Something even worse than the dead. Please. Holy blood should not be spilled this way,” said Ashta, looking to the ground, still holding up the boy.

“Open the gate,” said the guard. “We will all die anyways. Better for them to die in here than on the streets.”

“There is something coming,” said Ashta, feigning shortness of breath as she rushed into the temple. “Her name is written on the dead. Ubissa, She-Who-Mourns. The dead have summoned her. Look to the sky.”

There was a sound not quite like thunder, and the moon began to crack; the sky pushed outwards against itself, the stars falling off one by one, shaken loose as the night was torn out against itself like quicksilver, dividing against itself and reforming again and again, stretching out into coils that reached down towards the city.

As the guards stared up at the sky, Ashta slipped away from them, into the temple itself. The high priest would be waiting in the uppermost chamber, and she had an appointment to make with him.

“Lady Ashta,” said the high priest as she entered his chamber, his fingers gripped tightly around his crosier, shining with light stolen from the sun and gold from the streets of conquered cities. He stared at her with ash gray eyes, and she pulled away her veil, supplicating herself in his vision. “So. The rumors were true. I had thought better of the widows of my city.”

“All of them, I’m afraid,” she said, stepping forward, the child hiding behind her. “And perhaps a few more.”

“The dead that walk the street. They are yours?”

“They are not,” said Ashta, smiling as she stepped towards the high priest. “I am neither the ruler of this city nor the avatar of the Mistress Beneath the Earth.”

“Do you think that you will overthrow me? Make yourself Empress Above the Earth? My soldiers will defeat your abominations soon enough.”

“They will,” said Ashta. “The dead are weak, in the end. They yearn to return to their graves. To the cold embrace of mother earth. There is nothing to fear of the dead. And soon there will be no one left in your city to fear.”

Ashta walked to the edge of the room and stood at the threshold, looking at the sky as it fell apart.

“Ubissa,” she whispered, staring down at the city below them. “Ubissa.”

Above them and all around them, all the way to the dome of the world the sky was alive, the darkness breaking apart into a mass like long worms bursting forth from a corpse and falling down onto Eresh, tracing veins on city streets, invading homes and temples and graves. The dead were silent; the living screamed. A thousand mouths opened across the heavens, moaning in pain as Ubissa uncoiled herself across the city.

The high priest was silent; he opened his mouth to speak but no words came. He stood from his throne and raised his crosier in the air before bringing it down on Ashta, again and again; she crumpled like paper as the blows fell upon her but made no attempt to stop him.

“The Emperor of Heaven will strike you down for what you have done. He will turn your body to salt and scatter it to the four winds. Your name will be burned, a forgotten curse, recalled only in whispers as the demoness who brought ruin to the First City. Or perhaps not even that. The Mistress Beneath the Earth will strike your name from the record of the living and the dead. You will be forgotten. You will be even less than the dead.”

He raised his staff above his head, ready to bring it down upon her in one final blow when the boy set upon the priest, his mouth open wide, a silent scream, and the priest gripped his crosier in both hands, ready to knock the child aside. The boy did not even try to hide his eyes—the dead care not for the holiness of the living—and when the priest saw them, sky gray, heaven gray, he stayed his hand.

“You bring this sin in to my house? To try and shame me? To serve as your blade?” he said, looking back to Ashta.

“No,” she said, pushing herself up from the ground. “I will not kill you. And you are beyond shame. But you will die. Or the city will. And when Ubissa,” answered Ashta—as she spoke the name of She-Who-Mourns, the temple shuddered against itself, moaning as Ubissa’s hair caressed against it. “And when Ubissa has finished feasting on the bodies of the living and the dead here, she will leave the city’s corpse and find a new home. And another. At last, Selaphem’s walls will fall. At last, you shall have your victory.”

The high priest did not answer her; he let his staff fall from his hands and he averted his eyes from her face. Ashta smiled as he turned from her, watching as he stepped out of the antechamber, dousing the braziers as he did, filling the room with black smoke. He looked up at the black sky, alive and hungry, and dropped to his knees in supplication, mouthing a prayer to the Emperor of the Sky. Ubissa reached down to him, a single black coil forcing itself into the priest’s mouth, under his skin, into his veins and arteries and deeper still, his heart polluted with Ubissa, his skin breaking apart like charcoal as she devoured him. But as the priest fell apart the coils of Ubissa’s hair began to shudder before snapping like the string of a lyre that had been strung too tightly and the darkness stopped, each strand of Ubissa pulled apart from the other even as they fell to the earth, burying the ruins of the half dead city in her corpse. The moon and the stars hung in their rightful places again; the sky did not writhe—the night was empty. Ashta could see that her manor no longer blazed; she did not hear the sound of the dead fighting against the living, just the distant wailing of those who had managed to reach the city’s walls.

She felt something tugging at her dress, and saw the boy looking up at her, his gray eyes as empty as when she had taken him from the catacombs. She leaned over to him, kissing him on the forehead and stroking his hair, wiping away the makeup that had hidden his injuries.

“You have your death,” she said, whispering in the boy’s ear. “You have your name. I am sorry that he would not give it to you.”

The boy looked up at her, her word dislodging itself from his throat, the blood from his neck flowing anew, the strength that let his unbeating heart drive his corpse vanishing; his corpse fell to the ground, as lifeless as the day he had been placed in the halls of the unhonored dead. Ashta knelt onto the ground, taking his body in her arms and cradling him to her chest as she left the temple behind her. She stepped from the chamber, feeling the rain of Ubissa’s hair falling upon her skin; it felt like, somehow, like the last touch of her husband’s hand—and nothing at all. A few soldiers had not yet abandoned their posts; they dropped their weapons as Ubissa gave them one last caress before she was blown away in a midnight breeze. Ashta cleared her throat, and one of the men turned around to face her.

“Your holiness,” he gasped, dropping to his knees, averting his gaze from Ashta. “You have saved us.”

“Rise,” said Ashta, her fingertips drawing the the soldier up, forcing his eyes to meet her face. “We have work to do. Send word to Selaphem. And come with me. We have bodies to bury.”

About the Author

Chris Pearce is an author of horror and fantasy fiction living in the central United States. He has been previously published in Tales from the Lake, Werewolves Vs, Sanitarium and Equal Opportunity Madness. You can find him online on twitter @chrispearc1.

THE INFINITE CLUBHOUSE

Andrew Kozma

WE ONLY TRULY LIVED while we were in the infinite clubhouse. In our parents’ homes, at school, in the park, we were the kids we were supposed to be, tiny beings without any responsibility, without any real agency of our own. Our parents loved us and cared for us, but they also lived through us, were proud of us because we represented what was good in them. We were the tiny homunculi they’d formed from their very flesh and we had no wills of our own that couldn’t be seen as extensions of their own desires.

But in the clubhouse we were the self-born gods of our own creation. The air we breathed was as crisp as the skin of an apple. We moved like dancers, every step intentional, our movements beautiful even when we tripped and fell laughing to the ground to bust a lip or sprain a hand.

Harry was the one who found the clubhouse. During a game of Hide-and-Seek he crawled into the dog house behind the abandoned tattoo parlor and never came out, not even after we called ollie-ollie-oxen-free. I’d seen him enter the dog house, but it was clearly only big enough for one person, and, besides, I didn’t want to try and fit in there with him, because no one wants to be that close to the person they have a crush on. And when it was getting dark and the game had been over for what seemed like forever, I led everyone to that dog house and we stood outside it awkwardly, none of us willing to look inside.

Because it was dark beyond the entrance, black as sun-melted tar puddling in the street. And though the dog house was narrow and shallow, not even deep enough to stretch a leg into without having to bend at the knee, we hesitated.

“Harry?” we called out. “Come on out, the game’s over?”

“You’ve won,” Joe said, but we all knew he’d tag Harry as soon as he stuck his head out and claim victory for himself, rules be damned.

“I’m going home,” Sven whined. He took a few steps away, but when no one joined him, Sven scooted back to the rest of us.

The air was turning colder. We were dressed for running around in the sun, not standing around under the half-eaten moon. An owl hooted nearby. In the distance, the yips and barks of a pack of feral dogs. Silence spilled from the dog house, sticky and slow as syrup.

No one else was going to, so I knelt in the mix of dirt and grass before the dog house, already hearing my mom’s voice berating me for getting my clothes stained. Up close, the darkness inside was even more palpable, the shadows so thick I could grab hold of them and yank them out into the dying light.

I whispered “Harry?” so quietly I couldn’t even hear my own voice. I couldn’t see the back wall of the dog house, so close to me now I should be able to reach through the tiny doorway and touch it. There was nothing inside that house. I don’t mean it was empty. There was simply nothing there.

But Harry had gone in.

Without giving myself time to think, or for the others to talk me out of it, I darted inside.

Eyes full of light. Eyes full of darkness.

I was in a hallway without windows, walking on what felt like a damp sponge, but soon my footsteps thudded on a wooden floor. It was an exact reproduction of the floor in my house, the same pale wood, the same width and length of the slats. The lights which hovered in the air near the ceiling like candle flames without candles, now became light bulbs, softened by opaque white glass.

“Harry?”

As soon as I spoke his name, I heard voices. A door opened ahead of me in the wall. I smelled fresh dirt and old dog. A breeze drifted past, making the wets spots on my jeans cold as ice. I peeked around the door to see Harry, and was so relieved I rushed into the room and wrapped him in a hug, before self-consciousness forced me to put some space between us.

“What are you doing here?” was his first question. “How did you find me?” his next.

He looked a strange combination of startled and bored, as though he been here so long he’d lost the ability to be afraid or awed or curious, his senses stunned into submission. I started to answer, but then saw what was before him, what was in-between us, what I’d squished unknowingly in my eagerness to hug him.

It was a pink thing about half our height, misshapen and lumpy like a pig standing on its hind legs. The imprint of my leg was in its side, its body dented like Play-Doh. One of Harry’s hands rested on the top of it, patiently thumbing an ear into shape. He’d made a sculpture out of some pink clay, just like we did last year in school, most of what we’d made being as shapeless and ugly as this. It didn’t at all look realistic, not like the statues we saw at the MFAH, but there was something lifelike about it. And then it breathed. I jerked back with a shriek.

“Harry?” I asked. The pink pig-thing gazed at me with wide, mismatched eyes. “What is that?”

“It’s you,” he admitted, sheepishly. “But I don’t need it anymore now that you’re here.”

Harry lifted his hand from it and the pig-thing dissolved like cotton candy in the rain, the eyes, the arms, its stomach collapsing inward until it vanished into the floor, not even a stain to mark where it had stood.

“Me?” I backed up through the door—but the door I’d come through was gone. I was trapped in this room with Harry, a room no bigger than my bedroom and filled with random junk. A rocking chair like my grandmother’s with a broken arm. A tall, full-length mirror which didn’t show our reflections. A pile of broken dolls, their original plastic heads replaced with furred animal heads.

I thought of the voices, how if anyone else was here, the room would feel like a closet. “Who were you talking to?”

“No one,” Harry said, but his eyes glanced to where the pink pig-thing had been. “Want to play a game?”

“Sure,” I said, but all I wanted was to get out of there, wherever we were. There was no door, and there were no windows. The off-white walls looked porous, like the rocks Ms. Beasley had brought into science class which she dissolved in a beaker of weak acid. The floor was pink and slightly sticky, the same color as the creature Harry had made.

Harry knelt down and carved his hands into the floor as though it were strawberry ice cream left out on the kitchen counter to soften, but when he pulled the hunk of floor up he was holding a checkers set. The delicate wooden board was thickly-painted with red and black squares, and the pieces were made of clay, their faces decorated with thin, wispy vines.

All of my fear vanished in that moment.

“How did you do that?”

Harry set the board between us without answering. “Look, Mel, do you want to play or not?”

This stubbornness of Harry’s is what attracted me to him, the sense of mystery he created simply by not answering a question, his thoughts tightly locked inside his skull. Even when he acted like a jerk, I figured there were reasons for his actions he wasn’t giving, and if he gave them I’d surely understand.

And right then, I didn’t care that he wasn’t answering my question, I was simply amazed. Harry had created something from nothing. We played checkers, and I didn’t worry about being trapped in a room without doors or windows because I was confident Harry would explain everything. If he didn’t seem worried, why should I be?

And when the others entered the room in ways I didn’t understand, appearing beside the mirror or suddenly sitting next to us as I kinged my pieces again and again, I wasn’t startled. Like me, they fell into the rhythm of the clubhouse, ripping up more of the spongy floor and making things with it. A pogo stick which Saari used even though there was barely enough room at first. A remote control helicopter Tomaso set hovering over his shoulder. A handheld telescope Nance swore showed the night sky so clearly she could see the tiny American flag on the moon, even without a window to look through.

All the things we created filled the room around us, but the room grew bigger, too, the ceiling taller, until there were two rooms, then three, then five. Bridgette carved steps into the wall with a plastic shovel until she could walk all the way to a second floor which hadn’t existed until she got there.

Sven was the first to say it was late and he was going home. Though he’d been watching a TV for hours and hours, programs we never knew existed painting his face with the brightest of colors, tears collected at the corners of his eyes.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“Have some food,” we said, offering him steaming burgers, buttered corn, and mashed potatoes.

“I miss my mom,” he said, and we could feel it in our chests, too, our families tugging on us like rubber bands we’d stretched to the limit, and if we stretched a little farther, the bands would break.

Without even looking at the rest of us, Sven turned to the wall, opened a door. Through that door was blackness, the same nothing the dog house had been full of. Just like that, Sven walked through and was gone.

Rodolfo and Joe followed him, and I hurried after, too, but not before hearing Harry’s plaintive, “Guys, come on.”

Then I was crawling out of the dog house, my hands and legs covered in grass stains and mud, my body smelling entirely of dog. In the cool, humid night air, we waited until the rest had emerged from the dog house, not saying a word to each other. With the quietest of goodbyes we ran to our homes. Had we been out too late? Had our parents called the police to report us missing like they did when our older brothers and sisters snuck out to meet up with their girlfriends and boyfriends? But we arrived home to barely-cooled dinners, to indulgent parents who accepted our minor lateness without comment except to ask if we’d had fun.

Inside the clubhouse, hours and hours had passed. In the world, only minutes.

The next day we met up at the dog house right after breakfast. Harry crawled in and we followed him. The clubhouse blossomed into being exactly as we’d left it. The apple pie Rodolfo made last night bled steam as Saari cut herself a piece. The robots Bridgette built rested against the wall like people I’d seen in war movies, waiting for a firing squad.

“Did you line them up like that?” I asked her.

“I must have,” she said, unconcerned.

We built more rooms. One with books for walls, ceiling, and floor. One an indoor pool as wide an ocean, filled with glowing coral and brightly-colored fish. One that turned like a carousel, pressing us against the walls as flowers made of heat and light bloomed in the center, and no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t touch them. Anything we could imagine, we created inside the clubhouse’s walls.

All that summer and all that next school year we hung out at the clubhouse. We moved the dog house from the yard where we’d found it to a tree in the woods behind our houses because we were afraid someone would mistake it for abandoned trash or adopt it for their own dog. One especially hot day, we threw the dog house into Joe’s pool, his parents gone for the weekend, and swam down to enter the clubhouse underwater.

Sven was the first one who tried to take something out of the clubhouse, a cat he’d pulled from the ceiling. It was the first live thing any of us had made—I didn’t count the strange creature Harry had made before I’d entered—and Sven wanted it outside with him in the real world. His older sister had left to go to college, and his parents were fighting all the time, and that cat was the only constant he had, the only thing that loved him.

But when he emerged from the clubhouse, what was in his arms was wet and slimy and stank of death. It pulsed a few times like it was trying to meow before it came apart in his hands and splattered over his legs and shoes, darkening the bright grass of his parents’ lawn. For days that spot smelled like an uncleaned garbage disposal. The grass died. The worms crawled up through the murky soil to die, dry and crusty as though burnt by the sun.

Sven made a new cat in the clubhouse, but it wasn’t the same.

We built a palace in the clubhouse, a maze to anyone who didn’t help build it, impenetrable almost even to us. But we knew we could leave whenever we wanted, no matter where we were inside, our desire creating the door to the black in-between. We’d step through and then we were free.

Free and dead. Oh, we didn’t melt like Sven’s poor cat, but reality lost its flavor. There was no amazement at the way light poured over the ground like honey right before sunset. When Saari’s parents brought home a new baby girl, Saari didn’t want to talk about it. She wouldn’t even tell us its name. My dad made chicken and sausage gumbo that tasted like clay. I dumped most of it into a planter, not willing to brave the garbage disposal which now smelled like Sven’s dead cat.

Rodolfo was the only one worried about this.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he said, dressed in clothes he’d made himself, a blinding white suit with a trim of real gold. He faced a tall mirror which made him look like some other person, older and paler with a nose like doorstop. I wasn’t sure if it was something he’d done to the mirror or something the mirror had done to him.

“What could you possibly want that we don’t have?” Joe asked with a sneer.

“I miss being bored,” Rodolfo said. Deep in my stomach I felt a similar hollowness, but I shoved it back down. Out in the real world my parents were threatening to move to Colorado because my older sister was hanging out with kids they didn’t like and they believed the mountain air would do us good.

I left him staring into that mirror, but his words haunted me. We shouldn’t be here. We didn’t know where here was. We named it the infinite clubhouse as though this place was ours to name, but we didn’t create it. Who did? And when were they coming back?

These questions led me to wonder why no one had ever built downwards. Bridgette had built upwards until there were ten high-ceilinged stories, and yet there were no stairs down from that first room Harry’d found. I reached down into the floor and created a wooden trapdoor with a large brass ring at one end. A cold blast of stale air hit me in the face when I pulled it open. Below me was a shaft of damp, weathered stone, descending down and down into oblivion.

One step forward and I’d fall forever. I was tempted. Not just because of the threat of moving to Colorado, but because something about that cold, dank pit called to me, as though a faint voice rose up from it that I could only just barely hear, and if I fell in I’d understand exactly what it was trying to tell me.

I dropped the trapdoor with a heavy thud. It disappeared smoothly into the floor.

Right then, something changed for me as it had changed for Rodolfo. I realized I didn’t actually like Harry, and that I’d never really liked him, just who I wanted him to be. All of us, one by one, grew disenchanted with the clubhouse, stories spreading among us about what turned each of our hearts. Joe showed up with a scar crossing across both of his eyes, like his skin had grown over them and he’d had to cut his eyes free. Nance discovered a room with a hundred copies of herself, each mimicking her voice and movements exactly until she nearly forgot who the real her was. We stopped laughing, stopped smiling, stopped talking with each other, until each time we entered the clubhouse we immediately went our separate ways. Our time at the clubhouse dwindled from every day to once a week, to once a month, and then never.

Before the clubhouse, all of us had been woven into each other’s lives like extra siblings. We’d talked constantly at school and on the phone and online. But when we stopped going to the clubhouse, we stopped, just stopped. My family never moved to Colorado, but I made new friends anyway, just as if we had moved. On days when I was alone or bored or depressed, I tried finding the clubhouse again on my own, but it had vanished from the usual spaces, not in the forest, not hiding behind the bushes in the park, not at the bottom of a pool.

Months after the last time I’d visited the infinite clubhouse, my parents called me down from my room to watch something on the local evening news.

“Isn’t that your friend?” my mom asked, pointing at a picture of Harry. Below his smiling face blared a title: MISSING CHILD.

“No,” I said, truthfully. “I don’t know him.”

I’d forgotten him, just like I’d forgotten the rest of my once-friends, their names and faces flaking away from my life like half-remembered dreams. On the way up the stairs I smelled, for just a second, rotting meat.

About the Author

Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Escape Pod, Interzone and Daily Science Fiction. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.

RELICS OF EMPIRE

By D. A. D’Amico

“THEY’RE NOT BUYING IT.”

Prathra Das stepped off the transmission plate, tugging at the stiff scarlet collar of her imperial uniform. It stunk. The black fabric reeked of mold and cat piss, and it probably hadn’t been cleaned in more than a decade.

“According to the records, it’s worked half a dozen times in the last two centuries.” Anjos Ing stood just outside the transmitter’s field of view, a holograph of their home system rotating above a very worn scrap of smartpaper in his hands. Several starships traced an arc from the outer edge inward towards the small greyish second planet. “Maybe it’s your delivery.”

“Then maybe you should put on this stinking rag and show me how it’s done.”

Prathra pushed through the bright imperial banners and into the bare cement bunker beyond. Her hands shook as she tossed her cap onto a large yellow-plastic crate and ran her fingers across her newly shaven head. She didn’t need this. She should be back at her parent’s farm. There was a harvest to bring in, and animals that required tending.

Anjos ignored her outburst, still fixated on the approaching ships. “It has to be you, Prathra. You look the most like the soldiers who used to run this place.”

Prathra sighed, collapsing onto the crate. She picked up one of the disk-shaped transponders resting in heaps around the bunker, and slid it across the floor. It bumped two others before coming to rest beside the door to the old imperial hanger.

“I wish these weren’t just electronic nametags.”

Each of the ancient devices had the name of an imperial vessel etched across its polished silver surface. In space, the transponders would advertise a ship’s class and location, but they were merely scrap sitting in the crates scattered throughout the old station’s ruins.

“We all wish things were different.” Anjos reached up to scratch at the pale peach fuzz stubble of his beard. He’d been trying to grow it since before he moved away, but the scruffy irregular patches looked like a poorly mowed field. “But we only have one working ship left. That’s why we need you to convince those vessels the empire still exists, and that it has a strong presence here.”

“They aren’t going to stop just because someone in an old uniform tells them to.”

“They have to, and you’ve got to make them believe it.” Anjos rested a hand on her shoulder. Prathra could feel his fingers trembling. He was frightened too.

She felt guilty for snapping at him. They’d been close as children, playing in and around the imperial storage buildings together. Nobody knew more about the old technology than he did. He could even pilot their one spacecraft, but they’d lost touch after their adulthood tests the previous year, Anjos moving to the city while Prathra remained on her parent’s farm.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Just follow the script, and they’ll be gone before you know it.”

Prathra hadn’t been born the last time invaders had come to her world, but she found it hard to believe empty threats could deflect starships. “Do I have a choice?”

“No. It has to be you.”

She stood, pulling her cap back on. The sooner she started, the quicker she could get out of this stinking uniform.

“It might have worked in the past, but the galactic empire hasn’t been heard from for centuries. We can’t keep using ghosts to fight our battles.”

THE STARSHIP WAS OLD. Chipped plastic panels lined cramped stations where gruff men hunched over exposed circuitry. A rudimentary three-dimensional grid glowed beside a slab-like command chair, its blocky images similar to the more elegant star maps Prathra had access to. Transponder signals showed the seven ships as dots, with larger circles indicating planetary orbits. They’d passed the outer planet already, headed sunward.

“This system once housed an imperial storage depot. I want access to it.” The man sitting in the command chair wouldn’t have appeared out of place on an imperial starship. He had the high cheekbones and dark square features the old propaganda favored, but with none of the tempered wisdom those images evoked. He was all passion and rage, a coiled snake waiting to strike.

“What you want, commander, is irrelevant.” Prathra stood with her hands behind her back, her head held high in a pose of strength and superiority, but she trembled inside. She tried to stick to the script Anjos had given her, but this man was too direct. He wouldn’t play along.

“I need—”

“Your needs are as irrelevant as your wants.” She cut him off, something she’d never do had they met in person. “This is an imperial facility, and we do not take orders from pirates.”

“Good. Be tough.” Anjos whispered from behind the curtain. “Let him know you have all the power.”

If that were true, then why was she shaking? She felt out of place, off balance and out of her league. She folded her hands behind her back, squeezing them so tight her fingers went numb.

The man on the starship laughed, loud and confident. “We’re not pirates. This fleet represents a coalition of four star systems, our own little empire.”

“I would be more impressed if I thought your ships were capable of reaching four systems.” She snorted, trying her best to look bored. “You will break off. You will leave this system, and you will not return. You have one standard day to comply.”

The commander jumped to his feet, anger coloring his features. “I’m through speaking with lackeys. Get me someone in charge, girl.”

Prathra turned her back to him, her voice a chuckling whisper. “Frankly, nobody thought you important enough to warrant anyone in charge.”

“I CAN’T DO THIS.” Prathra’s legs shook. She stepped off the transmission plate. The inside of the starship vanished, and she staggered out of the fake imperial communications room.

Anjos followed close behind. “You did fine. You’re a natural.”

“He’s going to slip me up, and they’ll know for sure I’m a fraud.” She’d never been under so much stress, and it was chewing her up inside. Anjos should have been the one to speak for the community. He knew the most about the empire.

“Come on. We’ll take a break.” Anjos slipped an arm around her shoulder. They walked together through long deserted hallways, still spotless after hundreds of years of disuse, serviced by machines Prathra had never seen and couldn’t fully understand.

Much of what the galactic empire had kept here was still in these buildings, still sitting in bunkers deep underground, but the men and women who’d watched over it all had long since shipped out or assimilated into the local population. Only shadows remained.

THE CRISP FEEL OF chill air, and the familiar scents of hay and manure followed Prathra as she adjusted her cap and pushed into the communications room. Violet lights blinked from complex devices arrayed behind the transmission plate. A mockup of a sentinel drone sat in the corner like a fat spider, and banners emblazoned with the empire’s triple halo design hid bland cement walls.

“They’ve had time to worry.” Anjos ducked behind a black and crimson pennant, taking up position out of sight in a small alcove. “Push them and they’ll run.”

Prathra took a deep breath, trying to steady her shaking hands. “You better be right.”

She stepped onto the transmitter. The bridge of the lead starship appeared, dimly lit, its atmosphere smoky with an almost greasy appearance. One of the walls had been removed, and two crewmen barked in low grumbles as they struggled to reroute a bundle of faintly glowing wires.

“Pirate commander. It has been one standard day, and you still continue into this star system. You will comply with our directives. Break off. Now.”

The commander stood with his back to Prathra, his stance loose, unconcerned.

“No.”

“Excuse me?” Prathra stumbled over the words. She hadn’t expected such a blunt refusal.

He turned to face her, a sly look on his otherwise handsome features. “Where is your fleet? I see no signs of activity in this system, no deterrents. How will you stop me?”

Prathra didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t prepared for this. Threats of imperial retribution had kept her world safe for ten generations, but intimidation was their only deterrent. They’d relied solely on deception. There was nothing to back that up.

The commander raised an eyebrow. “Well...”

“That’s classified.” Anjos whispered from hiding. “Give them another ultimatum.”

Prathra swallowed. The room seemed suddenly hot, the air too thin to breathe. “That information is classified.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.” Anger colored her cheeks. She wasn’t handling this well. “You will adjust your course and leave this system.”

“The empire abandoned this part of the galaxy a long time ago. You’re bluffing.”

“Some insignificant systems may have been overlooked in the past couple of hundred years, but I assure you—”

“Enough!” His voice seemed to vibrate through her feet, although he stood millions of kilometers away. Prathra struggled to keep from jumping off the transmission plate.

She turned, her whispered voice hissing against the curtain. “I can’t do this.”

“Be strong.” Anjos snapped. “Don’t let him throw you off. Remember, you’re supposed to represent the galactic empire. You’re in charge. Act like it, because we’re all depending on you.”

Prathra took a deep breath, and spun to face the commander. “You will break off before your next orbital intersection. You will leave this system. You will not return. If you don’t comply with these orders, your safety cannot be guaranteed.”

The starship commander sighed. He dropped himself into his command chair, his features relaxed, almost amused.

“This ruse won’t work.”

Prathra started to speak, but he raised a hand to stop her.

“Give me what I want, or your safety can’t be guaranteed.

SHE SEVERED THE CONNECTION, falling heavily to the floor beside the transmission plate. Tears beaded her eyes. She could hardly breathe. She’d failed. The invaders could see right through her, and her bluffs wouldn’t be enough to stop them.

Anjos knelt beside her. He looked ghostly pale, puffed red lines rimming his small brown eyes. “It’s not your fault.”

He offered her a hand. Prathra slapped it away, climbing to her feet. Frustration had turned to anger. “I told you from the start I couldn’t do this.”

“If I thought that, I’d never have let them choose you.” Anjos stood, brushing off his finely creased black pants. He looked hurt. “You’re stronger than you think, Prathra.”

“Really? Tell it to the man on that ship!”

She spun, storming past the moldy imperial flags and out of the small room. Her first thought was to run. She felt trapped. The starship commander could see right through her, and it meant disaster for her home and for everything she loved.

The wide doors to the imperial hanger hung slightly open, the darkness within like the entrance to a crypt. She slid inside. Brilliant violet light exploded, momentarily blinding her before dimming to reveal a cavernous chamber filled with crates, heaps of twisted metal and debris, and a single starship.

She stepped over a transponder disk as she approached the craft. The ship’s dull silver hull seemed to shimmer, the inverted V of its lower fuselage glowing faintly in colors just at the edge of her vision.

She’d played in here as a child, sliding transponder disks across a grid drawn on the polished floor. They’d pretend the disks were ships and try to knock each other’s out of place. It hadn’t been too long ago, but it seemed like an eternity. Now, it all seemed lost.

“THE CAPTAIN WOULDN’T TALK to anyone else.” Anjos stepped quietly beside her. He reached up, rubbing his fingers over the starship’s hull. The slick metal flexed as if it were a living thing. “He insists on speaking only with you.”

Prathra felt the knot in her stomach tighten.

“Would it be so bad if we let them land, let them take what they want? We’re not using any of it.”

Anjos sighed. He looked worn out, the stress wearing him down. “This place was once... I don’t want to say important, but strategic. It was easy to reach from other points in the galaxy, and that hasn’t changed. If invaders land, they won’t just take. They’ll stay. They’ll build their own world right over this one, and they won’t care about our lives at all.”

Prathra slammed her fist into the ship. Its skin absorbed her blow, making her feel as if she’d punched a warm bag of sand. If only they had access to more of this technology.

“What about this ship? Can we use it?”

“I doubt our invaders would be intimidated.” Anjos strode to the ship’s docking iris, his eyes never leaving the glassy surface. “We’d be in trouble the moment they pinged our transponder signal.”

She hopped over a scattering of disks. “Couldn’t we just use one of these? Change the transponder so the ship looks like something else?”

“It’s possible, but one against seven?” He shook his head. “They might still like their odds.”

Prathra touched her head against the hull. The warm metal vibrated, making a sound like the purring of a kitten.

“They know I’m bluffing.”

“They’re bluffing too.” Anjos turned away from the hull. “Did you see their flagship? It’s junk. And I bet the other ships aren’t any better.”

“They’re not going to stop for me.” Prathra tried to keep the fear from her voice.

“Then find something they will stop for.” Anjos kicked a transponder out of the way, and headed back towards the communications room. “Are you coming?”

“WHY DID YOU ASK FOR ME?”

The commander glanced up, and there was something in his smile that made her want to dive off the transmission plate and hide under her bed.

“You’re a bundle of contradictions.” He grinned, stepping closer to the hologram. “You’re not strong, but you act tough. You seem out of place, but it’s like you belong there. You’re confusing. I find that... entertaining, and I’m going to enjoy meeting you in person.”

A chill ran up her spine. “You’ll never get a chance.”

“Prove it.” He laughed, becoming animated. He paced the narrow bridge, an animal stalking its prey. “Show me something to frighten me away.”

“Veer off before you reach the fourth planet.” She needed to keep them far enough away that they couldn’t get a clear visual on her home. “Your time is almost up.”

“Show me just one imperial warship. Make one mark on my map, and I’ll consider it.”

She glanced at his star map. His seven ships were clearly outlined, tagged with fierce-sounding names by transponder signals. Something about those labels triggered an idea in the back of her mind, but his insistence broke her concentration before it could fully form.

“Pay attention to me!”

“Petulance will get you nowhere. This is a classified facility.” Prathra almost stumbled the words. Her face felt hot. He was playing with her, making her squirm, and it was getting to her. “I will not entertain requests by pirates.”

He fell into his command chair. “Again with the pirates?”

“You’re little more if you come to invade.”

“I consider myself an excellent judge of character.” He brought a hand to his face, rubbing thick fingers across his lips. “And you don’t strike me as a soldier.”

Prathra stiffened. She imagined he could see the dark farm soil beneath her fingernails. She wanted to run. Her heart raced, and she fought to control her breathing as she struggled for a reply.

“Veer off before you reach the fourth planet. If you don’t, you risk waking a sleeping dragon who has paid too little attention to this sector of space, attention that may be long overdue. Leave, and you will not be followed.”

She was totally off script now. Sweat beaded her forehead. The stench of the old uniform had become overpowering, the reek making her dizzy. She couldn’t take anymore. She turned.

“Wait! Don’t go. I know who you really are.”

She gave him a puzzled look just before stepping out of the connection.

THE TRANSMISSION PLATE STROBED with blue light, pulsing angrily as the starship captain tried to reestablish the connection.

Anjos burst through the colorful banners, concern written across his features. “He’s made it personal. I don’t like this.”

“Neither do I.” Prathra’s heart pounded so loud she could hardly think. She couldn’t let those ships land, not now. She’d be dead the moment they hit the surface.

“I can get you to safety.”

“No, I’m not giving up.” She’d spent too much time trying to run away. Now she had no choice. It was time to fight, and something the starship commander said had triggered an idea. Words wouldn’t stop these men, but she had something else in mind.

She grabbed Anjos by the hand, dragging him into the imperial hanger.

“THIS IS PRATHRA DAS for the empire. We do not deal with pirates. Desist now. This is your final warning.”

The starship commander charged at the hologram, stopping just before reaching the transmission plate, his features contorted. “For the last time, we are not pirates!”

“Silence!” She dismissed him with a wave of her hand, reaching up to tap her temple. The button comm linked her to Anjos. He should be in orbit by now, the transponder removed to conceal their small vessel. “Permission to deploy.”

The commander’s anger vanished. He chuckled, sliding into his chair as he draped one large hand over the deadly looking weapon on his belt. “By all means, tell me how you’re going to blast me out of the sky if I get any closer.”

Prathra glanced up, raising an eyebrow in a gesture that was meant to imply he’d soon be getting his wish. She needed the man to believe she’d been playing with him this whole time.

His smile never wavered, but he shifted in his chair, his posture showing his uncertainty. “I’m waiting...”

“Now!”

She held her breath. Seconds ticked by. She could feel the sweat rolling down her spine. “Do it now.”

Nothing happened.

Confusion made her sag. Anjos should’ve had enough time to get the crate of transponders into orbit by now. They weren’t actual craft, but they’d look like it to the outdated and broken-down technology these men were struggling with. He should be there.

“Please...”

The commander laughed. His breath exploding from between clenched teeth as if he’d been afraid to let it go. “You almost had me worried.”

Prathra stared at the floor. She didn’t want him to see the panic in her eyes. “Anjos...”

The commander leaned forward, his amusement obvious. He looked like a wolf stalking its prey. “This has gone on long enough—”

“Commander, I have a ping!” The lanky bearded man beside the star map glanced up, his worried gaze flicking briefly over Prathra before shifting back to the map.

“What is it?”

“A ship! Coming around the curve of the second planet.” Transponder tags blossomed across the map, one then another... “Warships, sir! More than a dozen!”

Prathra smirked at the dumfounded look on the commander’s face, trying her best not to jump for joy. She felt giddy, a new sense of strength surging through her. She’d beaten them.

The commander scowled, dropping his gaze to the star map for a moment, and then returning to Prathra. She stiffened, meeting his scowl with steely determination. The time for talk was over.

He held her gaze for what seemed like hours. She never blinked. Finally, he turned away, his confident glare shattered. He whispered to the short man at his right. Prathra couldn’t understand the terse words, but the man looked relieved. Maybe the crew weren’t as eager to test her as their captain had been.

“We may meet again.” The commander glanced back one last time.

Prathra tugged at the hem of her uniform jacket, straightening her collar. She gave a tiny shake to her head as she stepped off the transmission plate and back into the comfort of the false imperial base.

The scrap of smartpaper Anjos had left on a nearby crate showed the small fleet already swinging around, headed out-system. It was over.

A tap to the communications button at her temple connected her to Anjos. “I told you we couldn’t rely on ghosts to fight our battles anymore.”

About the Author

D. A. D’Amico is a playful soul trapped in the body of a grumpy old man. In early years, this presented a problem, but the author’s grown into the role quite nicely. He’s had more than forty works published in the last few years in venues such as Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, and Shock Totem...among others. He’s also begun transcribing his memoirs onto the moon with a 25 petawatt pulse laser borrowed from his evil twin, but he’s afraid the beautiful 12-point Old Century Goth font he chose is lost among the bright dust of Tycho crater. he can be found at www.dadamico.com or on Facebook at authordadamico, or in the crevices between those pesky floorboards you’ve been meaning to fix--if you can find him.

THE LAST SACRIFICE

John Sykes

THE PROCESSION PASSED THROUGH the mud-clogged streets of Dayanesh. The skies were mottled gray and threatened rain, but it was no different than any other day—except that today was a special day for the town. Revin had grown up with the stories just like everyone else. The whole town would venture out, no matter the weather, to the appointed place.

Revin clung nervously to the saddle, his thick wolf skin cloak keeping most of the cold and moisture away. Ahead, Braneth rode next to their father. Neither had said a word to one another since his brother had claimed the right of combat.

A fate that was meant for me, Revin thought.

Northam Heartwood had little love for his youngest son. All of his tenderness had withered away with the life of Revin’s mother as she fought to bring him into the world. He blamed him for her death. It seemed he preferred him dead as well.

Revin stared up at the flecked paint, the broken roof tiles, the dark stains of wood smoke long set into the brick, and the other myriad signs of decay. Dayanesh was his home but it was a town of spirits and lonely voices from the past.

The procession cantered along the street, making its way out beyond the boundaries. They saw townspeople trudging ankle deep through the muck and mud, some of them wearing their finest feast day clothes—little better than the threadbare shirts Revin wore himself despite the foul weather. Most of those they encountered were loyal to the Heartwoods, though the occasional curse or spittle aimed at his boots, reminded him that the Grayholts were on the march too.

The journey to the Marchlander took the better part of an hour. The air was still but the cold seeped beneath his cloak sending shivers through Revin. He looked ahead and realized he’d fallen behind.

“Yah, get on now will you.” Revin kicked the horse with his boots. The animal snorted but picked up its pace.

Braneth looked back, a small grin brushing his lips. “Falling behind again, eh little brother.”

Revin tried to smile back, but couldn’t force it. A moment later, his father glanced at him—his eyes hard and filled with loathing. Though he tried to stare back, the anger on his father’s face made Revin dropped his eyes to the bridle. His face burned with shame. When he finally dared to look, his father was facing forward again.

The Heartwoods came up a small rise and beheld the barren fields of the Marchlander. A fog had rolled in and obscured the far horizon. The Grayholts were already present. A great crowd was milling about on the fringes of a circle made from rocks. Their taunting voices rose in anticipation of what was coming. Two dingy pavilions, each one showing generations of wear, had been erected to either side of the circle. A few smaller tents had cropped up around them. A number of men were busily feeding wood into the bonfire that blazed brightly in the dim daylight. Revin caught sight of the reddish hair of Douglas Grayholt, the patriarch of the rival family. Beside him, astride their horses, sat the three sons, Aram, Toranias, Davmore. He had only seen them a handful of times during his twenty years. The sight of them now reminded him anew of why they were coming to this place of death and sorrow.

Urging his horse forward, Revin rode up right behind Braneth until they reached their pavilion. The Heartwoods dismounted; the soldiers gathered behind Northam and Braneth. They mostly ignored Revin. As they approached on foot, a pale-haired man dressed in black robes came out of a smaller tent. He carried a small case over one shoulder. Two guards stepped away from the tent and walked on either side. The man spread his scrawny arms out and dropped his head in deference. The man’s face was grim and lifeless like the death masks that hung in his father’s house. “My lord Northam. I am ready.”

“Are you sure, Daval? Sure that it will work as you described to me? Remember that your life is forfeit if it fails.”

The threat seemed to bead off Daval like a drop of rain on burnished armor. His severe expression remained unchanged. “Yes, my lord. I am certain. Please excuse me.” Daval stepped back and bowed his head.

His father grumbled under his breath, then gritted his teeth. “Bloody alchemists.”

Braneth put a hand on the elder Heartwood’s shoulder. “What was that all about? It is nearly time, father. I must get ready.”

Revin saw his face’s face slacken and slightly pale. He nodded slowly. “Nothing you need to be concerned about, my son.” The softness in his voice was unfamiliar, quite unlike his father’s more common scowls and grimacing.

Revin’s felt the lump in his throat. “W...wait, Braneth. Don’t do it.” He went to his brother and grasped his arm. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Braneth leaned closer, pitching his voice so only Revin could hear him. “Little brother, do you see all of those people over there? They are waiting to see what the results of this contest will be. They want to ensure lasting peace for us for the next twenty years. People wait to see the work of their ancestors within that circle of death. For generations, it has been done this way and it has kept the peace between Heartwoods and Grayholts. It is my honor and my duty to take my turn. Let the gods decide whether the sacrifice is worth the price. Be brave and say a prayer for me come Midwinter’s Eve.” Braneth patted Revin on the back and left his side. He joined Daval and the two strode to the pavilion. Revin watched as Braneth disappeared inside. His father followed the alchemist. There was nothing he could do. Revin remained mute as a cold wind buffeted him, twisting at his cloak.

A short time later, his brother emerged, dressed in age-darkened armor. He paused just outside the circle and looked at Revin one last time. For me, Revin thought. He’s taken my place. He is to die so that I might live.

The deep moaning sound of a horn echoed across the foggy plain. The champions from both families arrived at the center of the circle and faced each other. Braneth would battle Davmore, the youngest of the Grayholt sons. Those loyal to Heartwood cried foul, shouting and spitting, and lobbing vile curses at the Grayholts. It was an affront to the traditions, an invective bitter enough to raise the ire of the forefathers. Aram Grayholt should be out there. The complaints were ignored, though the supporters of the Grayholts fired back.

The leaders of both families came into the circle and stood side by side.

Douglas Grayholt spoke. “Let it be as it has been in times past. We have each chosen our champions. Now, here on the Marchlander, on the fields where we fought the Jendari hordes, we hold faith with the pact made by our forefathers. Blood for blood.”

Revin waited for his father to say something. All of those gathered waited in that moment of tense silence.

“Blood for blood. Death for life. All is fulfilled. Let the hands of the ancestors be seen today!”

The patriarchs cleared the field of combat. Revin watched his father walk away. He never turned back but went straight to the pavilion. The crowds whooped and hollered.

Both men darted to the lines of weapons that were lying all along the perimeter of the circle. Braneth grabbed a blade from the pile. Davmore, smaller and thinner than his opponent, grabbed a sword as well, though he had a hard time brandishing the weapon. He was weak. Revin watched him rush Braneth, his form awkward and forced. His brother merely stepped to one side as the other man almost tumbled into him. He was turned around and ran at him again. His screams rose high above the din of the crowd. Davmore continued reckless moves against Braneth. Revin moved closer to the circle. The crowd parted to let him through.

When he landed blows, Davmore struggled to move in his armor. It barely fit him. In the first few minutes, the Grayholt ripped off the helmet and commenced shrieking as he launched himself at Braneth repeatedly. He wants to die. But Braneth knows it too.

His brother battered Davmore’s armor until he was surely bruised from end to end, but he did not land a killing blow. Braneth moved with a skilled warrior’s grace, always staying outside of range. He kept it up for several minutes. The crowd of Grayholts was enraged.

“Quit stalling. Let Rogarth the Red Hand come!”

No, no, I call for Caldish. I would see Caldish the Great carve you up, bloody Heartwood!”

It wasn’t just the Grayholts though. Revin winced as the men around him started chanting.

“Navareth. Navareth. Navereth.”

The townspeople, some Revin had seen on a daily basis all of his life, were screaming, faces red with bloodlust, all taunting the men fighting.

“Let them come, let the mighty ones rise and fight today!”

“The mighty ones! Spill your blood and beckon them.”

The battle continued, blows were exchanged, until both men were staggering. Braneth moved around trying to avoid Davmore but the Grayholt was more desperate than ever to finish it. As Revin watched, Davmore hurled himself at Braneth not bothering to wield his blade. The motion caught his brother by surprise. The crowd gasped as one when both men fell.

“Braneth!”

His brother pushed Davmore over. His blade was buried to the hilt in the man’s middle. Braneth backed away from him so that he was on the opposite side of the circle. The crowd roared. Their faces were filled with a demonic glee that leeched the warmed from Revin’s body. A few moments passed. A silence fell on the plain as everyone waited.

Then something happened.

Revin didn’t believe it at first. Davmore twitched. Then his legs moved. The Grayholt man sat up, the blood still flowing from the wound. He snarled like a wild beast. Davmore’s face twisted, the cheeks puffing out, the bones cracking. He was changing. But into what?

“Look! Look, it is he. It is Caldish!”

“No, curse you, it’s Fadern, Douglas Grayholt’s father himself!”

“No, I tell you, it’s Rogarth the Red Hand.”

Revin saw the faces of dozens of men shape and reshape on the body of Davmore until the writhing ceased and the dead man stood once again. There was no sound from him at first. His first steps were unsteady. The man who was once Davmore reached down and picked out a dark, ugly mace from the weapons. He hefted it easily, with far less trouble that poor Davmore would have.

“Yes, definitely, Fadern the Black. The mace was his weapon of choice!”

Revin could not believe it was true. The dead risen again to fight against the living. He saw the shock on Braneth’s face. His brother hadn’t quite believed the tales either. There was no hesitation in Fadern. The resurrected Grayholt came against Braneth hard and fast. Revin saw his brother take a few glancing blows from the mace that left him sprawling on the ground. Fadern drew the mace down on him again to finish it, but Braneth moved at the mast moment.

Revin watched in horror as his brother engaged the creature. But it was no use. Nothing he could do was enough. Braneth grew weaker by the moment. The blood flowed from numerous wounds. The barbs on the mace had sliced him deeply. Braneth still held his blade but he managed a few swipes.

“Keep fighting, Braneth!”

His brother turned at his voice. He found Revin in the crowd. They locked eyes for a brief moment. It was long enough.

“No!”

Fadern’s mace struck the back of Braneth’s head.

The Grayholts, one and all, cheered.

His brother was dead. Head head shattered by the mace

Revin turned away, his eyes welling up tears. Then he saw the expression on his father’s face. Shock and surprise. He spun around and saw Braneth rolling over. Blood matted his hair and covered half his face. Slowly, Ravin watched his brother scoot away from the thing that was Davmore. Braneth struggled in the muck but finally got enough strength to drag himself up. The jeering, cursing crowd of Grayholts and Heartwoods.

Protests rose up among the Grayhots. “What is this? The Heartwood was dead! Why does he not change?”

“Sorcery at work!” Another shouted.

Where’s the alchemist? Where is Daval?” More demanded.

Despite the protests, the fight in the circle was not over. Davmore lurched forward, growling and swinging the mace to and fro. Braneth dodged the other man, dropped, and rolled past him to retrieve his weapon. With the sword in hand, he got to his feet again, but his legs were shaky.

“Stand firm, Braneth! Stand firm, my son,” cried Northam Heartwood.

Revin looked at his father, his eyes alight with a joy he’d never seen before. Something happened. His brother was alive when he should be dead. Even as watched the contest, he noticed that the grievous wound on the back of Braneth’s head seemed better, less severe. The blood had stopped flowing. All that remained was that which covered his brother’s hair and neck.

Hope welled up in Revin and exploded from his throat. “Fight, Braneth! Win!”

Again, Braneth came at the walking corpse of Davmore and struck out with his blade. Gradually, he pushed back and landed blows against the mace. Biting into flesh on Davmore’s arms until fingers could no longer hold onto the thick handle. The mace slipped from Davmore’s hands. The creature screamed. Braneth ran at him, pointed his shoulder at the other man, and collided so hard that both fell to the muddy ground. Braneth held up his blade while pinning Davmore’s harms beneath his knees.

Once swift jab to the head brought Davmore’s stuggles to an end. Braneth rolled of the body and sat there in the mud, heaving for breath.

“Victory! It is over. The contest is over,” one of the nearest Heartwoods, a second cousin to Revin, shouted.

Revin’s other kin swarmed in around Braneth and heaved him up onto their shoulders. Their cheers and laughter went up over the solemn place.

“Lies! Deceipt! You’ve broken the accords, you Heartwoods. Cheated us. You’ve no honor at all. Here me now, you dogs! There will be no more peace!”

The words rang out, instantly quieting the exuberance of the Heartwoods and the smaller protests of the Grayholts that lingered at the circle.

Douglas Grayholt had spoken.

Revin waited and watched as the leader of the Grayholts walked to the center of the circle where his son lay dead. He jabbed at the ground. “See. We have honored the pact and called forth our ancestors. They have fought here, but you, Northam Heartwood, you and your clan have disgraced not only them but your own forefathers—they who knew better.”

“No!”

Revin jumped at the vehemence in his father’s voice. His eyes blazed like heated coals. The lads carrying Braneth eased him down and helped him back to the gathered Hearthwoods.

“I came here to put an end to this, Douglas. We’ve been mired in this bloody business for too long. Our families have paid the price in blood since the time of our grandfathers’ grandfathers. I say enough. No more sacrifice, Douglas. Let this unfortunate lad’s blood be the last spilled between us. Let us honor his last sacrifice. We must put the old ways and the dark necromancy of our fathers behind us. The ancestors should stay asleep. Let them trouble us no more.

The words echoed across the Marchlander. No one on the field deigned to break the solemn hush. All watched as Northam Heartwood walked into the circle, approaching Douglas Grayholt with open arms.

“See? I come to you without weapon and without malice. I wish to see an end to needless death. I’ve had more than enough and it’s eaten me alive. Even my son sought to save another by taking his place here. Douglas, look at your remaining sons. See what could be and not this needless ritual. This bloodthirst was ordained by some unknown slight lost to time. We need not be shackled to it anymore.”

Douglas Grayholt grimaced and bared his teeth, but he did look back at his sons and at the other Grayholts watching and listening. The air was chilly and the wind buffeted them all, flapping cloaks and twisting the penants that had been forced into the ground before the contest.

Revin strained to hear every word spoken between the leaders of their clans. His father continued. “From this day onward, we honor this day not with this demonic contest, but with a feast in honor of Davmore. Let us begin now, Douglas, by building a prye and committing his body to the flames so that his soul might find rest. Marchlander has been a place of blood and death too long. Now we can make a place of rebirth and renewal. Will you do this, Douglas Grayholt?”

“You speak well, Northam Heartwood. Many fine words have you spoken. Such words pierce my heart.” He reached out his hand. Revin’s father reached out and took it. “An end. We put it all to an end today. No more sacrifice.”

“No more sacrifice,” repeated Northam.

The words carried across the dreary field of Marchlander. Both Heartwood and Grayholt, one and all, took hold of the new accord and new hearts were forged. Revin never looked at his father the same way and honored him all his days. Braneth recovered from his wounds and lived well. No one ever knew what Daval, the alchemist, had given him for the man vanished after that day, but it mattered little in the end.

About the Author

John Sykes lives in Central Illinois and writes all sort of stories in his spare time.

BORN OF SILVER FIRE

Shaun Kilgore

THE SMELL OF SMOKE was still heavy in the early morning air. Even from this precipice of rock overlooking the valley, Naya could almost feel the heat of the smoldering timbers. Ash still floated through the air, darkening a sky already overcast with coming rains. The charred ruins of Calavel, the high city of the eastern kingdoms, still beckoned her though she knew that her sisters were likely dead. Few had survived the bombardments, let alone those unfortunate enough to dwell on the crowded slums around the wharves.

Naya continued to stare, watching the city, hoping, and praying that Evala and Shalese would appear. She felt a hand on her shoulder. Looking back, Naya saw it was Benjude. There were others gathered behind the carpenter’s apprentice—fifteen by her reckoning. They were all survivors of the slums who had been left behind by the caravans of soldiers and the wealthier merchants, merchants who had fled once it was clear the attacks were going to happen.

Naya wasn’t sure whose ships had attacked the port. Did it really matter now? They had arrived so suddenly, but the small fleet lingered a few hours at the mouth of the bay. They were small, unmarked vessels. No banners identified them so no one could be sure which of the lords was responsible. Someone aboard the black ships had called upon Silver Fire, one of the seven known powers, to strike the heart of Calavel.

Glancing again at the destruction, Naya shuddered. Her sisters were dead but she could not weep nor mourn for them. Benjude stood close, but he had removed his hand. He too watched the fires burn and the smoke rise above their home. He had seen the fire destroy his master’s shop and the lumberyard go up like so much kindling.

None of the survivors knew what to do or even where to go. They were homeless and alone. They looked around at each other each hoping one of the others would say or do something, but they didn’t. Naya wasn’t paying much attention to the others; she simply replayed the events of the day over and over in her mind. Finally, in a sudden and unexpected moment of clarity, she looked over at Benjude and said, “We need go.”

“Go? Go where?” Benjude asked, confused and startled by her sudden attentiveness.

“It’s going to rain,” she said as she looked towards the sky. “We need to find shelter and food.”

“But where are we going to go? There isn’t another village around for miles.” Benjude sounded worried.

Naya stood up from where she had kneeled on the ground. “Well, we can’t stay here. There is nothing left for us here, Benjude. We must move on,” she said with growing certainty.

Benjude hesitated. Naya waited for further objections. Instead, he stood up. “Come on everyone. We have to get moving.”

The others looked up at them, and slowly one by one began to rise from where they had dropped to the cold, hard ground. Naya began walking away from the overlook, searching for a path to the main road, moving away from the smoldering ruins of the city. Benjude was following closely behind her. The bedraggled people were unsure of where they were going, yet relieved that someone had taken charge so they followed her. As they walked further and further away from their home, the storm that had been looming in the distance finally caught up with them, and it began to drizzle. While she could hear murmured complaints from the others, Naya barely noticed the rainfall. She had an inexplicable sense of focus prompting her to find shelter for the night.

The light drizzle quickly became a downpour. The temperature was beginning to drop and the wind felt bitter cold on their wet skin and clothes. As they traveled the rest of the day, many of them were getting anxious. Would they walk forever in this icy rain without food or any prospect of a place to stay? Naya peered through the thick rain, looking ahead for anything. She looked to the right and saw nothing, and then to the left. The land was obscured. In the distance she saw something; she wasn’t at all sure what it was, but veered toward it.

As they got closer to the object, she realized it was a small wooded area, not a building or village as she had hoped. Nevertheless, she led her group into the small patch of woods. In the shelter of the thick boughs the rain lightened considerably. It’s probably better to stay here until the rain stops, she thought. Naya removed her cloak and began to wring it out, so Benjude did the same. Then she sat down next to a large tree and propped her back against it for support. It felt so good to rest after the many miles they had traveled. The others followed her example and settled down to rest.

They gathered in small groups, huddling to keep warm. Everyone’s clothes were drenched. Naya fought down her own shivers to look at Benjude. “Can you start a fire?”

Benjude nodded and started scrounging through the underbrush to find some drier sticks and fallen leaves to use for kindling. Then he produced a flint from a belt pouch. With swift, practiced motions he piled the debris and struck the flint to get a spark. With a few minute’s work, Benjude had a small fire going. The groups gathered closer. It wasn’t sufficient to warm everyone but the proximity of so many bodies produced its own heat.

Next, Naya stood up and took in everyone with her gaze. All eyes were on her. “Everyone, we are but a few of Calavel’s survivors. We know that we were left behind and we are very likely on our own. It is up to us to make our way to Arrosdale, the seat of Lady Mandias. There we are sure to find aid and even family who may be wondering if we are alive or dead.” Naya noticed Benjude glance directed at her. “However, we may be another two days from Arrosdale. That means we need to find food and shelter along the road. Does anyone know if there are any settlements or smaller villages along this road?”

One man raised his hand, his face still covered with soot. “I think there is a small village named Haman another few miles up the road.”

Naya looked out into dimming light. It was getting too late to walk and the rain was falling steadily, though it had slackened noticeably. Naya frowned. We need to stay put for now. If we spend any more time in this weather, we could all get sick.

“It may be better if we stay here tonight. It’s too late to walk farther. What did you manage to bring with you? We may need to combine our coins or other valuables to get food and a place to stay. Please bring them forward so we can consolidate what we have.”

A grizzled man with a shaggy gray beard stood up. “Why should we do that? I’m grateful that you and the boy there helped us get away from the city, but I for one only have a few bronze stars on me. Probably enough to get a loaf of day-old bread, if I’m lucky. Still, it’s my coin. I don’t feel comfortably parting with it.”

Naya didn’t respond for a moment. She could see similar thoughts behind tight expressions and the wayward glances. This group was barely holding back despair. They had seen their city burned, their homes and livelihoods destroyed, and many had lost friends and loved ones in the blaze. They were refugees. Naya knew she had to tread lightly.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“They call me Nevin.”

Naya forced a smile. “Nevin, I agree that this is not what any of us want to do. I myself have a single gold star, but I am willing to share it with all of you. We are Calavelans, aren’t we? Our city is lost but we must remember that some of us were once neighbors.” Naya held out her hands. “We will find aid in Arrosdale—but only if we can make it there. Please, Nevin. Please, all of you. Share what you have so that we may all have a chance at a warm meal and a dry place to sleep tomorrow. I know that some of you lack anything of value to trade or money at all. By sharing what we have, we can all make it to Arrosdale safe and sound.”

Benjude stood up and pulled out his pouch and poured his coins into a larger satchel. Naya nodded her thanks. One by one, the rest of the refugees came forward, putting coins and, in some cases, rings and brooches into the satchel. Nearly half remained in place. They had nothing; Naya knew it. Finally, Nevin came forward. He looked at Naya for a moment.

“You speak well, child. Get us to Arrosdale.” Nevin dropped in his bronze stars.

THE RAINS EASED UP during the night giving those huddled beneath the trees a chance to dry out. Benjude stoke the flames, adding the bits of twigs and dead wood he found that was dry enough to burn. Naya sat with the others, humming a tune her mother used to sing to her and her sisters when they were girls. The sound was the only thing to disturb the wearied quiet except for the crackling of the fire. Most of the refugees did get a bit of sleep, but Naya remained awake and alert through the long darkness until the first hints of dawn light appeared through the boughs.

Benjude had settled down next to her and was snoring softly where he was propped against the tree. Naya was still damp and was sure her hair was matted mess. She took fingers and tried to comb it out but gave up after a few minutes. I need a proper brush, she thought idly. Everything Naya owned was lost now. She looked down at her lap and squeezed the pouch with all of the money and valuables inside. This was all they had left too. The trust these folk place in me. I can’t let them down.

Naya’s stomach gurgled. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday. The same was likely true of the others. She stood up and stretched her legs. Her simple, homespun skirt and blouse were tattered and scorched in places. A few of the others stirred and stretched legs and bodies stiffened from sleeping on the cold, damp ground. Nevin nodded at her as he rubbed his shoulder gingerly.

“Wet weather always makes my shoulders ache,” said Nevin. “You get to be my age, everything stiffens in weather like this.”

Naya nodded in understanding. “Then the sooner we get moving the better so we can get somewhere warm and dry. Benjude!”

Benjude snorted and jerked awake. Naya smirked. “Wha...what?” He rubbed his eyes. A deep yawn cracked his jaw. “What’s going on?”

“We’re leaving.” Naya glanced at the road. “The rain’s stopped. We need to make for Haman or some other place before it starts again.”

Benjude got up, his legs cracking. “Right.”

“Sure you can make it,” Naya teased.

Benjude sniffed. “Talk to me after we’ve been on the road. Let see who’s dragging their feet. You should have tried to get some sleep, Naya.”

Naya sighed. “I’ll sleep when we get to the next village.”

The other refugees gathered what they had, Benjude put out the fire, and they left the clump of trees and set out down the road. The air was cool and smelled fresh. The sky was covered in thick grayish clouds. After a mile or so, Naya’s clothes were starting to dry out. The refugees had the road to themselves—a fact that bothered Naya. Maybe Haman would be abandoned or worse already crowded with others who’d escape the devastation of the city. The worry twisted her stomach. Naya kept her fears to herself and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. She figured the others were doing the same.

The going was rough in places as the road had turned to mud in spots. They shifted from one side of the road to the other just to keep from getting mired in the mess. Benjude slowed to help an older woman named Agena negotiate the path. Nevin was doing the same with a woman called Lela and her daughter, Catia. They had been strangers but now they were helping each other, talking and becoming something more. Their common fate was drawing them closer to one another. Naya smiled when she noticed the gestures. Naya spent a good portion of the day moving back and forth among them. At different points, she mouthed encouragement to a few of the weaker ones, coaxing a bit more speed out of them when they were lagging behind the rest. Names were given to all fifteen faces.

Once they’d walked through the morning, Naya called for a rest around midday. They found a spot on the side of the road where a fallen tree provided a drier seat than the damp, spongy grass. The refugees were tired. Naya’s eyes burned and she stifled a jaw-cracking yawn. She wanted to lie down, but wouldn’t let herself. Not yet. Naya shook her head and paced. The others saw down on the log. She could hear some whispering how hungry they were.

Benjude came up beside her. “Maybe we should forage in the woods over there. Might be something we could eat. Berries or something.”

Naya thought about it. She nodded. “You, Tomlan, and Olaver go. Don’t venture too deep. I don’t want any of you to get lost.”

Benjude gave her a crooked grin. “Lost? Come on, Naya, I’ve done a bit of foraging.”

“Yes, in the berry patches in Warings Park,” she replied.

“I’ll have you know, that I found some very fine mushrooms while picking blackberries.”

Naya shook her head and smiled. “Just be careful.”

Benjude held up his hands. “Don’t worry. We will.”

Benjude went over, gathered up Tomlan and Olaver, and headed into the trees just beyond them. She listened to the sounds of their voices, the crunching of branches as they attempted to find food in the wildwood. In a short time, she could barely hear them. Nevin hobbled up beside her. He twisted his unruly beard.

“Those lads had much experience with woodcraft?”

Naya shook her head. “Benjude played at it in Warings Park when we were children. But no, we’d never ventured too far from the tenements along the wharves.”

“In my younger days, I traveled to Morelean Islands on a fishing boat. Otherwise, I don’t think I left the walls of Calavel.”

Naya stared around them at the empty road that cut through the wooded countryside. “Do you think there are any farmsteads up this way? Surely, there have to be some somewhere. How else did the city get its food?”

Nevin scratched his chin. “Lot of it was shipped in, actually. The boats came up and down the coastline from Beres and Tallington. Lots of farmland, pastureland, and orchards, I think. The governor of Calavel had long-standing agreements with them.”

Naya nodded absently. We won’t be finding any fruit trees or abandoned crops then. She rubbed her eyes again. She strained her ears but couldn’t hear Benjude and the others now. Those sitting on the log were talking amongst themselves. She heard them speak about friends, families, and the places they call their homes. Naya resisted thinking or remembering. She could conjure the faces of her sisters and the boarding house they ran on Neddersham Street. But what good would it do now? Naya blinked away tears and started pacing again. Nevin averted his gaze.

“Naya!”

It was Benjude.

Naya went to edge of the woods. The others on the log were up and gathered. Fear painted their faces. Hearting pounding her chest, Naya tried to keep control. She wanted to bolt beneath the trees. Benjude’s voice was distant but still clear enough. He was shouting very loudly.

“Naya!” Benjude was closer. She tried to track him in the trees but the underbrush was too thick. She moved forward but a hand was on her shoulder. It was Nevin.

Finally, she heard leaves rustling a few yards ahead. Then Naya glimpsed movement, little more than a flash. “Benjude?”

Then he appeared. His face was pale with fear, his eyes wide. “We’ve got to get off the road. Have to hide!” Benjude was followed by Tomlan and Olaver. They were similarly disturbed.

“What? Why?” Naya saw the other refugees were concerned. “What is all this about?”

“Bandits or worse, Naya. We stumbled upon a camp. Not sure if we were spotted, but they’ve got a people tied up as prisoners. They’re watching the road ahead. They have men lying in wait. From the piles of bags and other items, they’ve been busy.”

“We have to go around then. Go into the forest.” She looked back at the others. “Come. Let’s get moving.”

Naya saw their apprehension. One after the other, they stood up and started walking towards the opposite side of the road. The darkened woods were filled with a foreboding air. Naya swallowed a lump in her throat and joined them.

FIFTEEN SOULS STUMBLED INTO the shaded woods, skirting well wide of where Benjude believed the bandits were camped. As before, the younger aided the older who found the tangled ground beneath the trees filled with snares that tripped them up and slowed everyone down. Naya stumbled a few times herself, wincing when a branch hidden beneath dried leaves scraped her leg. The refugees were straining to keep down the noise of their passage in case the bandits had men scouting the immediate area. Naya’s heart was pounding and she was breathless. She kept scanning the surrounding brush, looking for the least sign of a danger. She started at the smallest rustlings. The woods were filled with chattering creatures that did not seem to be fearful of the people trespassing.

Benjude fell in beside her, his reassuring grin seemed a bit bright. “Naya, we’ll be fine. Those bandits are looking for unwary travelers bound to the road. We’ll sneak by them and be in Haman before the morrow.”

“You sound quite confident of yourself.” Naya was amused.

A twig snapped. Suddenly a group of men in filthy cloaks swarmed in around the refugees. Benjude then shouted. “Run, Naya!”

Naya took off, but stopped several yards away. She glanced back and found that the older refugees had been taken. Nevin was kneeling on the ground, a bloody gash oozed blood down the side of his face. Benjude was on the ground. He wasn’t moving. Naya gasped. Her throat felt like it was closing up. One of the men saw her and pointed a hand wielding a wooden rod.

“There. Get the woman!”

Naya ran.

SHE RAN AND RAN, stumbling at times over roots and downed branches. Naya ran deeper into the woods, until the trees grew so thick that she had to slow down and squeeze through them. She didn’t stop until the sounds of pursuit had faded away. Naya slid down a small hill, her skirts getting caught on brambles on the way down. She came to a halt at the bottom, heaving for breath and crying.

I’ve failed them. They all trusted me.

Naya gazed up at the small patches of light that pierced the canopy of the trees, her tears blurring the images and creating kaleidoscope of colors to sparkle at the edges of her vision. The desolation of her loneliness crashed down upon her. Naya’s ears perked up in the stillness of the woods. The sigh of the breeze moving the boughs and rustling the leaves above her head. The skittering of the smaller animals underfoot. She strained her hearing to see if she could catch the steps of men creeping through the dead and dried clumps of twigs.

“Oh Benjude, please don’t be dead.” She started sobbing. “I...I can’t lose some...someone else.”

Naya lapsed into silence after a time. Her mind wandered until she recalled what Benjude said about the camp. She brushed the tears from her cheeks and looked around her again. She climbed to her feet, brushing dirt and crushed leaves from her skirt and blouse, pulling twigs and other things from her hair. Naya turned completely around and looked up at the top of the hill. She wasn’t entirely sure how far she’d come or in what direction her desperate flight had taken her.

Naya struggled climbing the hill, holding fast to saplings that bent like cords of rope in her hands. They held her and allowed her to reach the top. The trees were thicker at the top and the light more muted. There was no discernable path back the way she’d come. She couldn’t see the sun directly so she couldn’t be sure of her directions. The landscape was totally bewildering to her.

“I’ve spent most of my life in the city, in the slums,” she said softly. “Why do I think I can find my way back out of this tangled mess?” She shook her head, tears blooming at the corners of her eyes.

Naya started walking in what she hoped was the right direction. Her eyes roved everywhere, which kept her moving slowly through the brush and detritus of the woods. She wanted to run ahead again. Naya picked up the pace, hitching up her skirt above her ankles to keep them from getting snagged. Her shoes were sturdy, no-nonsense leather, well worn from her daily work at the boarding house.

Time seemed to pass slowly beneath the trees. Naya did not stop even though her legs ached, her mouth cried out for water, and her vision blurred at the edges. More than a day had passed since she eaten. Naya pressed on, silently praying to the gods for aid. After a time, she noticed the light growing dimmer. It’s getting late. Naya’s stomach clenched in fear. I have to find them before it gets dark.

As darkness descended, her desperation grew. Naya moved faster and more recklessly through the brush. Her skirt snagged and ripped in places. She became covered in a number of scratches from branches, brambles, and the abrasive bark of the trees. Shadows stretched longer and longer until Naya could barely distinguish the shapes of the trees around her. She moved more carefully, not wanting to fall in the dark. The woods were louder now that the sun was down, the denizens of the tangled place awake and prowling, some wondering what creature was stumbling about in their domain.

Naya trembled, partly from fear partly because it was colder. She crossed her arms and tucked her hands beneath them. Crickets chirped loudly. A horned owl hooted in a nearby tree. The darkness was complete now so all Naya had was her hearing. She stumbled over a root and caught herself against one of the trees. She winced. The rough bark cut into her palms. For a time, Naya moved along, weaving through the branches and trees, skirting around prickly brambles when the long thorns poked her.

Then Naya saw something ahead. A change in the darkness. No, smudges of light barely visible to her eyes. Shadows appeared to undulate in the faint glow, which only grew stronger as she continued walking. To reach the brighter spot, Naya had to climb a slight rise in the woods. Something told her to do so as quietly as possible so it took her a little time to reach the top. The ground sloped down again and the woods seemed slightly thinner. She could see the shadowy forms of the trees backlit by two fires. There were several people gathered around the blazes, with a couple of carts resting nearby. Horses were tied to them. Men wandered around the camp in a rough circle, some clearly armed with spears and swords. Others were situated near the fires all in small bunches. From her position, she could hear voices talking loudly, pointing figures, or raising arms threateningly against those seated. The whimpers reached her and made Naya cringe.

I found them. Naya’s chest grew tight and she felt ready to sob again, but held her emotions in check. Instead, she watched and waited. I have to figure out a way to rescue them.

SITTING THERE, HUDDLING NEXT to the tree in the cold darkness, Naya watched the flames dancing and imagined their heat soothing her aches and banishing the chill from her flesh. She longed to rejoin them, simply to remove the feelings of loneliness. Naya’s bold thoughts of rescue faded in the time that followed her discovery of the camp. She had no experience or skills to help her pull off such a daring operation. Naya had neither weapons nor the knowledge of them. She felt useless. Worse than useless. She was also angry with herself, but its heat faded quickly.

“I should be angry at them,” said Naya to herself. “Thieves and worse. They prey on the weak.” The anger was banked and she fed it like kindling to the flames so that it grew more intense. Naya stared fixedly at the fires burning below. Two brilliant points of light in the darkness.

Her breathing changed. Naya drew in long, deep breaths. The air expelled from her lungs was hot. So very hot. Naya trembled and felt the warmth all around her that almost lifted her to her feet. She stood at the top of the hill. Breathing. Breathing. Breathing. Her breath was like fire. Her eyes throbbed and she could see more clearly. The darkness melted away from her gaze.

Suddenly there were cries from below. The armed bandits were gathered together. They stared and pointed up at where Naya stood. There was much shouting and cursing but the men remained where they were. Naya realized they were afraid. She was no longer cold. The air shimmered with heat. It surrounded her like a pleasant cloud. At its heart, she stood, and deep within her, a angry fire was threatening to spill out.

Naya took a step down the hill. Then another. No one in the camp moved. Those gathered on the ground nearer the fire cowered together. Naya could not see Benjude or Nevin—couldn’t recognize anyone in the flickering light. She reached the bottom of the hill. The bandits were transfixed. Naya noticed steam rising where she stepped on wet mounds of leaves. Crackling sounds rose up too. Drier branches and fallen nuts burned or broken open in her path. Naya was drawn forth almost like she was being led by something, by some powerful, hungry need. Consume. Consume. Consume. The word repeated over again in her mind. The cloud and the heat swelled. Then little patches of grass and leaves caught flame. Naya gasped.

The men cursed and started backing away.

Naya saw them trying to escape and all of the anger and sadness crested deep within her and sought ways to get out. She gritted her teeth and something changed. Darkness fled as a strange daylight erupted into being. Fire, brilliant, glowing fire rushed from Naya towards the bandits. They bumped and stumbled into each other in their haste to flee, but the angry flames found them, caught upon clothes, hair, and skin. They burned. Their screams pierced the night.

Naya’s vision blurred, her head went fuzzy, and the fires dampened until they disappeared. Steam rose all around her, the air still felt like the heat of summer. Naya’s legs went weak and she slipped to the ground. The agonizing screams followed her until she knew no more.

NAYA AWOKE. THE WORLD was changed. She stared up at the boughs of the trees. Morning light streamed down through the leaves and branches in mottled patterns. The air was cool. Images of fire and terrible cries flashed in her mind. She bolted upright. Leaves and tiny twigs were caught in her tangled hair. She looked around her. There were people gathered nearby, perched close to a fire. Some were roasting what looked like rabbits or other small game over the flames. Eyes roving about her, she found Nevin. The older man had a rag wrapped about his head. He saw her and gave a slight wave, but also eyed her with peculiar expression.

“Naya!”

Benjude rushed up to her. He took her in an embrace and pulled back to look at her. Naya gasped. Benjude’s face was a mass of ugly purple bruises. She reached out and touched his cheek gingerly.

“Oh, Benjude.” She smiled then. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

Naya glanced over his shoulder and saw the dark, charred earth. A large patch spread across half the camp. “What? I...,” her words faltered.

Benjude saw where she looked. He leaned closer and stared into her eyes. “Naya. They say you called the Silver Fire. I’d heard tell of such things happening in the wake of a power’s use, but they were always considered a rarity. You killed the bandits with the power.” He smiled hesitantly and pointed to where the carts were still parked beneath some willow trees. The horses busily chewing clumps of grass. “You saved us all. We can use the carts to get to the next village.”

Benjude took her arm. “There’s something else.”

Naya blinked away tears. “What?”

He waved. “Come now. She’s awake.”

Naya frowned. She looked and saw two women approaching. For a moment, she did not recognize them. She shook her head. “No. No, it cannot be.” Tears flowed down her cheeks. “You cannot be...be alive.”

The first woman approached and kneeled down beside Naya. “Yes. It is true, dearest.” She held out her hands and Naya touched them.

“Evala?”

The woman nodded. “Yes, sister.” Evala beckoned the other woman closer. She was younger, more girl than grown woman. She was crying.

Naya reached for her. “Shalese. Oh, Shalese.”

The three of them embraced.

About the Author

Shaun Kilgore is the author of various works of fantasy, science fiction, and a number of nonfiction works. He has also published numerous short stories and collections. His books appear in both print and ebook editions. Shaun is the publisher and editor of MYTHIC: A Quarterly Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine. He lives in eastern Illinois. You can also visit www.shaunkilgore.com for more info.

WHAT THE #@&% IS THAT?: THE SAGA ANTHOLOGY OF THE MONSTROUS AND THE MACABRE

Edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen (Saga Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Stephen Reid Case

Any time I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone’s neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing? Jack Handy, Deep Thoughts

Horror is unfamiliar territory to me. I tend to stay in the brighter regions of fantasy or the cleaner, crisper corners of science fiction. I’m not sure what the touchstones of great horror are supposed to be, and I tend to prefer not walking away from a story with the feeling that all light has fled from the world. At the same time though, I can appreciate the delicious chill, the cold unease, that comes from a well-crafted horror story. Sometimes it’s nice to look up from a page and recall that, yes, the world indeed contains light out here and off the page.

What the #@&% Is That? is a horror anthology co-edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen, and it contains several stories I thought were cool and creepy. As a whole though, I’m not sure the anthology was uniformly successful, either in the execution of the theme or in story quality. It’s fair to say that any anthology will be a mixed bag (though Adams’ work is usually unfailingly well-selected), so the fact that some of the stories fell flat to me is not a huge deal. More broadly though, I felt the execution of the theme was a bit of a letdown. The idea, outlined in the introduction, was this would be an anthology about monsters, about things hiding in the dark, about (like the very cool cover image) creatures that would compel characters to say (or rather, screech or bellow or shout in terror), “What the #@&% is that?!”

This was not, however, actually the case. There were a few stories that indeed did this well. Scott Sigler’s “Those Gaddam Cookies” I think may have been the best—a deeply unsettling and well-crafted encounter with a science fiction something, some kind of plant-parasite-fungus thing. That thing and our reaction to it was exactly the intended point (it seemed) of the collection: encounters with the creepy, unsettling, and hard to identify. “The Daughter out of Darkness” by Nancy Holder also did this well in a Lovecraftian tribute where the narrative spun away along with the narrator’s sanity. Finally, “Framing Mortensen” by Adam-Troy Castro reached literary heights reminiscent of Poe, telling an elaborate, lyric ballad of hate, revenge, and torture mixing the bile of “The Cask of Amontillado” with something like The Picture of Dorian Gray. In all three of these stories, besides just being great tales, an encounter with the bizarre and macabre takes center stage.

For most of the rest of the stories, even though there was some excellent horror, such as Alan Dean Foster’s “Castleweep,” in which a slave castle in Africa takes a grizzly revenge, or Terence Taylor’s “The Catch,” which combines an examination of the life and habits of a serial killer with an alien encounter and autopsy, the big reveal, the central what the #@&% (with different authors filling in that blank as they chose) is a sideline, in some almost an afterthought. There’s at least one story in the collection that cheats completely, offering the exclamation as a throwaway line that one character shouts merely to distract another. This all makes it feel that while the collection might be a fine anthology of recent horror in general terms, it doesn’t quite satisfy the guidelines it set out.

If you enjoy horror for its own sake and want to read a clutch of recent stories by some great authors, don’t let that stop you. But be warned that if you’re looking for something specific—that gut-wrenching feeling of confronting the unknown and unknowable in the form of something (a la Lovecraft), you’ll find it here in a few stories, but you’ll also find a selection running the gamut from psychological thriller to ghost story to time travel that feels a bit shoe-horned into the theme.

MERIGAN TALES: STORIES FROM THE WORLD OF STAR’S REACH

EDITED BY JOHN MICHAEL GREER

(Founders House Publishing, December 2016, 289 pages, $16.99)

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

The stories that fill this extraordinary volume depict a far-future world that defies most people’s expectations about the future. In it, America and the other developed nations have reverted to a preindustrial state of existence as a consequence of having exhausted the Earth’s economically recoverable fossil fuels as well as rendered immense regions of the planet humanly uninhabitable in the process. Throughout the formerly industrialized world, people have had to invent new modes of living, ones that can be sustained with renewable resources. The result has been a wild profusion of diverse human societies whose attitudes and everyday experiences differ starkly from ours.

The speculative future outlined above was first brought to life in John Michael Greer’s 2014 novel Star’s Reach. Greer’s tale takes place some 400 years from now in what today is the American South, and concerns a quest to uncover one of the 21st century’s darkest, most enduring secrets. The main characters journey to a faraway, long-abandoned research station where scientists from the 2050s are rumored to have contacted alien life in a last-ditch bid to save the crumbling industrial age by way of extraterrestrial intervention. Along the way we’re given a fascinating tour of one particular corner of 25th-century America—or “Meriga,” as it’s now known.

A shared-world anthology, Merigan Tales presents eight new stories by authors inspired enough by Star’s Reach to incorporate its milieu into their own fiction. None of these pieces can really be considered a sequel or prequel to Greer’s novel, though a couple do allude fleetingly to its events. Some take place before Star’s Reach, others concurrently with it and still others afterward. Greer, who edited this collection, chose to order the stories more or less chronologically, a move that helps ease us into the radically altered world that they present.

Among the more poignant themes of this book is the profound influence that today’s technologies, though long gone, continue to exert on people’s thinking and behavior. Some people despise the machines of old, while others pray for their return. Whatever one’s particular feelings about industrial-age technology, however, the one constant seems to be that everyone spends a great deal of time thinking about it and the time in our history that it represents. The places where it’s least well regarded tend, justifiably, to be those that have been most ravaged by climate change and other ecological calamities. In such regions, those suspected of trying to bring back the old ways often face draconian punishments. (While this isn’t referenced anywhere in Merigan Tales, we learned in Star’s Reach that there are communities where the penalty for drilling for oil is live burial.)

In places where the technology of our time is sorely missed, people are desperate to believe in anyone who purports to be able to bring back the machines. The main character in Al Sevcik’s “The Second Coming” is one such person. Everywhere he goes, he’s seen as a messiah figure—until, that is, he proves incapable of delivering on his promises, at which point he finds himself unceremoniously run out of town. He’s a challenging protagonist because, while he doesn’t set out to deceive people, he’s clearly a disturbed individual. He hears imaginary voices imploring him to confront the leader of what’s left of the United States and demand the machines’ return. He lashes out at anyone who opposes him. The pressure he feels to carry out the commands in his head distresses him greatly. As he tearfully explains to Nora, his one friend in the world, “I want them to leave me alone. I’m not smart enough to do what they want, Nora.”

For the most part, those who desire a revival of the previous age have an incomplete understanding of why it went away and why it can’t be brought back. The central character in Sevcik’s story believes that the machines were probably taken away for some legitimate reason—but that, whatever this reason, it has surely become moot at this point, so all that’s needed is to persuade the elites who hid the machines that it’s now safe to make them available again. Only a few people seem to know anything of the laws of physics that stand in the way of such an endeavor, no matter how much people at any level of society may want to undertake it. In one of the crowds that gather around Sevcik’s hero, we hear one such man lucidly explain, “I was told the machines needed energy, more than we can get from the sun and the wind.” Yet clearly this well-informed person is an outlier.

In Troy Jones III’s exciting mystery “Tiny’s Legacy,” we meet a cabal of shady characters who will stop at nothing to learn the location of the fabled research facility we were introduced to in Star’s Reach, which they’re convinced holds the key to restoring the old world. The story’s lead character, Danna, is an impetuous, physically imposing young woman who can hold her own against most men in a fight. Employed as a “burner”—or one charged with incinerating the deceased and then safely disposing of their ashes—she one day happens upon the corpse of a suspicious out-of-towner. As she attempts to gather clues as to the man’s identity and the reason he turned up dead in her community, she becomes involved in a high-stakes clandestine operation. The result is a taut, intelligent thriller told from the viewpoint of a wonderfully fierce heroine.

Catherine McGuire’s “Elwus has Left the Building” supplies excitement of a different sort, in this case an archeologist’s thrill at making a momentous find. Though archeology no longer exists as a profession, important discoveries about the past continue to be made by connoisseurs of ancient artifacts. It’s common for such people to be employed as “ruinmen,” or those who demolish old buildings for their scrap. Indeed, one of the main characters in McGuire’s piece is a young ruinman’s assistant. She plays a key role in figuring out the true location of the famous Graceland mansion where Elvis Presley (now reverently called “King Elwus”) lived out his final years. Our other chief character is a young “elwus” (i.e., Elvis impersonator) who is enrolled in a sort of elwus boot camp. McGuire’s story is great fun and replete with delightful Easter eggs for those familiar with Elvis’ actual life and times.

“Silent Key” by Tony f. whelKs is another story about the adventure of discovery. An avid amateur radio operator, whelKs has long seen the potential of small-scale, amateur radio to maintain communications in the event of disasters that take out conventional channels. (Just recently, this potential was on sharp display when, following Hurricane Maria, volunteer ham operators enabled Puerto Ricans to reconnect with family and friends on the U.S. mainland.) “Silent Key” is set at a time when amateur radio is not merely a backup form of communication pursued mostly by hobbyists but the dominant mode by which communities stay in touch. The story’s main character is an Australian “radioman” who stumbles on a transmission from Meriga—and in so doing finds the first evidence of transatlantic radio propagation that anyone has encountered in more than 200 years.

The story described above isn’t the only one that curiously takes place far away from Meriga; there’s also Matthew Griffiths’ “Journey to the North.” This one is set in China, a country to which Griffiths, a New Zealander, has devoted much study, according to his contributor bio. Griffiths accomplishes an impressive feat here, conjuring up a richly realized setting that feels at once futuristic and ancient. Central to the story’s plot is a project to construct the largest stone Buddha in China—no mean task, given the absence of modern-day machines.

The remaining three stories cover a wealth of thematic ground and take place across the world’s northern reaches. “Eight Stars of Gold” by Grant Canterbury depicts life aboard a whaling boat at a time when the Arctic is navigable year round and Greenlun (i.e., Greenland) is an ice-free island chain. In Ben Johnson’s “Over the Top of the World,” a naval fleet sails north from the coast of Nuwinga (a new nation consisting of what is now New England) to defeat a band of pirates in the Balteka (i.e., Baltic Sea). Lastly, “The Heart of Winter” by Walt Freitag is about a man who rescues a hypothermic woman he encounters in the midst of a mountain blizzard. The two turn out to hold diametrically opposed belief systems—one founded on seeking the blessings of a deity, the other on abiding by one’s own moral compass—and as the woman awakens in the shelter set up for her recovery, they have a fruitful discussion about their disparate worldviews.

It would be easy for a book like this to feel unbearably oppressive, and to take glee in its bleakness. Yet this isn’t the way that Merigan Tales comes across. In so many ways, our contemporary experience is already indistinguishable from dystopian fiction; all that the stories in this volume do is take current trends to their logical conclusions. In their shared future, as in our present world, there is much to dread as well as to be thankful for, and people see just as much reason to live and have hope for the future as people today generally do. As Greer beautifully puts it in his foreword, here is “a future in which individuals and societies have had to come to terms with the hard limits of a finite planet, and gone on to live their lives anyway.”