Stories

Seven subjects, Ethan thought. One of them a child. All of them physically torn into two distinct beings: a functional husk, and an abomination. He had read the doctor's journal. The subjects had come from different families, different boroughs, different backgrounds. None of them had known any of the others. All of them Raah?

On those late afternoons, when the day slipped away and the night lights came, the shades would wander out from the empty hills, down to the road. All kinds of them. People we knew. But more we didn't, moving slowly along in search of something, somebody. Wandering the road, following the lines of the dusty track. Then they would mill aimlessly until they found the broken edge of the garden wall and the thorny bushes that once grew raspberries, and they would follow that for a time, until it took them out to the field, where they could walk on.

There were more than a few of the planks that could become chairs, but Lucas passed them by. None of them were suitable for the likes of Lord Adelard. The vampire wished to appear powerful. There was only one kind of wood in the cellar that fit that description. He squeezed back, back, back, into the furthest reaches, where once mice and rats might have made a home, back before the rats and mice had found themselves in stewpots and on skewers.

He lifts the onion to the lantern’s lone light, and in it, I suddenly see: the goldwork towers and walls of the Old City; the broken bridge, jagged after a recent bombing yet still shining; rows of humble houses etched in ebullient metal; the curve and sway of the historical museum. I reach out my hand, and he drops the city into it. It feels warm in my palm.

Her family brings their best to the table and talk unreservedly in their first language. Rviv cannot keep up with the conversation. She understands the words, the phrases, but not why they make her parents laugh or grimace. They reference a place Rviv has never seen and a history she has not lived. The stranger and her parents commiserate about living in such a strange country. Together they laugh at the way the Cuialo smile with their teeth and eat meat with their hands. Her parents wait with excruciating patience to ask what news of home.

This was the mood the second time my late guest arrived. They were still dressed as a witch but this time wore a cloak of ambiguous cut that masked it from a casual observer; the slashing diagonal weave might be a witch’s style, or it could be the even horizontal line a breath-person would wear turned askew in the weather. Something in the ambiguity called to me, an enticing possibility, though I was still unwaveringly comfortable folding my clothes into the straight hems and smooth lines of second-childhood. I nodded as they entered but waited several moments for them to settle before approaching their table.

“That would be a fine thing, to hear that fiddle played as it should be,” the ferryman said, mostly to hisself. He cast an eye over the dark expanse of river, dotted with white ice cakes. “You sure, jacks? A trip like this, it rarely takes you where you’re planning.”

"Grandpa, you don't have to." Dovan's little hand rests inside his. Cyfris closes his fingers around it. "I know I said before that I wanted you to tell everything, but I changed my mind. You don't need to tell this part."

“We found something,” Matias began. He had rehearsed what he would say and was determined now to watch their expressions. To see if this was a revelation for them—or if they already knew. “We’re expanding the palace kitchens, putting in a new hearth and tables. The builders knocked out a wall—turns out it was a closet that had been sealed up. In the closet was a body.”

The Poet Laureate was fetched from his retirement in a lighthouse on the far shore of the Founder Mer to compose a song of eighty-six interlocked stanzas like steps on a stairway spiraling down into a cool dim quiet. But on the forty-seventh stanza of its recitation, the Governor squinted into the space over the Poet's shoulder and said, "listen, any deeper and we shall hear the words those beasts sing as they pass" and demanded that the previous stanzas be read in reverse; "back to the surface," he said.

27. Parsifal confessed to me that she has never dreamed of Valis. Not once. In her youth, she learned of the city in a book: a philosophical dialogue where a poet, a knight, a musician, and a madman argue about the nature of reality while awaiting the arrival of a fifth person. Near the end, the madman recounts the story of Valis, which the others think is nonsense. Parsifal disagreed, and the city quickly became an obsession (she herself used the word 'obsession'). She said all this while pacing back and forth, refusing to look me in the face until the end.

Whatever the mallepulpus’s moral stature, it would not allow its enemies an uneventful exit. Even as Jacob, dripping and shivering, urged the Abbess and the canonesses to back away from the shore, a portion of the swamp coalesced into a roaring and amorphous mass of silt and muck. With a noise like a thousand oxen breaking wind, the monstrous pudding detached itself from Paludis Cochlea, flopped onto the shore, and undulated forward, seeking to suffocate its parent bog’s tormentors.

Gorel could smell the sea. It was always there, the water like a black mirror, upon which glided the enormous black ships with the seven-pointed star on their hulls. From time to time spells crackled in the air above the port. Wind-mages and speakers-to-whales and astrologer-navigators and sun-talkers and battle-sorcerers with the power to level whole cities. Goliris’s fleets sailed across the World and brought the civilising influence of the empire to its furthest reaches. They came back laden with the World’s goods; with all the riches the World had to offer.

The three stare at me—Hayrick, Handsy, and Ben whose name I wish I didn’t have to know. I want them to believe me, to see the possibility, to think about the smiling faces they’d seen while pestering the market-goers and stall-keepers, and how little their targets had been frightened. Sometimes young men like these Boys do listen. Sometimes all they need is to be shown a new direction. But this time, my best isn't enough.

Merton did not answer because Soliver's jibe had struck truer than he could know. The Moult attacked more than the body. Flightlessness was followed inevitably by madness and then total emptiness of the mind, if the disease was allowed to run its course. Most Kin afflicted as he was killed themselves long before that point though or were killed by others in pointless battles the madness caused the afflicted to seek out.

Rugg was ready to turn back and try to make Ganvill when a bright dot of light appeared through the churning murk of the storm: a campfire. Never trust a light too bright in a dark hole, the speaking goes, but then he smelled roasting meat. And then he heard the flute. A sweet, sad little song, a flutter of music. Bone flutes had a tone distinct from those carved of wood or reed; lonelier, somehow. A sweet breath of music sighing out to the wild.

I'm sure there was a vision. There had to be, as that's the whole symbiotic exchange. It’s how Mother worked her fortunes. While the syopterae feed on our smoke-saturated brains, we go to Tera. We experience visions there. Past or potential futures. I don't remember one that first time. I do remember Mother wiping the streaming tears from my eye, her own dead eye darting fish-like and upside-down as she bent over my face.

Maribel had not spoken of that day in the thirty-eight years since it had happened. But she thought the pig-boy deserved to know what would happen. “When they pronounce him guilty,” she said, “Father Domingo will come and get you. He will want you to pray at the shrine of Saint Rafael for the power of transmogrification. He will tell you the words to use. Then he will take you to the village square. Everyone will be gathered and the man tied up there. You’ll make the man swallow a cup of something and command his devil to take the form of a javelina.”