Deep Magic. Fourth Collection

6,500 Words

“HO THERE, STRANGERS,” said the man. He settled a rag over his shoulder and tucked his thumbs behind his belt, pushing his gut out, straining the cloth of his plain cotton tunic.

“Ho,” replied the rogue, leaning back in his chair and balancing on the two rear legs while his foot rested on the table to keep him stable. He looked the man up and down. “Are you the proprietor of this way station . . . Murdoch?”

The portly man grinned and shook his head. “Yes and no. I am the proprietor of this fine establishment, but Murdoch himself passed away ages ago. I never got around to changing the sign.”

“My kind of man,” said the rogue. He raised his tankard and winked.

Lady Karina Towaal, mage of the Sanctuary, cleared her throat and glanced at the proprietor, affecting a look of disdain, hoping it gave the man the hint that they preferred their privacy. “Can we help you with anything?”

The innkeeper didn’t take the hint. Instead, he looked between the five companions seated at the table as if struggling to decide which he should address.

Rhys, the rogue who had spoken, was clearly not the leader of their party. He had the look of a man who spent a great deal of time observing the inside of gaol cells. His clothes had been recently washed, but only because Lady Towaal had demanded it as soon as they arrived at the way station. Even after bathing, his chin bristled with stubble, and his long hair hung unkempt around his face. A longsword and a brace of knives hung over the back of his chair, giving little doubt as to his profession. Surely the innkeeper could recognize hired muscle, but he let his gaze rest on Rhys curiously for some time before shifting to the others.

He looked to Saala first. A second swordsman, though just as obviously not the leader of their small band. His head was shaved bald, he wore loose clothing that was unusual in central Alcott, and he had a heavy-bladed falchion resting beside him. He kept his lips pressed tightly shut and only offered a polite nod to the innkeeper before the rotund man’s wandering gaze moved on.

Two young women were at the table as well. Amelie and Meredith, the youngest of the party, but dressed the finest. An experienced innkeeper would notice the fine cut of their travel attire and their smooth skin, unmarred by the burdens of hard labor. These girls were no pot scrubbers or chambermaids. The innkeeper must have wondered whether they were highborn, traveling with hired swords, but in the end, he turned back to Lady Towaal.

She smiled humorlessly at him.

“M’lady . . .” he said, a question in his tone.

She didn’t confirm or deny the honorific. Instead, she stated, “Your food and rooms are quite agreeable, innkeeper. We need nothing further this evening.”

The man swallowed and shifted nervously. “Ah . . .” he glanced at the men and then back to her. “I don’t know if your men are proper hunters, but there’s a town nearby that has a sore need of some skilled blades. There’s a reward.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Farview,” continued the innkeeper, “up in the mountains about two days from here. A small place, not equipped to deal with . . . with what they’re facing.”

“And what is that?” she asked, exasperated by the man’s slow explanation.

“A demon, m’lady,” he responded, his voice a quiet whisper, barely audible in the crowded common room.

She frowned. “A demon, near here?”

The innkeeper nodded. “The village council sent a delegation to my way station to find a hunter, m’lady. I was told the creature was first spotted several weeks ago, and the village assembled a posse to face it. It slayed two of them and escaped. They told me that since then, it’s been taking livestock and scaring the people witless. Farview is a peaceful place, m’lady; they have no soldiers or militia. Why, I doubt they’ve even seen a delegation from Issen in our time. Even if they were to send a messenger to our liege, by the time help arrived . . . You are travelers, people of the world. You must understand how quickly a demon can grow. A hunter is the only solution. These are innocent, simple people, m’lady.”

She nodded impatiently.

“They take care of themselves in Farview, and do a good job of it,” the innkeeper added. “We rarely hear a fuss from them, but they’ve no skill to deal with something like this. They’ve offered ten gold coins to any hunter who can bring the demon’s horns to the village council.”

“A loose demon is unfortunate,” she replied, “but we’ve a tight schedule to keep. We can’t afford to deviate—”

“Lady Towaal,” interjected one of the girls. “These people need us.”

She turned and frowned at the interruption. “Amelie, I am tasked with escorting you to . . . escorting you to your destination. I will not be distracted from that charge. We continue on to Fabrizo, and from there we’ll catch a ship across the Blood Bay. Any delays and we may miss important deadlines. That is not something I am willing to risk.”

The girl shook her head. “I’m not yet a part of your order, Lady Towaal, and we are still within my lands. We cannot let these people suffer when we could so easily address this problem. It’s only a small delay on a long journey. I’m certain we can make up the time elsewhere.”

“We?” questioned Lady Towaal sternly. “You plan to face this demon yourself?”

“Not I,” replied Amelie. She glanced between the two swordsmen, Saala and Rhys. “I believe they’d have little trouble with a solitary demon.”

Lady Towaal snorted and sat back, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Could you?” asked Amelie, looking to Saala. “My father said you were a bladem—”

“A lone demon is little bother,” interjected Saala, “but Lady Towaal is right. We have a long journey ahead of us, and even a few days—”

“We will go to Farview,” declared Amelie, cutting off the blademaster. “We will take care of this demon.” She looked to the innkeeper. “Can you tell us the way?”

Lady Karina Towaal sat back and studied her charge. The girl, the woman, as she supposed she should think of her, was headstrong and impetuous. It’d serve her well after initiation when she became a full mage, but it would make her training unnecessarily difficult. The instructors in the Sanctuary would break her if she resisted their tutelage. Those women had overseen generations of strong-willed initiates, and they wouldn’t be intimidated by the girl’s pedigree. Lady Amelie would be broken and reduced until the Sanctuary could mold her into the form that they desired. In Lady Towaal’s experience, strength was only an asset for an initiate when it was malleable.

Brittle will was of little use to the mages of the Sanctuary.

Perhaps Amelie was strong enough to retain some of herself through the decades of intense training, and wise enough to bow her head when necessary to avoid angering her superiors. The potential was there. Lady Towaal could feel it seeping from the girl like the light from a shuttered lamp. Amelie could reach greatness given time, but in the current climate, they had little of that. All too soon, the pressures of the world would wrap around the girl. Lady Towaal frowned, studying Amelie, watching as the girl felt the mage’s eyes on her and cringed. But Amelie did not turn from the innkeeper to look back at the mage. She’d made her decision.

Lady Towaal sighed. The girl may be broken one day, but she was not yet. There was still some time before she must face the horrors of the future, before she learned the truth of what was happening in the world. No, it was not yet time for Amelie to be bowed before the magnitude of what was coming. Perhaps she would survive the rigors of the Sanctuary, perhaps she would not. Whatever the girl’s future, Lady Towaal decided it would remain in the future.

She knew Amelie thought she was doing right, taking them into the mountains to save her people from a demon. It wasn’t an awful notion, but it would delay their party’s travel. Sometimes, to achieve a greater goal, small sacrifices must be made. It was a lesson learned through rough experience.

Lady Towaal shifted, her eyes still on the girl’s back. Rhys and Saala both looked to her. Lady Towaal nodded to them slightly, and the swordsmen grinned.

When the innkeeper left, Lady Towaal addressed Amelie. “We will follow your lead on this, girl, but we will finish the task and then leave. No more delays. You are a lady of Issen, the daughter of the rulers of this land, but soon we will pass from the reach of your father and mother, and you will become a daughter of the Sanctuary. An initiate and no more. Do you understand the difference, what that means? Soon, girl, your birth will not matter. Highborn, common, it means little to a mage. You will be the lowest rank in our order, and you should learn to act as such, even if you think it just an act.”

Amelie nodded. “You are right. Soon, I will be an initiate only. But while we are here, we will do what we can.”

“Knowledge and will,” said Lady Towaal.

She was sitting across a low fire from Amelie, cross-legged, speaking in a hushed tone. It was unnecessary. No one was within leagues of them on the deserted road between Murdoch’s Waystation and the small mountain village of Farview. But even though there was no reason for secrecy, she thought the drama of the fire lighting the underside of her face and the low tones, as if sharing whispers of dangerous secrets, would help catch the girl’s interest.

The daughter of Lord Gregor of Issen, his sole heir. Amelie was used to making demands and getting her way. In her father’s keep, she would have very rarely heard the word no. But the world was not her father’s keep, and she needed to become used to the idea that when she arrived at the Sanctuary, she would be no one’s superior. She’d be among the lowest-ranking members of the order, and she’d need to accept that if she was to learn what they had to teach.

“Knowledge and will,” repeated Amelie. “I know that. Lady Greenfoot, my father’s adviser, has been instructing me. She told you that when you arrived to collect me, didn’t she?”

“Has she been instructing you?” asked Lady Towaal archly. “Then cast a bit of fire over there beside our log pile.”

“Cast a bit of . . .” stammered Amelie. “Well, I cannot actually—”

“You cannot use your will to manipulate the energy and transfer the heat, or you do not have the knowledge of how to do it?” interjected Lady Towaal. “If you have neither the knowledge nor the will, then I daresay Lady Greenfoot has not even begun your instruction.”

Amelie frowned.

“Training a mage takes decades of intensive study,” said Lady Towaal, “not months of sporadic discussions. From now on, you are no longer a highborn. When we reach the village of Farview, you will not walk in as the lady of this land, you will walk in as a simple traveler. When we reach Fabrizo, you will be a girl in my retinue, not a visiting dignitary. And when we reach the City and you are enrolled in the Sanctuary, you will be nothing more than an initiate. This sounds harsh, I realize, and you may think it unfair. I say this to help you, Amelie. If you are to succeed as a mage, if you are to become more than your birth would have earned you in Issen, then you must learn humility. If I teach you one thing, then I hope it is that. Be humble, listen, and learn.”

Amelie pursed her full lips and glanced at her companion, who sat silently beside them. Meredith, the girl’s handmaiden, another token of her previous life that Lady Towaal wished they had dispensed with before the journey had begun, but Lord Gregor had insisted.

Amelie asked, “You still think it was a bad idea for us to go to Farview?”

Lady Towaal nodded. “As a highborn, even more so as a mage, you have the power to change the world. You can do great good, or great evil, but what you cannot do is everything. No matter how powerful you become, no matter what heights you reach, you cannot do it all. There is too much sorrow in the world for you to save everyone. Too much hatred and pain for it all to be healed by one person. If you try, if you stop to assist every stray, to intercede in every conflict, to save every life, you will find yourself running in circles. Focus, girl, is what makes us effective. It is good that you want to help these people. You feel an obligation to them as the daughter of their liege, which is a noble sentiment. I do not mean to argue that feeling or take away your kind heart, but I ask that you direct it. Focus on where you can accomplish the most. Do not fight for two people when you can fight for a dozen.”

“You are suggesting we turn back,” guessed Amelie.

Lady Towaal shook her head. “We’ve already made it halfway. We will continue, but the next time, think if what you hope to accomplish must be done by you, or if there is another. Who’s to say that if we had not accepted the task from the innkeeper that a true hunter would not have arrived the next morning? Who’s to say that our presence in this village is necessary at all?”

“And who’s to say that it wouldn’t have been two more weeks before a hunter came to the way station, and that by then, dozens of innocent people would have died?”

Lady Towaal shrugged. “No one said being a mage was easy.”

Raising her hand, the mage drew heat from the fire, letting it build in her palm until red and orange flames danced there. She shielded her skin, directing the energy back into the silent, flickering ball of flame. “What mages do, Amelie, is take energy from one source and put it somewhere else. It is the core of who we are. That simple concept is what we understand with knowledge and manipulate with will.”

Amelie leaned forward, staring at the small ball of flame.

“As you watch, I am taking heat from this fire,” explained Lady Towaal. “I’ve studied the sciences of thermodynamics and entropy for years to understand what it is I do. I’ve practiced extending my will to accomplish such tasks for decades.” She let the fire die out. “Greenfoot may have taught you some, but you are just beginning to learn. Consider if I used another source to build the heat I just manipulated. What if we had not yet lit the fire, and to perform the task, I drew the heat from myself? I could pull it from my hand and my arm and perhaps get enough heat to ignite the wood. Not a bad thing, starting our campfire. Except, pulling the heat from my body would make me quite cold, and it’s likely I’d suffer frostbite in my extremities. Lighting our campfire with transferred heat would be a small but noble act. I would pay for it severely.”

“You’ve made your point,” grumbled Amelie.

Lady Towaal leaned closer, feeling the heat of the fire on her face. “Have I?”

The girl shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”

“Nothing,” replied Lady Towaal. “I want you to listen.”

And then she began to explain how she’d drawn the heat from the fire, how she’d directed it, and what she’d done to protect herself. The discussion of exerting one’s will was always more exciting than the scientific principles one needed to understand to do it successfully. In time, they’d get to those. In time, the girl would learn. But until then, all that was needed was for her to open her eyes and humble herself. She had to know how much she did not know. If she understood that, and gained the proper attitude to approach it, Amelie could become one of the most powerful mages in generations.

Beneath the trees in the forest on the outskirts of Farview, the shadows stretched like long, hungry fingers. The air was cool enough without the sun that Lady Towaal pulled her cloak tight and thought longingly of the roaring fire they’d left back at the tavern. Two days to walk up to the yokel-filled mountain village, one night to hunt the demon, and two more days back to the way station where they could resume their journey.

A waste of time, she’d decided, the moment they spotted the place. There were dozens of healthy men, strong from work in the forest or on the farms. They may have had no training or experience with weaponry, but an ax was an ax. Whether a man spent years learning the use of the thing in battle or years chopping through logs, it was the same principle. These men could have faced the demon had they the courage. A few of them might have perished, that was true. Demons, once they’d begun serious feeding, were shockingly quick, but the men would have prevailed.

She said as much to her companion.

The blademaster, Saala Ishaam, smirked at her.

“You’ve grown cold, Lady Towaal,” he remarked. “A few men dying? It does not seem much, in terms of battles and continent-spanning wars, but in a village such as this, it would be a catastrophe felt for generations. Families would lose their income as their healthiest, strongest members were gone. In a place like this, there is little they could turn to for alternatives, so they’d become impoverished. Perhaps the town council would make some allowance, but no one here has so much extra they could support dozens of hungry mouths. Maybe they could leave, move to where they could find a trade, but where? What trade? The closest settlement of any size is that way station, and they have no need of more hands to turn the spits or pour the ale. If a few more men fell to this demon, the entire village would be affected for years. A few men is nothing to the Sanctuary, but it’s everything to a village like this.”

“I have grown cold, perhaps, but I do understand,” retorted Lady Towaal. “A village is a small thing. I think in terms of large, continent-spanning wars because that is what we face. You and Amelie both sound like her father, Lord Gregor. The man gnashes his teeth and loses sleep over the fate of a few when our business is the fate of them all.”

“You are certain it will be war, then?” Saala asked her, moving through the forest as silent as a ghost.

She shrugged, brushing aside a low-hanging branch and watching as the blademaster somehow weaved through the woods without causing even a small stir among the foliage.

“Tell me what you know, mage,” he insisted, turning to look back at her.

She frowned at him.

“Please,” he added. “I am tasked with Amelie’s safety, and we mean to pass through Whitehall.”

“Lord Gregor will swear fealty to King Argren of Whitehall, will he not?” asked Lady Towaal. “If that is the case, then there is little risk to the girl while we pass through the city. She’ll be the daughter of King Argren’s most powerful ally, and feted as such, I imagine.”

“There is always risk in foreign cities,” claimed Saala.

“And that is why it is imperative we get Amelie to the Sanctuary as quickly as possible,” declared Lady Towaal. “She will be safe there, behind our walls, surrounded by mages.”

“Will she?” asked Saala. “How is the Sanctuary involved in this growing conflict? Are they supporting Argren and the Alliance, or do they throw their weight behind the Coalition in the east? Lord Gregor has cast his dice, gambling with his daughter before he knows the true intentions of your leader.”

“The Sanctuary is remaining neutral,” said Lady Towaal. “Neither the Alliance nor the Coalition will have mages at their sides. The Veil is keeping her mages free of this brewing confrontation. She wants nothing to do with it.”

Saala snorted. “Yes, that is what the Sanctuary is telling everyone, but you mages are steeped in political intrigue and hidden machinations. Tell me true: What role do the mages seek to play?”

They walked on quickly, picking their way through the boughs of the pine trees. She did not bother to hide the fall of her feet on the soft soil, but Saala seemed to do it instinctually. Silent or not, it did not much matter for their purposes that night.

The demon that was preying upon the villagers of Farview was a unique creature in Alcott—an interloper from another world. Demons slipped through tears in the fabric of space, and they feasted upon the lifeblood of anything that they could find. They consumed blood ravenously and grew rapidly from its succor. After several weeks of unimpeded feeding, the creature they were stalking would have become strong and deadly.

Finding the damned thing in the boundless wilderness would be nearly impossible. Even the blademaster would be useless at finding and following its tracks in the dark. Instead, to save time, their plan was to let it find them.

The demon would be able to sense their life forces and would be drawn to them like a starving man to the scent of a well-laden buffet table. It would have no thought of stealth, no concept of sneaking up and ambushing them. Demons knew only hunger, and once it sensed them, it would rush right at them. Easy work for two such as them.

Four days, though! They’d wasted four days on the flighty girl’s errand. Back at the way station, Lady Towaal had decided not to impose her will and demand they proceed immediately to Fabrizo, but she’d come to regret it. The blademaster’s pointed questioning only convinced her further that the detour had taken them too far from the world’s bubbling problems.

“Am I to take your silence as confirmation the Sanctuary is involved in both sides of the looming war?” asked Saala.

“No, I . . .” she muttered. “I merely had nothing else to say. I tell you true, the Veil does not seek to become embroiled in this conflict. Both parties are far to the east of us, and while we hope it does not result in war, if it does, we will stay out of it. Alcott’s mages will not be used in battles between fractious political enemies. We haven’t interceded in a major war since the Blood Bay.”

“If it comes to war?” chided Saala. “It will. You and I have studied enough history to know that. The Alliance and the Coalition are both accumulating allies, and both are decrying the threat of the other. Each action requires a reaction, and an escalation such as they’re engaged in only results in one outcome. Nothing will prevent it unless the Sanctuary does become involved. If the Veil has chosen not to do so, then—”

“Then we shall see what happens,” hissed Lady Towaal. “She does not support either faction over the other. I will tell that to King Argren himself when we pass through Whitehall. You’ll be there to hear it. But what of Lord Gregor? His land sits directly between the two factions. Outside of them, he’s the strongest lord in Alcott. When he kneels before Argren, he’ll tip the scales of this conflict.”

“He only does so because he must,” insisted Saala. “Both sides are forcing him to choose, so he will.”

“He will have trouble when the Coalition learns of his intention,” warned Lady Towaal. “King Argren is calling in his bannermen to a conclave to ratify the Alliance with himself at its head, but until they formally agree, no one will march to Issen’s defense. Gregor plays a dangerous game.”

Saala shrugged. “He knows of the conclave and the timing. He has few options.”

“He should be watching his back,” said Lady Towaal. “I am surprised he directed you to leave his side given the tools the Coalition has at its disposal.”

“You mean Lord Jason?” asked Saala. “Lord Gregor is aware of the man and his talents. I wanted to stay in Issen to help protect Gregor from the Coalition’s assassin, but Gregor cares more for his daughter than his own safety. I . . . I wonder if he believes he will survive this looming conflict.”

“He sent Amelie to the one place he is certain will not fall beneath the tide of war,” said Lady Towaal, an unexpected catch in her throat as she realized the finality of Lord Gregor’s decision. “Without knowing the Veil’s position, without knowing the outcome of the conclave . . . He knows the Sanctuary will remain, regardless of what happens.”

Saala stared at her. “As you say, Issen sits directly between the two agitators. It is like two feral dogs barking at each other in an alley, and my liege is trapped in the middle. Whichever dog triumphs, Gregor knows he will be bit. We’d hoped the Veil would intervene, but no matter what, you are right, the Sanctuary will be the safest place in Alcott for Amelie. Perhaps there, if you decline to protect her home, you can at least grant her the skills to survive in a world where Issen has fallen.”

“Perhaps,” said Lady Towaal. “Many things can happen, Saala. My own view of the future is not so dark as yours. You and I may not see a solution, but perhaps the Veil does. Perhaps Amelie and her generation will find a way out. It does not always end in war.”

Saala snorted.

A crack sounded in the dark forest, and beside her, Saala drew his falchion, the steel whispering against the leather sheath. There was silence for a moment, then the crash of a heavy body rushing through the undergrowth. An earsplitting bellow tore through the quiet as the demon shouted its challenge.

Two dozen paces from them, the thing burst into view, hunched over, running like a dog. Its jet-black skin blended in with the shadows, but even at speed and in the dark, Lady Towaal could see it was big. Its shoulders rose above her waist, and its heavily muscled body must have been four times her mass.

Saala stepped calmly forward, waiting on the beast’s reckless charge.

Three paces from him, it leaped, streaking straight at the blademaster, its maw opened wide, flashing teeth prepared to sink into his neck, tear his flesh free, and consume his lifeblood. Thick, powerful muscles bunched beneath its smooth skin as it flew into the air. Claws flexed, as long and sharp as her belt dagger.

The blademaster shifted gracefully to the side and knelt, letting the demon’s momentum carry it past him. He swept his falchion up, attempting to cleave it from beneath, spilling the thing’s guts, but at the last moment, the demon twisted in the air, a clawed limb swiping down at Saala’s falchion. The blade bit into its foreleg, carving a bloody laceration, catching on the creature’s sturdy bone.

And then it was past, landing on the earth with a heavy thump, tumbling over its wounded leg. It sprang back up and scrambled to turn, clawed feet digging great clots of dirt as it spun to face them again.

“Damn,” muttered Saala, standing, his blade held steadily in front of him. “It’s faster than I expected.”

“Do you need assistance?” asked Lady Towaal, raising her hands.

“I’ve got it,” grumbled Saala.

He stepped forward again as the demon charged back at him. This time, the blademaster didn’t risk missing. Instead of leaping out of the path of the beast, he attacked, running directly at it.

The demon, wounded, purple blood leaking from where Saala’s first strike had cut it deeply, stumbled. It clearly hadn’t expected its prey to attack.

Saala, moving in a blur, feinted a blow at the creature’s face, freezing it in place, and then thrust into its chest, seeking its heart.

The demon roared at him, twitching its arms in spasmodic rage, but it was powerless to stop the length of razor-sharp steel skewering its body. Its voice warbled, and then it fell, sliding off the weapon to crash heavily onto the ground. Echoes of its cry bounced from tree to tree, and when they faded, the forest was silent again.

Saala wiped the creature’s blood from his falchion, sheathed the weapon, and drew his dagger. He stooped beside the demon and worked the sharp steel of the blade into its scalp, sawing free the demon’s two horns. He cleaned the dagger and then deposited the horns into a pouch he hung on his belt.

“I’ve never seen a demon that large,” remarked Saala.

Lady Towaal grunted.

“Have you?” he pressed her.

Finally, she shook her head. “Perhaps it has been here longer than the villagers realized. From the size of it, it looks to have been feeding for at least three months. It is only because this place is so isolated that no one has been forced to deal with it.”

“They would have lost a lot of men facing this creature,” mentioned the blademaster, nudging the dead body with his boot. “If it gave me trouble . . .”

“One of them stood up to the thing,” she retorted, looking away from the demon’s body. “A boy. He fought back against it and dragged another man to safety. All they need is a little courage. They would have prevailed.”

“Maybe,” replied Saala doubtfully. “Maybe they would have; maybe an awfully lot of those people back in the village would have died. I find it difficult to believe an untrained boy survived an encounter with this demon. He must be possessed with a unique courage. I’d like to meet him if we get the chance.”

“We don’t have time to go searching all over the village,” said Lady Towaal. “We have a schedule to keep, remember?”

“I remember,” he said. “Back to the village, then?”

She nodded curtly. “To the village. Hopefully this satisfies Amelie, and we can get back to our original mission. Our conversation tonight serves as ample reminder of what we’ve ignored by coming here.”

“Tell her of the import,” suggested Saala as they trekked back through the forest, the way through the darkening wood lit by a glowing orb suspended above the mage’s open palm. “Amelie is not a stupid girl. If she understands the political concerns, the reason it is so important we move quickly, then you will hear no argument from her.”

“You think I should tell her that her father and mother sent her to the Sanctuary in fear that Issen will fall in the war between the Alliance and the Coalition?” snapped Lady Towaal. “I have not known her long, but I’ve known the girl long enough to realize what she’ll do when she hears that. She’ll slip from us and go running directly back to her parents and her people. She dragged us to this little village over a single demon, did she not? She’d stop at nothing to be there in the face of a war. Someday, she will realize why she was sent to the Sanctuary, but before then, I hope we can impart some wisdom and skill to the girl. You are right, the world will be a dangerous place for her, however it goes. There is much she will need to learn if she is to survive.”

Saala grunted.

“The longer we take to reach the Sanctuary,” warned Lady Towaal, “the more opportunities for harm to befall Amelie. Tonight, we faced a single demon, but there are many dangers in this world. Help me, Saala. Help me get Amelie to the City and behind the walls of the Sanctuary.”

“I understand,” conceded the man. He looked away into the darkness. “I understand.”

Lady Towaal crossed her arms, her sharp glance darting between the young woman and her father. The man, Alistair Pinewood, was what passed for leadership in this small village. He was wailing like a little boy who’d been told they’d eaten all the pie. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks, and he sobbed dramatically, occasionally reaching out as if to clutch his daughter and hold her there.

“You cannot take her!” he shouted. “I’ll call a magistrate. I’ll have you arrested!”

“There are no magistrates anywhere within days of here,” mentioned Lady Towaal, shaking her head at the man’s antics. “And besides, this girl is a woman grown. She’s capable of making her own choices, and she’s agreed to accompany us. I will see to her safety, and if you do not believe me, go view your son. Without my help, the boy would have died from the infection the demon gave him.”

“Her safety!” crowed the council member. “Her safety! You mean to take her into that den of witches!”

“I mean to turn her into one of those witches,” snapped Lady Towaal, leaning toward the man, opening her eyes wide.

He cowered under her glare.

She shot a glance at the girl, Megan, hoping she hadn’t frightened the poor thing. The girl showed signs of incredible potential, and the moment she realized that Lady Towaal had the power to heal her brother from the ravages of demon infection, she’d been eager to learn more. The girl’s heart beat with the pattern of a born nurturer, and coupled with her bright burning will, she would make an excellent asset for the Sanctuary. It was a simple matter to negotiate her journey to the City in exchange for the healing.

The Sanctuary could always use more able bodies to supplement their ranks, particularly with war on the horizon. The moment Lady Towaal had seen the girl hunched over her feverish brother, seen the determination behind her eyes, she had known she would recruit the girl if she was able. That strength of will, tempered by deference to her betters and a willingness to listen, it made for a good combination in a young mage.

It was always difficult, though, to separate the new initiates from their families. The training to become a mage took several decades, and few parents were willing to accept that. It was best, Lady Towaal had found, when the departure came with a certain level of emotion. It made the break easier to bear for the initiates when their last recollection of their parents was a screaming face, red from tears and embarrassed impotence. The stoicism and strength of the Sanctuary’s mages was more impressive after such theatrics.

The door banged open, and two young men slipped into the common room of the inn. Lady Towaal recognized one who had been at their table the previous evening when they’d returned from the forest. He was the adopted brother of her new recruit. He was the one who had fended off the demon and dragged the injured boy to safety.

Evidently, he was the only man in the village who had the courage to face the demon. With only a quarterstaff, no less. She’d almost laughed at such a notion, until she’d seen the seriousness of the young man’s face and Rhys’s earnest interest in the story. To use a blunt weapon against a demon was crazy, but evidently it was the kind of insanity that the rogue appreciated.

She shook her head, looking at the boy. The line between bravery and foolishness was a thin one. Even now, he’d barged into the room as if there was something he could do. An entire gathering of villagers stood outside, neither brave nor foolish enough to interfere with a mage taking one of their own.

Lady Towaal rolled her eyes and glanced around, preparing to leave the little village, when suddenly both Megan and her father began begging for the boy to escort the girl safely to the City. As if the boy’s involvement would somehow add to the presence of a mage, a blademaster, and a rogue.

Lady Towaal began to shake her head no, but Rhys cleared his throat and caught her eye. “He did fend off a demon and save that kid.”

She frowned, but the rogue held her gaze, his face serious. She looked back to the boy and saw his clear-eyed, eager confidence. He had no idea what he was getting into.

She busied herself adjusting the straps of her pack, looking around the room as everyone watched her breathlessly. The boy was adopted, no blood relative of the girl Megan. She felt no magical potential when she looked at him, but his will burned with an intense fervor. There was something . . .

“I don’t think he’ll slow us down much,” added Rhys, holding her gaze.

She shook her head. Rhys was a rogue, but that was not all. He’d seen more of the world than her, and for far longer. That was an extraordinarily rare feat. Most of the time, the man was only interested in himself. If he was speaking up for the boy, there must be a reason. A reason she could not fathom, which worried her.

The boy shifted his feet, waiting for her answer. He looked at her unafraid, though by now he knew what she was. She held his gaze, but he did not look away. A fine line between bravery and foolishness indeed. If the boy accompanied them and survived, she wondered if there might not be a great adventure ahead of him.

Finally, she decided. “Fine, but he’s not my responsibility.” She nodded at the boy’s sudden grin. “We’ll stay at the way station tomorrow night and leave the next morning. If you are there, you can come with us. If not, we’ll leave you behind.”

With that, she hitched her pack and led her party out the door.

“You will not regret it, ah, m’lady . . .” stammered Megan. “He’s a good man.”

“We shall see,” remarked Lady Towaal. “We’ve a long, dangerous road to travel, and the journey is just the beginning. Tell me again, what was the young man’s name?”

“Benjamin Ashwood.”

AC Cobble

AC Cobble is the author of the Benjamin Ashwood and the Cartographer series. Benjamin Ashwood is a modern take on classic coming of age fantasy, and the Cartographer is a dark fantasy adventure with dashes of Sherlock Holmes. AC resides in Houston, Texas, with his wife, their three young boys, and his wife’s dog. A refugee from the corporate world, AC now writes full time in his home office, at least until the boys batter down the barricades and drag him out to play. He loves cooking and spending time outdoors, but his only claimed hobby is travel. AC enjoys finding the fantastical places in the real world and using them as inspiration for his stories. You can find more information about AC Cobble and his books at: https://www.accobble.com.

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Email: ac@accobble.com

5,600 Words

THEY UNPLUGGED SEB’S neurodes at the end of his ten-year tour of duty. He’d known it was coming, had been told before he ever signed the contract that if they left him in any longer, his health would start to deteriorate. What they hadn’t mentioned was that his health would deteriorate anyway.

Once, Seb had kept six hundred people alive, responding instantly to their needs, and their wishes too when those fell within his power. He had carried them all in his belly, made them part of himself. He thought he would implode under the emptiness of having lost them.

Today, his only job was to leave his apartment: something he hadn’t done since the first week he’d moved in. He had groceries delivered, the occasional takeout, odds and ends as he needed them. Supermarkets and corner stores might as well have been on another planet. If they were, he might have actually cared to visit them. He stared out his ninth-floor window while trying to summon up a reason to go out, let alone the will to do so. His fleet-assigned shrink had given him the task and called it homework. Which was of course the exact opposite of what it actually was: out-of-home work.

He paced the length of the living room a few times, until the 3D printer on his telemedicine kiosk chirped: his painkillers had printed. He dry-swallowed his pain pills and walked to the apartment door before he could think twice. No one else was in the ninth-floor elevator lobby, and Seb jabbed his finger into the interface to call for a ride to the ground floor. Once the door opened, he realized he should have put on a jacket. Too late—the two women already in the car stared at him as he hesitated. He ducked his head and took a place in the elevator’s front corner, as far from them as possible. Not a peep from either woman as the elevator dropped groundward, but their eyes burned on the neurode stumps that stood out at the base of his skull and the back of his neck. He imagined he could feel the photons pinging off him and into their greedy retinas and tried not to laugh. Phantom photons to go with his phantom limbs. He should have gone back for a jacket. One with a high collar and with thick padding to hide the swells of the additional stumps that traced the contour of his spine.

When he made it out of the downstairs lobby, evening shaded the street outside. Gaudy displays advertised burgers, sushi, movies, liquor. Seb’s head swung back and forth, trying to force a familiar constellation to appear from the pattern. He should have planned a route before departure. Burgers, then. That was closest.

Tires screeched as he stepped out into the street. Three cars abreast, one for each lane, came to a stop. Each of them maintained the same precise ten-foot stopping distance. Behind them, more traffic began to pile up. A woman in the middle car set aside her laptop and lowered her driver’s-side window. “This isn’t a crosswalk,” she yelled. “Are you impaired or something?” Seb fled to the far side of the street and crashed through the doors into the restaurant he’d chosen.

The boy behind the counter at the burger restaurant stared at Seb. “Welcome to Marilu’s,” he said finally. “Can I—”

“Burger.” Seb realized too late that he was interrupting. So slow, waiting for the clerk to invite him to order. Much faster, much better, to just shoot the data to a waiting computer that would have already started up the grill. “Fries. Chocolate malt.”

The boy’s eyes grew, and he prodded frantically at the interface on the counter in front of him. “Uh . . . cheese on that burger?”

Seb held out his handset to pay.

The boy tried again. “Was that a small or large fry? And the shake?”

Again Seb shook his handset in the direction of the interface. The boy pressed a few more keys, and Seb’s handset vibrated against his fingers to let him know the payment had been processed. “That’ll be right up,” the boy said, and rushed off. Seb retreated to a bench by the door to wait.

A man and his young daughter stood opposite him, in the corner between the door and the counter. Waiting for their own order, maybe, or for someone to come out of the bathroom. The man studiously watched the diners in the half-empty restaurant, but the girl’s eyes hung on Seb. She had violet irises—a favorite mod before Seb had left Earth, and still lingering around, apparently—and she was chewing wetly on the tips of her mittens. He wished she would stop that.

But when she finally did let go of the mitten, it was to pester him with a question, and an altogether too familiar one at that. “Did it hurt?” she asked. A tiny piece of blue fuzz clung to her upper lip. “When they put those neurodes in you?”

He didn’t correct her juvenile pronunciation—noo-rodez—and he didn’t answer her question either. “It hurts now,” he said, and the girl’s father bent down and whispered something in her ear. She didn’t ask anything else, but she kept staring at him while she masticated the blue yarn of her mittens. Seb thought about leaving without his food. He wondered what his doctor would say about that, if he told her about tonight’s adventure at all. But finally another man appeared, and the trio stepped out hand in hand into the evening.

Only another minute until the teenager behind the counter reappeared with a folded paper bag and a dew-beaded cup. “Here’s your order.” But he didn’t set the food down on the counter or hold it out when Seb approached. “My sister is an ore transport,” he said, and his voice cracked. “She’s got eight years left in her term. Do you think she—”

“I don’t know your sister.” Seb didn’t want to hear the end of the boy’s question. He reached out and snatched the bag out of the boy’s hand. His crude clumsy fingers slipped on the wet cup, and it crashed to the floor. Gobs of chocolate ice cream spattered the tiles, the counter, Seb’s shoes. Seb left it there, left the gaping boy, and fled to the comforting, oppressive walls of his apartment.

None of it was the fleet’s fault, not really. They had given him an apartment and a pension that would let him live comfortably for the rest of his life. They had set up the telemedicine kiosk on the kitchen counter, between the electric kettle and the wall. They even scheduled the consults for him—the pension was conditional on his keeping those appointments, in fact. An ex-implantee had offed herself not long after the program had launched, and now they kept close tabs on their alumni. Suicide was bad for recruitment, though that first death hadn’t kept Seb from signing on.

He wished he had a tele-med consult with his psychologist today, and at the same time, he was glad he didn’t. He sat in the darkness for a while and listened to the great nothingness all around him. Downstairs, a baby was crying, was always and forever crying, and there were raised voices somewhere down the hall too. He’d thought that the extra noise would help with the—what did his doctor call it? The “readjustment”—but instead it set his teeth on edge. It was just a reminder that there should have been so much more.

He hadn’t finished the hamburger, but the grease still lingered unpleasantly on his tongue. He went to the bathroom and took out his toothbrush. No mirror over the bathroom sink—none anywhere in the apartment, in fact. It was the only instance of redecoration he’d undertaken. Each time he glanced in a mirror, he expected to see the great curving hull of a starship arching away behind his back, and each time that absence tore him open like a speeding microasteroid fragment.

Seb stayed up too late at night. Returning to the habit of sleep had been a challenge; ten years of sleep-diversion tech had put his former life’s seven-hours-a-night routine out of reach. It wasn’t as if a starship could settle down for a few minutes’ rest, not with all the lives depending on it. So the years and years of stim had taken their toll on the old physiology too. Seb settled for a few hours each night, in fits and snatches. Just long enough to cycle through a set of dreams. A biological necessity, like a bowel movement; a means of dispelling mental waste rather than physical.

And there was so much waste to dispense with. Dreams of navigation maps and split-second course corrections. Dreams of power fluctuations and crew management. Dreams of Saturn’s rings shattering sunlight a thousand different ways. Dreams of the bustling hive inside him, back when he was much more than a single ticking heart, a pair of wet, fluttering lungs.

Seb dreamed of reincarnation.

He preserved the hamburger wrapper to show the psychologist during their next talk. An absurd little badge of honor, but she praised his progress—he left out the staring little girl and the final encounter with the anxious clerk. “I’m proud of you,” she told him from the tele-med kiosk’s glossy screen. Seb couldn’t remember her name; he only ever called her doctor, and if she’d noticed, she’d never mentioned it. “I imagine that wasn’t easy to do?”

“I guess not.” He managed not to glance at the time displayed in the top center of the screen.

She shifted to a different navigational bearing. “Have you given any more thought to a new hobby, like we talked about? A way you can spend your time, Sebastian?”

She always called him that, never Seb. Seb he preferred; Seb clipped short and simple off the tongue, not dragging through unnecessary syllables: Seh-bass-tyin. “A little. Lots of new music since before I left. Books to read.”

She gave him a moment, but he had run out of acceleration. “Have you downloaded anything? Ordered a musical instrument? Or a paper book?” She shifted her weight, recrossed her legs. “If you like analog books, you could even try antiquing. I’m sure there are some fine places in the city to shop for vintage copies.”

“That’s an idea.” Seb couldn’t bring himself to call it a good idea, and he didn’t want to call it a bad one to the doctor’s face. Along his back, his neurodes throbbed in white-hot longing, calling out for his missing self. He bobbed his head in a nod.

“Good,” said the doctor. “Give it some thought, come up with an idea or two. Then we can discuss concrete steps next time. Make a plan.”

“All right. Good. Thank you.” Seb didn’t much care for hobbies, but he liked plans.

Before she signed off, the doctor directed the kiosk to dispense his medications. Two different painkillers and an antidepressant—exactly one of each type of pill. The 3D printer in the kiosk chirped when it was finished. More doses would print at dinnertime and before Seb went to bed. He’d set up a bypass circuit in the printer, one that would print out duplicate doses of the pain meds every time the doctor sent an order. He’d been an engineer once, before any of this, an engineer and a self-professed technophile. He’d wanted to sail between the stars, to experience life as something greater than himself. Now the thought of having a stash took the sharp edge from the shadowy pain that hung over him. Only after he’d coded the bypass had he hesitated. If they caught him with stockpiled pills, they might think he was a suicide risk. They could bring him in for observation, for long-term commitment, and even the limited comfort of his too-big-too-small apartment would be forfeit.

So the circuit lay, unused but not forgotten, in the back of a dresser drawer. The pain wasn’t real, Seb told himself, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it. The phantom parts of his body haunted him, those severed from each neurode stump left in his spinal cord: the absent shuttle-bay doors, the missing habitation system, the navigation array, and the ConstDrive engines. Sometimes when Seb lay in bed half asleep, or sat by the kitchen window with the too-bright sun burning holes in his eyes, he caught himself trying to deploy repair nanos to allay the damage. But there were no nanos, and there was nothing to be done.

Seb dreamed of the vast empty space between asteroids, the nothingness between worlds. He dreamed of hollow echoing compartments and the ring of boots in long hallways. Seb dreamed of life, his and others’.

Seb spent the next morning lying on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. All the time in the world to think, and nothing to think about. At least it wouldn’t be a waste to divert some of his processing power to something as frivolous as a hobby. Learning to play the clarinet wouldn’t deprive a sanitation system of his attentions, and reading a novel wouldn’t require powering down the collision sensor array. He didn’t care about books or clarinets. But he cared about maintaining his medication supply, so he would have to figure out a way to redirect some energy into a hobby. A hobby, when all he really wanted to do again was—

Fly.

He sat up. Called out to his tablet, told it to place a series of orders from various vendors. He paid extra for overnight shipping, already wanting the pieces in his hands. This wasn’t a hobby, he told himself. It was just a different sort of life-support system.

The next time he spoke to the doctor, he had his handiwork to show her. A modified drone, outfitted with articulated limbs, a camera, a microphone. Her eyes rounded with surprise as he explained its assembly. “I thought,” he said, dissembling easily now that he had a comfortable plan to decelerate into, “that it could be my eyes and ears on the city. Give me a look at what’s out there before I’m going to head out under my own lift.”

“That’s a wonderful idea.” She studied the drone from her vantage point on the far side of the screen. “Do you have any plans for what you’re going to do with it first?”

“I have a few thoughts,” he said, and a genuine smile stretched his lips. It hurt, an unfamiliar sort of strain, but the pain was real, and Seb relished that.

The thing about the neurodes was that after ten years, being constantly plugged in started to overwrite the rest of your nervous system. Resources got rerouted to the systems that were in constant use: the ConstDrive, navigation, temperature control. Your arms got sluggish, your legs forgot how to walk. Your lungs started to slack off, and a coughing fit would split your needed attention away from the bay doors or from shifting the collision shield. Instead of going pitter-patter, your heart just pittered. And then you got sent back “home.”

But only if you stayed plugged in all the time, and if you were plugged in to something as vast as a ship. So many moving pieces in play, so much to keep track of. One little drone, a few limited sensory inputs. And Seb didn’t intend to stay plugged in all the time. Just now and then. When he needed it, to take away some of that dull throb of pain that his medications couldn’t reach. Like now.

The neurode at the back of his head, just where his skull met his spine, was the easiest for him to reach, and so he worked from there to attach the working transmitter he’d built. For the first time since he’d moved in to the apartment, he wished he had a mirror.

From the parts he’d ordered, he also managed to assemble a functional neurode receiver, through which he routed the drone’s inputs and outputs. He activated the transmitter first, a mere brush of thought, and gasped at the hollow echoing sense he’d opened up. Then on to the drone, turning on one input after another. The void filled, then reverberated, with light, color, sound. His apartment seen in dizzying double. His own hoarse breathing bounced back to him.

It felt good, tamped down on the pain. Some mental circuits, long dormant, flickered to life, warning Seb again of damage he’d taken: far too little input, far too little capacity, for what his neurodes had been designed for. He took a deep breath, soothed the autonomic response, enjoyed the sensation of being more than once again.

But more than still wasn’t enough. The window was open, and a mental twitch lifted the drone off Seb’s kitchen floor and out into the afternoon. White sunlight danced across the camera lens; Seb’s eyelids clamped instinctively but couldn’t shut out the light that seared him. It took him three tries to adjust the camera’s aperture and let a manageable amount of light in. By then the drone had lost considerable altitude; he righted it and stabilized its bearing only two stories off the ground.

Seb exhaled noisily. No one on the sidewalk glanced up at the drone; they probably hadn’t noticed the drones that had brought Seb’s pieces and parts either. He nudged the drone forward, hugging close to the apartment building on its route. He circled the exterior once, then hesitated. Sending his proxy out from home shouldn’t feel like such a challenge. What he’d desired had been to soar again, to remember what it felt like to be part of something greater than one fragile body and its limited sensations. He wanted to be free of that fleshy anchor, not cling ever closer to it. He brought the drone around and across the front of the building once more, and determined to send it out into the street this time.

But on the front steps, something caught his eye. A ragged EduFriend, the rabbit model, shuddering in the corner—one of those toys engineered to provide age-appropriate interaction and comfort to young children. Under Seb’s watch, the toy tried over and over again to squeeze itself into the crack between the building’s front door and its jamb. Of course it was far too large to fit, but it kept trying anyway. Seb wondered why no one had followed its signal to find it. He considered the rabbit’s battered state, the dent in the blue fur of its back. Broken, then. He felt almost sorry for the thing.

And not just the rabbit itself. There would be a child, somewhere in the building, who had noticed too late that their friend was missing. Well.

Seb extended the lightweight telescoping arm he’d installed on the drone, and a manipulator tool grasped the rabbit by the realistically fluffy scruff at the back of its neck. The rabbit panicked at first, playing havoc with the drone’s balance, but froze up when the drone began to pick up altitude. Either a self-preservation routine had kicked in, or the thing had simply shut down entirely.

Seb brought the drone around the side of the building, to a first-story window, and extended the telescopic arm to tap at the glass. The rabbit’s blue hind legs scratched there too. After a moment, a teenager approached the window, then stopped short at the sight of the rabbit-encumbered drone. Seb watched as her face folded into a bewildered scrunch, then moved the drone clear. No one came to the window at the next apartment, nor the one after that. The fourth window was open, with a man scrubbing dishes in the kitchen sink. Seb extended the rabbit out toward him. The drone’s microphone didn’t register a sound, but Seb could clearly read the man’s lips: “What the hell—?” And the drone retreated.

Around the building following the row of first-floor windows, then up a story, then another. Seb began to wonder whether he’d have any luck on this initial circuit of the building at all or if he’d need another pass, while he scratched at a window on the fifth floor. At least it was something to do.

At this window, no one answered right away. But he heard the vibrations of a voice from the front of the apartment, so he lingered by the window for an extra few moments just in case. Finally a woman appeared, lines cutting deep around her eyes and around her mouth. She pinched her nose as she approached the fridge and answered someone Seb couldn’t hear. “Honey,” she said. “Mr. Sanchez said Choochoo wasn’t at school either. I don’t know what else to tell—”

She saw the blue rabbit hovering in the window, and her mouth fell open.

“Choochoo?” A little boy stood in the kitchen doorway, sunlight and wonder sparkling in his eyes. “Mama! He flew home?” Clouds slid over some of that delight. “He’s hurt.”

“I could fix him.” Seb’s voice sounded rusty in his own ears; the echo the microphone picked up from the transmitter sounded even worse. He must sound like a madman, an invisible friend speaking out of a toy-toting drone. The silence stretching out from the microphone hurt his ears worse than his voice had; he pressed on. “If you’d like. It’s no trouble. I could have him back to you later this afternoon.”

“Sweetheart . . .” the woman said. But whatever had prompted her reservations fled her. Her arm dropped to her side.

“Yes, please.” The boy nodded, bouncing his tight black curls. “And thank you.”

The drone moved out of the window, looped around the building, and slipped carefully in through Seb’s waiting window. He reached out for the rabbit before he let the drone land, and cradled it against his chest with both hands until its trembling stilled.

When the next month’s pension check arrived in his account, Seb made more orders. Another drone, a basic tripod bot on three wheels, more cameras, and microphones. More hookups. Each one plugged in felt like an eye long closed, reopening. Like a part of himself gone dark and newly awoken. He still hurt: the ghost of his storage compartments, the empty echo of his engines. But the hurt had compressed, taking up less of his attention. Taking up less of him.

There was a young couple with a new baby on the floor below him. He sent the tripod bot down the elevator and let it explain, in Seb’s rusty voice, to the bleary-eyed mother why it had come.

“You’re the one who fixed Choochoo,” she said, and Seb made the tripod bot nod. The woman sat down on the couch, too exhausted or shocked to object, while his robot prepared a bottle and rocked the baby gently, in the warm padded cradle Seb had built into its torso. The mother—Seb did not know her name and did not have the robot ask—fell asleep within two minutes of taking a seat. The robot used its manipulator arm to drape her with a blanket and retreated to the corner to rock the baby until it fell asleep. Then it lowered the child into a waiting bassinet and retreated silently out the door. Seb wondered if the woman would think it was all a strange dream when she woke in the morning.

The mother to whose child Seb had returned Choochoo had two older boys as well, school-age, and at her invitation, Seb would send down a smaller drone to occupy them while she prepared dinner or finished the work she brought home night after night. The middle child enjoyed riddles, the eldest conquered all the math puzzles Seb set before him, and the youngest, Choochoo in arms, liked Seb’s stories the best.

The elderly man in the corner apartment on the first floor probably should have been moved to assisted living by now. But he didn’t want to go, and Seb sent a pair of small, agile bots down twice a week to clean the kitchen and bathroom, and to assemble a full fridge’s worth of microwaveable meals from the man’s grocery deliveries.

The three twenty-somethings at the opposite corner of Seb’s floor shared a two-bedroom, but not cleaning duties or equal shares of the rent. Seb sent a small bot down to mediate the dispute until all three parties came away not happy but satisfied.

A few people slipped notes under his door, asking for distance and privacy. Seb complied, and ordered more components, which he delivered to those apartments. Blockers, blinders, to program swaths of darkness into his input. No visuals or sound, black spots on his brain. That was all right; the interiors of the fuel pods had been points unknown too, and no camera or microphone could have survived the intensity of the ConstDrive engines either. Constellations of need, bright beautiful points of light, danced in his brain. The splotches of darkness only made those lights more important, more urgent. There was still pain, but it was a dull ache, a limb compressed oddly into a new and strange shape, not severed entirely. Growing pains, not war wounds.

A full-time hobby. Seb placed more orders online, not for parts this time but for sleep-diversion stims.

Seb sat awake in a dark apartment. Dreams receded and hid in the shadowed corners of his new life.

Toilets to clean. Kitchen fan motors to repair. Babies to rock, children to teach, songs to learn and sing and share. Conversations beamed wirelessly from his apartment to this one or that: a safe, sterile distance. Too busy to think. Too busy to dream. He cruised through doctor appointments on autopilot. Sometimes, he forgot to take his medication. The extras built up, a pyramid of white and pastel tablets, beside the kiosk. A miniature tomb in which to store his unwanted sleep. No call for sleep now, none at all, not with tongues of electric fire singing through the neurodes up and down his spine.

Hallways to rewire. Dinner to make. Rent negotiations to conduct. Tears to dry. Couches to lift. Lives, so many of them, to reach out for, to collect, to hold close and warm and safe.

A molehill of pills that grew into a mountain.

Seb—

—dreamed of falling.

Needles of light prickled his eyes. His eyelids clung together, as if they pulled 5Gs apiece. He didn’t want to wake up.

He didn’t want to sleep.

From the next room, voices. In the cupboard, dishware scraped together, and the fridge door closed with a soft sucking sound. Seb rolled onto his elbow and felt a shock of pain as his empty neurodes came up out of the warm, clinging bedcovers. No wings, no engines. No nanny drones or helper bots. He folded in on himself and gasped for air, for connection. For a reason.

“He’s awake,” a man said from the doorway. A familiar voice. The music teacher who lived on Seb’s floor. “Let me move you, Dr. Freeman.”

Seb didn’t want to be moved, but the teacher wasn’t talking to him. He came into Seb’s room toting the telemed kiosk, and deposited it on the bureau. The doctor’s pale, serious face peeped down at Seb from the screen.

“Sebastian,” she said. Her voice dragged in Seb’s ears. “How did all this happen?”

It had started with the drone. “I wanted to fly again,” Seb croaked, but that wasn’t true—it sounded true, but the echoes rang hollow. It wasn’t the flying, there was no kind of doing at all that could have changed anything. It wasn’t about doing: it was about being, being more than, being bigger. Being a starship again, albeit one ever anchored to the earth. He tried to explain it in a way the doctor would understand, and when that felt too far to reach, he tried to explain it in a way that he could. The music teacher shifted in the doorway, as if he didn’t know whether to give Seb his space or lend him support. Before long, a woman with a baby strapped to her chest appeared behind him. Seb didn’t care: the words spilled out of him like sewage from a broken sanitation pipe. He spoke about having people to care for, having a purpose. Being needed. Being a part of something—being something that others could be part of.

The psychologist watched him, listened, nudged him occasionally with a careful question. She . . . let him cry, and the music teacher edged away from the doorway. The mother with the baby moved closer, a full step into the room. She leaned against the wall, where she swayed back and forth, first in gentle counterpoint to the sobs that shook Seb. Then, when the swish of her shirt against the wall was the only sound in the room, Dr. Freeman cleared her throat.

“Sebastian . . . I’m not going to make you do anything you’re not comfortable with. But how do you feel about coming in to spend a few weeks doing an inpatient program? We can—work on some of these things you’ve mentioned.” We can keep a closer eye on you, she meant. She hastened to add, “There’s no pension contingency involved, no strings attached. But do you think it would help you to make a clean break?”

Seb swallowed hard. “I don’t want a clean break.” He didn’t want a break of any sort. “I’ll do better. I can—” The word “unplug” receded from him, slid from his tongue and down the back off his throat to choke him. “I can—”

The doctor’s stylus scratched against her table. “You can, and will, reduce the number of neurodes you’re plugged into. No more than four in use at any given time. You will be fully unplugged for ten hours a day. Ten uninterrupted hours, during which you will sleep. And we’ll be meeting every day again. For the foreseeable future.”

“I can check in on him.” The woman still rocked side to side, lulling the baby into happy gurgles. “I don’t have to come in or anything, Mr.—Sebastian? Sebastian. Just come by and make sure you’re doing all right for yourself.”

“Me too.” The man had reappeared just outside the doorway. “And I’m sure others will too. Now that we know.”

“I don’t need—” The word struggled off Seb’s sluggish tongue. “I don’t need help.” He was the one who helped, the one who oversaw, the one who checked in on. The doctor shifted in her seat, but didn’t say anything.

The woman stopped her pacing, and the baby on her belly squawked its dismay. “Don’t be ridiculous. You must have had technicians, or—or maintenance staff, or something, back when you were”—she waved a hand at the ceiling—“up there. Everyone needs something; I don’t care if they’re a man or a freighter. Or a coffeepot.”

“Sebastian?” said the doctor. Her face had moved closer to the camera, and it loomed large and pale in the screen. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Seb’s throat jerked, spasmed. The emptiness around him felt like severed limbs, like the endless night between the worlds. “I wish,” he said. The mother stroked her child’s wispy hair; the music teacher sucked on his front teeth. “I wish you’d call me Seb.”

Seb’s mind flew.

He spread his probability cloud of consciousness out over the building around him: today an awareness of gritty kitchen floors and fingerprint-streaked windows, tomorrow an empty fridge or raised voice bouncing off low ceilings or a baby’s wet cries. So much to do before he unplugged at 1700, when Charlotte came—she had served five years on a ship like the one Seb had been, till a loading-bay injury had grounded her. Sometimes they exchanged a brief conversation face-to-face, when she came up to check on him; sometimes they beamed words silently back and forth across the building. Memories of space, of darkness and collision alarms and long, long waits. A few others had begun to ping him with messages other than queries for help too. An image of a child’s drawing. A news headline link, marked up with comments: “Thought you might like to see this.” Greetings, wishes for well-being. Thank-you notes.

Time to peruse all that later. The apartment building was coming out of its afternoon quiescence as children arrived home from school, as people came in from work. Seb let himself spread out, through brick and carpet and drywall and plastic. Into the places that would have him, around the people that wanted him there. He had a family of sparrows to shoo out of a bathroom vent, a meal to make for the norovirus-riddled Kwoks on the third floor, a less-than-amicable breakup and move-out to oversee.

He stretched into the ache. The pain would come calling later, when the neurodes were unplugged and ten hours stretched out in front of him. The pain would come, maybe it always would, but he could abide it. So long as there was important work reaching out to him from the other side.

Seb had no starship wings to unfurl, not anymore and never again. But his roots grew deep, deep into the ground.

Aimee Ogden

Aimee Ogden lives in Wisconsin with her husband, three-year-old twins, and very old dog. A former software tester and science teacher, she now writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses.

Website: aimeeogdenwrites.wordpress.com

Twitter: @Aimee_Ogden

Email: fakegeekmom@gmail.com

2,000 Words

“WHAT KIND OF car is this?” Erik asked as he buckled his seat belt. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“It’s an import,” Vaughn, his driver, answered. “Not many of ’em over here yet.” He waited for a gap in traffic, then pulled out from the curb.

“So, you a big Corey Hart fan?” Erik asked as they merged onto the freeway a few minutes later.

“Who?”

“You know, because you’re wearing your sunglasses at night?”

Vaughn looked at him. He didn’t take his sunglasses off, though. “I don’t get it.”

“Never mind.”

The trip since had been pretty quiet. Erik had spent most of it with his head against the passenger window, looking up at the stars. It was a clear, moonless night, and the farther they got from the city, the more stars appeared. Erik was still able to pick out most of the constellations he’d learned in Cub Scouts. He’d wanted to be an astronomer growing up—even had his own telescope—but that changed once he got to college and realized the math was way over his head. The stars still brought him comfort; no matter where life took him—and it had taken him to some awful places over the years—he knew they’d always be up there waiting for him. It was sad to think about, but they were one of the few things left in life he could count on.

“Mind if I play the radio?” Vaughn asked.

Erik lifted his head from the passenger window. “Sure, go ahead. Maybe you’ll find an ’80s station playing Corey Hart, and I won’t feel like a total dork.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Vaughn said. He fiddled with the knob for a few minutes, but couldn’t find anything he liked. He finally gave up and left it on static, tapping his fingers to a beat Erik couldn’t quite pick up.

That’s an odd choice, he thought, but decided to let it go. They still had at least six more hours together, depending on gas and pee breaks, and it wasn’t worth upsetting his driver. Especially in the middle of the night out here in the middle of nowhere.

“Thanks again for picking me up on such short notice,” Erik said instead. “Uber and Lyft both declined my trip. Said it was too long for their drivers. I was about to try the bus station when, out of nowhere, your app just popped up on my screen. I don’t even remember downloading it, to be honest, but I don’t know what I’d have done without it. My girlfriend just dumped me, my cat ran away, even my cactus died. Sometimes I think this world has it out for me.” He took a deep breath. “Sorry to unload like that. I just really needed to get the heck out of Dodge, and your app was a real lifesaver.”

“‘Out of Dodge’?” Vaughn asked. “What does that mean? I thought you lived in Omaha?”

“You know: out of your present situation, away from something bad? I think it’s from Gunsmoke. You never saw that show?”

Vaughn shrugged his shoulders. “Guess I missed that one too,” he said. “Anyway, I’m glad you needed a ride. I’m always looking for an excuse to get out of the house and back on the road. I was a truck driver for almost thirty years. Semiretired a few years back. I’d fill in on the shorter routes if one of our drivers couldn’t make it, but for the most part I stayed home to take care of my wife. She was pretty sick.”

“How’s she doing?”

“She passed last year.” He took off his sunglasses and wiped his eyes. “Point is the app’s been a lifesaver for me too.”

“Sorry.”

“Thanks.” Vaughn put his sunglasses back on.

Erik changed the subject. “Almost thirty years, huh? How many states did you hit?”

Vaughn puffed his chest. “Forty-seven of the fifty-three, according to the company logs. But a couple off-the-book side trips got me up to forty-nine. That was before they started chip-tracking us, of course.” He patted the dash. “Couldn’t get away with that kind of thing these days.”

“Don’t you mean fifty?”

“What? Oh yeah, fifty. Duh.” Vaughn twirled his finger next to his ear. “Old age, I guess. Anyway, I missed being behind the wheel. And I gotta admit, this car’s a lot easier to drive than my rig ever was. Cargo’s usually nicer too.”

Erik smiled. “Thanks.”

“One thing I’ve learned driving folks around is that most people have no idea how big and empty this country of ours really is,” Vaughn said. “Especially now that every phone has a WayFinder in it. They just look at the little area displayed on their screens and think that’s it. But pull out an actual map sometime and look at how much empty space there is between towns. It’s easy to get lost out there in all that space. The space between . . .” His voice trailed off. “Shoot, listen to me prattle on,” he said, shaking his head. “Probably keeping you from updating your MyFace or something. Just tell me to shut up if you want.”

“I don’t mind,” said Erik, and he meant it. Pining over pictures of his ex was the last thing he wanted to do right now. “Bet you saw some weird stuff out there, huh?”

“Stuff you wouldn’t believe,” Vaughn said.

“Try me.”

Vaughn cocked his head, then nodded. “Ok. You know those empty spaces on the map?”

“The space between?”

Vaughn chuckled. “Yeah, those. Here’s the thing, Erik. They’re not always empty. In fact, sometimes they are chock full of some real crazy stuff. I’ve seen creatures out there you’ll never see on the Animal Channel, skulking in the ditches beside the road, gliding through the trees . . .”

“Pics or it didn’t happen.”

Vaughn snickered. “Like I’d get out and selfie myself.”

Erik laughed. Listening to Vaughn talk was like listening to his dad trying to sound hip, bless his heart.

Vaughn fiddled with the radio some more, finally stopping on a frequency where faint voices popped and crackled through the static.

“I hear people whispering to me on the radio sometimes,” he said. “In the static between stations. One night I heard my mother talking to me. She’d been dead twenty years at that point. Another time I heard my own voice begging me not to leave my wife by herself. I laughed it off—couldn’t be real, right?— but when I got home late that night, I found her unconscious on the couch. EMTs took her straight to the hospital, but she never woke up.” He sighed. “Guess I should’ve taken my own advice, huh?”

Erik’s eyes widened. Vaughn couldn’t really believe that, could he? Before he could ask, Vaughn changed the subject.

“You know anything about quantum physics, Erik? The multiverse? Schrödinger’s rat?”

Erik nodded, glad to be talking about something else. “A little, although I thought it was Schrödinger’s cat.”

“Tomato, tomahto,” Vaughn said.

“It’s been a while since college, but if I remember right, scientists think there are an infinite number of universes, right?”

“That’s right. All sitting right next to each other.” Vaughn pinched his forefinger and thumb as close as he could without touching.

“But scientists also say it’s impossible for anything to cross from one to the other, right?”

Vaughn snorted. “Those scientists need to come down out of their ivory towers and get out here with us regular folks, Erik. I’d tell ’em the same thing I’m about to tell you.” He paused for effect. “The bigger the open space, the smaller the space between. There are spots along these roads where the space between worlds is so thin it’s practically nonexistent. It’s easy to cross through there.”

A meteor shot across the sky up ahead. They watched it disappear over the mountains.

“When I first started driving, there were only a few thin spots like that, and only on the backest of the back roads. Truckers knew which ones to avoid. There are lots more now, though. And they’re spreading out to places beyond the open spaces.”

Vaughn had to be messing with him now, right? But since they still had a few hundred miles ahead of them, Erik decided to play along. “Okay, let’s say I crossed through one of those thin spots. How would I know?” he asked.

“Just pay attention,” Vaughn said. “You’ll know.”

“Pay attention to what?”

He shrugged. “Big things, little things. Anything, everything.” He pointed to Erik’s window. “I saw you looking up at the stars earlier,” he said. “One night I pulled off the side of the road to take a leak. Sky that night was filled with so many stars it hurt to look at them. But they weren’t my stars, the ones I learned in Scout Pack. The constellations I grew up with were gone. My sky was gone.”

Erik waved his hand. “That happens to everyone,” he said. “City lights are so bright these days you can’t see anything but the constellations, so when you get out in the open, it can be a little overwhelming. It’s even worse if the moon’s not out.”

“Yeah, like I didn’t think of that?” Vaughn snapped. “Sorry. But those weren’t my stars.” He gripped the wheel as he spoke. “They were all jumbled up. Different colors too. Red, blue, green . . . I swear some of them were even black, darker than the sky itself. There were two moons too. How do you explain that?”

“Reflection off the clouds? Trick of the atmosphere . . . ?” Erik’s voice trailed off.

“That’s what I thought too. Until I felt it.”

“Felt what?”

“Something out there behind those stars. Something looking for me. I got so scared standing out there my bladder froze. Ran back to my rig and got the heck out of Dodge, as you say, before whatever it was found me.”

Erik didn’t know what to say, so he leaned against the passenger window and looked outside. The Big Dipper was gone. He leaned forward over the dash and looked up through the front windshield. He couldn’t find the Little Dipper or Cassiopeia, either.

“I’ve seen pale white figures running alongside the road, keeping pace with my rig,” Vaughn said, ignoring Erik’s agitated state. “Their skin shimmered in the moonlight as they ran.” His voice grew quieter. “Once something so huge walked across the highway ahead of me all I could see were its legs. The rest of it just disappeared up in the clouds. Ground shook like an earthquake every time it took a step.”

Erik was barely listening now. He rolled down his window and stuck his head outside. The wind made his eyes water, but he could see the sky was all wrong.

“Other times the signs are more subtle,” Vaughn said as he slowed down and coasted onto the berm. “Car brands you’ve never heard of. Maps with the wrong number of states. Or something as simple as a new app on your phone. One you don’t even remember downloading.”

The car rolled to a stop. Vaughn killed the engine. “And the people?” He took off his sunglasses. “Well, you don’t want to make eye contact; let’s leave it at that.”

Erik’s stomach dropped. He threw open the door and stumbled out of the car, landing on his backside. Gravel and grit ground into his palms as he skittered away from the car. His head tilted back, and he froze. Millions of multicolored stars shimmered overhead, a sea of sinister jewels: endless, brilliant, dizzying in number. But they weren’t his stars, the ones he’d learned as a child. Erik felt a presence then, something ancient stirring far beyond the stars. It was looking for him. A dark stain spread down the front of his pants.

Vaughn smiled, then reached across the seat and shut the passenger door. The dome light turned off. In the darkness, Vaughn’s pupils glowed a sickly orange. He started the car and turned up the radio. Erik heard his own voice breaking through the static, warning himself not to use the app.

As Vaughn drove off, the ground began to shake.

Larry Hinkle

By day, Larry Hinkle is an advertising copywriter living with his wife and two dogs in Rockville, Maryland. When he's not writing stories that scare people into peeing their pants, he writes ads that scare people into buying adult diapers so they’re not caught peeing their pants.

His work has appeared in a number of publications, including The Horror Zine, Sanitarium Magazine, and the inaugural issue of Red Room Magazine from Comet Press, as well as such anthologies as Alternate Hilarities 5: One-Star Reviews of the Afterlife, The Arcanist, and Another Dimension, among others.

Website: larryhinkle.com

Facebook: willwriteforbeer

Twitter: @WrittenByLarry

Email: willwriteforbeer@gmail.com

7,800 Words

“I WANT TO hunt,” Shanto said, and Arwa’s world began to crack.

They sat hip to hip on the thickest branch of a plauplau tree, swinging their feet above the surface of the river Bombio and waiting for a fish to catch. Shanto was taller, nimbler at climbing, adept with hook or spearhead. Arwa was smaller, wilier, a better swimmer, and yet everyone in their village said that the girls were indistinguishable. Arwa-Shanto. Shanto-Arwa.

They were birthmates, born to different mothers in the same season, and they were inseparable. At least, they had been.

Cautiously, as though it wasn’t her entire future in her throat, Arwa said, “I thought you wanted to fish.”

Shanto sighed, tugged at her fish-rope, and sighed again. The branch creaked with her nervous shifting, now leaning against Arwa’s side, now leaning away. “I don’t have to decide today,” she said. “But . . . we each have our skills . . .”

It was clumsy. Shanto wasn’t usually so clumsy. She knew Arwa had never considered any other path but fisher. They were supposed to move up together. Share a canoe. Spend every day sitting knee to back and back to knee, spearing what they couldn’t hook, washing together, cooking together, talking till the stars came out together, and they couldn’t do any of that if Shanto went hunting.

Arwa was saved from blurting anything she’d regret when the river surged upward, violent and frothing and absolutely unnatural for this season. It slapped over their feet and clawed its way up the shoreline foliage that had grown complacent in its absence, and half a dozen Timbo warriors swept around the bend on a raft of driftwood and bone.

They had no time to move. The raft was piled high with baskets, poles, urns—all of it lashed into unsteady pillars, the weight distribution all wrong, the height ludicrous—and it hit their branch in an explosion of fruit and wicker. A warrior cried out, caught in the face. Half of their towering goods crashed to the water.

And Shanto was torn from the branch. She spun, tumbled, hit the churn of broken baskets, and vanished from sight.

Arwa leaped after her, barely drawing a full breath before she was submerged. The Bombio swept her along, swift and unrelenting. For a harrowing moment she was directionless, tumbling, battered by debris, and slapped by fishes caught in the flood.

But the river had always been kind to her. The silt cleared, the sun glittered through, and she spotted Shanto’s foot kicking against the current.

Arwa caught her around the waist and tried to pull her toward the opposing bank, but they were surrounded by tangled reeds and shattered clay. The world darkened—a shadow, the jagged bottom of another war raft—and Arwa fought to swim lower, ignoring the pain in her chest, only praying that Shanto had air remaining.

A fist gripped her hair. Another grasped her arm. She and Shanto were hauled from the river like fish, flailing and coughing and fearing the mercy blow that would take their heads.

One of the Timbo crouched over Arwa, babbling in his village tongue. She had only ever spoken Bitumb, but there were enough similarities for her to catch his general meaning, and what his words lacked, his tone made clear. They weren’t trying to kill her.

They were asking for help.

He spoke through an interpreter, one of their oldest grandmothers, who still remembered most of the birth language she’d left behind when she was matched into their village. She sat on a reed mat with her eyes shut tight, and after every word he spoke, her brow furrowed in something close to bliss.

“There are creatures coming,” she said slowly. “Creatures that walk like people, and cover their bodies, and make tools, and speak.”

The Timbo warrior paced as he explained, illustrating with his hands and the angry curve of his back. The rest of his war party remained under guard at the riverbank. Here, in the hollow beneath two interwoven beknal trees, there were only the speaker and the interpreter and the ring of worried faces surrounding them.

“They come from beyond the grassland,” he said. “First, they traveled through our territory, and we let them live because they left us gifts. But our leniency was a mistake. They developed a taste for the sap of the hupa vine. Now they come in greater and greater numbers, cutting their way to the vine, burning what they cannot cut.”

He spoke of creatures gone mad with sap lust. He spoke of a village destroyed, children stolen, an entire territory turned to ash and muck. He was a warrior laid low, begging for help, for shelter, for vengeance.

Arwa clutched Shanto tight throughout this furious appeal, afraid of the future and desperate to ensure they had one. Her mind was awhirl with logistics: flatland and jungle and water, always water. A conviction had stolen over her, hooking as deep as a bone lure and potentially just as fatal: she could do this. She could fight back, save her people, clear the land of this invasion before it pushed any deeper.

But she needed help.

She needed Mama Cascade.

The legend of Mama Cascade was as slick and slippery as the goddess herself. At times, she was a cautionary tale. At other times, a comfort. Everyone knew that Mama Cascade lurked beneath the surface of the river Bombio, eager to pull down children who strayed from marked paths. But Mama Cascade also birthed the fishes they ate and shaped the banks upon which they lived, and it was far more common to pull a fish from the river than a missing child.

All of her stories were bound by three common threads. She was voracious, she was curious, and she was maternal. These were all dangerous qualities in a goddess, perhaps the last one most of all. Mama Cascade protected her children fiercely, but she was pitiless to those who misbehaved.

Arwa approached the waterfall Mhaiko with all of this in mind. She had traveled for three days to reach this place, terrified all the way that she was wasting time better spent on carving weaponry. But there was nowhere better to make her request.

Here, Mama Cascade’s waters flowed down a series of shale steps and filled a turbulent pool before joining the main body of the river Bombio. It was the seat of her power. Her home.

There were three gifts attached to Arwa’s belt, and she untied each one and held it up to the sunlight. “Mama Cascade!” she called. “I have brought you a dagger with which to slice your enemies! Mama Cascade, I have brought you red clay to paint your cheeks! Mama Cascade, I have brought you the meat of the long-arm monkey, to fill your stomach!”

She threw each of her gifts into the froth at the base of the steps and then sat on a damp rock to wait. Midday turned to afternoon, and the sun shone dappled and green through the vegetation at Arwa’s back, but she was patient. When the roar of the waterfall faded to the buzzing of a distant bee, she knew her gifts had been accepted.

Mama Cascade slithered up from the depths of the pool and onto a rock just beyond Arwa’s reach. Her stomach was round and taut, her cheeks were red, and a new stone dagger hung from her belt. She slapped her tail against the rock three times, and she said, “Thank you for the gifts, child of the Bitumb. Have you a question for me?”

Arwa shuddered at the sight of her claws and teeth, at her bulbous eyes and tangled hair, and for a moment she considered fleeing back the way she’d come. But she thought of the Timbos’ grief. She thought of that same grief reaching Shanto. She couldn’t return alone.

“I’ve come to learn from you,” Arwa said. “Teach me how to manipulate the river. Teach me how to fight.”

Mama Cascade stared at her, unblinking and terrible, but also—yes—also curious. It was a new and strange thing that Arwa was asking, and the goddess liked new and strange things. In a voice as slow and deceptive as water over a deepening trench, she said, “Persuade me.”

Arwa’s pulse quickened. She had practiced her plea for three days. She only had to keep from stuttering.

“The Bitumb have lived along your banks for twenty generations,” she said. “The border of jungle and grass is our territory, and none of the other peoples dispute it. But there are creatures coming for us, coming to strip our land, consume our hupa, burn our homes. The village of the Timbo people has been destroyed and their children taken. Soon they will reach the Bitumb, and we must be ready. Will you help us, Mama Cascade? Will you teach me to wield the river?”

She stopped, breathing hard, and waited.

The goddess stretched along her rock, her scales glittering green and brown in the warm afternoon sun. Her woman’s face was dark and terrible and thoroughly unimpressed. “Child of the Bitumb,” she said, “what does the water care who drinks it? I am equally indifferent to the long-arm monkey, the howling marhaña, even this new creature from beyond the grass. Why should this concern me?”

Arwa had hoped that Mama Cascade’s curiosity would prevail over her fickle nature, but she had not traveled so far on hope alone.

“If you will not help out of love for the Bitumb, then do it for me,” Arwa said. She smiled, big-toothed and broad. “For I am your daughter.”

Mama Cascade’s appetites were well known. For food, for drink, for death, and for children. Sometimes she imposed herself on maidens who bathed too long in her waters, and in this way, she mothered river babies.

A river baby was announced by the astounding volume of water shed just before its birth. As a child, a river baby was curious and fearless, a natural swimmer. As an adult, a river baby had moods as unpredictable as the rapids.

Arwa was named for the rapids that tore up the river between the Bitumb and the Mendewa, and she had a temperament to match. Fierce. Unrelenting. Difficult.

From the day of her birth, Arwa had been told the river was her second mother. Her first mother, Nambi, told the story often—so often that Arwa could almost remember how it went. The rush of waters. The rain dripping through the canopy. How she spat her own lungs clear and screamed for days, offended at leaving a wet womb for dry air.

Faced with the terrible beauty of Mama Cascade, Arwa had to wonder: How much of the goddess was in her? To come all this way only to fail was unthinkable.

So Arwa would not fail.

Mama Cascade said, “Come to me,” and slipped underwater. Arwa strode into the pool as though her stomach weren’t writhing. Tiny fish nipped at her toes, more annoying than painful, and larger things slithered past her calves. Nothing fled her presence. There was only one creature to fear in the pool, and there was no point trying to evade her.

“What should I—?” Arwa’s question was cut short by the clasp of a hand around her ankle. Before she could draw breath, she went under.

The bottom of the pool stretched away. Moments ago, the water had only reached her knees, but now the river was a vast chasm, deepening by the second. She shut her eyes against the grit, and bright lights bloomed behind her eyelids, forcing her to see it anyway: a subterranean world of shadows limned in green.

It was too much. Arwa kicked and kicked and kicked, until her head broke the surface and a familiar bed of rocks reformed beneath her feet.

She clutched the nearest boulder, gasping for breath, and recoiled at the sight of Mama Cascade floating her way, submerged up to her neck in defiance of the shallow water. “You cannot learn the river from the bank,” the goddess scolded.

“Please,” Arwa said. “Give me one night to prepare.”

Mama Cascade pursed her lips, but she did not say no. When she swam away, Arwa sat down and cried.

That was the first day.

On the second day, Arwa fashioned herself a breathing apparatus. She cut down a hupa vine and drained the sap, creating a flexible hollow tube as long as three men. She lashed the vine to a plauplau branch hanging over the pool, and she used two soft-coated melly nuts to plug her nostrils. This time, when Mama Cascade tugged her down, Arwa shut her eyes and succumbed, vine in hand.

The underwater village came to life again, an entire civilization contained in the walls of a bottomless pit. Breathtaking and unfamiliar creatures inhabited dozens of alcoves, visible only as glowing green outlines. Arwa held tight to Mama Cascade as she sank past strange configurations of jagged fins and pendulous limbs, round bellies and long spines, claws and suckers, and always the silhouette of a human head.

It was a struggle to draw air down the long, sweet-tasting vine, but Arwa managed to hold and release four big lungsful before the pain in her chest sent her back to the surface. On her next descent, she managed six. With every trip, she explored more of Mama Cascade’s world, the goddess a constant presence at her side. On the third day, Arwa ceased to wonder how she was descending so far without losing hold of the hupa vine.

Mama Cascade spoke to her in a secret language of bubbles and blinks. At first it was pretty nonsense, but the longer Arwa spent underwater, the more she understood. Mama Cascade taught her the names of the currents and all the creatures within them. She taught Arwa their deepest fears and secret commands, and she demonstrated the proper way to request their help.

“I tell you this because you are mine,” Mama Cascade said fiercely while they warmed themselves upon the rocks. “These are secrets of the down below. Do not forget it.”

On the fifth day, Arwa opened her eyes, and the underwater world was more colorful and dazzling than she had ever imagined.

On the seventh day, Arwa no longer needed the breathing apparatus.

On the eighth day, she could speak.

Smoke rose from the south, curling thick and white over the treetops. Arwa didn’t see it until she surfaced in search of a midday meal.

“Mama Cascade!” she called, her voice hoarse from disuse. “Fire downriver!”

A stream of bubbles was her only answer, but it was enough. Arwa swam with breathless speed. She skimmed over and around obstacles with a steady and complete knowledge of where each one would be. The fish, the eels, the stones, the driftwood—if it entered the Bombio, it entered her awareness.

Arwa completed in half an afternoon a journey that had taken her three days on foot. When she reached the village of the Bitumb, she found most of her people already assembled in the hollow.

It was Shanto who spotted her first. Arwa stepped onto land, nearly collapsing at the weight of her own bones, and Shanto rushed to hold her up.

“Are we injured?” Arwa demanded.

“No, the smoke is from the west. Howler territory.”

Arwa grimaced. Howlers were a cruel bunch. The Bitumb killed them on sight, but it would be foolish to assume the invaders made any distinction between river people and forest people. If the Howlers were taken, the Bitumb were next.

Shanto’s arm was strong across Arwa’s back, but her voice was soft when she asked, “Did you find her?”

“I did.”

“Yes, yes? So what happened?”

Arwa hesitated, strangely reluctant to describe her time with Mama Cascade. The goddess was possessive, yes, but there was more to it than that. The past few days comprised the only experience of her entire life that she had not shared with someone else.

She was saved from answering when they reached the hollow. There were twenty Bitumb present. All but the children.

Arwa endured only a cursory questioning from the village elders—her first mother included—before delivering her pronouncement. “The Bitumb must leave the borderland,” she declared. “Mama Cascade cannot protect us here, but if we make a new camp upriver, past the Mhaiko, the invaders will not be able to reach us without braving the river Bombio.”

Their outrage was warranted. North of the waterfall, the jungle gave way to deep forest, where the trees grew so tall and so dense, they blocked most sunlight and nearly all plant life on the forest floor. In the deep forest, animals moved high in the canopy, and the Bitumb would have to change their hunting methods to survive.

The move would also take them uncomfortably close to the territories of the forest people. They were not all Howlers, and the Bitumb had successfully negotiated conjugal trades with forest people before, but it was a situation that required long discussion and many gifts.

Arwa heard all of their protests and stood firm. “This is our only option,” she said. “The river will be our protection and our guide, but only if we are willing to adapt.”

There was debate, because there was always debate, but Arwa had returned from the river with a different demeanor. She was assured, where before she had been aggressive. Solemn, where she had been rash. When she spoke, they heard a hint of goddess underneath.

The vote was swift, if not without reservation.

For three days they prepared to abandon their home. Arwa helped pack the canoes, resisting the lure of the river at her back. Her skin and eyes and mouth were terribly dry. Her body was unbearably heavy. How had she tolerated the land for so long?

Shanto worked at her side, cheerful as always when there was work to be done, oblivious to Arwa’s struggle.

“Tell me about her,” Shanto begged. “Does she speak as we speak? What has she taught you? You looked half fish coming down the river.”

Reluctantly, Arwa said, “She is teaching me the names of the currents.” A hundred different details buffeted her thoughts, any one of which would have thrilled Shanto to hear.

“Yes, yes? Tell me one.”

Arwa busied herself tying a bundle of arrows. She mumbled, “It is difficult to say in the air.”

“Ah.” Shanto’s hurt transformed her entire body, curving her back and lining her face. She had never been one to hide her thoughts. Neither had Arwa, before.

A warm rain fell the rest of the day. The Bitumb finished loading their canoes with all of the hammocks and weapons and pots and children that amounted to their most prized possessions, and they pushed off from the shore. It was a long ride against the current, but they rowed with the blessing of Mama Cascade and encountered no debris.

Arwa swam alongside the canoes. She darted in and out of that other world, making the children shriek in fear and joy at her rapid reappearances. Her first mother clucked in disapproval at the pompous display, but she smiled while she did so.

Shanto rowed one of the smaller canoes, packed tight with clay jars of fermenting milkfruits, her expression distant and unhappy. Arwa rode the current back until she slipped under the canoe, and then she shot up the side like a jumping fish and sprayed her with water.

“Ah!” Shanto cried, but she laughed at the sight of Arwa trailing river grasses in her hair. Arwa swam low, into the other world, and plucked up a small, glowing shell. When she surfaced again, she pressed the shell into Shanto’s hand and whispered, “This covers the body of a tiny hunting crab called moneko.”

Shanto beamed.

That night, Arwa climbed into Shanto’s hammock, and they curled up tight against one another, as they had when they were children. In a hushed voice, Arwa described Mama Cascade in all her beastly glory, and Shanto gleefully bombarded her with questions until they fell asleep.

Arwa could almost pretend she’d never left the land at all.

They reached the Mhaiko the next morning. The Bitumb spent the entire laborious day hauling their canoes from the water, carrying them uphill, and lowering them back down again. It was grueling work, but grimly satisfying. Every obstacle in their path would be visited upon the invaders twofold because they would be following without the cooperation of the river.

Once past Mama Cascade’s waterfall, the only reasonable way to carry supplies deeper into the forest was by canoe, between banks that grew increasingly steep. If invaders approached by the river, they would be trapped by the river walls. If they came overland, they would be heavily burdened and on foot.

On the fourth day, the Bitumb found the site of their new home.

A month passed before their natural defenses were put to the test. Arwa spent most of that time on land, helping to establish the new village and explore new hunting paths around it. The forest was dark and eerily quiet, and she longed painfully for the other world.

Every evening she climbed down the riverbank in search of Mama Cascade, and every evening she was disappointed. The water responded to her basic requests, and she used her new knowledge to set obstacles and traps, but the goddess would not appear, and the other world would not open.

Arwa stamped her feet in the reeds and slapped the river surface. She dived to the bottom and waited there for half the night. She threw gifts of food and necklaces and belts. All of them vanished immediately, but Mama Cascade did not appear to extend her thanks.

Her first mother, Nambi, pulled her aside so the other elders would not overhear. “Something has gone wrong,” she guessed.

Arwa tried to deny it. “I’m practicing at night,” she said.

“Do not lie to me,” Nambi snapped. She softened the rebuke with a hand on Arwa’s shoulder. “You forget I have met her myself. Like all creatures of the water, she is prideful. Determine what you have done to offend her, and then determine what she requires to make amends.”

Arwa redoubled her efforts at gift-giving instead. She wove headpieces and armbands. She brewed milks and mixed paints. She threw these into the water day after day, and she pretended she did not know exactly what she had done wrong.

She was standing on the bank with a freshly carved fishing spear in one hand, squinting through the morning rain for some sign of Mama Cascade, when she spotted the young hunter Muranya running up the opposite bank.

Muranya cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “The grassland creatures are coming! They are carrying canoes past the Mhaiko!”

There were only six other hunters close to the village. They came to Muranya’s call armed with wenwood bows, and they looked to her in accusation.

“How did they pass the waterfall?” the hunter Kindo demanded.

“We’ll know when we find them,” Arwa said. She struggled to suppress her own doubts.

She dived into the river, focusing on the threat at hand. The hunters vanished into the forest, but she had no doubt they were keeping pace with her as she swam. Their enemies would not hear a single step.

The invaders had advanced too far already. Arwa sensed one of their canoes in the water, two bodies within. A dense hooked object was caught in the rocks below, holding them in place.

Arwa slashed the rope hanging taut over the side of the canoe. The creatures on board shouted and lowered their oars, but Arwa ripped each one loose the moment it touched the water. A face appeared, wobbly through the flowing water, gawking at her with bulging eyes.

Another cry, a splash, and a new body entered the water. It was quickly swept away toward the waterfall. Arwa surfaced at the foot of the canoe. Five more of them stood on the bank, jabbering in a strange language, brandishing long silver objects at the trees. The hunters, unseen, shot a volley of arrows. Two of the invaders fell; the remaining three staggered but stood their ground. The silver objects they held roared, and one of the hunters cried out, struck by an invisible force.

Arwa didn’t have time to gape. She lunged against the canoe, hurrying its progress downriver. The creatures inside tried to push her away, and she clawed at their cheeks. The roar of the waterfall grew steadily louder, and then the current swept them over the edge and down the stone steps.

Their craft fractured first, their bodies second.

And Mama Cascade finally accepted an offering. The goddess appeared in the pool below, floating upward on her back, growing larger as she neared the surface. Her mouth opened wider and wider, stretching like a snake’s. She stuffed the invaders into her maw, tools and coverings and all, chewing with gluttonous delight.

Mama Cascade finished her meal and slithered up the steps. By the time she reached Arwa she was of ordinary size, still dribbling blood from the corner of her mouth. “Thank you for the meat,” she said, smiling with lazy satisfaction. Her stomach bulged over her fish tail.

“I thought you had abandoned me,” Arwa accused.

Mama Cascade’s eyes narrowed. “You insulted me. You shared knowledge that was not yours to share.”

Arwa’s face flared hot. “I didn’t—” She took a breath, remembering Nambi’s advice. “Mama Cascade, I beg your forgiveness. It was an error I won’t repeat. How can I make amends?”

Mama Cascade cocked her head, listening to the current. She sniffed the air delicately. “Your hunters are stripping fresh meat on my bank. Give it to me, and I will forget this insult.”

They swam upriver to the site of the confrontation. Arwa climbed out and explained the situation to the hunters. They weren’t thrilled to hand over their catch, but the goddess had only requested the meat. Arwa helped them finish stripping the bodies. Naked, the truth was disturbingly clear: though their bodies were pale, and their faces were blotched red and fringed with hair, their overall shapes were unmistakable.

The invaders were people, strangely colored and somewhat large, but definitely people.

She watched them vanish into Mama Cascade’s gullet, and she was nauseous with dread.

Upon her return to the village, Arwa was immediately accosted by Shanto, who asked breathlessly, “Is it true what Muranya is saying? Did Mama Cascade lure them into her maw? Did she transform into an enormous beast?”

The goddess’s reprimand rang in her ears. Arwa responded in the only way she could: “The workings of Mama Cascade are not for you to know.” Her tone was too harsh; she knew it by the look on Shanto’s face. But Arwa wouldn’t betray her second mother again.

It was only after Shanto left that Arwa registered the pain in her hands. She unclenched her fists and stared. At some point during the fight, her nails had turned into claws, thick and black.

It was the first of many skirmishes. As the rain increased from intermittent to daily, the swelling river brought increasingly aggressive incursions from beyond the grassland. Their boats were sturdier, their parties larger, their weapons more numerous.

The first Bitumb was killed, with only a small, hard ball found in his chest, and his fellow hunters revenged him seven times. They heard of another massacre downriver, the Mienyo village reduced from thirty to six. Much like the Timbo, those survivors would have to plead their way into other villages or risk starvation.

The Bitumb moved two more times. Their hunters set traps on the land, and Arwa set traps in the water. Under Mama Cascade’s tutelage, she arranged tangled branches across smooth stretches of the Bombio, and hid tall, jagged rocks around sharp bends. She increased the populations of fever-bringing mikato insects and flesh-burrowing ants. In order to reach the Bitumb, their enemies would have to brave carnivorous fishes, deadly parasites, and toxic vegetation.

But the invaders had a seemingly endless supply of bodies to pour into their endeavor, and the hupa vine had them intoxicated. They spread through the strip of jungle that united dark forest with grassland, building homes from the densest tree trunks and surrounding them with vicious dogs. These people looked more natural, with darker faces and bare arms, and they only attacked villages dense with hupa.

The red-and-white invaders were Arwa’s responsibility. She stabbed holes in their boats, and they came back with shiny, impenetrable hulls. She covered the river in debris, and they brought enormous curved knives to cut through it. She fed them to Mama Cascade, and they multiplied like a swarm of ants.

Arwa spent so much time in the water, she hardly spoke aloud except to ask for a warm meal. Shanto often cooked for her if Nambi was unavailable, and she took Arwa’s rough thanks with an air of silent suffering. They used to spend their mornings gathering together. They used to prepare their meals side by side. Arwa saw all of this in Shanto’s face and pretended she didn’t. She was visiting daily. It would have to be enough.

Mama Cascade had no interest in prior attachments. She lured Arwa deeper into her world, and Arwa felt her body adapting with every passing day. Her black claws were joined by dark scales on the backs of her hands. Her vision sharpened, her shoulders broadened, her legs lengthened.

Arwa’s mind expanded to all the rapids and shallows and chutes through the hills. She knew their every dip and rise. She knew the names of every creature between her banks, and they responded to her wishes without a whisper of resistance.

During a quiet time between skirmishes, Mama Cascade led Arwa to the river’s source, a journey of several days that ended in a shallow marshland. There were different plants there. Different birds. Arwa felt her awareness weakening as they progressed.

“I don’t like it here,” Arwa said, sitting half submerged among the reeds.

Mama Cascade slapped her tail impatiently. “Know the limits of your domain. If it does not live within your banks, it does not warrant your attention. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Arwa whispered. And she did. There would be no more evening meals with Shanto.

Arwa struggled to retain the sense of purpose that had driven her to Mama Cascade in the first place, but the more time she spent in the water, the less interest she held for human cares. The land grew duller by the day. The troubles of the Bitumb were distant, irrelevant. As the goddess herself said: What does the water care who drinks it?

“Come below with me,” Mama Cascade said.

Arwa happily abandoned the discomfort of the air for the familiarity of the other world. Many days passed before she surfaced again.

A strange thing happened as Arwa succumbed to the influence of her second mother. It was not only the insects and the fishes that she understood, but all living things that spent time in the river. The Bitumb, the Howlers, the isolated villages on every far-flung branch of the Bombio—they were all equally intelligible. Arwa was developing her goddess ear.

And all peoples spoke the same news. The invaders were creeping steadily north, claiming fresh ground anywhere the hupa vine flourished—this, she already knew. But there was a second purpose to their invasion, stranger and more insidious than sap lust:

Exploration.

It was a concept that meant little to the Bitumb beyond the search for new hunting trails, but information trickled in to the river people from the jungle people, who heard it from the grass people, who had engaged in some manner of communication with the invaders: they wanted to draw the river with ink and bring it back to show their people.

The word was whispered from person to person to person, and it reached the river in their prayers and pleas: map. Once they had this map, the grass people warned, the invaders would control the river. They would be unstoppable.

Arwa was outraged. But every time she resolved to do something about it, the goddess devised a new distraction for her. Mama Cascade taught her to wrestle giant eels and eat fish in a single bite. She massaged Arwa’s legs until they sprouted finlike ridges. She made plaits of Arwa’s hair and taught her how to use them to grasp vines and reeds.

And each time, Arwa’s attention drifted from old concerns.

Once, Arwa sensed a fight on the surface: splashing and gurgling and thick spurts of blood. She bubbled her question, Should we intervene? But Mama Cascade had grown bored of people for now, and instead she showed Arwa how to dig her own bedchamber in the wall of the underwater tunnel. Arwa lined it with glowing shells like stars and slept coiled in a nest of algae.

Arwa had set out to learn the ways of her second mother, and she had succeeded. But the only way to embrace the river was to leave the land behind.

Arwa’s name was being spoken in the air.

She became aware of it gradually, like the approach of a distant bee, and much like the approach of a bee, once the sound lodged in her ear she couldn’t shake it loose.

She was irritated and curious in equal measures, so she followed the call all the way to the Mhaiko. Three bundles splashed into the pool in rapid succession: a ripe, round guevia fruit; a bone necklace; and four bright blue feathers braided together for use on a ceremonial skirt.

Arwa eagerly consumed the guevia fruit—a rarity for her now, as it grew far from her banks—and donned the necklace and feathers before rising to thank her petitioner. She climbed a pleasantly warm rock, enjoying the sun on her scales, and cast a benevolent smile upon—

Shanto. Shanto stood on the bank, radiating anticipation and fear. It was a curiously vulnerable blend, and it cast a subtle scent on the air between them. The heady vibration between predator and prey.

“Thank you for the gifts,” Arwa said. “Have you a question for me?”

With that, Shanto’s vulnerability gave way to anger. “A question? Yes, Arwa! Where have you been? Why have you abandoned us? Do you know what is happening to the Bitumb in your absence?”

Arwa’s under-eyelids retracted, and more details came into focus: one side of Shanto’s head shorn in grief; a livid, half-healed cut across her collarbone; her hip cover ragged from days of travel. Old emotions surfaced, and Arwa swallowed them back. She smacked her heels against the rock. “I have been where I belong.”

“You went to Mama Cascade on our behalf,” Shanto protested. “To help us.”

“Yes, and I did. I moved the village. I fought off enemy after enemy. Why should I spend all my days on your tiny bank, when I have all of the Bombio to roam?”

Shanto stared, and those big eyes of hers were shiny with tears. “We are birthmates,” she whispered. “Have you forgotten? We spent every day of our lives together until you met her. We shared everything. Every meal, every chore, every thought. How could you leave me so easily?”

Arwa maintained her calm, even if her insides roiled like the rapids for which she was named. “We are entirely different. You were never part of the river.”

Shanto left at last. Arwa was so upset she nearly threw the bone necklace away, but it was extremely flattering, so after some deliberation she kept it. She swam back to her bedchamber in a furious flurry, determined to ignore all future petitions, determined to tear up the Bitumb’s fishing troughs, determined to slumber until Shanto and Nambi and everyone else she had ever known was dead.

But Arwa’s changeable nature prevailed, and by the time she reached her bedchamber, all that remained was the bile of guilt. She winced at how cold her tone had been. She wished that she had put her friend off with better words. At least now Shanto would give up.

Except Shanto did not give up. Two days later she threw one of Arwa’s favorite foods into the pool: crunchy tree lizards, dried on sticks. Two days after that, she offered deep red flower chains, the sort they used to braid around one another’s necks while waiting for the storyteller to begin. And another two days after that, she brought a freshly woven hammock, of a size to fit two young children who never wished to part.

Each one was an excellent gift, and each gift was also a memory. Shanto didn’t say a word as she tossed her offerings at the foot of the waterfall. She didn’t have to. Her presence screamed: Remember me! Remember us!

Arwa took the gifts to decorate her bedchamber, and the more she surrounded herself with their memories, the more restless she became. Her mouth watered in anticipation of cooked food. She chafed at the way her decorations tangled when she swam. All of her bright colors were muted in the deeps, barely visible without an otherworldly glow of their own. Arwa missed conversation that wasn’t transmitted by bubble.

An illness took hold of her, like nothing she’d experienced. The skin of her arms roughened and rashed. Her eyes were bleary; her stomach was distended and sore. She felt buried by water, but when she rose to the surface she could scarcely breathe.

Arwa swam to the pool on gift-giving day, keen to see Shanto, determined to ask her forgiveness—and, if she were being honest, to take solace in her sympathy. But the morning slipped by, and Shanto didn’t come.

Arwa waited, her indignation growing by the second. She reached out for more information.

There was blood in the water, far upriver. Near the village. Arwa cried out and climbed the first step in the cascade, only to be halted by a spasm of pain. Her legs were half-fused, difficult to use in the water and useless on the land. Arwa panicked.

Mama Cascade found her like this, sitting in the spray of the waterfall, desperately rubbing at her legs as though she could rip them apart. At the sight of the goddess, she called out, “Please! I need your help, Mother.”

“What is happening?” Mama Cascade asked.

Arwa shivered and coughed. “The village is under attack. I was selfish. I neglected their defenses. I have to go to them, but my body—I can hardly move, look. What is wrong with me?”

Sternly, Mama Cascade said, “You have been fighting the lure of two different worlds, and your body cannot bear the strain.”

“But what can I do?” Arwa felt a body plunge into the river, gored and sinking fast. Who was it?

Mama Cascade considered her carefully. “I have taught you all that you asked, and more, but the teachings of your first mother have an equally strong hook in your heart. It is up to you, child of the Bitumb, to decide your own path. You can give up your people and join me in the heart of the river, or you can go back and join their fight. What do you feel is right?”

Arwa hesitated.

Shanto thought that Mama Cascade had seduced Arwa’s loyalties and led her astray, but she was wrong. Arwa had always felt the tug of the wilderness. From her very first steps she had fled past the boundaries of the village, rescued time and again by Nambi or one of the other mothers. The water was her home in a way the trees had never been.

But there was more to a home than the nature of its roof. The village had moved from jungle to dark forest, and that had not changed them at their core.

Another body plunged into the river, this one still alive, the water reverberating with its voice as it called for help. What did she feel? Angry. Defensive. Possessive.

Arwa firmed her resolve. “The Bitumb are mine,” she said fiercely. “And I am ready to forge my own path.”

Mama Cascade nodded. “Then that is what you must do.”

The decision took hold, a blessed relief. Fresh strength filled Arwa’s limbs, and she dived deep into the pool. She dug sideways, into the earth itself, tearing through mud and rocks with hands as sharp as blades. Her legs tore where they had begun to fuse together, each one sprouting its own long fin to propel her through a new domain halfway between the river and the land.

She broke through the bank of the Bombio, trailing dark earths in her wake. The young hunter Muranya floated past her, a bow still clutched in his twitching hands. Rage nearly blinded her. It was the rage of family, yes, but it was also the rage of a goddess. These were her people, her gift-givers.

Mama Cascade was correct about one thing: the wilderness didn’t care where anyone came from. Language, color, dress—anyone who could discern the interplay of plant and bug and beast were welcome to reap the rewards of their knowledge. But to those who did not understand? The land was brutally unforgiving.

The Bitumb knew how to plead their case to a river goddess. The invaders did not.

Arwa took the men in the water first. All of their focus was on the fight up the bank. It was a horrible surprise when their canoe tipped sideways, and they slid directly into a mouth full of sharpened teeth.

Delicious.

Their struggle drew the attention of everyone on land. Men with broad hats and long silver weapons had laid siege upon the riverside huts. Three huts were already smoldering with flames. The young mothers and children were out of sight, hidden in a shelter disguised beneath thick vegetation.

The invaders might not find it, but their flames would. All of the adult hunters were locked in battle with the remaining attackers. They wouldn’t reach the shelter in time.

Arwa swarmed up the bank, tall and terrible, her arms and legs lengthened by extra joints, her hair whipping a bone-bladed frenzy about her face. The Bitumb saw a savior coming.

The people from beyond the grass saw death.

When the fighting was finished, Arwa stood triumphant over the last of them: a hairy, red-cheeked man gasping his last breaths. “Please,” he cried. “Let me go. We only came . . . we only came to map the river . . .”

It was impulsive pleading. He had no expectation of being understood. And so he gaped in shock when Arwa answered in his own language: “The river does not wish to be mapped.”

The expression stayed on his face long after his eyes dimmed.

The Bitumb surrounded Arwa, silent and awed, waiting for her instruction. She looked over all their faces, the faces of her people, until she found the one that was hers most of all: Shanto, emerging from the secret hut with the children. Shanto’s eyes widened at the sight of her, but she did not hesitate to run up and take Arwa’s hands.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I should have come sooner.” Arwa stared at the dead, not all of them enemies. Bekya, who taught her to string a bow. Bomba, named for the river itself, who brewed the milkfruit for their ceremonies. And Muranya, still in the water, guardian of the forest path.

Louder, to the entire village, Arwa said, “Strip the enemy and bury their tools. Burn their canoes. Empty your huts. We will move for the last time, deeper into the forest, away from the Bombio and all of its explorers and foragers.”

She took a breath, and spoke the truth of her heart. “I will be your river. I will bring to you fishes and waterbirds. You only have to trust in me, and remember my name.” She looked directly at Shanto then, their hands still clutched tight. “Do you understand what this means?”

Shanto nodded, eyes bright and wet. “I will miss you, Arwa.”

Arwa smiled, soft and sad. “I won’t be far.”

In spite of Arwa’s claws and fins and writhing hair, each of the Bitumb extended their arms in farewell, and Arwa clutched them each in turn, her first mother Nambi longest of all. And then she left them to uproot their lives once more, and she dived into the river for the last time.

Arwa dug long and deep. She tore a fresh passage through the earth, funneling all of her rage and determination and godly self-righteousness into the muscles of her arms and back. Slowly, a new channel drew off the water of the river Bombio, slender at first, choked by weeds and tangled branches, impassible by canoe, and then opening, welcoming, widening. Arwa twisted and turned; she made sharp bends of herself; she dredged up rocks and built long, deadly rapids. Her anger bubbled and frothed, white and warning: You are not welcome; do not follow.

She built something wild and changeable, a river as fickle and fierce as her own heart. With every fistful of earth shoved aside, with every rock drawn up from underground, Arwa felt her humanity sloughing off, all of her hesitance and nervousness and homesickness tugged away on the current, leaving behind a creature more water than flesh, confident and quick-tempered, but also protective, like her second mother, and loving, like her first.

The Bitumb followed at her side. For twenty generations they had lived along the banks of the river Bombio. For twenty generations they had made their offerings to Mama Cascade. Now they moved into a new phase of their history, the days after the invaders came. They would learn new paths through the forest, and new foods to eat. They would make offerings, as they always had, but to a new guardian, one with a fondness for tree lizards and flower chains.

She was the goddess of the river Arwa, unpredictable and lethal to strangers, plentiful and yielding to those people who knew her best. And she would appear on no map.

Samantha Mills

Samantha Mills lives in Southern California, in a house on a hill that is hopefully not a haunted hill house. Her short fiction has also appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and others. She was recently included in The New Voices of Science Fiction, out now from Tachyon Publications.

Website: www.samtasticbooks.com

Twitter: @amtasticbooks

Email: sam@samtasticbooks.com

7,800 Words

THE SNOW CAME down in ashy flakes. Although it was nearly midnight, the pale light of the moon brightened the tangle of trees surrounding a frozen pond behind the stone manor house. A blanket of white covered everything, even the dead bodies that lay still, no longer twitching.

Two members of the Dochte Mandar trudged over the thick, frozen tract of land; their fur-strapped boots were wet and white, and cakes of frost tumbled loose. The air was bitterly cold and stung their noses.

“Another one dead,” said the first of the two men, the dark-haired one, his eyes gleaming silver in the dark, pointing to the crooked shape of a man in the snow, sword still clenched in a death grip.

“That’s twelve so far,” said the other in disbelief. “He killed twelve? Alone?”

“Look over there! The snow’s been trampled. See the gap?”

“No. Where?”

“At the edge of the pond. This way.”

One of the Dochte Mandar led the way, hunkering beneath his heavy cloak, his toes already frigid, and his gloved fingers searing with pain as the cold penetrated his clothing.

When they reached the gap in the snow drift, they gazed down at the white bowl of the frozen pond. An owl hooted from the nearby woods. Deeper in the distance, the howl of a wolf came next. The forest was full of the hungry beasts in the midst of winter’s night.

There, at the bottom of the slope of the pond, atop the crust of ice, lay three more bodies, with freshly fallen snow on them.

Aiding each other, the two Dochte Mandar began to clamber down to the edge of the pond. Some snow gave way, and one of them slid partway down. When their boots hit the ice beneath the blanket of snow, they had the unsettling feeling they were about to fall.

“They’re still alive!” gasped the first Dochte Mandar.

Rushing forward, trying not to slip and fall, they reached the three bodies.

“The big one, look! It’s Derriko! He’s alive!” said the second.

The dark-haired Dochte Mandar knelt by him, breathing rapidly. He pressed his ear close to the big man’s face. “He’s breathing!”

“How did he survive this?” said the other in awe. “He was attacked by twelve clansmen in the dead of night, midwinter.” He drew a dagger from his belt and approached his kneeling companion. He raised the dagger to plunge it into the man’s back.

Snow exploded into his face, stinging and blinding him. One of the other bodies vaulted at him like a wolf. He felt a dagger plunge into his belly. Felt the shock, the surprise, then the fiery pain of the wound.

He tried to summon power from his kystrel medallion to defend himself, but he felt the power leaching away, felt his knees buckle. The man who’d been half-hidden in the snow shoved him down, holding the dagger in his hand. Then the man turned and faced the other Dochte Mandar, who gaped at him in shock. He drew a second blade.

“Well done, Kishion,” croaked the big man lying in the snow. The one called Derriko. “You found the traitor. Help me up.” He grunted in pain. “Did you bring the healer?” he asked the dark-haired Dochte Mandar, who cowered from the man holding the blades.

“I-I did,” stammered the other man, who gazed with horror as his partner twitched in the snow, the silver slowly leaving his eyes.

He had no name. Somehow, he’d lost it years ago in a grove of black oak trees pregnant with clumps of mistletoe. It was an ancient ceremony, an initiation into the order of killers, and he no longer remembered what oaths he had taken. He only remembered marching out of the grove a different man. A man without a name, a man without a past.

Those who entered the grove and survived were called kishion. It was a title of sorts. A certain brand of slavery. He’d given up trying to remember his past long ago, performing the purpose of his training. To remove those who stood in the way. To protect men like Derriko. Men who used him to further their own ends.

On that snow-swept night, a warlord had come to kill Derriko. It was supposed to be a surprise. A midnight murder. But the kishion had anticipated it. He was always thinking ahead, wondering about what might happen. He’d left ten dead in the manor before escaping outside with Derriko. His arms ached with the efforts, and he felt light-headed from the loss of blood. He’d left the leader of the war band facedown on the ice of the pond. That had been the most difficult fight of his life. He’d been tired before he’d faced the warrior, a man who had fought in dozens of battles with his clan, vying for supremacy. All that training had failed against the determination of a kishion.

Together with the sniveling Dochte Mandar, they carried the huge body of Derriko off the pond. He could feel the ice creaking beneath the combined weight, but they pressed on, reaching the edge. Groaning with effort, the two men heaved him up the slope and then carried him into the rear of the manor house, which was now lit by lamps. A fire had been stoked by the entourage of the Dochte Mandar.

“The table,” grunted Derriko in pain. They carried him there and set him down.

The waves of heat coming from the hearth made sweat drip down the kishion’s face moments later. There was a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, and he whipped around, bringing a knife out and finding himself pressing it against the throat of a woman.

“That’s the healer!” said the Dochte Mandar who had survived the pond. “Don’t hurt her!”

The woman stared him in the face, her eyes widening with what . . . recognition? She blinked quickly, and he lowered the blade.

“Is she . . . a hetaera?” wheezed Derriko. “Be sure!”

“She’s not, Derriko, I swear it!” said the Dochte Mandar.

“Be sure!” hissed the big man, stifling a groan of pain.

The kishion, still holding the curved blade at the ready, unfasted her cloak and hood with his left hand. She let him, her eyes crinkling with worry, but she gazed at him with determination, with a look that seemed almost familiar.

Roughly, he tugged at the front of her bodice, exposing the flesh of her throat, her collarbones. His gloved hands were uncaring as he searched for a medallion, for evidence that she, too, wore a kystrel. There were no shadowstains on her skin.

“Show me your shoulder,” he told her gruffly, giving her a threatening look.

She didn’t cower. Instead, she undid a few of the buttons on her bodice, turned, and exposed her bare shoulder to him. Her left shoulder. The skin was smooth, soft, even, in the firelight. Unblemished by any brands. No, she had not taken the brand. A hetaera used the power of the kystrel to alter emotions. She could even make a kishion afraid. But this woman was not one.

“She doesn’t bear the mark,” he said, turning away, not liking the way her look made him feel. Her hair was dark and straight, her eyes almost accusatory. Yet they still nagged at him. Should he know her? Did she know him?

“Attend me,” Derriko ordered, grunting again. “I can’t feel my leg.”

The woman reset her clothing and then came to the table. She’d dropped a bag of supplies on the floor when the kishion had accosted her, and she gestured now for it. The kishion sheathed his blade, fetched the bag, and handed it to her.

“Would you like me to ease your pain?” the Dochte Mandar asked Derriko.

“Yes,” he grunted in reply. The man’s eyes began to turn silver, and a calming feeling swept through the room. The kishion hated the way the kystrels manipulated feelings. He was in pain, but he’d not ask to be relieved of it. Pain was a companion, a brother in arms. He didn’t fear it or shy from it as other men did.

While the woman worked on Derriko’s injuries, the kishion patrolled the manor. Many of the servants had been killed in the raid, and Derriko kept few of them anyway. He didn’t trust anyone and maintained a lean staff at the manor. That had made him vulnerable. The kishion found the broken window that they had entered through and shoved some furniture to block it. He then tested every latch, every window, and every door to make sure they were locked.

When he returned, he found Derriko’s boot had been cut off and his pant leg cut away. His foot was gray with frostbite. The healer had arranged her implements and ointments nearby, but it was clear from the look of it that he’d lose the foot. Possibly even the entire leg.

“Who attacked you?” the Dochte Mandar asked Derriko. “Why would someone attack the Victus of Naess?” The kishion didn’t like the sniveling sound of his voice. It grated on his ears.

“Because I am the Victus of Naess,” came the gruff answer. “You killed the lackey, but now I know who the traitor is, and they can be dealt with, harshly. If they had hoped to kill me tonight, they should have realized that the best kishion works for me.” His eyes widened with satisfaction as he stared at his pet, his servant, his killer.

“My lord,” said the woman. Even her voice sounded familiar to the kishion. “If we don’t remove the frostbite, you will die. I’ve tried everything I can do to save it. By tomorrow, it will begin to fester. The skin is dead. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Can we not wait until tomorrow?” asked Derriko dispassionately.

“If we wait, you will likely die. You were in the snow for too long. And at your age and girth, your body will not heal quickly. The shock of losing a limb may even kill you.”

Even with such a bleak pronouncement, the kystrel was working its magic. “Do it,” he said. Then he turned his eyes to the kishion. “But he handles the blade. Sorry, healer, but I still don’t trust you.”

Derriko was sleeping when the dawn came. The healer had prepared a draft of valerianum tea for him with some hyssop to dull the pain. He’d watched to make sure she didn’t try to poison him. The Dochte Mandar was sleeping, his neck crooked, on a stuffed chair, snoring lightly. The dark paneled wood on the walls seemed to make the room grow darker as the sunrise came. The kishion, still aching from his own injuries, stood gazing out the rear window at the pond, arms folded, seeing that the snow had completely covered his dead enemies.

“He’s sleeping finally,” said the woman, appearing at his side. Then the pitch of her voice changed. “You’re wounded.”

“It’s nothing,” he said gruffly.

“But they could also fester,” she said. “Let me help you. It’s why I’m here.”

He looked at her, at the hair that was soft, but dark as the wood. A feeling of uneasiness crept into his stomach. His instincts warned him constantly.

“Please,” she asked. Her eyes were gray. That was a rare color, even in the north.

He shrugged and acquiesced. She took him to the couch and had him sit down. Then she gathered her healing implements and brought them closer, kneeling on the floor by the couch. She touched his chin to turn his face, exposing his ear, his neck. Her touch caused a pulse of heat inside him.

“You don’t remember me,” she said softly.

“Should I?” he shot back, anger and confusion starting to churn.

She pressed her lips tightly. Then she looked down. “I was the one who healed you after the battle of Maere.” She traced the edge of his partly missing ear. “I remember this. And these.” Her fingers went down the claw marks on his cheek and face. He was a hideous man, full of scars and demons. He was grateful he didn’t remember getting them.

He jerked his head away, looking at her warily. “I don’t know you.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard that happens. You were the only survivor of the battle. Everyone else around you was dead. One of the Dochte Mandar said you’d make a good kishion if you survived. They told me to save you if I could.”

Her words awoke feelings inside him. They were dangerous feelings. Who was she? He couldn’t remember her. But there was something of intimacy between them. Had she cared for him? Nursed him back to health? The look in her eyes said she was not a stranger. Why had he forgotten?

“What’s your name?” he asked, his brows nettled with conflict.

“Sorieul,” she answered. She took a bottle of healing ointment and dabbed it on a rag and began wiping his face. It stung.

Sorieul. There was nothing. The memories were all gone. Perhaps it was for the best.

A look of sadness came over her face. Blinking away tears, she continued to minster to his wounds. “What have they done to you?” she whispered.

It was Sorieul’s eyes that bothered the kishion the most. He knew when someone was lying by the look in their eyes. He knew the look of desperation of a man who knew he was about to be killed and would try to bargain. He knew the eyes of a man dying from poison. He knew the look of grief, of despair, of shattering loss, just as he knew the looks of revenge, hatred, and cunning.

But the look Sorieul gave him was a look of trust. And he was not used to that.

One thing he had learned in his existence as a highly trained killer was that a kishion was not to be trusted. He felt no loyalty in his heart. How could he when he watched the rulers of Naess squabble and undermine each other in their vying for power and authority. He respected other kishion for their skills, but he was the best of them. He’d never met a man he felt he couldn’t kill. And while he had been ordered to do some unsavory deeds, he had done them without malice or spite because that was what he’d been made to do. His heart was like a piece of flint.

Until now.

Sorieul’s eyes whispered that there were memories he’d lost. That she had meant something to him long ago.

“Kishion,” croaked the haggard voice of Derriko.

He turned away from the window and approached the bedside of his master. Sorieul was finishing changing the dressing on the stump of his leg. She folded up the coils of soiled bandages and marched past him, her eyes flicking to his once more, her mouth turned down in a sad frown.

The kishion ignored her and stood by the bedstead, arms folded.

“You must go,” said Derriko, grunting in pain as he shifted himself higher on the bed.

“And leave you vulnerable?” replied the kishion.

“It’s worth the risk. I know who tried to kill me now. Have you figured it out?”

The kishion chuckled darkly. “Everyone wants to kill you. Because they know you will become the next Hand of the Victus.”

“It was Shigionoth,” said Derriko. “It was his son who attacked last night. It was his servant within the Dochte Mandar who tried to murder me last night when they learned they’d failed. His war band wants to attack Comoros. I promised Chancellor Walraven that I’d buy him time to fulfill our aims in that kingdom. We’ve already poisoned the king’s marriage. And his daughter Maia is an outcast, a pariah. We’re close to achieving our aims. We cannot let Shigionoth’s ambition to rule Naess mar the larger picture.” His eyes narrowed with hate. “Find him. Kill him.”

The words were simple. Yet the task would be enormously difficult. Shigionoth led a powerful war band known for their cruelty and ruthlessness. That he’d attempted to murder Derriko last night proved he was bent on ruling the dark kingdom. This task would be difficult. But nothing the kishion couldn’t achieve.

“Very well,” he said. “Have you summoned more strength to defend you while you recover?”

“I have. There are twenty warriors guarding the manor even now. More will come later today. But if you don’t attack quickly, Shigionoth will have time to prepare for you. Go now.”

“I will,” the kishion said.

Derriko closed his eyes, wincing in pain, and grabbed a chalice of wine from the table at his bedside. He took a few heavy slurps of it and groaned again. The kishion felt no pity or compassion for his master. When one traded in deceit and death, such were the consequences.

The curtains had been drawn open in the halls, and he walked through. He saw two servants dragging a dead man wrapped in a rug away, straining against the burden. Others mopped bloodstains from the floor. He passed by them, uncaring, wondering if he’d catch another glimpse of Sorieul’s eyes, but she was gone. It was for the better. He didn’t like the way his chest pinched when he thought of her, like an echo of an old wound.

He went outside, hiking up the cowl and hood of his cloak to ward off the freezing air. He went to the barn where the horses were tethered and found the latch was already loosed. He squinted at it, suddenly suspicious. He noticed small details like that, always wary for an ambush or attack. He drew one of his curved knives, holding it in an underhand grip. He pulled open the barn door and walked in, as if nothing were amiss. His ears strained for sounds, hearing the snort of horses. Shadows filled the dark barn. The smell of hay and manure was strong, masking the smell of any human.

In the center of the barn was a heavy wooden sleigh with iron rails. He walked past it, keeping his dagger concealed beneath his cloak, and ran his gloved hand along the edge as he passed. He listened for any sound out of place. And heard one.

The small crunch of a foot on straw.

He turned suddenly, pulling back the blade to throw it, and then he saw her. Sorieul. Her eyes were earnest. Trusting.

He clenched his teeth and lowered the blade. “I almost killed you,” he said angrily.

“I knew you wouldn’t hurt me,” she said.

He cocked an eyebrow at her, aware of the gruesome scars on his face, his half-eaten ear. “Oh? I wouldn’t bet your life on that next time.”

“I wanted to talk to you before you left.”

He became even more distrusting of her intentions. He glared at her. “Why?”

She rushed up, closing the distance between them. If it had been any other woman, he would have driven his knife through her ribs. But he saw, even in the half-light, a look of anguish on her face, a pleading look. There was no deception in her eyes, no threat. She wrapped her arms around him, burying her face against his chest, stunning him with an embrace—an act of tenderness he didn’t deserve.

“How did they make you forget me?” she whispered, her voice choking. She looked up, a tear trickling down the curve of her cheek.

He flinched, flexing his arm and breaking her hold, and stepped away from her in confusion. The pain in his chest was like a burning coal.

“I don’t know you,” he said, shaking his head.

“I can see that,” she said, pressing her hand against her mouth. She shuddered, stepping back as well. “But how? How could they make you forget me? What power do they have over you?”

He frowned at her. “I am a kishion.”

“I know. It’s what you wanted to become. What they wanted for you. But there was a time . . . when I was healing you, that we . . . we meant something more to each other.”

He stared at her in disbelief. He’d fought many battles in the past. But the one raging inside himself was the worst kind. The ground felt as if an earthquake were shaking. His mind could not understand this. No one would ever want him. It just wasn’t possible.

“You were wounded so badly at Maere,” she said, looking at him in pity. “You were already half a corpse. But you fought to survive. I . . . I tended you, night and day, as they ordered.”

“But who are you?” he said angrily, stepping closer, using his wrath as a shield to protect his emotions. He hated that the Dochte Mandar could manipulate feelings. He knew what a kystrel felt like. And he was afraid of it. But this was much more powerful because her emotions were real. Her eyes weren’t glowing silver. He already knew she wasn’t a hetaera. And that made it worse. A hetaera he could understand. And he’d have no problem killing one. But this woman was innocent.

“I’m a wretched,” she said, shaking her head. “I have no family. I was abandoned at an abbey. Then a war band attacked, and I was made a slave here in Naess. I’m a good healer, and there are no shortage of the wounded, believe me. I became very good at keeping people alive. I . . . I have a lot of compassion. I feel the hurts of my charges deeply, and it helps me know how to heal them. I used to . . . I used to hold your hand when you were suffering. You never wanted medicine for the pain. Just holding your hand was enough.”

His mind felt like a rat scratching at a box trap, trying to get out. He could feel the scratching noises. But the claws were not sharp enough to penetrate the iron. He could only scratch at it endlessly.

“Do you know my name?” he asked her hoarsely, his insides flaming brightly now. It burned. It burned terribly. He wanted to remember her. Her words sounded familiar. But he couldn’t remember.

She nodded. “Your name was Krywult.”

“Krywult,” he said, shaking his head. Not even that brought back a spark of recollection. “It’s Naestor,” he said, feeling part of his soul flinch.

She looked eager, hoping against hope that he would remember. “It means war wood.” Her excitement began to drain. “But you don’t remember it, even now? Even after I’ve told you? You don’t remember your own name.”

He shook his head no.

He clenched his fist and shook his head again. Impotent rage flooded him. “I must go,” he said gruffly, turning around.

She caught his cloak, and he spun, gripping her wrist hard, forcing her to release him. He saw the look of pain in her eyes. He could snap her wrist so easily.

“Why do you obey these men?” she whispered, looking urgently into his eyes. “I’m a slave still. I cannot go back to Dahomey. But you . . . you have strength. You have power. Yet you obey them. Why?”

He released her wrist and saw her rub it, but her eyes didn’t leave his. They demanded an answer. He didn’t give her one. He stood impassively, trying to ignore the feelings writhing in his chest.

“Take me with you,” she pleaded, her brow wrinkling in distress. She looked as if she would touch him again, but perhaps the recent pain dissuaded her. “Take me back to Dahomey. To my homeland. I’m weary of this land of endless night. Take me, Krywult. Please.”

“I cannot,” he said, shaking his head, backing away from her. His chest heaved with suppressed emotions. He was tempted. He was sorely tempted. There was no way he could unlock the part of his brain where the memories of her lay.

Another tear came down that cheek. She closed her eyes and wept softly. “Where are you going?” she asked, her voice thick with despair. The look of grief in her eyes tortured him.

“I have my orders,” he said. “And neither you nor anyone else will stop me from fulfilling them.”

“But why?” she said in anguish. “Why must you obey them? If you won’t save me, then at least save yourself!”

He was more angry now. More angry than he wanted to be. She had unwound something inside him, loosened the moorings, and now his boat was churning on a stormy lake. Part of him wanted to flee from her, to escape into the snow and try to forget her once again. It was torturing him, not being able to remember her.

Take me to Dahomey. Please.

“I am the knife,” he said curtly. “That is my role. I don’t direct the blade. You heal wounds. I make them. We both have our parts to play in this world.”

She bit her lip and shook her head. “No! We are slaves, both of us! I remember being a child at the abbey. It was peaceful there. It—”

“There is no peace!” he said, cutting her off. “What you chase is a shade. An illusion. The abbey was raided. It didn’t protect you. An abbey can’t protect you. Not from someone like me.” He chuffed. “There is nowhere we could go that the Victus wouldn’t find us. Look at me! I would not be safe there either. They would come for us. And they would kill us. But not until after they’d tortured us. I’ve seen what these men do to their enemies.” It made the heat in his chest begin to flag, to fade.

“Please, take me with you,” she said, but it was without conviction. “There is more to life than killing people.” Her voice fell even softer. “If you were with me, I wouldn’t fear anyone. Please, Krywult. You don’t have to obey them. You always have a choice.”

She would never know how close he came to defying Derriko and abandoning his mission. Part of him wanted to protect her. To keep her safe. Yes, there was the fear of reprisal. The knowledge that he would be a hunted man for the rest of his life. Maybe if he’d remembered her, he would have chosen differently.

Maybe that was why they had taken his memories away.

“I won’t,” he said. And he prepared to depart and left her in the shadows of the barn, preferring the ice of the winter wind to the throbs of dying flame in his heart.

He came to regret his choice.

The hall of Shigionoth was ablaze with fire. A huge pit in the center held two roasting spits, and the hot coals beneath the flames shimmered with orange. The trestle tables were up, and the remains of a massive feast lay spread about. Dogs chewed on bones beneath the tables. Huge iron chandeliers, at least eight of them, hung from chains attached to the roof timbers. There even seemed to be a real wolf with a chain around its neck being baited by a child with a gristly bone.

The kishion was escorted into the hall by ten warriors, each wearing a slathering of war paint on their faces. Guffaws and cheers went up among those gathered. The air smelled like ale and cooking venison. At the head of the hall, within a stone inset, sat two wooden thrones on which sat Shigionoth and his wife, Lady Pressa, who had the looks of a Hautlander with her pale yellow hair.

Shigionoth was a bearlike man, and although in his forties, was well-sinewed and had a savage-looking face. A single scar cut across his cheekbone. He had a beard, flecked with the remnants of his meal, and a balding head. As the kishion was escorted up, Shigionoth’s own personal guards emerged from the shadows of the inlet. There were six of them, each brandishing a sword.

On the walls hung tapestries seized from previous raids. Shigionoth was not one to flaunt his wealth. No, the bulk of his treasures were locked within a crypt deep within the bowels of the fortress. But it wasn’t the treasures that the kishion had come for.

“My lord,” said one of the guards escorting him when they reached the alcove. “Here is the man.”

Shigionoth had green eyes that narrowed at the news, his hand stroking his beard. His eyes were full of enmity and also worry. “He’s uglier than you said,” he mocked. “Where are his weapons?”

“He had only these,” said the guard, holding out the kishion’s twin curved blades.

Shigionoth motioned for them, and the guard handed them to him. He took them, eyeing them critically. His wife, Lady Pressa, was nervous. It was hot enough in the hall to make the sweat pool at the hollow in her throat. But she was on edge, not as sure as her husband.

“Who are you?” asked Shigionoth as he eyed one of the blades more closely. “You claim to bring tidings of my son.”

“I’m the servant of the Victus of Naess,” said the kishion.

Shigionoth pursed his lips and set down the blades, one on each of the armrests. His own sword was also there, set against the side of his throne, always within easy reach. The look in his eyes flashed with guilt and then anger.

“The Victus?” Shigionoth said, tilting his head.

“The one you tried to murder last night,” the kishion said.

Shigionoth barked out a curt laugh. “And who are you again to speak such falsehoods in my hall?” He was growing more and more agitated. The kishion watched as his composure cracked, began to fall apart.

“Your son is dead,” the kishion said.

“No,” gasped Lady Pressa.

“And this is the news you bring me?” said Shigionoth, his eyes blinking, his rage building. Those from Naess were so predictable. They consumed hatred as much as their ale. They spent half their lives in a stupor.

“There is more,” said the kishion. “I’ve been sent to kill you.”

Shigionoth rose from his throne, surprisingly sturdy for the amount of drink he’d consumed. There was a look of panic in his eyes as well. His brain would be flustered. The kishion was counting on it.

“You came here?” Shigionoth said in disbelief. “To murder me here in my own hall? And you . . . you told me first? Are you mad? I have your weapons. You’re surrounded by my trusted men. Servant of the Victus, your body will soon be cooking on one of those spits!” He ended with a shout, pointing at the blaze in the center of the hall.

The kishion stared at him without emotion. “You were already dead before I set foot in here,” he answered. “Your son met his end on a frozen pond. And yes, I killed him. I am a kishion. And you drank your death before I arrived.”

“Kill him!” shouted Shigionoth, his eyes flashing with horror. He reached for his own sword.

The kishion swung around and smashed his elbow into the nearest guard’s face. He pulled a two-edged sword from another’s scabbard and kicked him hard on the knee, breaking it. The commotion rocked the hall, shouts and grunts and shrieks filling the air. The kishion grabbed one man by the strap of his armor and threw him down. He parried thrusts sent at him, watching as faces soon grimaced with the internal pains his poison had already infected them with. The sudden rush of their blood, the fighting pulse accelerated the toxin. By fighting him, they were only killing themselves faster.

A table crashed to the floor, knocking down goblets and the broken carcasses of the feast. The kishion pushed two men at once, and both fell into the firepit. He used the blade to block another screaming man trying to kill him and then punched him in the face, knocking him unconscious in one blow. He turned, and there was Shigionoth with his own sword out, screaming his intent to kill. The kishion dodged the first two slashes. The war chief was an able foe. His son had been too.

The kishion leaped over the flames and landed on the other side, retreating. Another soldier lunged at him, and he caught the man’s wrist and bashed his head with the hilt of the sword. Then Shigionoth was through the flames himself charging, bellowing, screaming in rage. This was a man who went mad on the battlefield.

The kishion blocked his thrusts and kicked him back, but the war chief was desperate to kill him. The two slashed at each other, knocking others out of their way. Still the kishion retreated, watching for the toxin to take effect. Shigionoth winced with pain, pressing his arm against his bowels. He staggered forward, yet still the kishion backed away.

“I’ll . . . kill . . . you!” he groaned.

The kishion cut the man’s wrist with a flick of the sword, and Shigionoth dropped his weapon. With the tip of his boot, the kishion sent the blade into the firepit.

He heard the scuff of a boot behind him and whirled as a man with a dagger tried to stab him in the back. He caught the man’s wrist and torqued it hard. He heard the satisfying snap of a bone, and the dagger fell to the floor. Then the kishion slammed him in the chest with his heel, sending the man falling. He turned, watching Shigionoth on his hands and knees, drool spilling from his lips.

“Craven . . . coward . . . poison . . . ” he choked.

The kishion kicked Shigionoth onto his back, leveling the sword at his throat. He looked around at the disheveled hall, watching others on their hands and knees. Servants huddled behind the tables fearfully. They hadn’t drunk the ale.

Then he felt a queer sensation inside his chest. The cool anger began to soften. Compassion for these people, for the warlord made his veins turn to ice. He looked through the veil of smoke and saw a set of glowing silver eyes. A Dochte Mandar with a kystrel.

He began to step around the firepit, leaving Shigionoth doubled over in agony, his death coming relentlessly.

“Peace, friend,” said the Dochte Mandar, holding up his hands. “I mean you no harm.” There was a pulse of magic, and the kishion felt the two of them had been friends for years. He hated the magic. Hated how it manipulated him.

“Your compatriot is dead,” said the kishion. “The one who was summoned last night.”

“I know. He didn’t report back today from the manor as instructed. So the Victus is still alive?”

“Yes,” said the kishion.

He saw another man step away from the shadows as well. A man with a calm look, a steady set of eyes that were trained and full of death. Another kishion.

The other man had a dagger and threw it at the kishion’s face.

Sensing his threat, the kishion dived forward, the blade slicing past his ear. They met in a clash of limbs. He felt pain go down his arm, realizing he’d been cut, knowing the blade was probably poisoned. He crashed his forehead into the other man’s face. It hurt them both. The two wrestled on the floor, trying to gain supremacy, but the kishion quickly put him in a hold, squeezing against his throat, controlling the arm with the other dagger. The Dochte Mandar, his tattooed face blanching, fled.

The kishion hooked the man leg’s with his foot, sending him sprawling. The other man still in his grip tried to claw at the kishion’s eyes, but he held his face away until the lack of air made him pass out. Then he let go. The Dochte Mandar was scrabbling to his feet and started for the door again.

The kishion wrested the dagger from the unconscious grip of the other killer, turned, and hurled it. It struck the Dochte Mandar in the back, and he arched his body and spilled to the floor, unable to walk. The kishion knew exactly where to throw a knife to paralyze a man.

Rising, brushing off his arms, he looked around the room for any other threats. Seeing no one but cowering servants, who were slaves from other kingdoms, he marched over to the fallen Dochte Mandar, who was grunting and wheezing in pain. He pulled the dagger out of his back.

“Just because you control a kystrel, you think you control the world,” he said with contempt. “Some of us aren’t ruled by our feelings.” The man panted, eyes wide with fear.

The kishion walked back to the front of the hall, where two empty thrones sat. Lady Pressa had already fled. But she would die just like the others. The kishion sat down on Shigionoth’s throne, sheathed the two curved blades that had been left there, and leaned back, watching the flames dance, watching the survivors cower and slink away. He didn’t care about the slaves.

In his memory, he saw Sorieul’s gray eyes. Saw the pleading look in them to free her. He wasn’t used to feeling things, and he certainly didn’t trust his feelings. But as he sat there, on the throne, he imagined another choice. He imagined what it would be like to sit on such a throne and be the one to give commands and have them obeyed. The Dochte Mandar and the Victus liked to control from the shadows. To make kings into puppets to be manipulated and controlled.

What if he were to take control of the strings?

There was that dull ache in his chest again. The memory of Sorieul’s eyes. He grit his teeth, forcing himself to face the emotion that nagged at him.

What if he were to escape the game entirely? Flee to a place where no one would ever find him?

Did such a place even exist?

It was snowing when the kishion arrived back at the manor nestled deep in the woods. The steep roofline had a substantial buildup on it, except around the main chimney, which belched out a plume of gray smoke. He was sore from the winter journey, and his wounds still ached. But pain was just a consequence of living, a reminder that he still breathed.

He rode the horse into the barn and secured it, hanging the tack and harness, and gave the beast a bag of oats to sate its hunger. Then he walked to the manor, where he found several warriors dressed in furs guarding the door. They looked at him, then at each other, and nodded for him to enter.

The interior was pleasantly warm, and he stamped his snow-crusted boots on the threshold before seeking Derriko’s sickbed. For a man who had recently lost his leg, he looked surprisingly hale. He was sitting up, reviewing a stack of papers, and sipping from a chalice. He noticed the kishion’s entrance immediately.

“Back so soon?” Derriko asked with a slight wheeze.

The kishion walked the perimeter of the room, glancing at the corners to make sure no one was hidden. The heavy velvet curtains blocked the limited light outside. He parted the curtains, gazing at the white landscape, at the frozen-over pond. A remembrance of the fight there flitted pasted his memory. But he felt nothing. He always felt nothing.

“Is he dead?”

The kishion turned away from the window, looked at his master, and nodded curtly.

Derriko smiled in relief. “Good. Very good. What about his family? His wife and children?”

“The lady is dead. You didn’t tell me to kill the children,” said the kishion. “Shall I go back?”

“No, it’s not necessary. Wolves will come now that blood has been spilled. Shigionoth was a wealthy battle lord. They’ll fight over his scraps for months. The threat has been checked. Well done.”

The kishion shrugged again. He could see the advantage to Derriko. He just didn’t care.

“I will be bedridden for several months,” Derriko said, setting down the goblet. He arranged the sheaf of papers. “I have enough servants and warriors to protect me until the winter is over. And there’s another way you can be useful to our cause.”

The kishion folded his arms and cocked his head.

“The Victus of Dahomey has requested a kishion for an assignment. You know Corriveaux Tenir?”

The kishion nodded slowly. Dahomey was where Sorieul had wanted to be taken. “I’ve heard of him.”

“Corriveaux is clever. He will do well. He’s engaged in a ploy to upset the King of Comoros’s succession.”

The kishion frowned. “He wants me to murder King Bannon?”

“No. He wants you to poison his daughter. The heir. Not to kill her. But to make her believe that her life is in danger. For years she’s been groomed by Chancellor Walraven. If we can turn her fully to our side, she will be a great strength in helping restore the hetaera to power. Go to Lisyeux and report to Corriveaux.”

Dahomey. He thought again of Sorieul’s eyes, her plea to be taken there. He had never gone against his orders before. Never given them a reason not to trust his loyalty.

He hadn’t considered himself a slave, as she was. That thought made something sour in his mind. Did he have any choices anymore?

“What’s wrong?” Derriko asked. His brow wrinkled with concern.

“Nothing,” replied the kishion. “When do you want me to go?”

“Tomorrow is soon enough. I will commune with Corriveaux through the Leering and tell him you’re coming. I will tell him that I am sending my best. I know you won’t fail me.”

The kishion looked at the big man, helpless in his bed. He realized how easy it would be to kill him. How his position of trust could undermine Derikko’s illusion of safety. No, the kishion wasn’t a slave. If he wanted to, he could change his fate. He could be his own master. He served Derriko because it suited him. Their secret acts, hidden from the sight of the world, were changing kingdoms and principalities. He was the bringer of change.

“I won’t,” said the kishion. He nodded to his master and turned to leave.

Dahomey. What new secrets would be learned there?

King Bannon’s only child. What kind of person was she? What was her name again? Maia? He shut the door behind him and went in search of a place to rest.

Chancellor Walraven twisted the handle and opened it. A bead of perspiration had gathered on his brow, and he wiped it away. Inside the room, there was only one person, an older woman with crinkled gray-gold hair and tight features. It was a sitting room, with only a few stuffed benches. She rose from one of them.

“Were you followed?” she asked him.

“No, Sabine. I made sure of it. Yet still, it’s a risk meeting you like this.”

“I’m glad you came,” she replied. “Meeting here in Pry-Ree was the safest course.”

“I know you are fully aware of the risks, High Seer.”

His stomach was knotted with worries. When he had received her summons, he’d dreaded this meeting. If any of the other Victus learned that he was betraying the order, his death would be a gruesome one.

She clasped his hands in hers. “Dark days lie ahead, Chancellor. You know I cannot involve myself directly in what will come. I must do as the Medium commands me. I had a vision recently. It is what prompted me to summon you.”

“My lady, your gift is truly exceptional. Was it a vision of your granddaughter?”

“No. Although I feel it relates to her somehow. In my vision, I saw my trusted hunter, Jon Tayt, lying in his own blood, struck with grievous wounds. There was another man there, one with a scarred face. A kishion, I think.”

The scars reminded Walraven of Derriko’s trusted killer. He waited, listening keenly.

“They were in the cursed shores, Chancellor. In Dahomey. I saw a woman who had been hiding approach the bodies. She was a healer, a slave of the Naestors. Without her aid, Jon Tayt would have died. I asked the Cruciger orb who she was, and it gave me only a name. Sorieul. She needs to be there on that day. My authority does not reach Naess. But yours does. Can you summon her, Chancellor? I can have my ship take her to Dahomey.”

“I-I believe I can arrange it,” said Walraven. He ran his fingers through his untamed gray hair.

“Please do,” Sabine said. She gripped his hands and squeezed them harder. “We will not see each other again, Chancellor. Until I come to Naess as a prisoner. Thank you for doing what you’ve done to protect my granddaughter’s life. She will not be seduced by the Victus. Have faith in her.”

Walraven nodded. “It grieves me that she trusts in me so much. I feel like I’ve failed her.”

“No, Chancellor. She will know the truth in the end. That you saved her.”

He sighed. “Thank you, Sabine. I will do as you command.”

The kishion had died. His soul had departed his body, which lay in the tangled growth of the blighted landscape near the Lost Abbey. He felt something tugging at him, a force that was invisible as well as all-powerful. He didn’t want to go to the afterlife. He stared at his dead body, feeling grief and despair.

And then he saw a woman appear through the thick moss-covered trees. Although she wore a cloak, her size and gait reminded him of someone he’d met long ago. When she reached the scene, she lowered the cowl, and he started, recognizing her. It was Sorieul.

The hunter groaned in pain. She knelt down and tended his wounds, suturing the cuts the kishion had inflicted on him in their final confrontation. The kishion stared at her, in disbelief, feeling that infernal tugging at his soul. Then, her work was done, and she rose from the hunter’s body. He’d fallen unconscious from the sleeping draft she’d given him.

Then Sorieul came over to him. She knelt by his body. He tried to touch her, but his ghost-hand couldn’t be felt. A thousand regrets filled him.

Then he saw her put her hand on his head. She raised her other hand to the sky, and with a trembling voice she said, “Krywult, by the authority of the High Seer of Pry-Ree, I Gift you with life.”

Jeff Wheeler

Wall Street Journal bestselling author Jeff Wheeler took an early retirement from his career at Intel in 2014 to write full-time. He is a husband, father of five, and a devout member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Jeff lives in the Rocky Mountains.

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