The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

  Worst lie I’ve ever put together, but it did the job. If by “did the job” I mean “kept me out of the dungeon.”

  Okay, so I do lie occasionally, but only when there’s great need.

  The lady glared at me. “You will leave this town,” she said. “You will leave and not come back. I do not want to see your face here again.”

  Fine by me, I thought, and didn’t even protest when they sent me back out into the rain.

  I was all prepared to put that disaster behind me when the raven found me again.

  “Go away,” I snarled through clenched teeth. “You’ve caused enough trouble for one day.”

  Then a hawk came arrowing out of the damp air to land next to the raven on the fence. She looked at the raven, then at me. “Can he really understand me?”

  “Oh, no!” My protest made both birds flutter their wings. “I am not talking to you anymore. Any of you. Leave me alone!”

  The hawk fixed me with her bright eyes. Normally I’d rather talk to a hawk than a raven, but not right now. I remembered well enough what the raven had said about the dead knight. If this wasn’t Tergram’s hawk, I would eat my shoes. And hawks are very single-minded creatures.

  “This one tells me you have a care for my master,” the hawk said.

  “No,” I said immediately. “I just wanted to get him buried. That’s done, so I’m done.” Even if the knight had been dumped in an unmarked grave.

  “I would not count on that,” the hawk said.

  Against my will, she had my attention. “Count on what?”

  “Being done.”

  I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “My master was murdered,” the hawk said.

  “Now wait a second,” I cut in. “This raven here said your master just fell out of his saddle and died. He didn’t say anything about an arrow or an attack.”

  The hawk mantled, and it occured to me that she could rip me bloody if I made her angry. “He was murdered by magic,” she said.

  Your average man would have laughed this statement off. Your average man, though, has never caught a pixie skulking around his fire one night, and has never forced that pixie to grant him a wish. I had proof of magic, all right, although I seriously regretted asking to be able to understand birds.

  I had thought they might be able to give me directions on the road.

  The rain was tapering off to an annoying mist. I stood in the middle of the road and tried to tell myself to keep walking. The knight had been murdered by magic, his hawk said. His lady thought he had died months ago. His lady’s right-hand man had hidden the knight’s body and then lied to her about it.

  This had all the marks of something I should have never gotten involved with in the first place.

  But if that man was responsible for murdering the knight, then the lady deserved to know.

  Besides which, I had a hawk sitting not far away with a look in her eye that said she was not going to leave the matter alone until I helped her.

  I had a vision of myself pecked to a bloody ruin, and snarled.

  “All right,” I said reluctantly. “Where’s he buried?”

  *

  The riders had not buried the body very deeply, and the ground was soft. A few minutes of work coated me in mud and revealed the knight’s body.

  “Now what?” I asked the two birds who were watching from a tree.

  “Can I eat him?” the raven asked.

  I ignored that. The hawk fluttered down to land on her dead master’s chest and nodded her beak toward his hand. “He put that ring on and it made him very ill.”

  I looked at the ring she had indicated, checking my urge to reach out for it. The ring in question was a heavy signet; with the mud on it I couldn’t be sure, but my guess was that it was the Tergram seal. “Why didn’t he take it off?”

  “It wouldn’t come off,” the hawk said. “He tried.”

  So he hadn’t been entirely stupid. The question was, what should I do now? I had an apparently cursed ring and an obviously dead knight. If I brought them to the town, at least I could prove to the lady that I had been telling the truth — assuming, of course, that the guards let me in. But what proof did I have that he’d been murdered?

  I looked around and sighed. The knight had been buried in the lee of another low stone wall, farther from the road. There was a wood right nearby; I could go cut branches from that to make a sledge, and use that to drag the body. The mud might actually help me out, by making it easier to slide things. But what would be even better would be to find a farmer who had a horse I could use. According to the hawk, the knight’s own horse was long gone, and so was his hound.

  The sun was headed for the horizon; I didn’t have a lot of time to waste. I flicked my wet hair out of my eyes and looked at the hawk. “Do me a favor. Fly around here until you find a nearby house, okay? You know what a house is, right?” She glared at me, offended. “When you find the nearest one — preferably in the general direction of the town — then come back here and tell me.”

  The hawk opened her beak, but I cut her off before she could protest. “If you tell me this is beneath your dignity, I’m going to dump your master back in this hole and forget the entire thing.”

  The threat worked. She flew off.

  I sat down with my back to the wall to wait. At this point I didn’t care about the mud; I was just about as dirty as I could get already.

  Not much time had passed before I heard hoofbeats squelching across the fields. The hawk must have found someone quicker than I thought, and brought him to me already.

  But wait — that thought made no sense at all. Farmers can’t understand bird talk. How could the hawk have brought someone?

  I leapt to my feet just as two horses came sailing over the wall and skidded to a halt in the mud.

  “Well,” the knight’s lady said in a cold voice, turning her horse to face me. “It seems you are yet inclined to meddle.”

  I clenched my teeth and called myself nineteen kinds of idiot. How had I been so stupid? Her calm was not that of a widow who has come to terms with her grief; it was the calm of a murderess who never mourned her husband’s passing in the first place.

  At her side, the man she had dispatched to hide her husband’s body smiled unpleasantly.

  The lady looked down on the mud-covered form of her late husband and made an irritated sound. “If only he had done as he should, and died the moment he put on the ring,” she said. “Where he got the strength to survive for so long, I do not know.” Her cold gaze lifted to regard me. “But it does not matter. He is dead, and I am Lady, and no troublesome pedlar is going to change that.”

  I stood with my back to the wall, my heart so far up in my throat I could taste it. There was nowhere I could run; they would ride me down.

  “My love,” the lady, the witch, said to the man at her side. “Do me the favor of killing this man.”

  “Gladly,” the man said, and his expression echoed it. He would enjoy killing me.

  I looked desperately about for an escape as he unhooked a crossbow from his saddle.

  “Would you like help?” the raven asked me from its perch in the tree.

  Neither the lady nor the man reacted. They could not understand him; all they heard was squawking. I could barely speak for terror, but I managed to yelp, “Yes!”

  The man was loading a quarrel into the crossbow.

  “Can I eat their eyes?”

  The murdered knight might deserve better, but these two did not. “Yes!”

  The man lifted the crossbow and aimed it at me.

  The raven arrowed down out of the tree and flew directly for his face. The man swore and jerked instinctively away; the quarrel flew, but skipped off the top of the stone wall, missing me by a hair.

  The raven flew off, screaming something unintelligible, and left me alone with the two of them.

  Some help, I thought bitterly, and ran like hell for the wood.

  “Get hi
m!” the lady screeched, and within an instant I heard hoofbeats behind me. I was going to die anyway; the raven had only delayed it for a moment.

  Then the birds came.

  They poured out of the wood like a flood, thundering past me on a thousand wings. I could not identify half of them; they flew too quickly, and besides, their kind did not matter. What mattered was that they attacked the riders pursuing me, while the raven circled and shrieked battle cries, urging them on to blood.

  As I reached the periphery of the wood, I had to turn around. The horses had stopped; their riders were flailing their arms, trying to fend off the birds. They did not stand a chance, though. Here and there they struck a small body, stunning the bird or occasionally hurting it, but there were too many. Their screams rose above those of the raven.

  And then the hawk plummeted from the sky like a taloned rock and struck the lady, and she toppled from her horse into the mud. The man followed a moment later, vanquished by a thousand little birds.

  He lived, actually — at least for a little while. The lord who came in to clean up the mess afterward sentenced him to death, so he hung in the end, with the wounds still visible on his face where the birds had attacked him. The lady died out there in that field, though; the hawk had seen to that.

  The murdered knight was buried properly, where the ravens cannot get at him. The one who got me into all this trouble didn’t hold that against me, though; he made quite a feast of the lady’s face before anyone arrived to take care of her body.

  I might have been a bit slow getting people out there.

  I got a bit of a reward for the whole thing; they found evidence in the lady’s chambers of her witchcraft. It didn’t make up for nearly being shot, though, and it certainly doesn’t make up for what’s happened since.

  You see, some of the birds got hurt in that attack, and I couldn’t just abandon them, not after they saved my life. So I nursed them back into health while all that trial business was going on, and the upshot of it all is that now the birds like me. They follow me wherever I go, and tell me about the worm they caught that morning and the way the breeze is blowing and how they think their eggs might hatch soon.

  All except the ravens. They all snicker among themselves when they see me, and ask if I’d like to see the dead bodies they’ve found.

  Next time I catch a pixie, I know what wish I’m going to make.

  I don’t remember for sure, but I think it was at World Horror in Denver when I left my dealer table to check out a panel on the best dark short fiction of the year. I smiled from the audience when Ellen Datlow mentioned Terry McGarry’s “God of Exile.” It didn’t quite make it into her Year’s Best anthology, but it was a strong contender, and it’s still one of my favorite Talebones stories. I can relate to its theme about abandonment, but thank goodness for the restorative power of music. Lucky issue #13’s cover art was by Bob Hobbs.

  GOD OF EXILE

  TERRY MCGARRY

  The music of the lyre washed over the arid landscape in languorous waves, its chordal undercurrents caressing the failing soil, its melody lapping at the cliff face only to return in gentle counterpoint. The tune ran in rivulets through the interstices in the rocks. The dry grasses swayed to its cadences, the leaves of the wind-bent trees gave fluttery applause; the wind itself — incessant in this place, crying its loneliness without respite — moaned harmony.

  Now and then a deeper note would plunk resoundingly into the current like a large, long-forming droplet giving way over the edge of an eave, and a tear would slide, in sympathy, onto a downy cheek. For she knew what he would do to her for this. And she feared him: but she knew that she could no more stop making music than she could stop the beating of her heart.

  She was her music. And she hoped beyond hope that he would share its beauty with her, because it was all they had.

  And so you are condemned to the Outer Reaches, where men tread no longer, where there will be no one to worship you,” said the goddess Athanaïs. “You will be god of barrenness and ashes, unknown and unrevered. Your powers will be shorn; we will leave you only a limited ability to make fire. Ration it wisely. You will be chained to human form, unable to fly through the air or seep through the earth. You will take but one memento of the world you have forfeited: this little girl.”

  Beside her throne appeared a child of miraculous beauty, a mortal child unawed by the blinding might of the assembled deities, draped in silk-trimmed velvets and bedecked with bangles so that her every movement was a tinkling melody. A child-sized lyre rested against her leg, and from a leather band over her shoulder hung a goatskin drum dyed with bright swirls of color. In her hands she held a slim blackwood flute worked in finest silver, and her lips — tiny, heart-shaped lips like a new flower budding in the creamy skin of her face — puckered as if ever prepared to blow on it.

  Her dark eyes shone with love and trust, and her fine, pale hair took up the dancing sparkles of the fountain of light and softened them in reflection, made them human. In this place of crystalline resplendence, she glowed with warmth and health and innocence.

  He hated her.

  He had cast away her tinkling jewelry and broken her instruments, wordlessly, when they reached their destination.

  She had looked at him, uncomprehending; she had looked down into the ravine where he had cast flute and lyre and drum, brows drawn into a frown, perhaps with the effort of locating the fragments of wood and strings.

  Then, seeming to accept that the pieces could never be reassembled, she followed him back from the edge of the precipice, trudging behind him up the windy slope. Her fine garments were travel-worn, her satin slippers stained and tattered. Her pale hair was lank and tangled, her milky skin smudged; purple crescents had formed under her eyes like bruises, mute testament to the rigors of following a fallen god to the farthest reaches of the world. The pantheon had not prepared her for a life of exile; intent only on their vengeance against him, they had, uncaring, cast this child’s lot with his without supplying so much as a pair of sturdy shoes or a pack of travel rations.

  She had played her little flute as they had walked, an endless battering of notes against his ears. When they could go no farther, daunted by the mountains ahead, the sea to the west, the precipice to the east, they had found a shack waiting for them, planks banged together haphazardly, a mockery of a palace for two.

  Their arrival had freed him to put an end to her unendurable, dangerous music. With that done, she could survive as she would; it made no difference to him, as long as it was a hard life, and short. He had ignored the sound of her small footsteps behind him as he had intended to ignore her for whatever was left of her pathetic, finite existence.

  So they had lived in silence on the windy hillside, under a white-gray sky that never changed, except at sunset, when the sickly yellow orb ducked out from under the sheet of cloud for one quick peek at them before it dove into the waves — the gods’ spy.

  He didn’t know what she scrounged for herself to eat; weeds and thistles, perhaps, which grew in sad abundance about the clapboard structure. He had retained enough godhood to require no sustenance, and spent his days looking down toward the slate sea, ruminating on his predicament and waiting for her to grow up, grow old, and die.

  She lingered at a dry well at the top of the hill, a dead circle of stonework, its inner rim striped by centuries of rubbing as ropes hauled up buckets of water for whatever ancient folk had once inhabited this forsaken place. Perhaps she was counting the days on the old impressions; days turned into months and into years.

  Or perhaps she was calculating something, for one morning she seemed to find the answer, come to a decision. He sensed some change behind him and, mildly startled, turned his head toward it. She stood on the rim of the well, the highest spot she could find; she was a wild thing now, a half-grown child draped in colorless rags, hair a filthy tangle around her shoulders, face soiled brown, and yet some mortal beauty still radiated from her, lit the space around h
er, made a candle of their desolate hill, herself the flame at its tip.

  And then the wind shifted, and brought the explanation to him. She was humming. As he rose, moved his body around to face her, locked his gaze on her, she opened her mouth and loosed the song.

  She must have spent the years composing it in her mind. It was a perfectly crafted thing — still a child’s song, but adapted, enlarged, and filled with all the wistfulness and heartache of a soul straining against the crush of isolation. I am not alone when I am with you, the song said, in its lyrics, in its rhymes, in its modal changes, its melancholy undertones overlaid with bright passages singing of hope. You are my god and my father now, and if you will just sing with me, we will be one forever.

  He listened to the song for what seemed one endless moment. It felt as if the very movement of the invisible sun and stars had stopped, suspended outside the circle of her sound, and a suspicion, long forgotten, prickled to life in the back of his mind.

  But it was swept away by rage. Could she not leave him in peace, leave him to the emptiness, let the unceasing wind be his tormentor? Could she not live out her life and have done with it? Why did she insist on baiting him, why did she torture him with this cursed, insufferable loveliness? Stupid, stupid creature — to tempt a god so —

  With a snarl he strode up the slope to her. She wavered in fright on the lip of the well, and in truth he wished to push her in, but he knew it would avail him nothing. His rage was huge, it was a ravening hound whose jaws must clamp on flesh, it demanded gratification.

  He yanked her down from her perch, pulled her head back by a handful of greasy hair, looked down at her beseeching, openmouthed face, and ripped out her tongue.