Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  Digging her fingernails into the crack between the covers, Kim pried the reliquary open.

  She had expected a flash of magic like in the Lord of the Rings movies, but nothing even glowed. Inside the reliquary lay a mat of dried leaves. Kim held her breath for fear of disturbing the thing lying on them.

  Curled in a fetal ball lay the tiniest skeleton Kim had ever seen. All her life she had heard of the other breeds of Fae but had never seen anyone besides her parents. With birdlike bones, this skeleton could only belong to a pixie, the most delicate of the Fae.

  Kim slid her hand under the leaves and they disintegrated. Shaking, she picked up the pixie’s skull. Dried to almost nothing, it felt like papier-mâché and was no bigger than her thumb. She set the skeleton on the altar piece by careful piece. Most of the bones were still attached with mummified tendons and leathery skin. She did not like to think about how hard it would have been if she’d had to piece the hands together.

  “Don’t miss a single bone.” Mom leaned forward, as if she could stick her own hand in the reliquary and fish around.

  “I know.” Kim scowled. They’d spent enough time telling her bedtime tales about little changelings who didn’t follow the rules. Kim sifted the ashy remains of the leaves until she was confident she had all the bones.

  Bowing her head over the remains, Kim held her hands over them in benediction and said the words she had been taught.

  “Child of Faerie, blessed are ye in your innocence. Return ye to the state from which our ancestors preserved us, free from the knowledge of the tree of good and evil. I release ye from your bonds to the mortal world. Go in peace.”

  Light, golden as sunset, bloomed out of the arch behind and cast her shadow across the altar. Now this was more like it. This was magic.

  Her mother hissed, “Bow. The Faerie Queen is coming.”

  Kim’s mother lowered herself into a deep curtsy. Kim tried to follow suit, but her legs gave way and dropped her on the ground. Her scraped knee sent a bright flash of pain up into her forebrain and snapped her attention to the fact that this was happening. She was about to meet the freakin’ Faerie Queen.

  For the first time in five hundred years, faeries set foot on mortal soil without needing to take a human in exchange. A retinue of faerie men and women stepped through the gate. Kim’s heart sank as she looked from beautiful Fae to Fae. This was worse than high school; the disdain was apparent even on their inhumanly beautiful faces. Every one of them was beautiful and she... She looked like ass.

  Her mother even looked panicky at the sight of these beautiful Fae.

  The light frothed over, spreading to all the arches of the monument. The interior lit up like Kim was standing center stage in the auditorium at school. Trumpets sounded. If silver were a sound, then it bugled out of the arch. The light boiled within the confines of the stone.

  The radiance in all the other arches coalesced into a horde of other Fae. They sent up a cheer as they streamed through into the mortal world.

  None of her parents’ stories had prepared Kim for the full diversity of faeries. She’d known about the different species of Fae, but did not realize they came in every shade of skin known to humanity and then some. Brown, black, green, blue and red—some with tall pointing ears, others with noses drooping to their chins. The sight of a scattered few who were as ancient in appearance as she was, relieved her somewhat. She wouldn’t stand out like a freak in Faerie after all.

  Amidst the horde stampeding into the space, strode a woman who made every model ever born look dull and ordinary. She was made of beautiful.

  Kim’s mother turned from the group of Fae who had come through the first arch and gasped. “Majesty!”

  This was the Faerie Queen? Then who were these other guys? The Queen saw them and her perfect face blanched in horror. Kim’s mind caught up. The Unseelie Court had found them.

  A tall elven man with fox-red hair drew his sword and stepped between the Queen and the Unseelie. “Majesty, we are ambushed.”

  Only then did Kim realize that each of the first group of Fae carried a weapon and wore a red band on their sleeves. Before she had time to register more than that, the Unseelie Court fell upon the Queen and her retinue. Metal clashed against metal and sparks flew.

  Her mother shrieked and scrambled toward the Queen. Kim turned to follow her, but an Unseelie man with leaf-green hair stopped her with a sword to her chest.

  Kim bent back across the altar to get away. One of her hands landed on the reliquary. Desperate for a weapon, Kim swung it up and swiped at him. The corner nicked his cheek.

  His skin sizzled and peeled as if she had hit him with a flaming poker. Holy shit. Iron raised welts on her parents’ skin, but nothing like this. Kim didn’t waste time wondering why, she just started laying into the Unseelie faeries attacking her.

  Kim wielded the reliquary as if it were a book in a room full of jocks. At first the Unseelie retreated from the cold iron but the reliquary gave her a shorter reach than their swords and daggers.

  Another beautiful, lean Unseelie man, with eyes like ice, nearly took her arm off but a gnome stopped his blow with a shovel. Kim retreated, dodging blows that pushed her farther from the Faerie Queen. The Unseelie man drove the point of his sword over the gnome’s shovel and into his chest. Wrenching it free, he stepped toward Kim.

  Kim staggered and fetched up against the hard surface of one of the monoliths. He had the sword leveled at her before she had time to draw breath. As he thrust it at her, she raised the reliquary to block. The shock of impact sent tremors through the bones of her hands.

  She tried to swipe at him, but he twisted the sword under the reliquary and flicked it out of Kim’s hands.

  A squeak of horror escaped her throat as the piece of iron flew out of her grasp.

  The Unseelie smiled the coldest smile Kim had ever seen. “What now, changeling child?”

  He pressed the sword against her chest lightly but with enough force to pin her against the concrete block. “By the powers, you reek like a mortal. If the Unseelie Court didn’t have use for you, I’d gut you like the spelless outcast you are.”

  Kim tried to twist away from the sword but he pressed it forward, cutting through her shirt and into her breastbone. She grunted at the sudden pain.

  And then she got pissed. “I’m not spelless, you bastard.”

  Kim pressed her hand flat against the concrete behind her.

  “Stone, stone, earth’s bone,

  Once hid, now shown!”

  The concrete exploded. Chunks spun through the air, slamming into the mob. The blast knocked Kim flat, forcing the air from her lungs. She rolled frantically to get away from the falling concrete and rebar.

  Her chest burned, screaming for air, but she could not draw a breath. Kim pawed at her throat as if she could open it by hand.

  Howling, the Unseelie man pushed a block off his chest. A host of other Unseelie, bloodied and furious, turned toward where Kim lay. She dragged air in with a terrified wheeze. A part of her brain wondered if this was what her dad felt like.

  Her anger rekindled. Her dad was dying because of these traitors.

  Kim grabbed the first thing she laid her hand on—a twisted length of rebar torn from the stone. Her hand stung from its rough surface, but Kim didn’t care. She rose to her feet and ran at the Unseelie as he was dragging his sword from under another chunk of cement.

  Double-handed, Kim brought the rebar down on his wrist. The rod passed through his arm in a crackle of flesh. He screamed and fell, leaving his hand still clutching the hilt of his sword.

  No blood dripped from the wound. The blackened skin had cauterized as the rebar had passed through. Kim stared at the rod in disbelief. Of course...it was iron. She had, like, a freakin’ lightsaber against these guys. And since she’d grown up here, it only stung her a little.

  Kim dove forward, hacking with the rebar. Even a glancing nick with the iron made their skin bubble and peel. The Unseelie retrea
ted before her.

  This was the best weapon, ever.

  Gnomes, changelings and other of the Queen’s Fae came to her side and formed a phalanx, cutting through the host of Unseelie. Kim fought without grace, but the terror that her weapon brought turned the tide quickly to the Queen’s favor.

  Time lost its meaning until Kim found herself standing, rebar in hand, next to her mother.

  And the Faerie Queen.

  “Bravely done, good Mossblossom.”

  For a moment, Kim wondered who she was talking to, and then remembered her Faerie name. “I—thank you, your Majesty.” There was probably something else she should say, but Dad didn’t have time for formalities. She pushed away the possibility that he was already dead. “So, could you—”

  The fox-haired Fae stepped in front of her. “I am Oreyn, the Queen’s champion and I, too, thank you for your service, but I must ask you to release your weapon near the Queen.”

  “Oh.” Kim looked at the length of iron stupidly and let it drop to the ground. “Okay. But listen, my dad needs help.”

  Oreyn shied as the rebar rolled toward his toe. “Of course.” He stepped past it and put his hand on Kim’s shoulder.

  She had never been this close to anyone like him. He smelled of honeysuckle and salt. His cheeks bore no trace of fuzz and had the poreless perfection of porcelain. He lifted his left hand and put a knife to her throat.

  “Oreyn! What means this?” The Faerie Queen’s shout came at the same moment as a wordless cry from Kim’s mother.

  Oreyn spoke three quick words in some language Kim did not recognize.

  The world inverted, spun and sharpened into a painful clarity. The replica of Stonehenge had vanished, replaced by crisp trees and a stark blue sky.

  The iron ring in Kim’s nose burned. As it seared her flesh, she screamed.

  Kim didn’t care about the knife at her throat. The thing burning her had to stop. She grabbed it. Her fingers flared with pain.

  She jerked them away.

  Oreyn laughed and let his knife fall. “The touch of iron is worse here, is it not?”

  Sick, twisted traitor. He was the one who had told the Unseelie Court about her. He was why her dad was dying.

  Tears filling her eyes, Kim let the sleeve of her shirt fall over her fingers. With that slight protection, she yanked the ring out of her nose. The skin tore, but the pain was nothing to what she had felt.

  Kim drove the point of the tiny piece of iron into Oreyn’s throat. Flame curdled the skin around it.

  He shrieked.

  As he tried snatching it, the fire leaped from his throat to his hands and then to his sleeves. His screams turned to hoarse wheezes. Arms outstretched, he staggered toward Kim.

  She dodged, then turned and fled deeper into Faerie’s perfect woods. Careening through the trees, Kim ran until her legs collapsed under her. With her arms wrapped around her head, Kim lay on the ground and sobbed.

  #

  She woke in an unfamiliar bed. Every thread in the silk sheets chafed, as if her skin were too sensitive from a fever. Light filtered through carved filigree windows and caressed rich tapestries. Kim squinted to hold out as much of the too-crisp vision as possible. Her head ached from all the intricate detail.

  “Kim, honey?” Her mother’s voice drew her gaze to the side.

  She had thought Mom seemed old before, but worry had added new lines to her forehead. Or maybe she could see more in Faerie. “Dad?” Her voice cracked on that one syllable.

  “Right here.” From her other side, Dad took her hand and held it firmly. “How do you feel, little girl?”

  She whispered, “I want to go home.”

  Her dad froze. “You are home, sweetie.”

  “Hush, Woody.” Mom patted her hand. “Let’s go.”

  They helped her stand. Then Kim’s mother spoke in the same language Oreyn had used. The world twisted, spun, and Kim staggered into her living room.

  The soft toile fabric and Berber carpet looked as they had left it. The clock on the mantel said it was just after seven. Outside the window, dawn was beginning to light in their yard.

  Her mother said, “Why don’t you run on up to bed?”

  Without words to even think about everything that had happened, Kim nodded. Later there would be time to talk, but she felt too battered for thought. Kim hugged her parents for a long time and dragged herself up the stairs to her room.

  She hopped over the line of salt, then turned. Squatting, she brushed the barrier aside.

  Kim turned out the lights and crawled into bed.

  She left the door open.

  Pattern on Stone

  By James SA Corey

  Excerpt of remarks by Yva Alenea Brooks delivered to the Umarra Institute, Bercale-3, August 15 2751 (relative standard)

  The purpose of our mission was to examine the Carrath artifact discovered on Ouroboros-4 seven standard years ago. As with previous relics of its kind, this took the form of metamorphic rock, apparently of local origin, with a complex of channels and penetrations that either create or contain an energetic field effect. The effect has been compared to neural activity, but the gross similarities between the Carrath patterns and signaling systems of either Earth- or Eunollia-based life-trees breaks down quickly at a finer level of analysis. The signature peculiarity of the field effect is its vulnerability to slipdrive transport. The first four Carrath artifacts were effectively erased in the attempts to take them for analysis on Earth, Tanabea, and Kors. It is this property that makes them as enigmatic and troubling as they are.

  While there is little doubt that the analytic powers of our great institutions would reveal a great deal more than we presently understand about the stonemakers, what exactly they were, and the purpose and structure of the artifacts they left behind, it is for practical reasons impossible. We have the object. We have the means to decode it. But we can’t put the two together. Someday we may discover a Carrath stone already on a well-settled and civilized planet. Or we may invest in building up a solar system in which a Carrath stone exists. Until that day, however, research teams such as my own are the best hope for understanding the mysteries that these objects represent. The stones are fascinating to me and have been the center of my own research for eighty years standard, in part because I became focused on—and to a degree seduced by—the idea of something so tantalizingly strange and also so uniquely and intimately out of reach.

  #

  Slipdrive pilot Peros Danari Williamson woke in his old bed and his new body. This regeneration had darker skin than he’d had before, with thick, black hair on his chest and arms, and, he suspected, the potential of a fairly epic mustache. He’d spent the last fifty years clean-shaven, and the prospect of getting a little facial hair back pleased him more than he let on. He stretched, enjoying the younger muscles and ligaments, the pain-free joints.

  The smell of tea wafted in from the little kitchenette. Nadima making her usual breakfast. His sense of smell once again undimmed by age, he let the memories of the same scent of tea carry him back to the common house on Molos, the little flat in London back on Earth, and even the mud-and-bamboo hut on Lopporo that had been their first home after they’d married, two hundred years before. In all the places they had lived their shared life, Nadima has always liked the same smoky tea in the morning.

  He dressed himself in a pair of canvas trousers and a casual tunic. The flooring was textured stone, and cool under his bare feet. In the kitchenette, Nadima sat on a tall stool. Her hair was white with just a hint of yellow that made her look always a little unwashed. She wore a suit jacket and a broad, dark skirt with laced boots that said she was ready to travel. Peros didn’t hide his pleasure at that.

  “Good,” he said.

  She turned to him as if just noticing he was there. “What is?”

  He gestured at her—index and middle fingers together sweeping up and down her body as he walked to the coffee maker. “You’re ready for the clinic. You put off the
regen too long. You won’t be recovered all the way before we have to go.”

  “Go,” she echoed as if the word meant something different to her.

  “No clinics on Ourborous-4. You’ll be stuck like that until we get back.” He didn’t say Or die that way. Nadima had never liked the regen process. He had to cajole and bully her every time. The threat of her body wearing out and failing was a stage in the traditional argument, but it came later if he needed it.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, and he stopped, coffee cup in hand but still cool and empty. Her gaze floated for a moment, then found his and stayed there.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I cancelled the appointment. I’m not ready for it. Not yet.”

  “We’ll look ridiculous. I’ll seem like I’m married to my grandmother.” While he said it lightly, there was a buzz of annoyance in it. If anyone in the thousands of worlds would hear it, it would be her. She softened, which was odd. They were very practiced at how to fight with each other and how to reconcile after. The expression in her eyes and the corners of her mouth wasn’t the one that two centuries had led him to expect. He put the coffee mug into the machine with a feeling like he’d slipped on ice he hadn’t known was there.

  “Come, you,” she said gently. “Sit.”

  “My coffee is—”

  “Come sit.”

  Peros felt a rush of annoyance—almost anger—that even as it warmed his blood, he recognized as a mask for some other emotion. “Nadi—”

  “Please,” she said without a hint of pleading in her voice. As if against his will, he abandoned his cup and came to the stool beside hers.

  She took his right hand in both of hers. Her skin felt thin and papery against his own. “I think we’re done,” she said. “You can have the tea.”

  She squeezed his hand, let it go, and stood with a gentle sigh.