Musha pops open a belt pouch and pulls out a variety of gadgets – tuning fork, stoppered tubes of coloured oils, feathers of various sizes. "Everyting here is trap," she declares.
I wince. She's used to making herself heard over the sound of the ocean; her voice carries. We're going to attract attention. It's time to call Amaranth in. I clear a space on the floor and light a summoning circle-shaped ring of flame.
"Anything you can't disarm?"
Musha snorts. "Please. Is it tickin'? I silence it. Is it not bolted down? I steal it."
I begin the ritual steps to open a portal to the Searing Paths. "What if the thing that's ticking is bolted down?"
"I keep t' bolts."
#
My monkey army wore the insignia of the Burning Wizard and donned the uniforms of the Red Protectorate. Before, my people never wore a stitch or carved an icon. Amaranth was big on branding, excuse the pun.
We stormed the Arbora capital and put Milady D'Autumn's forces to the torch. The streets filled with leaf-sweet smoke, so thick that not even Amaranth's far-seeing eyes could witness the victory. The Evergreen Brigade formed a tight circle of defence about the Forest Queen. My retinue of sisters and cousins surrounded them, screeching and blazing in triumph.
"I congratulate you, General Monkey," she said. Her hair wafted in the flurries whipped up by the encircling flames. Her pale green skin was flushed with the rising heat. "Your master chose his slaves well. You have served his designs admirably."
"He's a good judge of opportunity," I replied. "But don't give me the credit. He never would've brought my people to his cause if you didn't fight your wizard battles with him."
She inclined her head. "You may be right," she said. Her skin crinkled like onion skin, her hair curling like worms on a hot stone. "But all of us must act in accordance with our nature. It is in the nature of my people to chase the heat until it burns us."
"Yeah? My people got a different nature." The heat was unbearable for the Arbora. The Evergreen Brigade withered and dried, becoming rough husks wearing monkey leather armour.
"You are vindictive and mischievous," said Milady D'Autumn, understanding the fire monkeys for perhaps the first time.
"I am that and more," I told her as her leafy flesh wrinkled and dried into paper.
"Let me show you a trick."
#
Musha is as good as her boast. The final lock is a jigsaw of murder-runes triggering a vortex-portal to a maze dimension teeming with carnivorous cacti and swarms of zombie wasps. The Alabaster Knight is very serious about home security.
Musha waggles her antlers in a pattern of ritual suppression until the lock fizzes out of existence.
The Golden Salamander gets to taste about six seconds of freedom before the Knight hits us.
Broad daylight streams in as the roof bursts open. The Alabaster Knight and his retinue of Pearl Angels drop through in a hail of white quartz rubble and righteous fury.
I've nearly completed the ritual. If I break it off now, its fixed magic will unravel like a wildfire, consuming everyone. I help by raising the heat given off by the circle; the thermal updrafts play havoc with the Angels' flight.
The Knight fixes on Zikizz, mistaking it for our ringleader. Al's physically formidable but he's nobody's idea of a tactical genius.
The Angels swoop, their talons glistening with demoralising venom. One strays too close to the Salamander, who mutters "Oops" and "Didn't mean it" as the torc swipes the Angel into a gooey grey smear on the far wall. Musha shoots another between its sunspot eyes. The others attack Zikizz with swords, claws and a heavenly chorus of unintelligible smack talk.
Just as I finish the ritual, Shiklizk leaps onto the Knight's back. With a noise like a breaking egg, an ashen proboscis explodes from the middle of the Alabaster Knight's forehead. The Knight's perfect porcelain skin start to grey and harden; cracks radiate from the protruding bone.
A foot-long spike of monster bone impaling his head doesn't slow the Knight as much as you'd expect. He kicks back at Shiklizk, pulling himself off the impaling bone. His sword Bonereaver arcs around and lops four of Shiklizk's forelimbs off at their inner joints. The two crash together in a pale tangle of bone and white armour.
I toss a low-power flame stream into the fracas between the Angels and Zikizz as a distraction. The spell unexpectedly forks into two flows. Each envelops an Angel and incinerates it between one breath and the next.
Amaranth has arrived.
Musha fires her pistols at the Knight's back but he's made of stronger stuff than the Angels. The Knight flings a retaliatory knife. Musha folds over as it punches through her breastplate.
It's all the victory the Knight enjoys.
Shiklizk spins a lasso of grave-silk and pins the Knight's sword arm with it. Amaranth heats the Knight's platinum plate armour to melting point. The Alabaster Knight fries without saying a word.
#
I move to help Musha.
Zikizz intercepts me, skittering with uncanny grace for a collection of bones. "Ssstay where you are, Monkey." It bares its bone fangs, forcing me back a step. The bone shards of Shiklizk's severed legs spike up, forming a cage around me. Shiklizk looms behind.
Trapped, I look to Amaranth. He can't quite keep a superior smirk off his dour countenance.
"So that's how it is, huh?" I tap the butt of my cigar against the bone bars of my cage. Fireproof and unbreakable. My heart begins to pound. "Arachs before brachs?"
"You should take it as a compliment, General Monkey," says Amaranth from behind his almost-smile. "You've learned my fire magic techniques well. Never before have I had a servant so gifted that he became a threat to my power."
I nervously bite the end from the cigar and spit it on the floor, where it writhes and begins to smoke in the lingering heat of the summoning ritual. "I was never disloyal, boss."
Amaranth chuckles. "You didn't need to show it. I understand your unreliable nature well enough. Sooner or later you would have betrayed me." He approaches the Golden Salamander slowly, murmuring respectful remarks about the Torc's power and appearance. When he gingerly plucks the Torc from the Salamander's head and places it on his own, they both sigh with evident relief.
I point the cigar at the Salamander. "Were you in on this, Goldie?"
The Salamander shakes its head. "Nothing to do with me. I was just the chump stuck carrying the macguffin."
"Then I'm sorry." The cigar tip bursts into flame; Amaranth's power suppresses any stronger magic. I take a big drag on the fat roll of dried leaves and hold the hot smoke in. I feel it swirl and cool inside my chest. I puff it out in a long exhalation in Shiklizk's face.
"I guess you got me sussed, boss." I make a show of the next puff, waggling my eyebrows as it emits a series of tiny pops like distant firecrackers. "I can't be trusted."
"Sssomething is wrong. What isss he burning?" Zikizz the Hunter has a good sense of smell for a walking ossuary.
I drag again, pulling until the scorching tip hits my lips. More pops. "Doesn't it smell good?" I say. "It's my personal blend. Some tobacco. A pinch of ground bark. Just a hint of mint leaf."
On the floor outside my cage, the cigar ash piles like a snowy mountain peak. Tiny avalanches form on its slopes.
I blow out the last of the smoke and drop the butt into the ash pile. "But it wouldn't work without the secret ingredient. The dried seed pods of Milady D'Autumn and her elite Evergreen Brigade."
Amaranth gets it. "What have you done?"
The ash pile shivers and splits. Green saplings sprout and grow, creaking with the speed of their expansion.
"That's the thing about nature, boss. It's all about cycles. Life, death, destruction, rebirth. We monkeys, we live for fun, food and fire, and when we die, we rot for the worms. That's natural. But we don't all got the same nature, do we?"
The saplings spread and reach for the sky. Shiklizk snaps at one with its gorgon-mandibles; the springy trunk resists its bite. The young tree
s are taking distinctly human shapes.
"The Forest people, their nature's different. They need the spring rain and the summer sun to grow and flourish. And when the autumn comes, their thinking turns to the next generation. Then they come hunting for that old monkey fire."
Amaranth has a panicked look. He stumbles back, his hands aflame. He's preparing a big spell – Scalding Geyser, or maybe a Volcanic Outburst. More than hot enough.
"A little taste of flame, that's all the seeds needed to get them going." He probably thinks I mean the ones in the cigar. I don't mention how many of those seeds I've been carrying in my guts since I made my deal with Milady D'Autumn. My people's freedom for her people's rejuvenation, reborn from my ashes.
One sapling reaches Amaranth's size. Its bark hardens in the shape of a face. Its branches are green-tipped claws.
I can't resist. "Do you think the new Milady knows the Codes of Parley, Amaranth?"
Ooh. It's getting hot in here.
I wrote 'The Nature of Monkey' for the short story contest for Canberra's Conflux convention. The contest theme – Red Fire Monkey – put me in mind of the collectible card game Magic the Gathering, and in my mind I suddenly saw a contest of wizards deploying an eclectic band of mismatched servants to do their bidding.
I also thought of Monkey (aka Monkey Magic), the 1970's Japanese television adaptation of the Journey to the West legend, which was broadcast on high rotation in Australia during my youth. The title came from the famous opening credits quote: "The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!" General Monkey sprang forth as a trickster, running a heist and double-crossing his untrustworthy boss.
The final part of the story might not make sense to non-Australian readers. Some Australian forests are highly adapted to seasonal bushfires. Certain species' seed pods can only germinate through exposure to extreme heat; they cannot reproduce without fire. The fantasy ecology of the fire monkeys and the Arbora works in a similar way.
The story came second in the contest, by the way.
Second Time Around
Three months after the breakup, Toby Virtue came across the record player in the electronics shelf of the Second Time Around shop for "pre-loved and sustainably obsolete artefacts". He was getting back into vinyl, and his experiments with the beautiful variance of different players led him to sink every spare dollar into collecting as many old turntables as he could find.
"It's fancy, isn't it?" said the young man with the rolled-up sleeves and serious reading glasses behind the counter. "A 1975 Magnavox Stereo Phone portable."
"It looks like a sewing machine," said Toby, laughing for the first time in forever. "I'll take it."
He didn't even have to think about the first thing to play on it when he got it home. He unsleeved his copy of Benchley Hicks' Unbreathable Ashes – the one Ben had bought for him after the Wisdom Street gig in 2003 – and dropped the fresh new needle onto track 8, 'Made of Reappearances'.
The very second the bass line kicked in, he was transported back to that night in the converted police station: the stifling late summer heat, the cigarette haze dimming the light from only a handful of unblown bulbs, the bodies pushing against the stage and each other while bandmates Hicks, Bellamy and Shimizu prowled and roared like lions above them.
An elbow caught him in the ribs. His arm was wet where beer sloshed from a nearby dancer's glass. His throat was dry from dust and cheering.
Panic and wonder fought for the right to seize control of him. This wasn't just a vivid memory.
"I'm really here," he shouted, inadvertently coinciding with the three-beat lull just before the song's bridge.
"Yeah, it's great isn't it?" shouted a voice in return. Toby stared wild-eyed at a much younger Ben; fit, lean, wearing the blonde surfer locks he'd brought with him from the coast. He couldn't tear his eyes from Ben's wild, fearless dancing, his ecstasy-fuelled grin, his arms around anyone and everyone who wanted to share the love. Toby's body remembered the feeling of those arms around it. He took a step forward, blinking away tears.
He was back in his too-tidy flat, the winter chill pushing through a gap somewhere as the needle crackled its way to Track 9. Toby lifted it off the vinyl and sat looking at the Magnavox for a long time.
He chose another album. "Let's see what you can do with 'Just in Case We Don't' by the Telltale Signs," he told the Magnavox, as he positioned the arm. He swallowed hard, wondering too late if he should have poured himself a drink.
He was in the lounge of their old share house, the one on Terrabulla Drive with the leaking roof and the crack that ran the front length of the building. Ben was shivering in his arms; the phone in Ben's hand was beeping a disconnected signal; tears of rainwater were bubbling out of the crack and tracking down the wall behind their heads. Ben was sobbing unintelligibly, but Toby both remembered and knew in the moment that the caller was Ben's mother, telling him that his sister Beth's fight with cancer was over. Toby wished he could stay there, holding Ben, but the CD player turned down for the phone call had almost reached the end of 'Just in Case We Don't' and –
Toby went back to Second Time Around. The same attendant was on duty, cleaning ornamental Japanese sake mugs with a toothbrush. "Where did you get that Magnavox I bought yesterday?"
The attendant pushed back his glasses. "Everything comes from charity bins or the rubbish tip. We clean it, test the electricals, that's it. We don't keep records, sorry. My name's Lucas, by the way."
They shook hands and Toby went home troubled.
He made a table out of the boxes Ben had still not returned to collect, and set the Magnavox on it. He thought of songs, of associations, of memories pleasant and otherwise. He turned Ophelia Vernon's 2016 album Pick Someone Else over and over between his fingers, unable to decide on a song until he dropped it on the platter and slid the needle to the final track. 'Is This About You?' was the dramatic Side One closer. One of Toby's favourite things about the album was how it pandered to neo-vinyl enthusiasts like him with its pre-digital song order.
The rolling piano decrescendo began. Toby slammed the car door on the radio playing the week's Top Ten hits. He shielded his eyes as sleeting rain hammered the roof, drowning out the song and the sound of his cries. "Ben! Ben!"
Ben stood on the far side of the safety rail. His shirt was gone. The rest of him was soaked to the skin. His grip on the wet railings looked tenuous and it was a long way down the face of the escarpment to the rocky gorge below.
Toby walked one step at a time, speaking just above the volume of the rain, just loud enough to push at whatever dark voices Ben was listening to. Neither of them could hear the song but it played in Toby's mind. He continued talking, and the song ended before the memory did.
Back in his own time, he remembered his soft words coaxed Ben away from the ledge and into an argument, one that never really ended. For Toby it started with that song, and now, at last, he could feel it end the same way. He lifted the needle, played the song again, and stayed right where he was.
The next day, he brought the Magnavox back to the Second Time Around shop. "I'm donating this back, okay?"
Lucas smiled as he took the case and set it back on the same display shelf. "Not what you needed?"
Toby shrugged. "Just the opposite," he said. "Can I buy you a drink after work to say thanks?"
This story is not so much about music as the intense association of specific memories with particular pieces of music. Certain songs trigger vivid flashbacks for me. I'm sure it's the case for many people, even those without magic record players.
'Second Time Around' was first published in December 2017 as a Friday Flash Fiction post at DavidVersace.com.
Mr Lupin's Hat Trick
Mr Castro Lupin, once reckoned as the greatest illusionist of his age, had a secret. It was not that he wore no mask but possessed the head of a rabbit; no, everyone knew that.
Boris Gilooly cared nothing for heads or secrets. "Mr Lupin, my theatre will close before opening night if
you fail." Gilooly was tall but his shape was impossible to guess; he wrapped himself in a smothering haberdashery of woollen scarves, layered vests and a soldier's greatcoat. He dabbed an embroidered towel at his brow. It came away damp, smelling of old onions. "These miserable gremlins drove off punters and players alike. Can you be rid of them?"
A terrible crash echoed from the catwalks high above the stage. Gilooly flinched, peering up for the source of a peal of mocking cackles. The gloom above was absolute.
Unperturbed, Lupin swept off his gleaming black topper in an elegant arc from head to breast, freeing his ears to spring to their full height. A ruffle of fur shivering across the tip of Lupin's left ear signified an eagerness that escaped this tiresome Gilooly. "Have no fear, sir. You have an infestation of Cardinales, minor mischief-sprites. I've dealt with their like before."
While not strictly true, this was more than enough assurance for Gilooly. "Then I will leave you to your work. Knock twice at my office door when you are done. Announce yourself with gusto. I shall be engaged with a bottle."
Lupin waited, a look of solemn confidence on his leporine features, until Gilooly retreated to his stronghold. When he was alone, he ran two fingers about the brim of his upturned hat and breathed an incantation.
Hearts harbouring secrets
Gifts of the past
Cracks in the crystal
A summons is cast
He reached into the depths of his hat and drew forth a great crystal decanter. It was stoppered with a plug forged from copper, silver and gold. Its surface was frost-rimed and chilling to the touch. Encased within the translucent walls was the head of a beautiful woman; a heart-shaped face, framed by a curtain of chestnut curls. Her sleeping features were relaxed; all but her mouth, which pursed with misgivings.
The warmth of Lupin's fingers made vapour of the frost. In moments the air was cool with moisture and the decanter's surface was clear. The woman's eyes fluttered and fixed on Lupin's pink nose, his fuzzy white cheeks and finally his pallid blue eyes.
Mnemo's Memory Page 6