by John Marco
Long fingers fastened on her shoulder and pulled her back around. “I was talking to you.”
Kemeti shoved the hand away, clumsy with fear. “Who are you?”
He was taller than she, older, blond hair drawn back from his sallow, angular face. His dark eyes were hard beneath scowling sandy brows.
“I’m Achel, your friend.” Irritated, he planted his hands on his hips, bare-armed in his long leather jerkin and coarse breeches, barefooted as every boatman standing proudly on his deck. “You don’t seem pleased to see me.”
“But—” If some curious boy from the river traders had managed to sneak past the gates and the guards, incredible as that might be, how did he know to call himself Achel?
“I’m dreaming,” Kemeti realized aloud.
His sudden slap stung her face. “Are you?”
As she gaped at him, she couldn’t deny a shock of recognition. How could that be? She searched her memories of all the times she’d watched the river boats, out in the gardens, from the towers of the other castles the seasons took her to. No, she hadn’t ever seen him, not really.
But somehow she knew deep inside her that he was the boy she’d imagined so often by her side. But he wasn’t the friend she had longed for.
“Go away!” She couldn’t help glancing beyond him towards the closed door.
“No one’s coming.” He laughed, cruelly amused.
“You’re not real,” she protested. “You can’t be.”
“No?” He reached forward and pinched her upper arm, twisting the tender flesh through the cloth of her nightgown.
“Ow!” The unexpected pain redoubled the ache in her bladder.
“You wanted me here. You imagined me.” He scowled.
“What do you want?” She was not going to wet herself. Pressing her thighs together, she blinked away furious tears. “What are you going to do?”
“Whatever I please.” He looked idly around and picked up one of her books from a side table. “To pay you back.” He started tearing out pages with slow malice.
“Stop that,” she shouted, outraged.
“Afraid you’ll you get into trouble?” he sneered. Dropping the book, he swept a fine china dish from the mantelshelf into the hearth. “You will, you know.” Laughing, he smashed a crystal tree hung with necklaces beside it. “Because no one else can see me but you.”
Kemeti rejected the futile hope of saving her treasures and ran for the door. She slammed it behind her, fumbling for the lock. As her fingers fastened on the key, Achel threw his shoulder against the other side. The jolt threw her backwards, the key lost in the darkness.
“You won’t get rid of me that easily,” he promised ominously as he pulled the door open.
Kemeti didn’t waste breath replying, bolting from the antechamber into the corridor. But everything was wrong. There were no lanterns. Window shutters that should be safely closed stood wide, uncaring moonlight pooling on the narrow carpet.
She rounded a corner, then another, shivering with cold and fear. Was there anyone here? She threw open the door to Giseri’s rooms but the antechamber was empty.
Kemeti pushed the door shut without actually latching it. She bit her lip as she hitched up her nightgown and used a shapely vase as a chamber pot. This had better be a dream, otherwise she’d have some explaining to do. She was just setting the vessel down when a deep-throated bark startled her. A dog?
“Seek, Scaff, seek.” She could hear Achel encouraging it.
Dry-mouthed, she remembered imagining a dog at his heels, one of those rangy brindled curs that leaped from deck to deck. But she’d never imagined a name for his dog, she thought bemused.
Panting echoed louder as the dog turned into the corridor. She shoved the door all the way shut with a frantic whimper. The river cur barked triumphantly, and she heard its feet thud on the floorboards. Its claws scraped at the wood as it growled, low and menacing.
Memory paralyzed her. She couldn’t breathe. That terrible night when Rasun had been taken ill, he’d shrieked about birds in the room, birds that no one else could see.
He’d screamed for his servants, for Giseri, for their mother and father. When they’d already been standing there. Only Rasun’s empty gaze had slid straight over them, unseeing. He’d blundered about, weeping for fear of the darkness, when their father was summoning countless branches of candles.
She knew from servants’ whispers that Rasun was still lost in his incomprehensible madness. Had she gone mad too—
Her panicked thoughts dissolved in utter confusion.
“Good boy, Scaff.” Achel raised his voice on the far side of the door. “Kemeti, come out of there at once!”
A feeble flicker of indignation countered the wretchedness overwhelming her. He presumed to command her? Kemeti bit her lip and concentrated on holding the door closed. The river cur growled angrily, scrabbling harder, faster. As it snuffled at the base of the door, she could feel its breath hot and moist on her bare feet. She screwed her eyes shut, fighting the choking terror rising in her throat once again.
“Come out,” Achel snapped. “Or you’ll be punished all the more.”
Outraged, Kemeti’s eyes snapped open. Only her father and mother could order her punished. And she hadn’t done anything wrong. He was the intruder here, him and his horrid cur.
One of her father’s big hounds would defend her from this horrid river boy, she thought with desperate fury. She wasn’t afraid of the robust hunting dogs, and they liked her. They wouldn’t tolerate this cur in their castle. Introducing them to Jastro’s new whelp had taken all the kennelmen’s guile to save the pup from being torn to pieces.
A questioning whine made her yelp with fright. Spinning around, she pressed her back against the door. There was a shape in the room with her, a shadow beneath the window. Only it was made from moonlight rather than shade. How could that be?
She realized she could make out the outline of a sizable hunting hound. Long muzzled, its head cocked to one side, floppy ears pricked with curiosity. Its ruff of thick white fur was fluffed up, curled tail held high over its muscular rump.
Only it wasn’t real. Kemeti could see right through it. But as it whined again, expectant, she realized she couldn’t see the upright of the lamp stand through its flank any more. Somehow it was getting more real.
On the other side of the door, the river cur barked furiously. The hound’s silent snarl drew its black lips back from perfect ivory fangs, but it didn’t move, still looking keenly at Kemeti. Now she could see the darker gray inside its ears, under its belly, inside the curl of its wagging tail. It made as it to take a step forward but paced on the spot instead, as the best-trained hounds did until a command released them.
“Come here, boy.” She bent to offer her hand. The hound thrust a solid wet nose into her palm, its warm tongue licking her icy fingers. She stroked it, feeling thick softness beneath the harsher upper coat. It hadn’t been here a moment ago but it was undoubtedly real.
The river cur was barking hysterically now. The hound kept its eyes fixed on Kemeti’s face as it growled low deep in its chest. She felt its hackles rising beneath her hand. It was real, and it was an ally. Wrenching the door open, she urged the hound on with hand and voice. “See him off, boy!”
The white hound sprang on the river cur. Taller but lighter-boned, the other dog was unable to resist the solid impact. Snarling, the hound crouched astride the cur as it whimpered, bowled over, pale belly exposed. Moonlight shone on the hound’s gnashing teeth then they fastened in the river dog’s throat. Gurgling, the cur drew up its hind legs to rake at the hound’s belly but the heavier dog shook it like a rat, breaking its neck with an audible snap.
Kemeti stood, staring, mouth open, shivering with cold and fright. Achel swore an oath the stable boys used. She looked up, startled, to see him running away though the moonbeams and shadow dappling the corridor. Where was he going? Who else might he hurt? Jastro?
“Chase, boy!” She sur
prised herself by shouting to the white hound. “Bring him down!”
Obediently abandoning its kill, the dog pursued Achel, its eager barks echoing back from the stone walls.
Steeling herself, Kemeti edged past the slaughtered river cur. Her toes cringed at the thought of sticky blood on the carpet. But as she strained her eyes to try to see any stains in the gloom, all she could make out was the pattern of interlaced leaves.
Kemeti blinked, and there was no river cur. It was only an illusion wrought by the weaver’s design meeting the moonshine’s deceit. Like one of those pictures in Perisen’s book, where a beautiful girl in a sumptuous gown became a hook-nosed old woman swathed in a wrap if you looked at her the right way. A cloud slid over the edge of the moon. When Kemeti looked again, she saw the hapless beast curled motionless in its death agony.
Tears stung her eyes. She hadn’t meant to bring an innocent animal here to die in such pain, whatever that horrid Achel might say. If she had truly done something to cause this, she didn’t know how, and she really hadn’t meant to. She blinked, wiping her nose on her sleeve, struggling not to cry in earnest.
But this wasn’t over. She could hear the white hound baying triumphantly and Achel shouting foul curses at it. It must have him trapped. There must be someone she could find, a guard who could throw him into a dungeon. If this really was all somehow her fault, she must try to put things right, mustn’t she?
Trembling with apprehension, she screwed up her courage and opened her eyes. As she looked, she saw the dead cur fading away. Just as moonlight had shaped the white hound, now the river dog was dissolving into the shadows before her very eyes. She thrust a hesitant toe forward only to feel the soft dry wool of the carpet. The dog wasn’t real. It had never been real.
You imagined me.
Achel’s words echoed in her head.
She had. She had imagined him, and his dog. Because just about every trader’s boat had a cur or two pacing its decks, splashing after the boys when they swam ashore, walking circumspectly behind the elders when a river clan anchored to pay formal visits to the city’s merchants. But it hadn’t been a real dog. Just the idea of a dog.
Kemeti groped for understanding but that was beyond her. She settled for concentrating on what was in front of her. Nothing. The dog had been nothing, not really. So Achel was nothing. Not real. And she’d tell him so. Not stopping to risk her new boldness foundering on some further inconvenient thought, she hurried towards the barking and shouting.
The white hound had Achel cornered. The river youth was pressed into a door recess where a side passage ended in a narrow window. He was cursing, vile as a trooper, and Kemeti saw him kick at the dog. The hound’s gleaming teeth missed his tanned foot by a hair’s breadth, and he hastily thought better of it.
As he saw Kemeti at the corner of the corridor, he yelled at her, enraged. “Call it off or I’ll make you sorry!”
She could hear fear undercutting his wrath, but she wouldn’t let satisfaction distract her. “You can’t do anything to me,” she said stoutly. “You’re not real.”
“I’m real enough to slap you senseless, you little bitch!” Achel tried to take a step forward, but the hound snapped at him.
“No, you’re not.” Kemeti couldn’t help the tremor in her voice. She swallowed and pressed on. “You’re just someone I made up when I was thinking about river boys.” She pictured all the youths she’d seen, on walks with her maids, riding in the castle grounds. There had been so many glimpses of different boats, on journeys through the city or up and down the high-road that followed the great river’s winding course across the vast plains of the kingdom. None of them was Achel. They were all different from him.
“I am—” He gasped and fell back, the door resounding with a hollow thud. “Hah,” he spat. “Hear that?” He hammered a clenched fist backwards to bang the door again.
But Kemeti saw the weakness in his legs. His face had blurred into uncertainty, a shiver of moonlight running through his body. “You’re not real,” she insisted. “You’re just—”
As she hesitated, Achel stood upright again, stronger, bolder. “You know nothing,” he said with contempt.
“I just wanted a friend,” she shouted with sudden anger. “I was lonely. I wanted someone to share things with, to play games, making up stories, like I used to do with Rusan—” Anguish choked her as she recalled all the times she’d been missing Rusan so badly, she’d pretended she had someone there to replace him. That’s how all this had started. None of it was real.
Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to continue. “You’re not real. I made you up. You’re not even right. If you were a real river boy come ashore, you’d have boots on.” She was yelling at the top of her voice now, infuriated. “They only have bare feet on board their boats.”
Images ran through her mind, of all the shirtless, shoeless youths she’d ever seen. They were real. This one was not. As she thought this, she realized she could see the outline of the doorframe through Achel’s shirt.
“And you’d have brought a cloak,” she added scornfully. “It’s a cold night, and you’re dressed for high summer.”
Insubstantial as smoke, Achel opened his mouth, but he could make no sound. Kemeti could see the moonlight through him now.
“Go away.” Her conviction was firm, hard as iron. “And never come back.”
Abrupt shafts of light pierced him, shining through the empty hollows of his eyes and mouth, and he vanished.
Sarese’s vicelike hand restrained Leshina. The younger woman blinked away her own tears, her vision flickering back to the lantern-lit warmth of the real corridor. Somewhere overhead, she could hear a maid or a manservant’s soft footsteps. The castle never entirely slept.
With an effort, she focused on the empty darkness again, where Kemeti stood alone with the white hound gazing obediently at her.
“I’m sorry.” The little girl scrubbed at her tear-stained face with the cuffs of her nightgown. “I know you came to help me, but you’re not real either. Please go away.” Her voice broke on a sob. “I want to go back to bed and wake up and this all to be a dream.”
Leshina held her breath, tense.
The white dog dutifully lay down, its nose on its forepaws, and dissolved into nothingness.
“Good girl,” Sarese murmured with satisfaction. “Her magic’s strong. She’ll do well.”
The two women stepped back as Kemeti came runningtoward them, unseeing, still lost in the deserted unreality of the castle confining her imagination. They followed her back to her room, where the maid Feia dozed in the antechamber, thanks to the powdered oblivion Sarese had dosed her supper with.
Entering the bedchamber, Leshina saw Kemeti scramble into bed, pulling the covers over her head to muffle her weeping.
Sarese was looking around, and Leshina knew she was seeing the real and the unreal side by side. “Don’t break the necklace tree,” the old woman decided. “But smash that dish in the hearth. She’ll need something to convince her it was no dream.”
Leshina nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Sarese’s thoughts were already moving on. “I’ll let the others know in the morning, as much as is necessary. Make sure you’re at hand to answer her questions.” She chuckled. “You had better empty that vase she peed in. But ask her what she knows about it, if you think she needs a prompt. Right, let’s get back to our own beds.”
Satisfied, Sarese walked briskly from the room without a backward glance.
Kemeti’s sobs were slowly subsiding beneath the quilt. Leshina slowly closed the window and the shutters, her heart wrung with pity and guilt. Then she closed the shutters on the unreal window too, and lit the thought of a candle besides, in case Kemeti woke in that terrifying darkness again.
She set the dish in the hearth and broke it with a savage stamp of her foot. Never mind Sarese’s instructions. She’d wait out the night here in case Kemeti woke up before daybreak brought her securely back to rea
lity. She could guide her home.
She was not going to see the little girl abandoned like Rusan. She owed him that. Since she owed her very existence to his fertile imagination, his adolescent longing shaping her seductive curves, her alluring blondeness. But she had been too bemused to help Rusan. Well, now she understood.
Now she could repay him by being Kemeti’s friend.
SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
HE was strange from the start, yet oddly compelling.
I can explain the strange. The compelling is harder. He’d come into my bar about 3:30 Friday afternoons, thirty minutes before the official start of Happy Hour. He’d take a seat as far from the door as he could get. He’d order two drinks—one, a piña colada, the other light beer on tap.
Then he’d wait.
He was stunningly handsome. That’s the thing you’d see first off. The square jaw, the black-black hair, the laughing blue eyes all accented his broad shoulders and perfect male model physique. Only he dressed like a regular guy: nice suit with a jacket he’d remove when he sat down, white shirt, and shoes that could use some attention. Before the drinks arrived, he’d loosen his tie and roll up his sleeves, revealing muscular arms.
And then he’d nurse the beer.
Any red-blooded woman would look at him, as well as a handful of closeted males. So of course I looked at him. I’m as red-blooded as the next woman—even if it is my bar.
I’m red-blooded, but I’m not pretty. I’m perfectly cast in my role as bar owner. I’m muscular and broad shouldered too. My father used to say I looked like Bette Davis—and he didn’t mean the young beauty of her early roles. He meant the battle-axe from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? with the crumpled skin and the bugged out eyes and the voice that sounded as if she’d smoked a thousand cigarettes too many.