The door hung open, as if they welcomed the return of the terror now that they were awake and armed. Inside, I found a man weeping as he clung to a woman who seethed in his embrace. In the corner, a bereaved sibling crouched as far from the adults as she could get. She hugged her knees, and her mop of cornsilk hair covered her face.
“I’m sorry,” the man whimpered through his sobs. He was huge, shirtless, and though a dark braid thick as a horsetail hung down his back, not a single hair sprouted on his arms. The smith, I guessed.
The woman’s hard gaze sharpened on me as I entered. “Who are you?” she spat.
“Imuri Bane,” I said.
She shrugged off her husband. The miserly lines around her mouth deepened as she sized me up. “Bane? You deal with anathema, then?”
“For a price.”
Only a ghost of grief pained her voice when she asked, “How much is my child’s life worth?”
I thought about what I knew, about windows and an abundance of iron, about common townfolk who could afford nice crossbows.
“If the child still lives, eighteen imperial horseheads. If it’s dead when I get there, I’ll bring you the remains for ten. Either way, I’ll kill the anathema and teach you how to stop it next time. Half upfront.”
One of the men staring out the windows turned around. A Lady’s Column inked the back of his right hand, and he wore a black silk sash around his waist. Mine had been orange, the second-brightest color in the Assembly of the Divine Lady.
His sleek black brows rumpled, but his voice was even when he spoke. “You would charge for a service our Fierce Mother provides for free?”
“If you’d prefer to wait for a Disciple, I won’t argue. If the weather holds, they might even get across the mountains before the passes close. Whatever you decide,” I said, turning to address the pinch-faced woman and her wet-faced husband, “please decide soon. If you don’t require my services, I’m going back to my warm bed.”
The sobbing father barked at me. “I have the money, and I’ll pay it. I want Keeley home.” He turned haunted eyes on me. Swollen and red, they reminded me of the sagging, fleshy anemones that slept during the low tide. “You’ll swear it?”
“I swear on the Suffering Sailor’s blisters, the rope that bound him, and the storm that freed him.” It wasn’t the standard oath in Fierwa, but it was serious enough, especially among fishermen.
The parish keeper—he’d have had a Column on both hands if he was a full priest—said nothing, and though his eyes latched into the Exit Cross on my forehead like a hook in a fish, he remained unnaturally composed.
He was Floating-Among-Lilies. I was still doing it myself, so I didn’t even smile when I noticed. The practice of distancing your soul from the moment, packing it up and setting it on an invisible shelf, was the first of the difficult Tactics. My teachers had done everything from pricking my face with skewers to throwing a dead, dog-chewed child into my lap. Eventually, I had stopped flinching. I wondered if this parish keeper truly had learned Floating-Among-Lilies or if it was a textbook mockery of my own perfection.
“Browan said he’s seen a book of anathema,” I said. “Which did this?”
“Anathema are all the same. They take the form that hurts us most. If such a book existed, I wouldn’t consult it,” the parish keeper said.
I nodded. “I thought you’d refuse to help a child if it went against doctrine.” It was a calculated barb—at the moment, I didn’t hate him for his simple, pleasant existence or the lack of responsibility on his bony shoulders. I only wanted to be sure I made my bounty.
“You’re—you’re charging them!”
His incredulity knocked his soul off the shelf. Sinking-Among-Lilies, I thought, but I still didn’t smile. I would be smug later, when my emotions weighed so heavily that they forced me to release the Tactic and feel all the stomach-sickening passion it had kept at bay.
“Tell me exactly what happened, and show me where it occurred,” I said.
The wife took the lead, climbing a leaning wooden ladder with fitted iron braces. The carpentry was so perfect it was like climbing stairs. The tiny mezzanine held one empty bunk, crafted with the same love and skill as the ladder. No blood, but water droplets dappled the floor. I put my finger in one and tasted it. Salt.
I mentally listed aquatic threats: kelpies, jennies, sharkums, niskies, kraken. The water trail began at the window; when I glanced out, I saw claw scrapes on the sill and, below, something white in the bushes. I dashed outside. It was a ladder, constructed nearly as well as the one I’d just used, but this was of driftwood, bone, and scraps of dark knotted rope that peeled away under my fingernails. Seaweed.
Nothing on my list could do this. Not a jenny, who haunted freshwater. It could only be niskies if there were many, because it would have taken at least ten to carry this ladder, and besides, they were too small to make the marks on the walls. Whatever it was, it had left the ladder behind.
The parents waited in the doorway, their pale faces like sad twin moons.
“Was the anathema interrupted in its task?” I asked.
The wife shook her head. “No. I heard a crash outside, and when Browan got up to investigate, I went up. She was gone.”
I went over the ground around the house, but of course their kinfolk had already trampled it into a sea of chopped, muddy boot prints.
I took my soul down and stopped Floating-Among-Lilies, because now I would need my intuition.
It didn’t feel much different. I was still working. It wasn’t my child, and it wasn’t the first, or even the fiftieth, of the children I’d attempted to recover. I vowed it would not be the twenty-seventh I’d lost. The hill sharpened into a cliff as it neared the water. I squinted in the dark. Watching-as-the-Owl, I spotted long horizontal scrapes in the moss on the vertical rock face.
I tiptoed through the fog, silent in my leather-soled boots as I hugged the cliff. The identity of the anathema gnawed at me. I had narrowed it down to sharkums, which built complex cities of coral beneath the waves, but I’d never seen a sharkum leave the water for more than a minute or two. It might be only a clever human predator, transferring the suspicion onto anathema.
Or the anathema might be unlisted, something new.
I found a trail of human footprints, adult, not much larger than mine. I lost them over fucus-furred rocks and found them again, skirting a herd of sleeping, log-like seals. The trail stopped at the rising tide.
Simple, ugly. She’d been put into a boat and floated out into the gray nothing. She’d be sold into slavery, perhaps, or kept for the amusement of a repulsive but unfortunately common paedophile.
I renewed Watching-as-the-Owl and added Unsinging-of-Cats, so if a child cried on the water, or even a paddle sloshed among the waves, I might pick out the wrong notes in the otherwise peaceful symphony of the shore. Nothing.
My eyes fell on the prints one last time as I turned to leave. There were five tiny holes in the sand, each one directly in front of a toe depression. Claws. And the toes were webbed.
Even if the villagers wouldn’t tell me what was plaguing them, I would solve their soiled laundry and scarred wood. I would get them a better, uglier skull to display down by the water.
When I returned to the inn, my ears were still sensitive with the Unsinging-of-Cats. Notes of anger filtered out through the inn’s stoic cedar walls. As I crept across the bridge, I held my arms out from my sides so the mail wouldn’t clink against itself. Even with all my precautions, I could barely hear the conversation, and it ended too soon.
“It’s an abomination, Browan. Heresy!” The words rushed into the night air as the parish keeper stormed out the door. Though his face twisted with hate at the sight of me, he passed me by. I stepped inside and found Browan setting out china for breakfast, which wasn’t for a few hours yet.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“Nothing will happen to a child in this house,” I promised. “Does the parish keeper often rais
e his voice?”
He chuckled, running his thumb along the edge of one hand-painted dish. “He tells me you’ll take care of the anathema, on Fenny Smith’s gold.”
“I’ll try,” I said. I stared hard at his brown eyes—long-lashed and friendly and covetous of their secrets. I didn’t think he would tell me why he was unusually prosperous at his out-of-the-way inn, and his wife likely wouldn’t either.
But children had less sense about such things.
I spent the day scouring the foggy shore. In this remote stretch of beach, there were plenty of anathema, but none of them seemed a likely culprit. I saw niskies in the waves. They giggled and blew foam bubbles, and the only corpse they played with today was that of a battered gull. A more stately selkie lounged in seal form on a slab of barnacle-crusted rock—I only knew she wasn’t a mere seal because of the fear in her gaze. A real seal was stupid. Fragments of coral structure from a storm-torn sharkum city littered the tideline, but there was no telling how long they had been knocking about in the depths beyond Keyward, or how far away the city might be.
I returned for the mid-day meal with damp sand-filled woolens and a few cuts from prying oysters off of the rocks. These latter were my excuse for entering the back door.
Browan’s child was there, as I suspected. It crouched on a pile of sacks by the woodpile, strangely far from the fire’s warmth. I decided it was a boy. His snowy hair reached his shoulders, and when he turned his eyes on me, I suddenly dropped my hand to the hilt of my sword.
The parish keeper’s talk of abominations hadn’t been about me, after all. It was expressly forbidden by the Lady to harbor or treat with anathema; the king’s penalty was death, and the Lady’s penalty was excommunication. The sour little man had known the whole time.
I kicked myself for observing without thinking. Every adult in Keyward had brown hair, and I’d seen two blond children, unkempt and poorly clothed despite the town’s unexplained prosperity. There had only been one bed in Smith’s house—the blond child slept on a rumpled blanket while the missing Keeley had a bed.
I took a step toward the blond boy. He pressed himself against the wall, his feet kicking dirty burlap between us. His mouth hung open, panting like a dog’s, his sea-gray eyes wide with horror at the sight of all that steel. All that iron. I glanced back at the door frame—the handle was iron, the doorjamb, the hinges, and there were so many iron nails pounded into it that not even the fiercest of adult selkies could hope to claw through.
Suddenly, the furnishings in the main room became a sinister cruelty instead of a strange display of wealth and prowess. Pelts.
The parish keeper was right. This was an abomination. And not just to break the Lady’s edicts but to subjugate any living thing, supernatural or not . . .
“I won’t hurt you,” I said. My voice was so gentle it surprised me. “How many of you were stolen?”
“That’s none of your mother-damned business, Prodigal.”
Browan stood in the doorway to the common room, his bulk not quite obscuring the raw-eyed smith behind him or a lean woman about my age with a cudgel propped on her shoulder. She looked like she might be Browan’s sister.
So the parish keeper had explained what my cross tattoo meant. I took to my feet slowly. I had my sword, and I had a bag of fist-sized oysters. All the rest of my weapons were in my room.
As I rose, the selkie child flashed three fingers at me. The webbing between them had been sliced away, to make his hand seem more human.
The child shrieked as Browan thrust his iron-tipped club toward it, dragging the metal down the boy’s leg. It left a streak of bluish-purple, like a scar exposed to the cold.
Browan turned back to me, his brow low and his teeth bared. “Leave town.”
“What made you decide to come after me?” I asked. “Is this how you afford your china, Browan? Robbing those who trust your hospitality?”
“Dandla saw you sneak into the kitchen with a bag of treats for my anathema. Leave now, and the most you’ll lose is your horse.”
I slipped out the door and strode toward the beach. Unsinging-of-Cats would let me know if they followed me, but it was still difficult to control the urge to glance over my shoulder.
I knew they would attempt to murder me—their apostasy and treason were too great of secrets. They were well aware that I was a trained warrior. They would try to take me in the night.
I walked down the stream toward the sea. The entire village was complicit in this grotesque slavery, not to mention the loss of all the belongings that I had been forced to abandon in my room, and there were few places left to hide while I strategized.
The islands, nothing more than dark smears in the dissipating fog, beckoned to me from the bay. Let the men and women of Keyward navigate their way out there in the dark, past the selkies they’d wronged. I had Warmth-of-the-Bear to keep me, at least until morning.
I stole a skiff and two iron-reinforced oars. Fenny Smith’s work was fine indeed, and I thought perhaps I might burn it when I was done with it.
I rowed straight out to the islands, a row of jagged black silhouettes rising out of a bed of fog. A fine mist obscured the struggling sun, and as I approached, I found the rocks less friendly than I’d imagined. Rain soaked my clothes and hair. I despaired of finding a way to climb ashore without cracking my bones in the surf before I discovered a slender crescent of sandy beach. It lay submissively at the feet of the sheer cliffs on the tallest island.
Selkies eat birds, so I wasn’t surprised when I stepped out of the boat and found a horde of anathema crawling out of crevices in the rocks.
“Why do you intrude, human?” The anathema’s voice was like the rain on my skin, smooth and cool and shiver-inducing.
“My conscience,” I said.
The anathema who had spoken first cocked its head to the side. “I wasn’t aware the thieves of children had such endowments.” Its sibilant speech crashed against my ears like the tide on the rocks.
“I’ve never stolen a child,” I said. “But tonight, I will steal three.”
The anathema held still, but its gaze slid over my weapons and mail, over the coins dangling in my hair. “If you speak of our children,” it said, narrowing its eyes, “you must mean eleven.”
My teeth ground against one another for a brief moment before I regained control of myself. Browan brazenly wore the coins of a warrior or a thief king; he mimicked the men who gambled that their deeds were so fierce, so brave, that if you tried to take their hair you’d regret it.
Yet the lying wretches of Keyward had taken every golden disk from the sale of the most helpless of all anathema: a creature enslaved to the holder of its pelt.
“If you go to retrieve our children, we will help. I am Lum.”
“I am Imuri. I welcome your help.”
“You and I shall swear on fire,” said Lum. “It burns us both, and the one who breaks their word will suffer its wrath.”
I nodded. They escorted me inside the largest of their caves. It was damp and smelled of salt and stone. I couldn’t tell if I was a guest or a prisoner, but the plan we discussed was mostly mine, so perhaps I was a general. A general of anathema, Lady forgive me, but when her followers acted as they did, what were right and wrong but simple words?
In the corner, two human children huddled, terrified of the anathema and not mollified by the woman with a sword who politely sipped cold fish soup while discussing the terms of the children’s ransom and the punishment of their parents.
Lum was lanky, with rubbery grayish-white flesh and a mostly human face. I recognized that the skull on the pylon outside Keyward wasn’t a man—the sockets were too angular, the breadth of the cheekbones too wide. If there’d been any teeth left, they would have been pointed.
“You know you cannot stay,” I said. “They’ll find you here, and destroy your home.”
“If I cannot keep mine,” he replied, “then why should they keep theirs?”
His wife held out
a wide flat clamshell that I could have used as a dinner plate. A coal smoldered in the center.
After speaking his oath to me, which I accepted, he placed his palm on the coal and allowed his flesh to sizzle for three seconds before lifting his hand. The air reeked of charred fish and charcoal.
My hand hovered over the coal as I spoke mine, and then my toes curled in my boots at the excruciating pain. One. Two. Three. The sickening scent of baked ham scalded my nostrils. I pulled my hand away and allowed his wife to wrap it in cold seaweed.
It was time to return to Keyward.
The parish keeper answered the knock at his window holding an iron knife and a handful of salt. He didn’t know the difference between selkies and nippers—Browan and Fenny hadn’t shared the book with him.
He was the reason I couldn’t stop giving away my books. He needed to know that nippers wouldn’t be interested in his salt; the grains were too small, and the shining surfaces would hurt their bulbous eyes. It would be better to distract them with a handful of black rice. It could be my fault if he died, or worse yet, if he taught a child the wrong way to defend herself.
Just like it was my fault the villagers had the information that led to the slave trade in selkie pups. Guilt stung me as the thought surfaced again, until Floating-Among-Lilies sagged under the weight of my grief. I had included the most benign of anathema so they might be separated from the more dangerous niskies and sharkums, not so they might be preyed upon.
I was cleaning up my mess, Lady bless me. I would scour it with fire and steel and if I had to, the most dangerous Tactic: Fight-of-the-Crocodile.
“What do you here, Prodigal?” The parish keeper spat the words as if they tasted of his own guilt.
“I found the human children,” I said. “For a small fee and an answer, I’ll tell you where.”
He didn’t ask me how he’d know I was telling the truth. He could afford to trust me; with such a successful parish, he had plenty of coins to spare. And he cared about those children because at least in that, he was faithful.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 44