Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #5

by Emily Cataneo

  Fantasy Scroll Magazine

  Speculative Fiction - Issue #5 - February 2015

  Featuring works by Andrew Kaye, Charles Payseur, Christine Borne,

  Emily Cataneo, Jarod K. Anderson, John Giezentanner,

  John H. Stevens, Josh Brown, Laurie Tom, Sarah Avery

  This collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Editorial Team

  Iulian Ionescu, Editor-in-Chief

  Frederick Doot, Managing Editor

  Alexandra Zamorski, Senior Editor

  Michelle Muller, Editor

  First Readers: M.E. Garber, Jennifer McGinnis, Alex Hurst, Rachel Aronov

  Cover Art: Todor Hristov

  Published by Fantasy Scroll Press, LLC

  New York, NY

  © Copyright 2015. All Rights Reserved.

  Published by Fantasy Scroll Press LLC Publishing at Smashwords

  ISBN #978-0-9916619-4-7

  ISSN #2333-4932

  www.FantasyScrollMag.com

  Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #5

  February, 2015

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Fiction

  "The City Dreams of Bird-Men" - Emily Cataneo

  "Moksha" - Andrew Kaye

  "The White Snake" - Laurie Tom

  "Tempest Fugit" - Christine Borne

  "Sticks and Stones" - Jarod K. Anderson

  "The Thousand Year Tart" - Charles Payseur

  "How the Grail Came to the Fisher King" - Sarah Avery

  "Human Bones" - John Giezentanner

  "Bandit" - John H. Stevens

  Graphic Story: "Shamrock" - Josh Brown & John Fortune

  Departments

  Interview with Author Jim Hines

  Interview with Author Sarah Avery

  Interview with Author Christine Borne

  Interview with Award Winning Editor John Joseph Adams

  Artist Spotlight: Todor Hristov

  Book Review: Echopraxia (Peter Watts)

  Movie Review: Rigor Mortis (Juno Mak)

  Editorial, February 2015

  Iulian Ionescu

  Welcome to Issue #5 of Fantasy Scroll Magazine.

  Here we are—Year Two! The first year flew by incredibly fast, it feels surreal. We've had the opportunity to read so many wonderful stories and meet many incredible writers. Thank you to all the writers out there who've submitted your work. Keep them coming; we promise to give as many as we can a good home!

  I also want to thank all subscribers and Kickstarter supporters once again. You've helped us get this project off the ground, and we are very grateful to all of you!

  With 2015 upon us, we are bringing you three new and exciting features:

  First, we are changing our publishing schedule from quarterly to bi-monthly. We are receiving so many amazing stories, it would be a crime not to share them with you more often. We will publish one issue every other month, starting this February, with new issues likely to be released around the first or second week of the month. We'll keep the same general format, aiming for about sixty stories in the year.

  The second big announcement is our fiction podcast. Starting with this issue, we are producing a weekly podcast featuring the stories published in our issues. We'd love it if you would give it a listen and give us your feedback so we can make it better.

  Lastly, this year we will publish our very first anthology, in both print and e-book formats. The details and timeframes are still being worked on, but stay tuned and we will have an announcement very soon.

  Now back to Issue #5.

  We begin with Emily Cataneo's "The City Dreams of Bird-Men," a story of struggle and love, set in an alternate world where danger looms over the city.

  "Moksha," by Andrew Kaye follows, and features a mixture of science fiction and fantasy elements inspired by Indian culture and myths.

  Next we have "The White Snake," a flash story reprint by Laurie Tom, and "Tempest Fugit," the first published story by Christine Borne, a tale filled with sailors, ghosts, and gin.

  "Sticks and Stones," by Jarod Anderson is a flash story that will make you think twice before giving nicknames to baristas at your favorite coffee shop.

  Charles Payseur envisions a future where actors could be machines in his story, "The Thousand Year Tart," complete with a very unexpected twist at the end.

  Next is a wonderful story by Sarah Avery. She captures her emotions in a tale born from personal pain and the loss of a friend in “How The Grail Came to the Fisher King.”

  John Giezentanner discusses the issues of artificial body parts in his fast-paced sci-fi tale "Human Bones."

  We close our fiction section with "Bandit," by John Stevens, a light horror story that will elicit a smile.

  Before moving to the non-fiction section, let me mention that we are experimenting with something else new:

  In this issue we are including a graphic story: Sharmrock, written by Josh Brown with art by John Fortune. If our readers approve, this may become a permanent feature.

  In the non-fiction section we have interviews with writers Jim Hines, Christine Borne, and Sarah Avery, and with award-winning editor John Joseph Adams, editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and Nightmare Magazine.

  We close with the artist spotlight on Todor Hristov, a book review for Peter Watts' Echopraxia, and a review for Rigor Mortis, a horror movie directed by Juno Mak.

  I hope you enjoy this issue. Please add your comments to the stories you read—our writers love to read them!

  I also want to take a moment to remind everyone that our magazine lives through your subscriptions.

  Please subscribe and help us spread the word!

  Thank you and see you in a couple months!

  Find us on the web:

  Magazine site: http://www.fantasyscrollmag.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FantasyScroll

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/FantasyScroll

  The City Dreams of Bird-Men

  Emily Cataneo

  Eliška huddled in her laboratory during that short autumn before the predicted onset of the Dark. She poured over her star-maps, scrawled calculations on a black ink diagram of planetary epicycles. She hefted bound volumes of research by Copernicus and Kepler, Brahe and Galileo, about Mars and the moon, about the ascendency of Mercury and the dangers of spotting a comet in Taurus.

  She scoured the stars for a sign that the Bird-Men would return, a sign she knew would never appear.

  Seven days before the Dark was predicted to sweep through the city, Eliška hunched over the Dutch spyglass she'd inherited from her father, charting yet another comet in Taurus. She was sucking on a piece of an Italian orange—the third-to-last she had left—and scratching with her quill when a hollow knock on the door echoed throughout her laboratory.

  Eliška threw her quill down. "Come in."

  Her maidservant entered, dropped a curtsey. "Pardon, Mistress, someone's here to see you."

  Eliška scraped her chair back over the flagstone floor and stood. The first thought that leapt into her mind was, Perhaps it's Johann. She hated herself for that.

  She hurried down the dark steps to her poorly lit antechamber.

  The man who turned from the mullioned windows wa
s not Johann: this man was short, with black leather hip boots and snow in his hair.

  "Erazim Pesmet," she said. Her former apprentice had grown thin in the five years since she'd seen him. "What brings you here?"

  A smile spread across Pesmet's face and he clasped her hand with a man's assurance. "Well met, Mistress Knopf."

  "Did you wish to return to my service?"

  "On the contrary, I come as a messenger from the Monastic Order of the Relics. I've been traveling the continent finding holy objects for them, and I've just returned from Vienna with something that we think will be of great interest to you." Pesmet pulled aside the window curtain and studied the dark world outside. "It involves the Bird-Men."

  Eliška waited.

  "It's not here," Pesmet said. "It's at the monastery. A half-day's ride."

  "The stars say the Dark will arrive by Christmastide," Eliška said. "You know the emperor requires that I continue researching the—"

  "You don't believe the Bird-Men will ever return."

  "I didn't say—"

  "Come now, Eliška, I know you. But I've also seen the Dark first-hand, in Styria and Austria. It's… you must come with me, you must."

  Could she justify spending a day riding hard through the countryside to examine some charlatan's trick at the monastery?

  But she remembered Pesmet's boyish enthusiasm for her blue-and-gold inlaid model of the planets, his struggle to understand Jupiter's orbit. How could she shatter his faith that the Bird-Men would return in time to save them from the Dark?

  And why should she stay in the city, at her telescope, searching the stars for a sign that she would never see?

  "Meet me at first light on the east side of the bridge," Eliška said.

  Eliška had learned the story of the Bird-Men from her father, in her girlhood. She would peer over his shoulder as he studied Mars' orbit and he would describe how the Bird-Men had come to the city, why they had abandoned it and how they would return someday. Two centuries ago, a great inventor built a creature with the body of a man. It was made of sturdy wire with wire-and-feather wings protruding from his back and a head built of dozens of tiny bird-statues sculpted from porcelain imported from the East and patterned with swirls and icons. The inventor secretly practiced astral magic. He invoked the power of the planets to give the Bird-Man life, then whispered "Go forth, and save the city." The Bird-Man flapped across the unpaved streets of the Old Town and rose between the wattle-roofed houses and the church spires.

  The Bird-Man plucked a child from between the wheels of a carriage. He visited a coughing woman's deathbed and brought roses back to her cheeks. He touched the face of a crying young lady in the market and her smile lit up like a summer morning. He saved two bankers running from a mob, and a heartbroken old man about to jump from the black-slate roof of town hall. The inventor built more Bird-Men until the city streets swarmed with them and its citizens walked happy and proud along the river under the shadow of the castle.

  But as the inventor strode the streets of the city admiring his creations, the king seethed with jealousy. Word had trickled across the river to the castle that the inventor had received offers from other cities that coveted the Bird-Men. The king wanted to keep the famous Bird-Men for his own kingdom, so he locked the inventor in a dungeon and ordered his execution before he could ever build another Bird-Man.

  As the inventor knelt before the executioner's blade, he muttered a few words and that night all the Bird-Men rustled into the air and flew away from the city's red roofs. Since then, floodwater had poured out of the river and sluiced over its embankments. Plague and Hungarian fever had each swept through the city, and for one week a century ago the entire city had gone blind. Its sons marched off to wars with the Turks or Austrians, and children died in the wombs of its daughters.

  For two centuries, the Imperial Inventors had labored to build new Bird-Men, and the Imperial Alchemists had tried to convert lumpy metal statues into shining gold saviors, and the Imperial Astrologer had studied the stars, searching for a sign of the Bird-Men's return.

  "They will return, sweetling," Eliška's father would tell her, "and if they don't return, we will force them to return."

  But then her father had died pursuing the Bird-Men, and Eliška, barely a woman, her eyes swimming with tears, had told her mother she knew, deep in her gut, that the city's saviors would never return. "He was a fool to even try," she had said.

  And yet the emperor, discovering her prowess with the telescope, had appointed her the first woman Imperial Astrologer to replace her father. She resigned herself to life in a laboratory.

  The sky spread silk-gray above the frozen river as Eliška crossed the bridge the morning after Pesmet's visit. She drew her green cloak tighter as she strode past the blank-eyed black statues that lined the bridge, martyrs of long-ago wars and treasons, each staring down at her sorrowfully. Hard bits of snow blew off the frozen ice that lined the bridge's stone railings.

  As she reached the river's far shore, Johann's house loomed out of the row of stone buildings along the embankment. A figure, all darkness, stood on the steps.

  "Johann." She made herself look at him, at his blue eyes not looking at her, at his raw red hands that grasped hers less and less frequently. "You've returned from Munich."

  "I didn't expect to see you at such an early hour." He studied the bare trees and red roofs strung along the opposite bank of the river.

  "Did you bring any oranges?" She smiled, remembering when her smile could pull a corresponding grin from him.

  "Yes," he said, not smiling. "They'll be for sale at the market."

  "You used to…" She swallowed. "You used to give me oranges."

  "I have a trade to conduct. I can't simply give away oranges to just anyone."

  Eliška hissed out a cloud of breath.

  "Eliška—"

  "Maybe I'll see you before the Dark comes," she snapped, looking up at the mullioned windows of his house, shut tight for the winter. "Maybe I won't."

  She marched off, blinking hard, trying to stave off the tightness in her throat.

  Eliška had witnessed heartbreak at an early age: her father had broken her mother's heart when he'd used astral magic, when he had implored Mercury to give him flight so he could search for the Bird-Men. The wings caused him to overbalance on his horse and fall, the snap of his spine echoing through the clean autumn air. For many years she had thought that was the only kind of heartbreak: loss through separation or death. But in the past months Johann had taught her a different kind of heartbreak, the kind where your heart cracked just a little, day after day, from a harsh word, or a scornful gaze, all building to a creeping suspicion that seeped in through the cracks in your heart, that he never loved you, after all.

  "Mistress." Pesmet appeared at the base of the bridge, two horses snorting behind him. "Are you prepared? I saw you speaking to Master Johann. Did you tell him how long you'll be away?"

  "Master Johann couldn't give a whit how long I'll be away." Eliška seized one set of reins from Pesmet's leather glove and wondered how she could have been foolish enough to believe that a man could sustain his love for a woman like her, wedded to the emperor's wishes and the vicissitudes of the stars.

  As her horse followed Pesmet's out of the city, she knew that the men, women and children who slumbered inside half-timbered houses, clutching dolls and each other—the butchers and servants and blacksmiths and priests and apprentices and old women—they all dreamed of their salvation swooping out of the sky to shelter them from the Dark. She had seen them walking the city streets, bumping into each other because their noses pointed towards the sky, searching for a fluttering wing, the glint of a wire ribcage.

  The city dreams of Bird-Men , Eliška thought. They are all fools.

  The Monastic Order of the Relics stood, a stone chapel and cloister, in the center of a snowy field that rippled off to the thin line of a creek. Two crows lifted off the single tree in the field, squawking. Eliš
ka swung off her horse and followed Pesmet to the door of the chapel.

  He creaked it open and she wrinkled her frozen nostrils against the musty smell of dust and churchyards. As she stepped inside, her eyes adjusted to the dim light. Inside the chapel loomed broken skulls lining shelves, columns, the crease between the wall and the ceiling. Femurs striped the walls like half-timbering on a house, and fingerbones and hipbones were arranged in a shield pattern on one wall. In the center of the chapel stood a pedestal, lit by the weak sunbeams falling from the high windows. On the pedestal sat a rough piece of uncut glass; the glass cradled a feather.

  Eliška was about to ask Pesmet why this feather sat on a pedestal as though it were a holy relic, but then she let her eyes rest on the feather, on the pale brown downiness fading to white, the brittle calamus—and a hazy, long-forgotten emotion tugged at her stomach.

  "That's from a Bird-Man," she said.

  "Indeed it is."

  Behind Pesmet, two more monks had emerged, their white robes trailing against the dusty floor. One of them spoke, barely moving his mouth as he talked, the effect rather disconcerting. "Pesmet received it from a trader, during his travels to the east. They say it came from the far north, from the lands above the kingdoms of the Swedes and Tartars."

  "How…" Eliška reached towards the feather, stopping her fingers just inches from the feather's brittle barb. "So the Bird-Men are still alive, somewhere."

  The monk who had spoken looked at her as though he expected her to fall to her knees and thank them for saving the city.

  "I don't see how this changes anything," she said, although hope continued to swell inside her stomach. "Whether the Bird-Men are with the Tartars or on the moon, they're not here."

  "Ah," Pesmet said. "But we want you to bring them here."

  "No, absolutely not. Pesmet, you should have told these men that I read the stars' predictions. I don't influence them."