"Mistress, I know you keep a copy of Picatrix in your drawer."
"Astral magic is for charlatans and necromancers," Eliška said, remembering the arch of her father's back as, weighted by his wings, he toppled backwards off his horse.
"Eliška." Pesmet stepped forward, his hip-boots clacking on the floor. "Do you know what the Dark does to a person?"
"Of course I—"
"Yes, you've heard what it does. But have you seen it? Have you seen the haunted look in the eyes of a man afflicted with the Dark, the green pockmarks that appear on the arms as the disease approaches? Have you seen the trembling hands and the snarling teeth of madness? Have you seen how it spreads from person to person, faster than the plague? Have you—"
"I'm not a magician. I'm a scientist. I do not practice astral magic."
"You will," the monk said. He palmed a key ring, and bowed his head to her. "I don't need to tell you, Mistress Eliška, that you have five days."
"What are you—"
"We've laid out supplies, and there's a fire burning in the apse." The monks swept towards the door, Pesmet keeping pace.
Eliška raced after them, shouting curses on their order, but when she reached the top of the stairs, they had already shut and bolted the door behind them.
Eliška thought of her two remaining oranges, growing mealy in a bowl in the larder. She thought of Johann and her broken heart, and how she might never see his blue eyes again, might never repair whatever had broken between them. She thought of how she only had four days to escape from the monks and return to the city before its blank-eyed statues, its frozen river, and black-spired cathedrals fell under the Dark.
But she wouldn't use astral magic, either to escape or to summon the Bird-Men. She wasn't a witch. If her father's death had taught her anything, it was that influencing the stars never worked how you expected, that astral magic always slithered and coiled around your ankle or wrist or throat while you were busy admiring the results.
The chapel door creaked open, and Pesmet shuffled in. She seized the glass-and-feather relic and held it over the fire. "Let me go," she snarled, "or I'll burn it."
Pesmet stayed in the shadows by the door. "Have you begun work on the magic yet?"
"I'll burn it." Eliška dangled the feather over the flame. Heat crawled up her hand.
"Mistress, I don't believe you'll burn it." Pesmet blinked rapidly, just as he had when he was her apprentice struggling to understand a concept. "I think despite what you say, you want the Bird-Men to return badly enough that you—"
"Don't you challenge me," Eliška snarled. "Didn't you learn anything as my apprentice? Did I use astral magic to save my mother from the Hungarian fever, or to make myself an ordinary life?" Or to make Johann love me again?
"But why not? Why not save our city?"
"Astral magic never works as you expect it to. I taught you that. I've studied the stars, and the Bird-Men aren't coming back before the Dark. They're simply not."
"Eliška." Pesmet inclined his head towards her. "Why have you spent your entire life searching for signs that the Bird-Men might return?"
"Because it's part of my duties as Imperial—"
"I think, despite what you say, you still believe that they might save the city. I think it's because you secretly harbor that most heady of elixirs: hope."
"When did you become such a scholar of human nature?" Eliška snarled. "'That most heady of elixirs'? Did the monks teach you to say such things?" She stepped forward. "Let me go. I command you, let—"
"Stay back," Pesmet shouted, his voice edged with a new harshness. He stepped into the weak light seeping from the sole window. His arms were covered in pale-green pockmarks, puckering his skin and matting his arm hair. Eliška snatched up her cloak and pressed a corner over her mouth.
"Stay away from me," she said, trying to calculate when and if she had touched Pesmet, if she might be contaminated with the Dark.
"I suppose I contracted it in Vienna," Pesmet said, not looking at her. "They're terribly itchy, and they burn. It's impossible to forget, even for a moment."
Eliska pressed her hands against her stomach, withholding a comforting pat on the old apprentice's arm. He was lost now, forever, and she knew she would never be able to touch him again. Pesmet walked from the chapel, his boots clicking on the stone floor.
Eliška paced her room until the sun set. Based on what the Imperial Physicians knew of the Dark, Pesmet had a day at most before the Dark swept through his mind. Part of her mourned Pesmet, who she still saw as the eager boy studying star charts at her side, but part of her hated him and his monks for trapping her here, in these waning days of her life. And a sliver of her wondered if perhaps Pesmet was right, if perhaps she wanted to race home and check the star charts because after all one cobwebbed corner of her heart hoped that the Bird-Men might return.
The sun set early on the third-to-last day.
Eliška thought of Johann, of sending him a letter before the Dark descended on them. She thought of her two remaining oranges and the red roofs of the city and its bridges and of her laboratory and, yes, of her star charts and whether they might tell a different tale if she had the chance to read them again.
It wouldn't take strong astral magic to force the monks and Pesmet to unlock her door and leave the monastery. She wouldn't have to embody one of the planets or even invoke much of their power. It would only take a simple spell.
She walked to the table in the apse where the monks had arranged supplies. She inscribed a scrap of linen with an image of Mars in ascendance. She sprinkled dried laurel and bat's blood onto the linen, wrapped it around a clay goblet.
She told herself she needed to escape. She needed to mend things with Johann. She needed to check her star-charts.
She tossed the linen-wrapped goblet into the fire.
"Unlock the chapel door," she whispered. "And then leave. Walk away from here. Go anywhere."
The fire hissed and spat crimson sparks. Smoke puffed into the room. Eliška coughed, and her head pounded. She bent over the table and her body buzzed.
Then the scrape of a lock echoed through the chapel.
She bounced on her boot-heels, waiting for them to leave. For an hour, she made herself stand still, until the monks had enough time to shuffle off across the snowy field, until there was no chance of them seeing her and forcing her back into the chapel. She knocked over a chair as she raced to the door, but hesitated just before she pushed it open.
Returning to the pedestal, she scooped up the Bird-Man feather and concealed it under her cloak. Then she raced back again through the chapel, past long shadows trailing out of the skulls and femurs, and into the hollow bowl of the night-dark field.
As she hurried towards the stables, she tripped over something and sprawled into the snow.
"Mistress." Pesmet, eyes gleaming, clawed at her cloak-hem. She clapped her hands over her mouth and lurched away from him. His arms and face were unmarked, unnaturally smooth—a sign that the Dark had advanced. "Mistress… they went…" He frowned, and although he looked at her eyes, she could tell he no longer saw her and instead only saw the snowy field and the chapel behind her. "Hello?" he whispered. "Is anyone there?"
"Pesmet." But she knew that the Dark had consumed him—the Dark that rendered its victims unable to see or hear other humans.
"Am I alone out here?"
Her heart beat faster at the fear in his voice, the trembling around the word 'alone'. In two days I will walk through the city and see no one… I will eat oranges alone for the rest of my life…I will walk the embankments of the river, dying of the Dark, and see only stone and shadow.
Pesmet's eyes refocused and he gasped, a drowning man given one last mouthful of air. "They went to the city. You told them to go anywhere, and they went to the city."
He pressed his baby-smooth hands against his eyes. "They went to the city and they have the Dark. They took horses."
"They…"
But P
esmet shuddered and fell to his knees. "Isn't anyone out here?" he howled, looking through her. "Please, where did everyone go?"
Eliška squeezed her eyes shut, then raced to the stables.
As she rode through the city walls, past the gold-lit windows sheltering husbands with their wives or mistresses, girls playing with poppets, boys pretending to be the soldiers they would never be, she knew they all hoped the Bird-Men would swoop down and wrap them in soft wings and cradle them with wire hands. She knew they hoped the Bird-Men's porcelain birds would open their beaks and sing. She knew they hoped the Bird-Men would save them, save them from Pesmet's fate, from the Dark, from plagues and war and floods and loneliness…
The city dreams of Bird-Men , Eliška thought. Can I fault them?
She raced up the stairs to her laboratory, carrying the smell of snow into the musty room, and pressed her eye to her telescope. She swept it over the bowl of the stars, searching for a sign of the Bird-Men's return and then sagged against her table when she saw that the stars looked the same. The same reading she'd taken five days ago. Except…
Saturn in the eighth house. Saturn had been in the ninth house five days ago.
She scribbled on her star chart. She crouched next to her astronomical model and trailed her fingers against Saturn's gold impassive curve as she realized: they didn't have two days until the Dark arrived. They had one.
The Dark would arrive at dawn, along with the monks that Eliška's magic had sent racing towards the city.
She buried her head in her hands. This was why she had avoided astral magic ever since her father had tumbled from his horse shining with the light of Mercury. This was why she had studied her star charts like a dutiful astronomer and stayed far, far away from witchcraft: because it never worked out the way you intended.
So the city had one night left, one night of laughter and tears, of drinking ale together and telling ghost stories and—
Eliška opened a drawer and lifted out her copy of Picatrix. She propped open the book, with its blood-red illustrations, and ripped a piece of linen off her skirt.
She had doomed the city to the Dark one day early through her use of astral magic. So now she must save it.
She concentrated on rehearsing the Latin incantations, focused on setting up her star chart and preparing her linen, not letting the gravity of what she was about to do overwhelm her.
At midnight, she walked to her window, looked across the way at the one house still glowing with candlelight at this hour, then past the silent snow-muted roofs to the faint distant stars above. She had always thought the stars looked strong, powerful—patricians and matricians willing to impart their secrets. She had never thought they looked fragile, as though one hard tap might shatter them.
She returned to her writing table and scribbled Johann a letter. She told him she still loved him, she hoped he felt the same and that he should meet her on this side of the bridge at dawn. She slipped the letter under her door for her chambermaid to post. Then she slid into her chair and lit a censer.
As blue smoke billowed through the room, she inscribed an image of the sun in the twelfth house on the rough linen. She draped the linen around the feather and balanced it on the censer.
The blue smoke came faster, choking the room, obscuring her planetary model, her star charts and bookshelves. She clasped her hands around the censer—it should have been hot, but it was cold as the ice on the river—and she incanted, she prayed, she hoped, she asked Mars to use force, Venus and the moon to use seduction, Mercury to use manipulation, and Saturn to use its darkness to ask the sun to grant her its anima motrix. She asked the planets to sing in their four-range voices, to change the plan the sun had laid out for their cursed city, the plan the stars had laid out for Eliška…
No , sang the planets. No, we won't bequeath the power of our god to a human, the sun's power changes a man.
"I'm not asking you. I'm demanding you," she shouted as she shook the censer.
The smoke poured into her nostrils, and the dry air of the laboratory vanished. She rose over a plain that was covered in wild and untamed snow, snow that didn't see sunlight this time of year.
She sensed the Bird-Men, sensed that they hid somewhere on this plain. She rose higher and her rays illumed the creatures sheltering in deep unbroken snow under bent pines. Beneath her light, the porcelain birds on their heads shone, and the frost and ice that lined their wire torsos glimmered.
Go.
She felt their resistance—but we were told, by our maker, to curse the city forever by our absence—but she only had to whisper Go once again and they rose out of the snow, shedding specks of frost from their wings as they flapped south.
Eliška shone in the sky for just a second, the kind of second you want to spend your whole life in. Then she opened her eyes in the laboratory, surrounded by clearing smoke and by her possessions, the possessions that had always defined her—Eliška, the woman who had followed what was written in the stars, until tonight.
She had done it. She had saved the city. She had dove into astral magic and come out the other side. Her body buzzed alive, as though she still glowed, still had the power to make the world turn to her will.
She paced her laboratory, eating an orange. Then, as dawn lightened the sky, she ran outside to meet Johann, and to see her Bird-Men.
Snow fell outdoors, fat white flakes blanketing the cobblestones of Golden Lane, obscuring the castle on the hill above her. She raced through the streets, her boots slipping, towards the shouts echoing from the riverbanks.
She stopped on the wide steps that led down the hill away from her laboratory and the castle. A dark crowd congregated on both sides of the silver-iced river, milling in the falling snow, streaming over the bridge between the blank-eyed statues.
"The Bird-Men!" shouted a man. "They've come! We're saved!"
Cries of We're saved, praise the Bird-Men, rose through the crowd.
Eliška craned her head towards the sky.
All she saw: fat flakes of snow drifting through lavender dawn.
Eliška drew her green cloak closer around her and surveyed the crowd standing ten deep along the frozen river. Every face looked up at the falling snow as though looking upon a lover returned from the Holy Land or a castle containing their heart's desire. Some fell to their knees, weeping, curling into balls as though wings embraced them. Others held children towards the sky, held hands with grandmothers, brothers and sisters.
"Eliška!" The Imperial Physician raced down the steps towards her, his cheeks ruddy and his eyes glistening. "It's a miracle!"
"I don't…" Eliška blinked snow off her eyelashes. "I don't see them."
"What do you mean?" The Imperial Physician laughed, a giddy childish laugh, and held his arms towards the sky. His feet lifted off the ground and he soared towards the river, buoyed by nothing as he twisted like a marionette and laughed like a little boy.
The city laughed and cheered and cried tears of relief. She scanned the cluster of people near the bridge—no blue-eyed trader waited there. Instead, one of the monks she had banished from the monastery stumbled through the crowd; the Dark had arrived in the city.
Why weren't the Bird-Men swooping down to protect her too? Why couldn't she see them? Why didn't they exist for her? Why had Johann stopped loving her?
She trained her eyes on the empty snowy sky leading to the dark spires of Old Town Square and raised her arm, a bare arm that emanated a silvery light, as though she still glowed with the power of the sun…
The sun's power changes a man , the planets had said.
She couldn't see the Bird-Men because right now, flush with the glow of the planets' magic, she wasn't part of the city. Perhaps she wasn't even human.
She had saved the city, but she had doomed herself.
Eliška squeezed her eyes shut and thought:
Imagine Johann's window creaking open, and imagine him bringing you basket upon basket of oranges until oranges spill out of your la
boratory and cascade down the stairs.
Imagine sun striking the black spires and gold spheres atop the cathedrals, sending the city into a bright interplay of light and shadow and tomorrow.
Imagine the skin on your arms isn't prickling, itching, burning beneath your green cloak.
Imagine that you can change the fate that the stars have written for you.
Imagine the Bird-Men are swooping around you too, folding you in their wings, singing with the porcelain statues on their heads, sheltering you from the Dark forever and ever.
When she opened her eyes something pale brown had stuck to her cloak. She pinched it between two fingers: it was a soft wispy feather, really nothing more than a piece of down.
Eliška pressed her feather to her lips, and pretended that any moment now, she would see Bird-Men in the falling snow.
© 2015 by Emily Cataneo
* * *
Emily B. Cataneo is a writer of dark fantasy and horror. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the anthologies Chiral Mad 2, Qualia Nous, and Steampunk World, as well as the magazines Kaleidotrope, the Dark, Betwixt, and Interfictions Online: A Journal of Interstitial Arts. She is a 2013 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop in Manchester, N.H. Follow her adventures and misadventures at emilycataneo.com or on Twitter @emilycataneo.
Moksha
Andrew Kaye
The day we met, Prasad asked me how many times I had died.
I answered without hesitation. "Forty-four."
That number is part of my identity. As important as my womanhood, my occupation, my name. My soul had occupied forty-four bodies. Had experienced forty-four deaths. And the memories of those forty-four are in my head. Unforgettable. Unshakeable.
Prasad understood. He too was a mantrik. Magical ability was our shared blessing, but remembering our past lives was our curse.
"Sixty-one," he said in reply. After he shook my hand, he downed a vial of rasayan in one gulp.
Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #5 Page 2