I should have been repulsed, awestruck, even terrified. But my memories had been conjuring up far worse scenes, and the god only served as a fleeting distraction. I watched Daybreak unleash two decks' worth of cannon and vajra, filling the sky with exploding shells and crackling arcs of energy. The tentacles writhed, whipping wildly at the projectiles, reaching for the vimana itself. Then came the second thunderous salvo.
I hoped it would be enough. Without the siphon to funnel rogue magic into it, the barrier would knit itself back together. But that would take time. Fifteen, twenty minutes. The god couldn't be allowed to slip free.
But that was up there. Down in the ashram my world was being consumed with a fire that only I could see, filling up with smoke and ash and burning flesh. Anger flashed hot across my eyes, turning my mouth into a sneer. "You'll get no release today, traitor." Magic coursed up my right arm in rippling bands of pink and orange. "Neela, stand aside."
The blademother obeyed, reluctantly. Kalibhat tried to sit up. I didn't give him a chance.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"Sparing you the blades."
I extended my hand. The bands of magic slipped off my arm and latched on to Kalibhat. Pinning him. Gagging him. And while the magic held the traitor tight, alternating bands of ashen rogue magic crumbled away. My siphons were humming now, their slats glowing blue and orange, and floating about my waist on their chains. I could hear choking sobs, but they weren't coming from Kalibhat.
My head throbbed. My eyes watered. My ears filled with the teakettle whine of firethrowers building pressure, a whump and hiss, a roar of flames. Kalibhat writhed at my feet. Cannon and vajra boomed and flared overhead, but I was deaf to nearly everything but the sounds of my past life. I was completely consumed, and I didn't even care.
I turned my back to leave. Ordered Neela to follow.
Neela looked shocked.
"Not a word," I said. Curt and clipped. "Mantriks serve the Raj. We make the Empire strong. Kalibhat and his discovery could undermine everything."
"A quick death, then," she said. "Not this."
"He deserves worse."
"But you're—"
"Loyal to the Raj. And strong." I wiped the sweat from my brow. "The strong don't need release."
Bones and empty vials crunched underfoot. I pushed my way outside, past Prasad, who nearly dropped a vial of his own. I scowled. He tried saying something in reply, but I couldn't hear him over the crackle of flames, the hiss of chemicals, and the screams of burning people.
Prasad had to repeat my name several times before I turned to him. "Anusha! The skymouth—"
"—Won't be a problem. I shut down the source." Crackle. Hiss. Scream.
"And the man we saw? At the window, the man—"
"Guilty. Weak." Every scream had a face. "Unclean."
Prasad narrowed his eyes. "We have to get you away from here. The memories are overpowering you."
"No. There's still work to be done. For the Raj."
My fingers wrapped around a firethrower that wasn't really there.
Magic pulsed along my fingertips. And memory became reality, and I summoned up fire.
I engulfed the building in flames.
© 2015 by Andrew Kaye
Author's Note: The nature of souls is a common theme in my fiction. In this particular story, I wanted to explore the soul in terms of reincarnation, and I was strongly inspired by Indian culture and ideas. The story's title, 'Moksha,' is a word from Indian religions meaning "release"—specifically release from the cycle of death and rebirth.
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Andrew Kaye is a writer, editor, and cartoonist from the suburban wilderness of Northern Virginia, where he lives with his wife, his three children, and a large empty space in the basement that should probably be filled with a robot or something. You can find him lurking in his usual haunt on Twitter: @andrewkaye.
The White Snake
Laurie Tom
You didn't know me the second time you said "Hello." You couldn't have known we'd met before, because people don't believe in spirits in this modern day. Everything is decided, neatly parceled into little bits of what is considered possible and what is not. I am just a myth. But when I look at you, gazing back at me from your seat beside my hospital bed, I know what is real. We are real, what we share is real, and I am dying.
You try to comfort me, fluff my pillow, and ask if you can get me something to drink, and I can't help but feel touched by your compassion. You have always been a gentle man. That was what drew me to you the first time we met. You couldn't have known what your actions had meant to a little white snake.
If you still have that gentleness in you, listen to me now. Please. I know you don't want to believe, but you have to accept.
I was not born in this country of yours but of a rushing stream in a land its people call the Middle Kingdom. My kind minds the ways of our common cousins and no man can tell the difference if he does not know us well. Most of the spiritfolk remained in the old country, but being a small and curious thing I sailed east across the ocean with the emigrants and landed here, on the land of your people.
At heart, people here are not so different from people there. You grow fields of wheat instead of fields of rice. That doesn't matter. You still eat. But you do not have the history of believing in us. The people of the Middle Kingdom know us, in the form of superstition if nothing else. Your people have never heard of us at all. But I didn't mind. I was only a snake.
You remember the day we met, don't you? It's only a childhood memory to you, if that at all. Some boys thought to make sport of the strange creature they found in the fields. White, but not albino, it didn't look like anything they had seen before. Of course they were curious. Of course they wanted to catch it. Even back in the old country boys did such things, but I did not expect to be caught.
Then you came. You were only a child yourself and you drove them back, yelled for them to leave. They scowled and pouted, but they scattered, and you turned to look at me.
"Hello," you said. "You can go now."
You could not have understood the thanks in my voice. To your ears my gratitude was nothing but a hiss, but I basked in your compassion as readily as I would have the sun. Seldom does a spirit find itself indebted to a man, but never does one forget to repay what it owes.
I watched you as you grew from boy to man, and I made good on my debt. When you stayed up nights to study I was the one who gathered your things for you so they'd be ready in the morning. That day you wanted lunch but found yourself a quarter short—I placed that coin on the sidewalk where you would find it. A snake could not do very much, even one a bit brighter than the rest, but I tried.
The problem was I wanted more.
You see, I came to know you, your strengths and your faults, and I wanted to be able to be with you without having to hide in the cracks and shadows. I wanted to see you smile at me and know me for who I am.
So I shed my scales, coated my head with hair, and grew limbs from my body in order to resemble a human being. I thought you might not have liked me because I could only look like the people who come from my country, but you didn't care that my eyes were brown instead of blue, or that my hair was black instead of straw. You were as kind to the woman as you were to the snake.
Though they seem brief now, I do not regret the twenty years spent with you. You cannot know the price my kind pays to maintain a human shape. We can never stay long, as if our lives must be further shorn beyond the longevity we have already lost. Disease has wracked my body in a way that would have been impossible but twenty years ago. But I would not change my mind.
My only wish is that you would understand me. We shared so much; life, love, and children, and yet you will never know the whole of me. You don't believe in spirits and think my stories are flights of fancy. You, who have been kind to me in so many ways, are the source of the only cruelty I cannot overcome.
But love forgives, love forgets, and I hav
e long accepted you for what you are. Soon, now, you will have to accept me for what I am.
I tried to tell you that I wasn't an ordinary girl.
What will you say when I pass on and you see not the body of a woman, but a coiled little serpent with shining marble scales?
© 2012 by Laurie Tom
Originally published in Penumbra Magazine, April 2012.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
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Laurie Tom is a third generation Chinese American living in the southern California area. She's been entranced by science fiction and fantasy since childhood and has never been able to stop visiting other worlds. Her work has also appeared in venues such as Crossed Genres, Galaxy's Edge, and Penumbra.
Tempest Fugit
Christine Borne
Captain Lawson stood in front of the wall-sized painting of the Battle of Melusinae, where he'd died.
He did not hear the wind blowing or the chilled waves pounding the rocks far below the inn. He did not hear Madame Shirley, the proprietor of this place, speaking to him, as she usually was or the lead crystal glasses clinking with rough chips of ice and fingers of gin.
Captain Lawson was too busy trying to understand where they were all going, his men—the men he'd commanded in that ill-fated battle, now so many years ago.
Captain Lawson had spent his youth the same way all young men did: dreaming and wondering about the mysteries of the world. Why nothing invigorated him like sea air, why women always smelled so good, where the spirit went after a man died—but it had all come to mean nothing, in the end. After all, he'd died, and he hadn't gone anywhere, had he? Except back to this inn, where he and his men had spent their last night before they set sail for Melusinae, when they were hard, ruddy-faced, blood-filled men.
The captain absentmindedly palmed a loose finial on the back of his chair. It was getting harder to hold onto solid objects now. That was one of the things that had surprised him most when he was freshly dead—that he and his men could still touch things. That was probably why they'd all come back here, to the Inn of the High Cliff. There were lots of opportunities for touching.
The inn had provided Captain Lawson and his men with much comfort over the years. They'd first arrived when the Madame's great grandmother—or was it her great-great grandmother, or one still greater?—had been the proprietor here. He'd seen many ladies come and go, step in the front door veiled in a rosy blush of innocence and be carried out, wizened and broken, on a bier. He remembered the Madame on the day of her birth, though now her hair was grey and her breasts lay like shriveled potatoes atop her dark corset.
The Madame hadn't hired a new girl in a while now, but exactly how long he didn't know. Business wasn't what it used to be, she said.
But why? The captain squinted his eyes at the painting, at the thick green whorls of oily sea. His eyes focused and unfocused rapidly, as if he was trying to trick himself into seeing a movement that he knew wasn't really there.
Melusinae. A place of such horrors in his youth. It was to the port of Melusinae that the Northerners had stolen so many of his people's women, sold them into slavery to fat, greedy men with too many jewels and too few scruples. Great grandmothers of girls who worked here now. He wondered if they knew that, knew the degradation their ancestors had known at the hands of these brutes.
Judging by the casual indifference with which these young little birds regarded the painting, he thought they must not.
Once, not long ago, he had perhaps gotten too rough with one of Shirley's girls, pinning her to the bed while telling her, in gruesome detail, what he would have done to her if he'd been one of those Northern slave masters. She'd squealed like a trapped piglet and wept and later Shirley had scolded him. But underneath his apology he still felt glad that although he was now too insubstantial to properly kill a man, he could still overpower a small, naive girl, still make her listen to him when he spoke.
Back when this painting was commissioned, right after the war, no one was even willing to say the name Melusinae aloud. The painting had cast a pall over the room when it was first done, as if the room was stacked with three thousand corpses. Certain normal topics of conversation were avoided out of reverence. Grown men would take their caps off in its presence, and Captain Lawson could still detect the smudge where a widow had thrown herself against it, howling with grief.
Captain Lawson remembered the painter's face but not his name. A thin, pale fellow, womanish-looking almost. There were some folk who said he was a ghost himself, that he'd been at the battle, but Captain Lawson didn't remember seeing him there.
Melusinae had boasted few survivors, and neither he nor (to his knowledge) any of his men had discussed the battle in any great detail since they'd returned. Still, the little fellow had gotten everything right: there were the orange billows of fire, bright and hot as Captain Lawson remembered them. And there was Captain Lawson himself, arrested in time, arm raised, shouting orders to his men as the frigate rocked sharply leeward—he'd been dimly aware at that moment of the Trafalgar, next to his own ship, bursting into flame—and then his last full memory: the cannon fire burst onto the deck, splitting his ship in two…
After that, it was all just fragments: that quiet feeling of sinking, of loosening, as his blood drained into the green sea. The deep blue blackness that dimmed, brightened, dimmed, as if on the breath of some unseen leviathan. And then the sudden feeling of rising, rising, skimming the water, voices coming closer… and then the faces of those long-ago girls as they stood at the window, stock—still as they watched his men stream up the side of the cliff, pulling themselves over the edge with wild-eyed desperation, the dank, drowned souls clawing toward warm, fluttering hearts.
A dull smack on the back of his head jolted him out of his reverie. "Are you going to have a drink, or aren't you?"
Madame Shirley stood behind him, rocking a sapphire-blue bottle back and forth in her hand; the liquid inside sloshed and churned like the sea below.
"What?" he said stupidly, although he'd heard her perfectly well. With a shiver of panic he wondered if he would soon lose his ability to taste gin, too.
The Madame frowned, then went back behind the bar and started filling a glass for him. Filling it too full, he could see. She bent her head over it and her once-smooth, once-white neck turned into an accordion of red turkey wrinkles. Her eye, the one not covered by the stark shock of grey hair that fell over her face like a sagging, threadbare sail, glanced upward at him. She knew what he was thinking. How could she not? Since she had stopped entertaining his men personally, she and the captain had become the closest of companions. There was something that happened to a woman, around the time her hair begins to turn grey. Something that made her more like a man, wiser, easier to talk to. Captain Lawson was grateful for it and frequently wished he would've understood this while he was alive.
She leaned over the bar, pressing the drink into his hand. "I said, here's your drink, Captain."
He took it, ducking his face close to the glass, breathing in deeply through his mouth. Of course, he could not really eat or drink anything. Smell and taste were perhaps the ghostliest of human senses, better appreciated by the dead than by living men. A dead man, for instance, could last a week on a single glass of gin just by inhaling its essence. He'd once been proud of this, as if he'd earned a secret privilege by passing through the harbor of death. But today Captain Lawson would have sold his stripes for a real drink. Today more than any other day in the ages since he'd been stuck on this cliff he felt the weight of this particular sorrow clench around his heart like a lobster's claw.
Madame Shirley took note. She was no longer young and pretty enough to distract him properly, but perhaps she could cheer him a little. "You know," she said. "After Melusinae, when all of you old dogs started showing up at her door, my great Granny figured she was just going to have to change her business model. I mean, what living man would want to come here and mess around with a few pretty gi
rls with all you dead-and-gone fellows hanging around?"
Captain Lawson smirked. "I remember."
"And for a while, she was right as rain. Business was bad, wasn't it? But then word got around and by gum, she had to start turning fellows away."
"Sure she did. Before she got the idea that she could double her profits selling tickets."
Madame chuckled. "Granny was a consummate businesswoman, so they say. I'll give her that."
They exchanged polite, reminiscent smiles for a moment, and then, to the Madame's chagrin, the captain drifted back to the painting. He squinted at it, listening almost—as if he were expecting a bolt of lightning to flash across its surface and illuminate everything he still did not understand.
"Shirley," he said quietly. "Why are all of my men leaving?"
Madame Shirley regarded him. He was starting to look more and more like a broken old grandfather, lost and forgotten in a time that belonged to younger men. A sudden wave of sadness pushed her gaze aside, back toward the bar. She pretended to be busy wiping up a spill. Shirley hadn't wanted him to ask this question, and she hadn't wanted to answer it. She had hoped the Captain would have figured it out himself.
"Well," she said slowly. "I expect it's because of the Tempest Fugit."
The finial that Captain Lawson was fidgeting with came off in his hand. He made to throw it at the ground but faltered, thinking better and attempted instead to pocket it. The knob fell to the ground with a loud knock and the man—the live man—sitting next to Captain Lawson jumped up, spilling his drink.
Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #5 Page 4