Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  On the landing, Monty hesitated. He glanced first toward Jenny’s sewing room. As he swung his gaze to Laura’s room, our eyes briefly met. I didn’t like his eyes. They were a gray paler than his side-combed hair. His mouth turned down at the corners like a fish. He glared at me standing in the bathroom, and his scowl deepened as he looked into Laura’s stripped room.

  “Lead on, Girly,” he said to Giselle, and did not even notice how she bristled. Cameras and cast entered the room and I stepped onto the landing to peer after them, my curiosity outweighing my common sense. Giselle had recovered her aplomb. I wondered if they would remove the “Girly” in the final cut. She reminded me of Vanna White as she waved a slow and graceful hand to indicate the hole where the necklace had been found. The roaring in my ears drowned out what she was saying. Bert took an empty jewelry case out of his carpenter’s belt pouch and presented it to Monty. The old man’s eyes were watering and his hands shook as he reached into the opening. He seized the chain and drew the pendant into view, but the chain held taut. I watched the ghost’s face, her features shifting and reforming as she fought to keep him from taking it. He pulled harder. Abruptly Laura released it, and the jewelry flew from his hand and fell to the floor.

  The ghost hadn’t trusted my promise. Defying all laws of physics, the fallen necklace slid across the floor and out onto the landing right in front of me. Did Laura urge me? Perhaps. I kept my promise. I tried to make it look accidental as I swept the necklace with my foot into the other bedroom. Monty gave an old man’s protesting cry and Giselle gave a furious shout. They bumped shoulders, jammed in the door, and nearly knocked me over as they charged after the jewelry. Cameras and lights tracked after them, with Bert trying to push his way back into the frame. Monty had gone to one knee inside Jenny’s sewing room and was trying to pick up the necklace chain between finger and thumb. Giselle had hold of the cross. It wasn’t budging off the floor. I saw Laura’s ghostly hand settle on Giselle’s shoulder and squeeze.

  Giselle’s expression was almost comical as she swiveled her head to see who was shoving her. When she saw no one, her eyes widened to manga-size. She shot to her feet, crying “There is a ghost here!” and a moment later she was pushing past the retreating camera to get out of the room. Monty remained where he was. Laura stood over him, a ghostly foot planted on the chain of the necklace.

  Tell her you’re sorry!

  Did Monty hear her angry command as clearly as I did? He seemed unmoved. I glanced at the rest of the cast and crew. Raymond’s dark eyes were huge and his teeth were bared in terror, but he wasn’t fleeing. Even Bert had lifted both hands to cover his mouth. But Monty heard and felt nothing. He was a sour old man, down on all fours and digging at the necklace like a dog after a bone.

  I had not entered the room, and everyone except Raymond, our camera operator, and Bert had retreated from the deepening cold and stillness. Dimly I heard Giselle wailing from downstairs. “It was so empty, so cold! Bert, where are you, I need you! It was so full of nothing!!” I wondered if anyone was capturing that on film. Raymond remained on the landing, his hands on the shoulders of the girl holding the camera steady, softly whispering instructions in her ear.

  “Tell Jenny you’re sorry!” Raymond suddenly said aloud.

  “What?” Monty’s voice was cracked and irritated. “Me sorry? Sorry for what? It was that little whore who broke her heart. Got herself knocked up and slashed her wrists in the closet while Jenny was out doing the shopping! I knew she was going to do something stupid. I kicked that door down, trying to get in there to save her! But I was too late! Little slut was just sitting there, the blood going everywhere!”

  I didn’t! I knew Jenny was out of the house and I heard him downstairs, muttering. I was in the closet. I was cutting myself. That’s true. But just, just shallow slashes. Like I’d done before. But . . . then he came up the stairs, and when he kicked in the door, the razor went into my wrist! Jenny, I didn’t commit suicide. I didn’t!

  All the cold in the room was coalescing into a gray old woman. Gray hair, gray face, gray housedress and apron more fitting to the fifties than the eighties. I glanced at Raymond. He was seeing her. I took a step closer to look in the camera monitor; the ghosts were just light flares in the screen. The camera girl was shaking her head and trying to back away; Raymond lifted the camera from her hands and she fled. Raymond held the camera on Monty’s face. “Say you’re sorry,” he mouthed at the man.

  Instead, Monty looked down at the necklace. “Well, this ain’t it! You all played me for a fool, didn’t you!” He got ponderously to his feet. He kicked at the necklace. Corroded links and cheap rhinestones in rusty settings scattered. “You got me here with a trick! You want me to say I’m sorry? Well, I’m not. They weren’t too bright, either of them. Should be able to tell a woman what you want and get that out of her. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Just like with a dog. But Jenny never did learn, and that little slut just taught her more bad ways. Tried to shame me, the both of them! I was better off the day both of them were gone! I wasn’t sorry then and I’m not sorry now!”

  The old woman’s faded lips moved and her thoughts flooded me. I don’t care, Monty. I don’t care that you’re not sorry. Did you think I’d died of a broken heart, you pathetic old man? I lived through your beatings, didn’t I? I lived through your not caring. No. I died of not caring anymore. Of not having anyone to care about anymore. I grew up believing that was what a woman did: she cared for people. Lord knows I tried to keep caring about you; I tried to keep my vows. But when you hit her, I stopped caring about you. And when Laura killed herself, there was no one left to care for. No one to live for. She swung her gaze from Monty to Laura.

  Monty wasn’t hearing her. I doubted he’d ever heard her. He was leaving, his face set in a cold scowl. He shouldered past Raymond. Raymond let the camera wander over the scattered bits of cold glitter on the floor, and then he turned it on Monty’s back and followed him down the stairs.

  I remained rooted where I was.

  Laura’s ghost stepped toward Jenny, her open hands reaching out in a plea. I saw them then, the familiar parallel cutting scars, all up and down both her inner arms. She’d been a dedicated cutter. But the only one that bled in bright splashes that vanished before they touched the floor was the deep slice at one wrist.

  The necklace. That was what had held Laura in that room, unable to penetrate Jenny’s wall of cold. A promise made and not kept. Thoughts poured from Laura.

  I didn’t commit suicide. I didn’t, Jenny! I listened to you, I threw my cigarettes away that very night, and I stopped smoking pot with Jeremy and Cliff, and I didn’t even taste a beer after that! I didn’t. But when I felt really bad, I would cut myself still. Just a little bit.

  And when it was awful here, when Monty was yelling at you or when I was hating myself for hiding while you took it for me, I could cut myself! Jenny, I swear it wasn’t suicide. I murdered myself but it wasn’t suicide! He was throwing things downstairs, and there was a big crash when he kicked the door in and the razor slipped. It was dark—I was hiding from him in the closet. I didn’t even know I’d done it until he jerked the door open and there was so much blood! Oh, Jenny, I tried to keep my promise! I tried!

  The air in the room shuddered. I wanted to back away. I couldn’t. The shuddering became a trembling. Downstairs, Raymond shouted, “Quake! Stand in a doorway or get outside!”

  But it was no quake. The floor shivered and the silver chain and the scattered rhinestones trembled and crept across the floor. A rush of warmth suddenly suffused the gray woman, and for an instant, I saw her as she had been, her washed-out blue eyes and the faded pink ruffles on her white apron. At her feet, a silver chain gleamed and a silver cross glittered. She opened her arms. He said it was my fault. That if I’d watched you better it wouldn’t have happened, that you killed yourself out of shame!

  No. It was an accident! A stupid accident. Can you forgive me? Laura was still standing back from h
er.

  Forgive you? I can finally forgive myself.

  I’ve never seen the light that some people talk about. I’d never seen ghosts do what those two did. They embraced, Jenny and Laura. They didn’t go toward the light; they were the light. They vanished into each other, and then they were gone.

  Downstairs, doors were slamming and people were shouting. Raymond’s firm voice rose over all of them. “Everyone calm down. It’s nothing we can’t fix in post-production!”

  I heard Giselle’s shrill laugh that shattered into short hysterical shrieks.

  Weak sunbeams came in through the dirty windows of Jenny’s room. The diamonds sparkled in its light and then calmed. I walked into the room, empty in an ordinary dusty way. I knelt by the necklace.

  When I picked it up, it was warm in my hand, as if someone had just taken it off and given it to me. I slipped the chain over my head and slid the cross down inside my shirt. Did the thought come from them, or had they left it inside my mind? Second chance. Stop hurting yourself.

  TAD WILLIAMS

  THIS HAS BEEN A DIFFICULT YEAR FOR ME FOR SHORT STORY WRITING (for various boring reasons), but I very much wanted to contribute something to this Unfettered, both to keep up the connection to an excellent series of anthologies and to support Shawn Speakman.

  So we had the idea to use part of my new Osten Ard book as a contribution, since the anthology will come out before publication of the novel and thus will be new to both readers who know my work and those who don’t.

  You don’t need to know too much about the books to understand this excerpt, but here’s a brief overview:

  Utuk’ku, queen of the Norns (they call themselves “Hikeda’ya”), has awakened after a decades-long sleep and is once more waging war against the mortals and her Sithi relatives.

  The two main characters featured in this chapter are Derra, also known as Tzoja (her Norn name), who is the long-lost daughter of Josua and Vorzehva, two of the main protagonists in the first Osten Ard series—Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn—and Viyeki, a Norn noble who became Tzoja’s lover and the father of her daughter, Nezeru, one of the queen’s most accomplished soldiers. But her father, Viyeki, unlike most Norns, has doubts about the wisdom of his deathless ruler Queen Utuk’ku’s destructive hatred of the mortals.

  The Norns are one of two main groups of immortals, Sithi and Norns, who once ruled Osten Ard, and who are now seeking revenge against both their Sithi kin and the mortals who have displaced both groups. There is also a third group of immortals, the Tinukeda’ya, or Changelings, who at one time were more or less slaves to the Norns and Sithi. They are different from both the mortals and the immortals, and their history is not entirely clear (at this point of the story, anyway), but unlike the Sithi and Norns, they come in many sizes and shapes.

  Seem complicated? It won’t when you’re reading. A lot of this is expanded upon in the excerpt itself. And even if it’s all new to you, you shouldn’t have any problem getting the flavor of Osten Ard, a place I’ve been writing about so long I know it better than many of the places I’ve actually lived.

  I hope you enjoy this taste of Empire of Grass, to be published in May of 2019.

  Tad Williams

  The Hidden

  Tad Williams

  “Do you know how your father lost his hand, Derra?” her mother had once asked, with the tone of someone about to reveal an important secret. She often said things like that, suddenly and out of nowhere, as though she were answering angry voices only she could hear.

  “In a war,” Derra—as she had then been called—answered. “He said it happened a long time ago, before he met you.”

  “He lost it for a woman,” Vorzheva continued, as if her daughter had not spoken. “A woman he still loves, a woman he keeps in his heart like a treasure.”

  “What a ridiculous thing to tell a child,” her father said, laughing, but his face looked a little angry. “I was fighting to protect my brother’s wife. Our caravan was attacked and she was killed, so it is a sad thing to talk about. Killed by Thrithings-men, as a matter of fact—your mother’s people.”

  Her mother turned on him. “Not my clan! They fought on your father’s side!”

  Derra had stopped paying attention: she had heard it before. She had already begged her father for the story until he’d told her. She couldn’t remember how old she’d been when she had first noticed that other men were not like her father, that most of them had two hands, but from that moment she had burned to know the story. Her brother Deornoth, strangely, had not, and had walked away when her father began to explain.

  But Deornoth had always been that way. He did not like bloodshed, not even in stories. Once when they were smaller he had hit Sagra, a boy who lived near their parents’ inn, and bloodied the child’s nose. Deornoth had run home and hidden under his blanket, refusing to come out even when Sagra himself came by later in the evening to ask him out to play.

  But Derra had always loved stories. She didn’t care that her father had only one hand, or that he had once been a prince but had decided not to be—a story her mother told often, sometimes as evidence of his love for her, sometimes as evidence of the reverse, especially when she was feeling oppressed by what she called “this wretched-smelling, watery place!”—Kwanitupul, on the edge of the Wran.

  It seemed strange to think about those days, especially when she could not have been farther away from them—not in plain distance or years. The lengthy, winding road that had led her to this place in the blackness beneath the great mountain was only bits of separated memory now, like beads on a necklace.

  When their father had not returned her mother had despaired, and after months of rage and recriminations, at last decided to take Derra and Deornoth north—although with what plan she never told them. She had sold Pelippa’s Bowl and its unexalted reputation for very little—even Derra, despite being only ten years, had known they were being cheated by the fat merchant—then set out with all their remaining goods on a single cart. But they had been captured on the road by Thrithings-men, who had been mostly interested in Vorzheva’s purse, but heard her muttering under her breath in her original tongue, which was also theirs. Only a few days later the entire family, minus the proceeds from selling the inn, of course, had been delivered to Vorzheva’s horrible father, Thane Fikolmij, ruler over much of the High Thrithings. From that point everything had gone from merely bad to dreadful. Her brother Deornoth was sent away to live with another clan—he did not even get to say goodbye. And Derra and her mother became no better than slaves to Fikolmij, laboring from dawn to dusk and beyond with the other women in her grandfather’s camp.

  Derra might have been able to put up with even such a dire change in fortune, but with each day after Deornoth had been taken away, her mother seemed to lose life. Vorzheva’s eyes became dark-circled and her face gaunt—she could barely force herself to eat. She even lost interest in Derra and began to avoid her. Derra’s kindly Aunt Hyara, the only good thing that had happened to her since her father vanished, tried to tell her that Vorzheva was not angry at her, but that each time she looked at her daughter, she saw the absent twin as well, her son, and it broke her heart.

  “She will come back to you,” Hyara had said. “Give her time.”

  But time had been the one thing Derra had not been able to give. Every day felt like being buried alive. She was not even allowed to mix with the other children—her grandfather deemed her too old for play when there was work to be done.

  And worse, her grandfather had begun to notice her in other ways, ways Derra could not talk about with her mother, who hardly spoke to her at all, or even with Aunt Hyara. And when the old man’s furtive squeezing and pinching and poking began to keep her from sleeping at night because she was terrified he would come to her bed, she decided she would run away from the camp, from the wagons, from her monstrous grandfather and her silent, brooding mother, who acted as though she had lost both children and not just one . . .

  Tz
oja stopped, startled by a noise from the underground lake. She folded the glowing sphere called a ni’yo deeper into her hand, until it showed as only a faint red glow in the web of her finger and thumb, then stood in silence, listening. She had heard a splash. Perhaps only a fish, but she had been so deep in memory that she hadn’t realized how close she had wandered to the shore of the underground lake. As far as she knew, there were no other people in any of the other lakefront dwellings, because they mostly belonged to rich nobles who only made the long journey out from the heart of the city during festivals. But back in the Enduya clan house, Viyeki’s wife Khimabu must have realized by now that Tzoja had fled—so she could not afford to be noticed even by some gardener or servant preparing for the arrival of a rich master, anyone who might mention to his masters that he had seen a mortal woman near the lake.

  And what if it were something else entirely? Things moved down here in the dark tunnels that even Viyeki avoided talking about, and he was magister of the order that had excavated these depths.

  She crouched in place. With her light-sphere hidden, the only glow came from the strange shining worms dangling above the lake on strands of luminous silk. She had been thinking of the old days, her old life, and for a moment she saw the glowing creatures as something else, as stars in the broad sky that she had not seen in so many years.

  The Thrithings, she thought, and Erkynland, and last in Rimmersgard, with Roskva and the Astalines. Sky as far as I could see in all directions, the mountains so far away they were only shadows . . .

  Something splashed again, making her heart speed, but now she was almost certain a sound so small must come from a fish or a frog, and she felt her fear ease. She knew she might have to start thinking about catching fish soon: the food she had brought from the clan-house pantry would not last too much longer. She had paced herself as carefully as she could, though it was difficult to know how much time was passing in a dark house in a cavern far beneath the ground, where she dared not even light a fire for fear of someone seeing it. In fact, that was the reason she had begun her daily walks around the lake to a rich manor house some distance away. By its outer decorations and the spiral on the door, the house seemed to belong to somebody well-placed in the Order of Song. She would never have dared to cross the threshold of such a place, but whoever owned the house had placed a very fine water clock in a grotto on the outer grounds of the property. The clock was a mysterious arrangement of gears and troughs and several stone jars of water, but she could mark by the movement of the decorated dial in the center of one of the largest gears how the face of the moon was changing in the sky above the mountain, on the far side of an incomprehensible weight of stone.