Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  “I will see this arch and listen to its pronouncement,” I say. “Because if it speaks for heaven then I have words of my own to speak back.”

  Deep in the cloudbank lightning ricochets, making the thunderheads glow, a flat light edging the slopes for a heartbeat. The rain hammers down, pricked with ice, but I’m burning with the memory of those thorns and the fever they put in my blood. No absolution in this storm—the stain of sin is past water’s touch. The wounds the thorns gave turned sour, beyond cleansing. But heaven’s arch waits and suddenly I’m eager to let it speak of me.

  The hand on John’s sword spasms open. “Let’s go.” A curt nod, scattering water, and he strides off. I follow, impatient now, the slope seeming less steep. Only the Nuban spares a backward glance for Avery, still hugging the slope, and a second one for me, watchful and beyond reading. The glow of my small victory fades, and not for the first time it’s the Nuban’s silence rather than his words that make me want to be better than I am.

  Another of the Select takes up the rear guard. Greb they call him. “Watch your footing,” I say. “It gets slippery.”

  We crest the lip of a valley and descend into shadows where the wind subsides from howls to complaint. The light is failing but where the trail snakes down the slope I can see something is wrong. I stop and Greb stumbles into me, cursing.

  “There’s something wrong with the rain.” I stare at it. Across a wide swath the rain seems to fall too slowly, the drops queuing to reach the ground and making a grey veil of falling water.

  “Slow-time.” John says, not turning or raising his voice.

  Greb kicks my calf and I carry on. I’ve heard of slow-time. Tatters of it wreath the Arcada mountains, remnants from when the Builders broke the world. We discovered the same thing, the Builders and me; if something shatters your world then afterward you find the rules have changed. They had the Day of a Thousand Suns. I had the thorns.

  I follow the Nuban into the slow-time, a band of it two or three yards wide. From the outside the rain within seems to fall at its leisure. Passing into the region all that changes is that now only where I’m walking are things right. Ahead and behind the rain powers down as if each drop were shot from a ballista and would punch holes in armour. And we’re through. Greb’s still wading through it behind me, moving like a street-mummer, slower than slow, until he’s free and starts to speed up. The slow-time sticks to him, reluctant to release its prisoner, as if for ten yards it’s still clinging to his skin before finally he’s walking at our pace once more.

  We advance and a shoulder of rock reveals the strangest sight. It’s as if a bubble of glass, so clear as to be invisible, has been intersected by the mountainside. Rain streams off it, turned from its path by unseen currents. At the heart of the half-sphere, close to the ground, a wild blue light entices, part diamond, part promise. And all about it statues stand.

  “Idiots.” John waves an arm at them as we pass. “I can understand the first one being trapped, but the other seven?”

  We’re close enough to see they’re not statues now. Eight travellers, the closest to the light dressed in fashions seen only in dusty oil paintings on castle walls. Flies in amber, moths drawn to the light of the fire in which we burn. What world will be waiting for them when they think to turn around and walk back out?

  “Do all time-bubbles have a handy warning light at the centre?” I wonder it aloud but no one answers.

  I glance back at them once before the distance takes them. All of them held there like memories while the days and months flicker past outside. I have time-bubbles in my head, places I return to over and again.

  When I killed my first man and left the Healing Hall in flames, sick with poison from the wounds the hook-briar gave, it was Father Gomst who found me. Memory takes me to that tower-top where I leaned out, watching the flames spiral and the lanterns moving far below as Father’s guards hunted me. We stand on that tower, trapped in those minutes, we two, and often I pass by, pausing to study it once more and learning nothing.

  Father Gomst raises both hands. “You don’t need the knife, Jorg.”

  “I think I do.” The blade trembles in my grip, not from fear but from what the fever puts in me. A sense of something rushing toward me, something thrilling, terrible, sudden…my body vibrating with anticipation. “How else would I cut?”

  “Give it to me.” He doesn’t reach for the knife. Around his neck a gold cross, and a Builder talisman, a fone, the ancient plasteek fractured, part melted, chased with silver like the church icons. He says God hears him through it, but I sense no connection.

  “The thorns wouldn’t let me go,” I tell him. Sir Jan had thrown me into the middle of the briar. The man had slabs of muscle, enough to tear the carriage door off and throw me clear before my uncle’s soldiers caught us. A strong man can throw a child of nine quite a way.

  “I know.” Father Gomst wipes the rain from his face, drawing his hand from forehead to chin. “A hook-briar can hold a grown man, Jorg.” If he could truly speak to God he would know the judgment on me and waste no more words.

  “I would have saved them.” The thorns hid me in their midst, held me. I had seen little William die, three flashes of lightning giving me the scene in frozen moments. “I would have saved them.” But the lie tastes rotten on my tongue. Would anything have held William from me? Would anything have held my mother back. Anything? All bonds can be slipped, all thorns torn free. It’s simply a matter of pain, and of what you’re prepared to lose.

  Greb jabs me and I’m back on the mountain. The stink of him reaches me even through the rain. “Keep moving.” It’s as if he didn’t even see me kill Avery for the same damn thing. Judgment…I’m ready for it.

  “Here.” John raises his hand and we all stop. At first I don’t see the arch, and then I do. A doorway rather than an arch, narrow and framed by the silver-steel of the Builders. It stands on a platform of Builder-stone, a poured surface still visible beneath the scatter of rocks. Twenty yards beyond is a pile of bones, an audience of skulls, some fresh, some mouldering, all cleaned of flesh by the dutiful ravens. “What happens if we’re not Select?” Dead men’s grins answer the Nuban’s question.

  John draws his sword, an old blade, notched, the iron stained. He goes to stand beyond the arch. The other three men take position around it, and Greb, who took over Avery’s position as Jorg-poker, pulls his knife. “You, big man. You’re first.”

  “When you pass through stand still and wait for the judgment. Move and I will kill you, without the mercy of the ritual.” John mimes the killing thrust.

  The Nuban looks around at the faces of the Select, blinking away raindrops. He’s thinking of the fight, wondering where his chance will come. He turns to me, making a single fist of his bound hands. “We have lived, Jorg. I’m glad we met.” His voice deep and without waver. He walks to the arch of judgment. His shoulders almost brush the steel on either side.

  “Fail—” The arch speaks with a voice that is neither male or female, nor even human.

  “Move aside.” John gestures with his blade, contempt on his face. He knows the Nuban is waiting his chance, and gives him none. “You next.” The Nuban is secured by two Select.

  I step forward, watching the reflections slide across the Builder-steel as I approach. I wonder what crimes stained the Nuban. Though he is the best of us you cannot live on the road and remain innocent, no matter the circumstance that put you there. With each step I feel the thorns tearing at me. They can’t hold me. But they held me on that night the world changed.

  “Judge me.” And I step through. Ice runs down my spine, a cold fire in every vein. Outside the world pauses, the rain halts in its plunge for an instant, or an age. I can’t tell which. Motion returns almost imperceptibly, the drops starting to crawl earthward once more.

  “Faaaaaiiiiilllllllu—” The word stretches out for an age, deeper than the Nuban’s rumble. And at the end it’s snatched away as if a knife sliced the throat it came
from.

  I believe in the arch. I deserved to fail, because I am guilty.

  Even so.

  “Join your friend.” John waves his sword toward the Nuban. His voice is wrong, a touch too deep.

  “The rain is too slow,” I say. The quick-time is fading from me but still the arch’s effects linger. I step back through the arch. God made me quick in any event, God or the Devil, and the Builders made me quicker. This time the arch had no comment, but before the Select can close on me I step through once more.

  Again the cold shock of transition. I ignore the arch’s judgment and dive forward, wrapped in quick-time, trailing it with me. John hardly flinches as I sever the ropes around my wrists on the sword he is so kind as to hold steady for me.

  “Sssssseeeeeellllect m—” While the arch speaks I take John’s knife from his belt and cut him a new smile. And before the blood comes I’m off, sprinting toward the Nuban. I’m still quick, but less so as I reach him and stab the first of his guards through the eye. I twist the blade as I pull it free, grating over the socket. The Nuban breaks the second man’s face with the back of his head.

  I chase Greb down. He runs although he has the bigger knife, and he thinks I’m as old as thirteen. My arm aches to stick John’s blade into the man, to sink it between his shoulders and hear him howl. But he sprints off a drop in the half-light before I reach him. I stop at the top and look down to where he sprawls at broken angles.

  Returning to the arch, I take slow steps. The rain comes in flurries now, weakening. The cold is in me at last, my hands numb. The Nuban is sat upon a rock by the bone pile, checking his crossbow for damage. He looks up as I draw near. It’s his judgment that matters to me, his approval.

  “We failed.” He nods toward the arch. “Maybe the Builders have been watching us. Wanting us to do better.”

  “I don’t care what they think of me,” I say.

  His brow lifts a fraction, half puzzled, half understanding. He puts the crossbow across his knees. “I’m as broken a thing as my gods ever made, Jorg. We keep bad company on the road. Any man would look good against them.” He shakes his head. “Better to listen to the arch than me! And better to listen to neither of us.” He slaps a hand to his chest. “Judge yourself boy.” He looks back to his work. And more quiet, “Forgive yourself.”

  I walk back to the arch, stepping around the corpses of the Select. I wonder at the ties that bound them, the bonds forged by the arch’s judgments. Those bonds seem more pure, more reasoned that the arbitrary brotherhood of the road that binds me to my own band of rogues, links forged and broken by circumstance. A yard from the arch I can see my reflection warped across the Builder-steel. The arch called “fail” for me, condemned me to the bone pile, and yet seconds later I was Select. Did I validate myself in the moments between?

  “Opinions are well and good,” I tell it. I have a rock in my hands, near as heavy as I can lift. “Sometimes it’s better not to speak them.” I throw the rock hard as I can and it slams into the cross support, breaking into jagged pieces.

  I set a hand to the scar left on the metal.

  “FAILure to connect,” the arch says.

  And in the end the arch has the right of it.

  My daughter, Maya, has loved and lost many cats. There was Boyboy, who went out one rainy Massachusetts night and never came back. In all likelihood, his was a grisly demise. Girly died of a heart attack at a vet’s office in Colorado Springs. A couple years later, the suave and debonair Dolphino felt called by the wild and disappeared into it. And then Melio, that scrappy street kitten from Fresno…let’s just say that Melio went to Maine. That’s no place for a Californian. We now have two very alive cats, Percy and Mungo. We’re doing our best to keep them that way.

  Maya had a bond with each of these lost pets. I will never forget the wail of grief when she heard of Girly’s death, or the glazed look in her eyes that lasted for weeks after Dolphino disappeared. They’re sad memories, but they’re ones that will forever be part of the childhood she’s now growing out of fast.

  Shawn Speakman asking me to contribute a story to his anthology coincided with the run-up to Maya’s thirteenth birthday. Prompted by him, I came up with a story that in many ways is for my daughter. I gave it to her on her birthday, a handmade version that I bound myself. And then I offered it to Shawn as well. Kind guy that he is, he accepted it.

  Expect no mad sorcerers, warrior princesses, or fantastical monsters in this story. This one is about a ghost cat named Michael Stein. He’s a clever cat, one that doesn’t let his unfortunate death stop him from giving an amazing gift to the girl he loves.

  — David Anthony Durham

  ALL THE GIRLS LOVE MICHAEL STEIN

  David Anthony Durham

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Michael Stein said.

  “Indeed,” Pax sighed. “It breaks my heart. She just has to get through it, though. They always do, eventually.”

  “But look at her!” Michael Stein said. “She’s…” He couldn’t think of the word. “She’s…”

  “Inconsolable?” Pax offered.

  The her was Lucy, and she did indeed look inconsolable.

  She lay on her bed, crying. It had been three days since the incident, but she hadn’t gotten any better. Her parents tried to soothe her. They let her miss the last few days of middle school, saying the summer would just have to begin early. They even proposed getting a new kitten.

  Michael Stein had been a bit put out by that, but he had nothing to worry about. Lucy wouldn’t hear of it. The very suggestion ripped a sob of grief out of her. She refused to leave her room. She refused to take her friend’s phone calls. She wouldn’t read any of her detective books. She wouldn’t even look at the shelves with the cat books, of which she had quite a collection. Usually, she spent hours each evening drawing feline forms in all their glory. Not anymore.

  Looking up at her from the floor, Michael Stein said, “I’ve tried everything.”

  He really had. Michael Stein had pulled out his full arsenal of techniques to cheer Lucy up. He had whipped himself back and forth across her ankles when she stood. He climbed on to the bed with her and kneaded the stuffed penguin she was attached to for some reason he couldn’t fathom. He curled up beside her and suckled on the edge of her old blanket. He even brushed his head on her chin and fired up the rumble of his full-on purr. Normally, that fixed just about any problem she had—even problems with boys.

  “You’re having a classic grief reaction,” Pax said, licking his forearm. “You’ll get through it. You’ll be all the wiser for it. Like me.”

  Michael Stein wished that Pax would quit with the old and wise act. He was annoying. But he was also right. Michael Stein couldn’t fix this. Even during the best days of his life, he had only been a medium-size tabby cat. Now…well, now he was a dead medium-size tabby cat. A ghost of his former self.

  Before he died, Michael Stein had lots of opinions about the dead cats he’d met. He’d spoken to plenty of them. All cats did. They see things that humans don’t, including the ghosts of departed cats. Michael Stein had found the sulky way they moped through their human’s homes kinda pathetic. They could go anywhere! Do anything! They weren’t bound to their humans. They didn’t need to coax food out of them or rely on them to change the litter. All of those physical needs were gone. Instead, they lingered on as pure vaporous energy. Considering that, why did they all stick around the same houses, watching the same lives of the people they’d lived with before they died?

  He used to argue about this with Pax, who was the ghost of an old cat that had belonged to Lucy’s mother when she was a girl. He’d died like thirty years ago! But the old geezer was still hanging around. He seemed to think the afterlife should consist of nothing more than lying curled in a ball at Lucy’s mother’s feet. The woman didn’t even know he was there! What was the use of that?

  Michael Stein had been sure that when he died he’d get up to all sorts of adventure
s. Once he was freed of any dependence on his humans he’d just take off. See ya. Been nice. Thanks for the catnip. He’d explore the world.

  But that was before he died. Now, he wasn’t so sure. A few days in the afterlife, and Michael Stein was starting to think he had misjudged the virtues of being dead.

  The whole ghost body thing wasn’t as much fun as he’d expected. He didn’t have to worry about getting hurt or killed anymore, but he couldn’t feel or smell or touch the world the way he used to. The things he thought he’d so enjoy about being dead just didn’t live up to his expectations.

  He’d always wanted to go right out onto the tiniest little tree branches in pursuit of the chickadees that seemed to think the entire garden belonged to them. When he was dead, he figured, he’d be light as a feather and could go anywhere they did. That was true. Problem was that when he got out on really thin branches his body would sink through them. He’d gotten right up beside a bird once, only to watch in frustration as the branch slipped through his body and he floated down to land in the bird pond.

  Worse still, he couldn’t actually touch the birds. He’d stalked a few his day first as a ghost. It was great right up until that last moment when his vaporous form crashed down upon the unsuspecting birds without having the slightest impact. Sometimes, when he’d really splattered them good, the bird might feel just enough to get a little nervous and fly away. It was terribly unsatisfying.

  More importantly, there was Lucy and all of her crying. If he could step back in time and change things, he would. He wouldn’t sneak out that fateful night. He wouldn’t focus all of his attention on that rabbit den. He’d have kept his wits about him, and the beast—he was never sure what exactly it was—wouldn’t have pounced on him. One moment he was about to sink his claws into a juicy rabbit. The next, something had caught him in its jaws. End of story.