Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  Completely inappropriate.

  • • • •

  My first thought when I went outside was that someone had died. The trees hung heavy with pale-eyed black birds. And not only the trees—lintels and rooftops and near every surface where a bird could perch. My hand went to the empty space in my chest, so as to prevent any of them from flying in. Bad enough I’d had to endure my own unwanted grief. I would not carry someone else’s.

  The space in my chest was cold. Heavy and empty at the same time. As I walked through the bird-lined streets, I saw others stop, push hands—flat and fingers spread—against themselves, as if to check for hollowness, or to prevent anything else from emerging.

  The Mourner was standing behind her shop counter, fingers bone-white on the edge of it. She gasped in a breath, and a scar that began at the outer corner of her left eye and traced down to her lips unknit itself and disappeared. She coughed, and a bird flew from her mouth.

  “I see that you are already aware that something has gone quite wrong,” I said.

  The girl coughed again, a thick, wet noise, and spat feathers onto the ground. She raised a hand to touch her lips, then let it fall again. “I do not feel at all well,” she said.

  Her eyes rolled back in her head, and I watched as she crumpled to the floor. As she fell, my ears were assaulted by the thunder of hundreds of wings.

  When her eyes opened they were again pale and shifting as moonstone. “Let me help you to the back,” I said.

  She nodded, and leaned, heavy, on my arm.

  I helped her onto the chaise. All of the knives on the table next to it were shattered, the empty birdcages reflected in their broken pieces.

  • • • •

  “It’s happened everywhere,” Sofie said, sipping from a teacup into which she had poured a liquid rather more robust than Earl Grey. “Old griefs reopening, birds emerging from the most inconvenient places.”

  “Have you heard any speculation as to why?” I asked.

  “Mama believes that something has affected the Mourners. A disease, like a flu, or a distempered air, that prevents them from carrying the griefs they have been retained to bear. It seems as good an explanation as any.”

  I looked outside the window, at trees so black with birds that one could scarce see the green of leaf behind them. “But for there to be so many—surely some of these are older griefs, ones that should well have healed by now, ones that should be gone. Sofie, there are so many birds.”

  She pressed her hand against her right side, just below her breast. “I know. Even had I mourned for him myself, my grief for Papa should have been over. The appropriate passage of time had been marked. None of it should have remained to hurt me. And yet this morning, a bird flew from me, and I wept for him.”

  • • • •

  As I walked home, I saw a woman with a bird of grief on her shoulder. It occurred to me as I did, that the bird that had crawled out of my chest had not tried to linger with me, as was the normal practice. One could bear one’s own grief for the allotted time, or one could hire a Mourner. One could not banish a bird otherwise.

  She walked past and all the birds rose up from the trees, blacking out the sky. I heard a cry, the cry of a woman, not the shriek of a bird, and felt the pull of wings in the empty space inside my chest.

  Then silence.

  The birds—all of them—were gone. The woman on the street stood, weeping.

  I could not say what it was that she wept for—the person who had been lost, or the reality that her mourning must now be over.

  I had not thought that the passing of a grief could also be a thing to mourn.

  • • • •

  I did not at first recognize the girl when I returned to her shop. She was unscarred, and terribly thin, as if there were not even blood between her bones and her skin. As well, her hair was all white feathers.

  “I would bear your grief for you, if I could,” she said, “but I do not think that I am able. The birds have flown. I will show you.”

  She looked like a bird herself as she walked away, feathers falling behind her. Her presence barely disturbed the air she passed through.

  She opened the door to a room hung with empty birdcages, all their doors open. Seeing them, I felt the brush of feathers along the inside of my bones.

  “I asked the birds to come back,” she said. “To be here. To be safe. A grief must be cared for, or it flies wild. But they are gone, and they do not return.

  “I am empty as a cage without them.”

  “I would think there are those better gone. Not all losses deserve to be mourned,” I said.

  “Loss begins earlier than you might think,” she said. “Grief is never solely about the person gone. It would not need to fly, if it were.”

  “But it is also never wholly free of that person,” I said. “If it were, it would not require being held in a cage.”

  • • • •

  I began, that day, to collect birdcages. I hung them in my room, close enough that they might chime together if brushed. I left the doors open, so that they might be a refuge, not a trap.

  • • • •

  The presence of the birds became normal. People reacted as if it were nothing to see small flocks of grief roosting along the main promenades. Women wore dresses made of feathers, and wove moonstones into their hair. Clothing became cut to display the empty spaces left in a body when the grief flew out, as if such a thing were something to be proud of.

  I did not dress myself in feathers. I wore nothing that displayed the empty cage of my bones.

  “I can give you the name of my seamstress. She’s a miracle with a needle,” Sofie said. “You’ll want to look fashionable if you’re going to find a new husband.”

  “I truly cannot imagine anything I would like less at this time,” I said.

  “You don’t … miss him, do you?” Sofie asked, her mouth twisting as if tasting something unpleasant. “I know the birds came back quite soon after his death. Perhaps something went wrong with your mourning.”

  My gaze fell to the embellished cutout in Sofie’s dress, marking the spot where her grief had emerged. “No, I do not miss him.”

  “Then you must buy yourself some new dresses, and look a proper part of society again. Have a flirtation, take a lover. It will do you good.

  “I know things have changed, but as my Mama says, if we are going to be forced to bear our own griefs, we must do so with style.”

  Her advice was kind, and well meant, but the grief I bore was not for him.

  • • • •

  I never saw the birds in my cages, but I knew they came. I would find feathers and other discarded evidence of their presence. At times, even their shadows lingered past their leaving.

  I did not need to see the cages full. I liked that they were there, waiting. That there was a choice of grief—to hold it close, or open the door and free it, to let it wing across the sky when it was time. That nothing was forced.

  • • • •

  I awoke one morning to find the wound in my chest closed over. No mark, no scar. It was as if it had never been.

  In one of the cages, a bird. White-feathered, eyes like black pearls.

  I did not close the cage door.

  © 2014 by Kat Howard.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kat Howard is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of over twenty pieces of short fiction. Her work has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, and Apex, among other venues. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, written with Maria Dahvana Headley, just came out in September from Subterranean Press. You can find her on twitter as @KatWithSword and she blogs at strangeink.blogspot.com.

  To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

  Enter Saunterance

  Matthew Hughes

  *

  Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles: Magic has replaced rationalism on the grand old
world of Novo Bantry, causing civilization to collapse. Returned from the horrors he encountered in the Seventh Plane, wizard’s henchman (and former hardboiled confidential operative) Erm Kaslo strives to discover who sent the multi-legged creatures that carried off the survivors who had taken shelter at Obron’s castle. But his employer has a surprise for him.

  To read the other stories in the series, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kaslo.

  *

  Back in Obron’s workroom, Kaslo told the wizard his theory that the reason their enemy had sent a fire elemental against them was because he wanted the fiery spirit to seize the noubles the op had originally acquired from the murderous thaumaturge, Asrat Gozon. “Fire cannot harm them,” he finished.

  “It could be,” Obron said, sifting through the multicolored orbs on his workbench. He picked up one, held it close to one eye, squinting. “Then we’d have to pose the question: ‘Why the noubles?’”

  “Magic,” said Kaslo, sitting atop a stool, his hands cradling a steaming mug of restorative punge. He and Bodwon had arrived back at the castle just as dawn was lighting the far horizon. The other man had gone straight to bed but Kaslo had come to his employer’s work room, where he’d found the wizard asleep at his bench, one cheek lying on another of his collection of ancient tomes.

  Obron put down the nouble. “But why send an elemental to recover three noubles when the sender is in the seventh plane, where noubles are as plentiful as pebbles are here?”

  Kaslo didn’t know. Neither did the wizard. But now Obron brightened and said, “But I have found out something about the other sending.”

  “The clickers?” Kaslo said.

  “They’re called preyns,” Obron said. He consulted a piece of paper on which he’d made notes. “They originated on an obscure world far up The Spray, and were bred up from some kind of shelled aquatic creature by a thaumaturge of considerable talent, a number of aeons ago.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t intend to find out,” the wizard said. “It’s probably not wise to allow such a name to enter one’s mind.”

  “Even after the passage of aeons?” Kaslo said.

  “Under the regime of sympathetic association,” Obron said, “time is not the barrier it used to be.” He consulted the paper again. “Their creator used them to overawe and terrify the inhabitants of the territory where he and his confederates ruled.”

  Kaslo repressed a shudder and disguised the action sipping from the mug of punge. “I could see that working,” he said.

  “Here’s the interesting part,” Obron went on. “The thaumaturge was one of a group of like-minded practitioners who held sway in the region. They had come to the place because it contained a spot where the third and seventh planes were adjacent and the veil between them more easily pierced.

  “Their plan was to build a device that would tap into the seventh plane and draw a certain kind of energy out of it. Their invention would also store the energy, so that they could draw upon it as they saw fit. They intended to perform some remarkable feats.”

  “Would the words ‘overweening pride’ and ‘unchecked ambition’ fit these ‘practitioners’?” Kaslo asked.

  “It would,” Obron said. “And theirs was the hubrists’ usual reward. The device malfunctioned. The resulting discharge turned a city and its surrounds into a desert and destroyed the world’s moon, which unfortunately was well inhabited.”

  “But the preyns survived,” Kaslo said.

  “They spent most of their time underground, in deep burrows. They were also used to fetch and carry between the planes, and some of them were in the seventh realm when the disaster occurred.”

  Kaslo finished the punge. He needed sleep, though the drink had sharpened his wits. “So,” he said, “the preyns connect us to this wizard who must not be named, who did his business in the seventh plane. Was he the one who so frightened Phalloon?”

  Obron waved away the supposition. “No. I have it on good authority that he survived the energy discharge. But when he sought to regain power he was destroyed.”

  “And yet we dare not mention his name?”

  “There are names,” Obron said, “and then there are names.”

  “I must sleep,” Kaslo said. He set the mug on the workbench and headed for the door. Before he reached it, he turned and said, “That energy, is it something we could use? To protect ourselves?”

  The wizard made a curious sound that Kaslo was slow to recognize as laughter. “No,” he said, once the fit had subsided, “not for a practitioner of the green school. Or the blue, for that matter.” He shook his head and made a tsking noise with his tongue and palate.

  Kaslo frowned. There had been a time when one of his frowns could cause strong and capable men to take a step back. But Obron just blinked at him. “Did I say something amusing?” the op asked.

  The wizard’s hands made dismissive flutters. “Just something unlikely,” he said. “The energy … well, it tends to accumulate in those who work with it, to deleterious effect.”

  “Like radiation?” Kaslo said.

  “I suppose. I thought I made that clear when we talked about it earlier.”

  Kaslo’s head was fatigue-fuzzy. “When did we talk about it? I don’t remember.”

  “Before you went to enter the whimsy.”

  The op cast his mind back. And the answer came. “The energy,” he said, “it’s the stuff that’s like weather in the seventh plane, but in our plane it’s …” He made a circular motion with one hand.

  “Exactly,” said the wizard. “It’s what we call evil.”

  • • • •

  The days passed and nothing happened. Kaslo went on two reconnaissance expeditions to the site of the whimsy, but saw nothing to concern him. Obron, when consulted, doubted that it would reappear, at least not in the near future.

  When the op asked for his reasons, the thaumaturge launched into an explanation that was dense with words like “fluxions” and “atypical congruencies.” Requests for explanations of these terms only led Kaslo deeper into thickets of non-understanding.

  “In simpler terms, please,” he said.

  “In simplest terms,” said the wizard, “he will not come against us soon because he cannot.”

  “His will is diminished?” Kaslo said.

  “Not at all. But his capacity to focus that will and direct events across the interplanar barrier is. For that he must gather strength.”

  “Was that why he stole our people?”

  “Indirectly.” Obron then expanded on the one word, but lapsed into the jargon of his craft: “volitionary incidence” and “cohered aptitudes.”

  Kaslo swore and went to look out the slit window. Obron spoke to his back, in a tone of sympathy. “You are frustrated.”

  The op regarded the horizon where the towers had once stood. “I am.”

  “I can understand. The change has reduced your effectiveness. It was a quality you prized.”

  “It was a quality I had earned,” said Kaslo, turning. “By sacrifice and difficult means.”

  Obron made a mollifying gesture. “And it was taken from you by an indifferent universe that acted on a seeming caprice.”

  “Yes.”

  “Whereas, equally capriciously, the universe has taken a noddy like me—or as I used to be—and raised me up.”

  “That is not your fault,” Kaslo said.

  “Even so,” said the thaumaturge, “it must rankle.”

  The op blew a small explosion of air over his lower lip. “Too mild a word. Try ‘infuriates.’”

  He told Obron he wanted action. He wanted revenge. Most of all, he wanted to know what to do. The wizard’s hand moved to indicate the books spread on his workbench, and a pile of papers held down by the ball of iron that he believed had come out of a dragon.

  Kaslo looked where his employer pointed. He saw numbers, diagrams, words, and symbols, connected by lines and arrows. They meant nothing to him.


  But Obron said, “I am making progress. One thing leads to another, and sometimes to several others.

  “Do you see this book?”

  Kaslo looked at the thick tome covered in green leather. “It doesn’t look as old as the others,” he said.

  “Yet it is. But aeons ago, a thaumaturge put it in a safe place, where it remained, immune from time’s effects.” Obron assumed an expression of one who has undertaken a demanding task and achieved a first-rate result. “My studies allowed me not only to discover its existence and location, but to retrieve it.”

  “Congratulations,” said Kaslo.

  “It is,” said Obron, ignoring his helper’s tone, “the Twentieth Aeon’s definitive text on interplanar mechanics.”

  “Ah,” said the op.

  “Well you may say, ‘Ah,’” said the wizard. “It is a complex and thorny subject, but I am coming to terms with it.”

  “Are we stronger today than we were yesterday?”

  “Yes, but not as strong as we shall be tomorrow.”

  Kaslo felt like a child who must trust in the power of his parent. He pushed the emotion away and concentrated on what was important. “You said ‘Twentieth Aeon.’ Does the book mention a face of black iron or the blood of a dragon?”

  Obron nodded. “It alludes to them. The references are not as clear as I would like.”

  Kaslo grunted. If things weren’t clear to Obron, they would be pure murk to him. He looked at the papers again, with all their inexplicable markings in the wizard’s neat hand. He picked up the ball of iron, the better to see a particularly complex diagram, but a clearer sight brought no clarity of understanding.

  He hefted the black ball in his hand and a question occurred. “Will there be dragons in our new age? If so, where will they come from?”

  Obron’s face now showed the suppressed glee of one who knows a good secret but is not yet ready to tell it. “I had an inkling,” he said, “even before the change. In a day or two, I should have the complete answer.”

  “You seem pleased,” said Kaslo.

  “Too mild a word,” said his employer. “Try ‘delighted.’ That is, if my inkling was right.”