Fantasy Gone Wrong

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  “Meisherane, arise and look at me. Your death is far from the legend your human accomplice has told of.”

  Hamster shuddered as the Lereian lord’s words resonated throughout the cavern with powerful authority. The northerner stood on the rough ground at the base of the dragon’s head, wife and child standing at his side. Kettlebank was a mere few steps from them.

  The old man nodded sagely to his nephews, ignoring Hamster altogether. “Watch now, you’ll see something you’ll never see again.”

  I should have known the old bastard knew more than he let on. Three visits.

  One of the Aishails was the first to realize the truth. “Farshik! You lied—”

  The expletive burned in Hamster’s ears but he ignored it—kept his eyes on the dragon. The named dragon. Come on, fire the lot of them!

  Meisherane blinked. One of the nephews shouted; the Aishails broke into an argument over whether it was a stunt. Only Kettlebank and the Lereians were unsurprised as Meisherane’s head came up off the ground in a neat sweep that took in the entire cavern, then settled near Lord Hanshian.

  The Lereian’s pale face had turned red. His eyes glowed with a deep omnipresent brown that reminded Hamster of the dragon’s own. There was no way to get to safety. No way to retreat back up the tunnel.

  Mei knew, he realized. The tail. He was trying for a diversion.

  “Meisherane, your misdeeds have been noted,” Lord Hanshian announced. “We are here to escort you back to Ajagameara. Come now and face your judgment.”

  “But, Papa, I thought you said I could slay it!” The kid was looking at Hamster.

  The back of Hamster’s arms grew cold despite the rising heat in the cavern. The kid’s mad.

  “Gushi, we’ll talk about killing later. Be silent and you can return the jewels of the Twelve.” At his father’s words, the little boy looked elated. Puffed his chest out like a lion.

  “The jewels of the Twelve?” Hamster whispered.

  The Lereians . . . they are not Lereians . . . heard him.

  The woman’s words came sharp and stinging. “You were unlucky to make your pact with this pirate spawn of a dragon, human. He is accused of stealing the entire wealth of our nation for himself.”

  ::Borrowed. I only borrowed them,:: Meisherane broke in, his silent words echoing in Hamster’s head.

  Lady Madashiri ignored him. “Never has such an incident been known in our history. The proof of his deeds is all around you.”

  “You mean they’re real?” Hamster stuttered, looking up and around at the glowing jewels. He turned on his friend, ignoring the sharp teeth and claws. “You said they were made of glass—the effect of water on limestone. Glass beads of caught sunlight.”

  ::Yes, and you believed me.:: Meisherane’s mind voice held a faint note of disbelief. ::Far more pathetic than thinking gingered wine can heal::

  “But. But. If they were real . . .” Hamster’s head shook wildly, taking in little of the dragon and less of the watchers. His gaze sharpened on the high walls—the thin ledges holding the gemstones. “You bastard. I wouldn’t have had to pander to these lordlings if I had just taken one of those beads!” ::Is that my fault?::

  ::You can create opportunity of my presence. Light beads become jewels. Bones become testaments to atrocities. I have heard you have a skill for such things,:: Meisherane had said.

  That’s why Meisherane had wanted to work with him—because Hamster was the best of his kind. He could feed them both and make more besides. If only I had known, I could’ve . . . left. Spent years living in wealth. “I can’t believe you lied to me!”

  Meisherane turned to face him and let out a hiss that carried steam. ::Even I would not trust the secret of our treasure to a human, at least not one striving toward my own genius. Even one who falls so short.::

  Hamster stared up at his partner of ten years—one of the few beings he thought that truly understood him. His face grew warm at the realization he was wrong, far wrong. “Was it all a game then?”

  Meisherane hissed. A laugh. ::Ah, in my lifetime, it is more of a single joke than an entire game. You wouldn’t be worth that much of my time.::

  Anger grew, burned up through Hamster’s chest and out his mouth as if he too could let out steam and fire. “You mean to say this was a joke . . . a joke on my entire life? I can’t believe it! Who could do such a thing?”

  “A joke such as you have played on the beliefs of each to pass through this chamber,” Lord Kettlebank interrupted, from the far side of Meisherane. “Though for my own part, I’ve enjoyed it, young man. It was a good charade while it lasted. There was a reason I came back more than once. Teaching these young bulls to see behind the facade. It is an important lesson for any who wish to rule . . . or to become traders.” The elderly statesman turned to the two from Aishail.

  The two exchanged embarrassed glances. “We were looking for a way to bring tokens back to sell off port,” one admitted. “Dragon’s bones would fetch up well.”

  At a different time, Hamster would have laughed at their audacity—two men after his own heart. Instead, he cursed. “I don’t go causing people harm! As if anyone wants to see reality—I gave them adventure. Just as they asked for. And you—” He stalked toward Meisherane, hands clenching into fists. His cheeks burned with heat. “You—I thought you were my partner!”

  He would have given the smug dragon a fistful, but Kettlebank grabbed his arm. The old man couldn’t hold him with strength, yet his words caught Hamster solid. “He’s a dragon, boy—nothing you can do to hurt him. Best let him go before this becomes more.”

  Hamster wilted, let the old lord pull him back. Meisherane remained unmoved. Imperial. As if Hamster’s retreat was no surprise.

  “Now then, Meisherane. It is time to return.” Lady Madashiri said.

  ::Yes, Gir Madashiri. There is nothing left for me here.:: Hamster knew the derision in the dragon’s sending. He had heard it before in his own voice.

  He struggled not to curse as a wisp of smoke bellowed from Lady Madashiri’s mouth, encompassing her and the other two not from Lerei in a fog. A strong twisting wind bashed him against the cavern wall. When the air cleared, three dragons stood where once there was one. Make that four. A small arrow-shaped head, pale brown with spindly head ridges, peeped out from beneath the heavyset gold-brown dragon.

  There was little to do but stare. They were fearsome beasts. Even the boy was ten times his size. Heart pounding, Hamster almost cried out.

  First the lady, her scales a deep bronze, took to the air, breezing past the spray of the waterfall and out into the open sky. Lord Hanshian followed, trailed by his silver-gray son.

  ::I’ll be back for the jewels tonight. I’ll be your curse if you’re not gone from here by then.:: The little boy’s voice was no less high-pitched as a dragon. Deadly nonetheless. Hamster trembled.

  Then Meisherane was the only dragon left on the floor of the cavern. The beginning and the end. If he didn’t look up, Hamster didn’t have to see gold-backed Lord Hanshian resting on the ledge across from the top of the waterfall. Waiting.

  Meisherane glanced down and met Hamster’s eyes.

  ::This has been a fun adventure. But truth be told, you are not as smart as you believe. After all, as your compatriot Kettlebank knows well, dragons do not leave bodies—we burn to ash upon our death.:: With a flick of his head and a burst of disparaging steam, Meisherane lifted his luminescent wings and sailed upward into the day.

  Hamster’s eyes stayed focused on the patch of blue visible through the broken eggshell of the ceiling long after the dragons disappeared. Partners. I should’ve known. He let out a long soft sigh.

  “Don’t you dare.” Lady Orshire’s shout broke Hamster from his reverie and made him turn. The two Aishails had paused less than a step away—fists taut and white-knuckled. “I won’t have you fighting in my presence,” she told them.

  As the brothers exchanged guilty looks, Hamster shivered in relief. He turned to bow hi
s gratitude, but before he could the lady from Turmalin shook her head in strong disapproval. “How could you be so thoughtless,” she demanded. “Taking advantage of people like this. You should be ashamed.”

  Hamster couldn’t respond. There were no words left to save the day. Not for him. It’s done. It’s over. Least I had ten years from the gallows. A shimmering arc of color brought a rainbow out of the waterfall, stealing his attention. Sunlight on water and gemstones—mesmerizing, as it had been on that very first day. Maybe I could still take one. If we worked together. . . .

  Kettlebank’s hand came down on his arm. Tightened. “Don’t even think it. I knew about the ashes from the first. I let you go on only because you weren’t hurting anyone. It was an adventure after all. But there is no more for you here. Don’t become what you’ve warned against.” The old man gave a nod toward the display of sheep bones and armour.

  “You’d let him go free?” One of the brothers demanded.

  “He’s lost the one thing he’s ever had of value. What more would you do? Kill him? If the dragons didn’t, then why should we?” No one seemed to want to answer.

  Then Kettlebank’s first words hit Hamster. Ashes.

  Wonder what it’d take to get that much ashes? He wondered. As a bold new plan took shape in his mind’s eye, Hamster nodded his agreement to Lord Kettlebank—let the old man lead him toward the stairs. First to get out of here. Then to wait out the boy’s—the dragon’s—return. Then I can start over.

  Plan seeding in his imagination, Hamster offered his current batch of adventurers a rueful smile. “I did say your deposits were not refundable, right?”

  THE MURDER OF MR. WOLF

  Josepha Sherman

  Josepha Sherman is a fantasy novelist, folklorist, and editor, who has written everything from Star Trek novels to biographies of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) to titles such as Mythology for Storytellers (from M.E. Sharpe) and Trickster Tales (August House). She is also the owner of Sherman Editorial Services (www.ses-ny.com). You can visit her at www.josephasherman.com.

  THE NAME’S PEEP. BEAU Peep. Yeah, that’s right. Go ahead, make your jokes. Heard them all hundreds of times already.

  Want another laugh? My colleague, who’s a pretty, sharp-eyed young woman who’d break your arm before you could pull a knife on her, is named Marie Gobeur. That’s right: Gobeur. French for sheep. Beau Peep and sheep. And no, I do not herd her. Nothing between us but business.

  Well, names aside, we’re good at what we do, damned good. We’re detectives for the Crown. Cole Godhebog, Cole the Magnificent, uses the guise of “merry old soul” whenever it pleases him—but there’s a sharp intelligence behind that fun-loving facade. And he doesn’t like his people killing each other.

  Which generally means enter Peep and, oh hell, go with it, Sheep. Okay, it was a nice spring day, and Marie and I had just tied up the last paperwork on the Eater case. You might have read about that one, since the papers love Crimes of Passion. Seems a small-time swindler, Peter “Pumpkin” Eater, had accused his wife of messing around with another man. He decided to cut down on the food bills by keeping Mrs. Eater under lock and key and forgetting to feed her. Fortunately for her, the neighbors noticed they hadn’t been seeing her around much, and we were called in. Mr. Eater’s now getting prison food, and the former Mrs. Eater is now, rumor has it, shacking up with Tom Piperson.

  So there we were, actually without a case for the first time in neither of us could remember how long.

  “Hickery Doc’s?” Marie suggested.

  Why not? We strolled to Hickery Doc’s Bar down on the corner. Doc’s a retired cop himself and serves cheap beer and the best smoked meats in town, and you can usually find off-duty cops or detectives hanging out there talking shop.

  A good crowd was in there today, cops and even a few forensic mages, one of the latter entertaining the crowd with fireworks of colored sparks. Soon Marie was flirting in a what-the-hell sort of way with one of the cops, a wiry young guy named Jack Candlestick who didn’t have a real chance with her, and I, ignoring the noise around me, was just about to bite with great relish into one of Doc’s overstuffed smoked beef sandwiches when a voice chilly with malice said almost in my ear, “Detective Peep.”

  Hell. Him. A good day ruined.

  Rather than jumping the way he’d expected, I took a big, defiant bite out of the sandwich and chewed, savoring the taste and taking my time. I followed that with a good swig of beer, swallowed, decided against a belch as being over the top, and only then answered, “Yeah.”

  I didn’t have to turn who knew who was there. Only one guy has a voice like that: the Crooked Man. It’s not his real name, of course, and he isn’t deformed. Physically. But it’s a good one for a Crown Security man, for which, of course, read “secret service.”

  Marie had noticed what was going on, and moved back through the crowd to my side, leaving the suddenly bereft Jack without a backward glance. “Now what?”

  There’s no love lost between our branch of the legal service and his. We generally handle all the nice, ordinary crimes, like murder. The Crooked Man handles all the cases the Crown officially refuses to acknowledge and involves us when he needs us. You might have read about what the media dubbed “The Jack and Jill Murder/Suicide.” What you didn’t hear was the whole story, because the young lovers hadn’t just been members of the In Crowd, they’d been cousins of the royal family—and no, I’m not going to name names—and they’d also been stoned out of their minds when they took that dive off the hill. Yeah, it had been the Crooked Man’s doing that all the story didn’t get out.

  “You put away the Red Gang,” he said with chill relish—only the Crooked Man could have managed that.

  “Yeah,” I said warily. They’d been a bunch of teenage punks, smalltime hoods who’d been stupid enough to try their inept hands at drug running. As most of them had been legal age, we weren’t going to see them around for some time. “And let me guess,” I continued. “You’re going to tell us we missed someone in the great roundup.”

  “Little Red.”

  “Oh come on!” Marie protested. “She’s just a kid! A rotten kid, maybe, but definitely not prosecutable as an adult.”

  “Not in our jurisdiction,” I agreed. “She did something wrong, send her to Juvenile.”

  The Crooked Man smiled thinly, which was not a pretty sight. “Juvenile doesn’t handle murder.”

  The murder scene was pretty messed up, which is, unfortunately, usually the way with crimes in the middle of the forest: Cops get there first, and they’re used to cob blestone streets, not to the woods and have little idea how not to trample plants that might have held clues or break branches that might have been already broken by a criminal. They had a white-faced, foul-mouthed Little Red in cuffs by the time Marie and I got there, and a basket lay on its side, spilling out what looked like innocent sausages and bread.

  And there lay the body, facedown in the mud. Male, burly, well-dressed—and with the back of his skull bashed in. The mud was mostly made from his blood.

  We flashed our badges. Only a few cops caught the names on those badges: You could tell, because they were the ones fighting grins. “Who have we got?” I asked.

  “His I.D. says he’s a Mr. Ivar Wolf. Wolf Real Estate.”

  That couldn’t be the whole story. Marie and I exchanged a quick glance. The Crooked Man wouldn’t have been called in over a real estate agent’s death.

  Okay, so Mr. Wolf had been more than he’d seemed. Someone, maybe, in the same branch of business as the Crooked Man.

  I crouched to examine the body. Nothing outstanding, other than that bashed-in skull. Something not quite blunt had done the job. Like a rock. Spontaneous crime? Spur of the moment decision? Or was someone being cute and making it look like a spontaneous crime? That blow certainly would have been enough to do in the unfortunate Wolf. Whether or not there were any other signs of violence on the body. . . .

  I straightene
d with a sigh. Determining that would be the work of the forensic magicians. Instead I did my own hunt for the murder weapon.

  Right. Try finding a rock in the forest. Assuming that the murder weapon had been a rock. Assuming that there hadn’t been someone smart enough to carry it off.

  Marie, meanwhile, was doing a good job of matching up what clear footprints were available against the feet of the corpse and against those of the cops. Only one possible partial print that didn’t match up, but it was so very partial, thanks to the cops trampling the site as they had, that it didn’t say much else. Other than that it couldn’t have been made by Little Red, either.

  Little Red, who was still swearing at the cops. And whom we now had to question.

  Lucky us.

  The forensic magicians got there in their usual way: A great gust of wind that nearly knocked us all over and a clap of thunder that is, so I’ve been told, actually nothing more dramatic than air being displaced by their sudden arrival. Efficient way to travel, but no thank you, I like my stomach’s contents to stay put. I’d rather stick to standard, safe, nonnauseating walking or riding.

  The sudden arrivals were a standard team of three, the most useful magical number: two men, one tall and skinny, one short, dark, and stocky, and one woman, plain but with gorgeous red hair in a long braid down her back. All three of them were in the standard forensic mage uniform of plain blue tunic and trousers with the royal insignia on a breast pocket—a more practical getup than mage robes at a murder scene.

  I recognized all three of them; we’d worked before on a few cases. We did the standard “Ken, Ilana, Tom, how’s it going?” bit, and then they got down to business. Ilana, the redhead—if you couldn’t figure it out by the name—whose specialty is clue preservation, put a stasis spell on the partial footprint so that Marie and I could tote it about without it crumbling. Ken, the tall guy, and Tom, the stocky one, cast glowing spells over and around the body and crime scene in general that gave them the needed data to quickly determined that yes, the blow to the head had killed Wolf and no, there were no other signs of violence. A search spell found no murder weapon either, though all three mages were pretty sure from the mineral feel they got from the fatal wound that it had been a rock. Forensic magicians are strictly Righthand Path, which meant no necromancy, no dead man rising up and naming his killers. I understand that a reanimated corpse doesn’t really remember how it died, anyhow, so why risk your soul asking it anything?