Magic and Mayhem: A Collection of 21 Fantasy Novels

by Jasmine Walt

“Musta been hard. Bein’ a doctor, not bein’ able to heal your kin.”

  Avery didn’t have to answer. “We sought help, but ...”

  He drained his glass. He saw that Janx had finished his, too, and rose to refill them both. From the kitchen, he said, “A light that can kill, cause plague—we had nothing that could fight that, not before the processors were complete, maybe not even now. When I think of Hissig, I still remember those days, of tending to Mari and Ani as they faded, day after day ...” He heard his voice grow thick. “I had just enough money left for their alchemical preservation, internment and mausoleum.”

  “I’m sorry,” Janx said.

  Avery nodded, unable for the moment to do anything else.

  When he could, he rejoined the whaler, and they sipped their whiskeys and watched the fire.

  The time had come.

  Avery turned to the whaler. “So. You want to know about Captain Sheridan and Commander Hambry. About why I needed to know how to pick a lock. Very well, then. Here is the story. Afterward, I’ll need your help to devise some plan of action. It’s why I contacted you. We need proof, and I think you’re the man to help me get it.”

  After Avery had told the tale of Sheridan’s and Hambry’s espionage, he and Janx sat there in silence, logs popping in the background. Eventually Janx said, “That’s a hell of a story, Doc.”

  “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

  Janx’s eyes speared Avery. “So how did it feel?”

  “How did what feel?”

  “You know.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Janx looked at him in exasperation. “Killing Hambry. How’d it feel?”

  “Ah.” Avery found it interesting that of everything he had told the whaler, Janx would fix on that. “I was sick.”

  “But how did you feel?”

  Avery started to answer, then saw Janx lean forward in his seat. As he did, the shadows shifted around him, and his eyes fell into a dark pool. Still, they glittered. He said nothing, but Avery could feel some strain coming off of him. Obviously the question was important. Perhaps some test.

  Avery remembered watching Hambry plummet to his death, remembered him falling, falling. He remembered Paul’s corpse, his staring eyes.

  “It felt ... good,” Avery said.

  Janx nodded. He drained his glass and stood. To Avery’s surprise, the whaler poured a drink for them both. “It was your first?” he asked.

  “Well ...” Avery started to say that he had seen many deaths as a doctor, but that wasn’t what Janx had meant. “Yes.”

  Janx passed him the glass, then made a toast. “To your first.” He drank.

  Avery hesitated. To your first. The words sounded ominous. After a moment, he tipped his glass. The drink burned his throat. “Hopefully my last.”

  “We’ll see. If you really want to begin this business, though, I don’t think it will be. You prepared for that, Doc?”

  Avery studied him. Janx was serious but no longer tense.

  “I would prefer not to kill anyone,” Avery said.

  Janx sat down. “How d’you intend to start it, then? What exactly is it you want done? Sheridan’s a traitor, you say. A spy. There may be others. If you’re right, and say I believe you, moving against them will be tricky.”

  “That’s exactly why I need your help. First we need proof. If we can get that, we can hand the evidence over to the authorities. I was hoping with your connections—if you’re as plugged into the underground as you claim—we might arrange for Sheridan to be ... tailed. Those that did it would follow her and gather evidence. We’ll need professionals.”

  Janx grinned, and it was not an entirely reassuring grin. “I know just the people.”

  “Excellent. We’ll find who she’s meeting—the other spies, of course, but most important is her handler. The spymaster. If we can find him, or her, we can bring down the whole network.” If they could do that, he thought, his mermaid would be safe.

  Janx rubbed his forehead. “She may not go to her handler much, if at all, Doc, from what I know about spies. How’re we gonna make sure she sees him?”

  “Leave that to me.”

  6

  “You see yourself the improvement in her,” said Doctor Wasnair, stabbing at the woman’s medical chart. He, Avery and three of the other committee members stood over Patient X’s bed. She looked quite well today, attractive and healthy, yet she slumbered on, unaware of their discussion.

  “Her fever’s lower,” Avery allowed. “But how can she ever get better in this place?” He gestured around them.

  The subbasement the lab was located in was dank and dark. Composed like the rest of Fort Brunt of huge stone blocks, the room stank of mold and strange chemicals, and Avery constantly feared that some nasty infection would creep into his patient. Yet the committee would not move her. This was one of the Navy’s secret labs, and it was covered in work benches, instruments, crammed with cold storage units, festooned with weird things in jars and huddling under dangerous substances in innumerable vials. Avery hated just to step foot in here, and yet the committee would see no change despite his repeated attempts.

  “Nonsense,” Wasnair said. “This place is having no ill effect on her. Quite the reverse, I think—and that is what you want, isn’t it? Hasn’t it been you that’s led the charge in bringing her back, as opposed to studying her anatomy?”

  Avery nodded as tolerantly as he could. “Yes, but it is in spite of this place that she’s improved. I say her recovery would accelerate if she were moved, perhaps to a place with fresh air, a view of the sun.”

  Dr. Wasnair sniffed. He was a tall, skinny man, with spotted skin, a thin nose, and a worse comb-over than Avery’s. “The sun! The sun will not cure her. Only our treatments will, and we cannot house her in the main hospital.”

  Avery sighed. He knew he could not win this battle. Best to let it go for now so as not to endanger his standing with the others, who did not appreciate his obstinacy on the matter. The men and women of the committee were secretive and mysterious, used to conducting strange and likely unethical experiments far away from prying eyes. In theory their studies were intended to help win the war or at least stave off defeat for a while longer. Rumors spoke of dark, desperate research being conducted on lower sublevels, resurrection projects, alchemical plagues, but Avery’s clearance wasn’t high enough for him to venture down there.

  “Very well,” he said. “She stays. Now—if we can move on to discussing the change in the antibody solution. I think increasing the levels is a mis—”

  Alarms blared throughout the lab. Sharp, heavy blades of sound.

  The doctors and scientists stopped what they were doing and stared up at the ceiling, as if trying to see through the heavy stone. It wouldn’t surprise Avery if a few of them could. Gods alone knew what they had done to themselves. Some barely looked human, with translucent skin and colorless eyes, some with veins that glowed slightly, sometimes red, sometimes purple. Rumors maintained that some of them were over a century old, that they had even performed research for the Drakes themselves.

  “An attack,” hissed Dr. Evra Sayd, a squat woman with thick lips and bulging eyes. Too-visible veins ran beneath her grayish, papery skin. Hair like a mop haloed her large head.

  “Damn it all,” said Dr. Wasnair. “I’d hoped conquering Es’hem would have delayed them more.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Ragund said. “Battle’s not our place. Let the grunts handle it.”

  “It matters if we lose,” Dr. Sayd snapped, looking suddenly afraid.

  “We should send a member up to be our eyes,” Dr. Sayd said. “If the battle goes ill for us, we need to prepare.”

  “A junior member,” added Sharra Winegold, swiveling her bespectacled gaze to Avery.

  All eyes turned to him.

  “Very well,” Avery said. “I’ll go. Just don’t make any decisions regarding our patient while I’m away.”

  Dr. Wasnair smiled th
inly. “We wouldn’t think of it, Doctor. Now go. I want a full report when you return.”

  Alarms blared overhead as Avery made his way through the reinforced subbasement tunnels and up through the bowels of the fortress, and he felt a flutter in his belly with every strident peal. Periodically he passed through checkpoints and had to sign out. He rose up through four levels before finally reaching the ground floor, where he found himself surrounded by soldiers tugging on jackets and helmets, following shouting commanders toward the main entrances. The soldiers looked especially grim, and Avery didn’t wonder why. If Octung had decided to launch its navy against the Hissig-based fleet at last, then the end was finally upon them. Avery tasted bile in the back of his throat and hoped he didn’t embarrass himself by throwing up.

  Following a phalanx of soldiers, he emerged from the fortress into the night. The wind off the sea braced him, and as he breathed in the acrid, electric taste he felt his eyes water. Lightning blasted across the dark waves, and foaming crests broke against the black rocks of the beach. Hundreds of military ships heaved up and down on the swells. Some swarmed with sailors readying for battle.

  Avery stood on the broad stoop of the fortress, staring out over the sea, shoulders hunched, hands shoved into jacket pockets. He saw no sign of the enemy. No warships, no shells exploding. He could not even hear gunfire. When the next phalanx of soldiers jogged past, he called out, “Where’s the enemy?”

  The soldiers did not reply. Numerous units mustered in formations on the shore as if awaiting an enemy landing party. They loaded guns and mounted machine gun emplacements, took positions behind barricades built long ago, and dropped into trenches that had been cut into the hard rock of the beach for just such a day. And still there was no sign of an enemy.

  The knots in Avery’s belly began to unwind. It was a relief to be out of the labs. If only it weren’t so damned cold. Shivering, feeling his sinuses begin to run, he waited.

  A familiar shape hurried by, then paused when it noticed him. “Look at you, out of the labs. I thought you’d turned into a mole like the rest.”

  Avery smiled, or tried to. “Not yet,” he said.

  “Well, stay safe,” Lt. Hinis said. She had adjusted well to life on land, Avery thought. In times of peace she would have been allowed to retire from military life after her injury, but at the moment a well-trained woman with one good arm was better than nothing.

  “Can I ask where the enemy is?” he asked, before she could rush off.

  “They’re comin’ from the water.”

  “Submarines? The harbor’s too shallow.”

  “Shit, I wish it was subs. I wish it were anything but what we’re getting.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Gotta go. ‘luck, Doc.”

  She hurried up the beach and dropped into a trench swarming with activity, and he frowned, staring out over the water, waiting. His legs began to ache. He was just about to retreat indoors for a cup of coffee when, without warning, it happened. The whole world seemed to stop. All his attention riveted on that one insane thing.

  Water burst on the beach directly before a certain phalanx of soldiers, not far from Lt. Hinis’s trench. Spray glittered under the moonlight, and some awesome, monstrous form exploded from the surf. Time may have slowed for Avery, but the soldiers were prepared for it. Commanders screamed orders, and gunfire sounded. Tracer rounds flickered through the dark and punched into the shape that had materialized from the harbor.

  Undeterred, it clambered up the beach toward the soldiers, claws snapping with cracks like thunder. At the sight, Avery felt the strength sap from his limbs.

  At first he was not sure what he was seeing. It was simply some nightmare given substance, all claws and weird insectile limbs sticking out at odd angles, mandibles snapping, sparks flashing. But then, when the water sloughed away from its scaled armor, and the lights along the beach picked it out a little bit more, he realized what it was, and a part of him wanted to laugh.

  It was, quite simply, a lobster. Or rather its distant ancestors had been lobsters. This abomination had been spawned by the far-flung descendents of the first lobsters to survive the encroaching foulness that had gripped the ocean a millennium ago. Over twenty feet tall, perhaps a hundred long, the creature was not a thing of the sane world. Mutated and made strange by the sea, it was a horror, with too many claws, eyes sticking out at odd places, some with antennae growing through them. Slabs of armor overgrew each other, creating odd mounds. Lightning arced from claw to claw, from claw to antennae, from twisted legs to gnashing mouthparts. It was a mad thing, an electric thing, a true scion of the Atomic Sea.

  It clambered up the beach, pincers clacking, and gunfire slammed into it from half a dozen positions. Lightning flashed from one of its strange claws into a group of soldiers. White fire exploded, and screaming men and women flew through the air. The atomic lobster clacked its claws again, and another burst of electricity skewered the man operating the machine gun. The gun and its heavy shells erupted, spraying fire and shrapnel into the soldiers behind the barricade. Those in the trench, some on fire, scrambled out, howling in agony. One was Lt. Hinis.

  In a rage, half a dozen troops ran at the decapod, guns spitting. To his shock, Avery realized that one of them was Hinis, slapping at the flames on her right stump with a hand that held an automatic rifle. Her one-armed silhouette was easily recognizable.

  When she and the others in her group drew within ten yards of the decapod, it opened its mandibles and did the strangest thing of all.

  It screamed.

  It was a high, weird wail, one that reminded Avery of nails across a chalkboard, but amplified immeasurably. The wall of horrible, teeth-rattling sound hit Hinis and the others, and it had an effect Avery never would have believed had he not seen it firsthand. The lobster screamed—and the soldiers melted.

  Like candles with a flame set too high, Hinis and the others wilted under the blast of sound and melted from the tops of their heads to their feet. The flesh and bones, brain and muscle, it all dissolved into fluid, and like heated wax the soldiers’ bodies puddled at their feet, which liquefied as well.

  “No!” Avery shouted, but of course there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do.

  The crustacean scuttled over the melted figures toward the men and women in the trenches and behind the barricades. Already it was weakening under the hail of bullets, but it still struggled up the beach relentlessly.

  Before it reached the barricades, more bursts of foam and water erupted from the shore behind it, and more decapods scuttled up out of the water, claws snapping, lightning arcing. Half a dozen at first, then a dozen, then two dozen of the crustaceans picked their way across the beach toward the soldiers. The men and women fought back, firing with everything they had. The decapods’ shells absorbed all but the largest-caliber weapons, and their lightning blasts destroyed the machine gunners and their guns. Commanders shouted for heavy artillery to be brought to bear, but the huge pieces took time to maneuver, and the battle could be over by then.

  Breathless, shivering, fearing that the end had come at last and wondering how it had happened, how the Octunggen had manipulated these nightmares, perhaps even bred them in the cauldron of the sea, Avery took stock. He had no guns, no weapons of any sort, and they were all but useless against the creatures anyway.

  The lobsters swarmed up the beach, snapping men in two with their claws, spearing them with bolts of electricity, and, when they deemed it prudent, melting them with unearthly screams.

  The crustaceans overran the troops’ positions. Men and women fell back, and back. Melted flesh ran across the stones.

  Several of the soldiers had been injured, and they lay on the ground bleeding—from shrapnel wounds mainly, caused by exploding machine gun mounts. The doctor in Avery could not sit by. Summoning what was left of his courage, he rushed down the beach. Other medics, embedded in the phalanxes, crouched over the injured, giving what aid they could, but there w
ere too few of them.

  Just as Avery approached the nearest injured soldier, three decapods broke through directly before him.

  Claws snapping, they rushed in. He could smell their mineral reek, see the barnacles hugging their armored sides, hear the rasp as sections of their carapaces scraped against others. Lightning crackled from claw and mandible. The lead crustacean drew near and towered over him, stalks waving above its head, mouthparts gnashing.

  Avery jumped back. The crustacean drove on. Avery retreated, knowing as long as he drew the creature’s attention it wouldn’t attack the soldier he’d been coming to help. The other two crustaceans found other targets.

  The decapod followed Avery, who backed away all the way to the façade of Fort Brunt. Heart thumping, pores streaming with sweat, Avery threaded his way through the columns before the massive main doors. At last he tripped over a dead man that had been torn apart and flung against a pillar. The decapod advanced toward him implacably.

  Avery tried to rise and flee, but he slipped in blood and fell.

  The decapod opened its mouthparts to scream.

  SNAP.

  Avery heard the tremendous, metallic sound, then another, and another, and all at once a strange hum. The hum grew into a great wall of noise that washed over him and the beach, filling him with pain. He clapped his hands over his ears. On the beach soldiers covered their ears, too.

  The lobster over Avery paused, its antennae twitching.

  Vaguely Avery realized what must be happening. He had noted the strange blocky, bus-sized machines that stood along the beach when he’d first arrived, and over the last few weeks he had inquired about them and been told that they were defensive weapons powered by the same hot lard the other machines and processors that protected Ghenisa from the unworldly weapons of the Octunggen were.

  Now he found out what they did.

  At first the machines simply clicked on. The click was like a giant mousetrap snapping. Each one clicked in turn, from the ones near the fortress all the way up the beach to the civilian marina to the north, a domino chain of monstrous mousetraps. Next the machines began to hum. The hum grew louder and louder until at last it drowned out the sound of gunfire, burnings and decapod screams. The sound grew so loud it wedged Avery’s skull like a hot shovel through his brain. He saw others all up and down the beach drop their weapons and clutch at their heads. Some fell to the ground and rolled about, driven mad by the noise.