by Eric Flint
"Yes . . . but we will never . . . never make it out the gate . . ."
"We will, Hereward . . . leave it to me. Here, I will help you up. Are you steady enough?"
"I will . . . stay on. Fitz . . ."
"Yes, Hereward."
"Don't . . . don't kill them all."
If Fitz answered, Hereward didn't hear, as he faded out of the world for a few seconds. When the world nauseatingly shivered back into sight and hearing, the puppet was nowhere in sight and the two battlemounts were already loping toward the gate, though the leading steed had no rider.
They did not pause at the wall. Though it was past midnight, the gate was open, and the guards who might have barred the way were nowhere to be seen, though there were strange splashes of color upon the earth where they might have stood. There were no guards beyond the gate, on the earthwork bastion either, the only sign of their prior existence a half-melted belt buckle still red with heat.
To Hereward's dim eyes, the city's defenses might as well be deserted, and nothing prevented the battlemounts continuing to lope, out into the warm autumn night.
The leading battlemount finally slowed and stopped a mile beyond the town, at the corner of a lemon grove, its hundreds of trees so laden with yellow fruit they scented the air with a sharp, clean tang that helped bring Hereward closer to full consciousness. Even so, he lacked the strength to shorten the chain of his own mount, but it stopped by its companion without urging.
Fitz swung down from the outlying branch of a lemon tree, onto his saddle, without spilling any of the fruit piled high in his upturned hat.
"We will ride on in a moment. But when we can, I shall make a lemon salve and a soothing drink."
Hereward nodded, finding himself unable to speak. Despite Fitz's repairing sorceries, the wound in his side was still very painful, and he was weak from loss of blood, but neither thing choked his voice. He was made quiet by a cold melancholy that held him tight, coupled with a feeling of terrible loss, the loss of some future, never-to-be happiness that had gone forever.
"I suppose we must head for Fort Yarz," mused Fitz. "It is the closest likely place for employment. There is always some trouble there, though I believe the Gebrak tribes have been largely quiet this past year."
Hereward tried to speak again, and at last found a croak that had some resemblance to a voice.
"No. I am tired of war. Find us somewhere peaceful, where I can rest."
Fitz hopped across to perch on the neck of Hereward's mount and faced the knight, his blue eyes brighter than the moonlight.
"I will try, Hereward. But as you ruminated earlier, the world is as it is, and we are what we were made to be. Even should we find somewhere that seems at peace, I suspect it will not stay so, should we remain. Remember Jeminero."
"Aye." Hereward sighed. He straightened up just a little and took up the chains, as Fitz jumped to his own saddle. "I remember."
"Fort Yarz?" asked Fitz.
Hereward nodded, and slapped the chain, urging his battlemount forward. As it stretched into its stride, the lemons began to fall from the trees in the orchard, playing the soft drumbeat of a funerary march, the first sign of the passing from the world of the god of Shûme.
* * *
Garth Nix is the author of many books and stories.
Midnight at the Quantum Cafe
Written by K. D. Wentworth
Illustrated by DT Yang
The torrid summer air tasted of industrial sludge as I stood ankle-deep in the rubble at the edge of the street and gazed into the darkness. A car rolled by, its occupants skittish and silent, then I caught the acrid stench of smoke. Somewhere, not too far away, Chicago was burning again.
My heart lifted. When this reality was at its nastiest, I always felt there was a slight edge in my favor. Foolish, I know. With each roll of the universe's proverbial dice, the probability of any particular outcome remains the same, but a man grasps at whatever straw glimmers before him, and I thought if I went to the cafe often enough, I might find another Marissa, one just different enough from the one who left to still love me.
I hurried down into the nearest station, took the next train, its gang-marks worked in fanciful chartreuse, and got off two stops to the south where the air tasted of ketones and shimmered like a veil even a few feet away. I stepped out of the car, eyes stinging, shoved my hands in my pockets to create the illusion I was carrying, and waded through discarded paper wrappers and beer bottles up the stairs to the street.
No use hurrying, I tried to persuade myself as I turned my face east. Either it would be there, or it wouldn't. No variable I could introduce would make any difference.
I rounded the corner and squinted down the block as I had so many times before. The haze refracted the glow of each street lamp into a nimbus of light so that I seemed to be standing inside a nebula and could make nothing out from more than ten feet away. Drops condensed on my cheeks. Tiny bursts of electricity tingled against my skin. The air trembled as though afraid.
Transition, I thought. The cafe was either coming or going.
From behind, a pair of brutish Otts shouldered me into the bricks as they passed. Their hide gleamed blue in the uncertain light; their eyes were black pits. Crimson jewels had been implanted into their elongated skulls, more scintillating than any mere ruby. They snarled as they passed, baring jagged yellow fangs, but did not strike. I had not been so fortunate on other nights. I rubbed a scar on my ribs through my shirt and slowed to let them get well ahead.
Otts hail from some other unimaginable Earth where evolution evidently took a hellish turn, or perhaps alien invasion repopulated the planet at some point. Either way, they disdain humans, whatever the variety. I could only hope enough of them hadn't gotten through to crowd the rest of us out tonight.
It always seems to be midnight at the cafe. Why it doesn't manifest anywhere during the day has been the subject of much discussion amongst the regular patrons, but Jaeko, the bartender, never volunteers any answers. Dressed in a worn leather jacket, he stumps back and forth behind the bar, reminiscent of a marmot crossed with an ape. His black eyes, bright with an old wisdom, blink in that hairy face of his and he serves another round of drinks, never what you ordered, but always some concoction that does what you need.
Electric pink gleamed through the haze, then I caught a green so bright, it seared an afterimage into the retina, neon lights spelling out letters in some language I've never been able to decipher. The cafe was within reach, at least for the moment. One can never be sure until it is observed. The act of conscious attention somehow opens a passageway when conditions are right. In hundreds of other locations on alternate Earths, the cafe also existed tonight because someone like me had looked up and seen it.
The double doors swung open at my approach and two women, eight feet or more tall, swept through. Their spiky hair was the gaudy pink of roses, their cheeks pierced with glittering brass symbols of rank. They walked arm in sinewy arm with long sleek weapons slung across their broad shoulders.
Rammats from a savage world of violent warrior cultures. I stepped aside and bowed my head and they let me live, one more time.
The air drifting out the double doors had a subtle spice I'd smelled before, familiar, though I couldn't place it. I remembered how bewildered I'd been on my first encounter, the strangeness of the speech and dress, the bizarre foods, the predominance of nonhuman life-forms. I'd left my apartment earlier that evening, feeling restless and lonely, then caught sight of a woman who looked like my lost love, Marissa, and followed her down street after dark street, until we both turned a corner and suddenly the cafe was there, garish against the black night sky.
There was no sign of Marissa, if that was really who I'd been following, so thinking she'd gone in, I entered myself, then slunk into a shadowy corner and stared until Jaeko brought me a seething blue drink and patiently fit my trembling fingers around the glass. It had been hot, not cold, and tasted like sugared formaldehyde, but
after a few sips I could string thoughts together again.
"Firs nigh?" Jaeko leaned on my table, propping one hairy arm over the other. His vocal apparatus, though capable of speech, has difficulty shaping final phonemes.
I nodded, still shaking, then let another sip burn down my throat.
"Jus keep you head down," he said with a wink of his surprisingly humanlike eye. "No one ever bother a firs nighter unless he get out of line." He raised a slim black rifle from its hiding place below the counter, then slid it back out of sight again. "Nex time, though, you got you own bac."
With that sage advice, I watched the bewildering parade of customers in silks, leathers, naked blue hide, and armor, even a few who could have been from my own Earth, who glanced at me with indifferent eyes, then looked away.
I stayed for hours, but no Marissa appeared, not even someone who resembled her slightly. When I finally summoned the courage to try to leave, I'd feared I was trapped there forever, but then walked right back into the shabby, vandalized remnants of my own gang-ruled Chicago.
The next night I came back and found only a burned-out building that had once held a pharmacy. Broken glass crunched beneath my shoes as I walked up and down, looking for some sign the cafe had ever been here.
I stayed away for a month after that, convinced I'd hallucinated the whole episode, but then, on a glacial December evening, when ice crystals stung my face and the brutal wind sledgehammered out of the north across the lake, I walked that way again and saw the pink and green letters gleaming through the darkness like an overpriced strumpet on the stroll.
That was the night I first encountered Alont. I was sitting at the long curving black bar, staring down at the reflection of my face in a spill, when the noise died. I turned and a woman stood framed in the double arch of the doorway, taller than most men, straight in a way models only dreamed of being, her hair and eyes both an intense orange. I'd never seen anyone more different from my sweet wife, Marissa.
A raw, half-healed scar snaked down her temple and cheek. She wore silver-gray leather harness on her upper body that concealed nothing, along with a worn belt and knife sheath at her waist. Those audacious orange eyes flicked over me and moved on.
Jaeko nodded as she passed, drawing stares in her wake as a magnet draws iron. "Alont," he said. "Big trouble. My advice: Fin a rock and bash you head in instea. Less painful."
Hell, most of what walked in that door looked like trouble. I picked up my drink, something pungent and lukewarm, reminiscent of spoiled lemonade laced with antifreeze. A body slid onto the stool next to me and naked skin pressed against my trousered thigh. Heat pooled between us like a lava flow. I shivered.
"Hey there, Rafe," she said, somehow knowing my name. "How's it hanging?"
I looked up, startled. Orange eyes gleamed at me like twin suns. My mouth gaped as I tried to think of something to say, then a hand seized my coat from behind and jerked me off onto the tile floor. I hit my head and sprawled there, blinking up at the ceiling, while a kunj soldier in dull-brown combat gear stepped over me and sat in my place with the clank of metal.
"Hullo, Alont," he said, his voice the deep subsonic rumble of a bull elephant. Black smudges gleamed beneath blue eyes.
"Shag off," she said in what sounded vaguely like an Australian accent. "I got no time for hair-faces."
"What about that?" He turned around and kicked me in the stomach. I gagged and belatedly crawled out of reach.
"That there's fresh meat," she said as I fought to breathe. "You, you're just last week's kill."
"Not too dead for you," he said, "as I recall." He ran a hand over that creamy expanse of naked thigh.
She drew a rippled blade and sliced two of his fingers off with no more fuss than if she were swatting an insect. They dropped close to my face on the floor, curled like question marks. "I said, shag off."
Blood fountained as, with a cry, he staggered away, staring at the stumps. She turned back to the bar and shoved three small black triangles at Jaeko.
He nodded and hobbled back to the rows of bottles to concoct something. Alont reached down with one hand and plucked me off the floor by my shirt. "I been to your world," she said, settling me back on the stool as though I weighed nothing. "Couple a times."
Something clicked in my left ear. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a snub-nosed gun aimed at Alont and jerked back.
She twitched, then her knife bloomed in the soldier's right eye like a steel flower. He fell backwards and lay spread-eagled on the tile. Red pooled around his head like some hellish crimson lake and the coppery stink of blood filled the air. His mouth gaped open as though he wanted to ask something.
The hairy bartender was now wielding the slim black rifle he'd shown me on the my first night. I got a better look this time. It seemed to be made of ceramic. Two bright red jewels pulsed at its business end as though about to fire. "Tha wil be doubl, for the mess," he said levelly. "Don't get your knickers in a twist," Alont said and dumped a handful of black triangles on the bar. "Rules say I'm allowed to finish what someone else starts. Won't go no further, boyo." She turned back to me. "You ever slip into 'nother world?" I noticed a bruise on her jaw and livid finger tracks on her throat.
"Uh, no," I managed around the pain in my gut. "I didn't know it was even possible."
"Is," she said. "All them other worlds is out there too, every time you leave, but you have to learn the trick of seeing them, 'stead of your own."
"It's hard enough just to get here," I said.
She wiped the bloody knife on my shirt, then slid it back into the sheath at her waist with an air of abstraction as though, like breathing, it required no attention. "I can show you."
"Thanks, but I'll pass," I said as two salivating Otts dragged the carcass behind us away. What they were going to do with it, I didn't want to know, any more than I wanted to see the brutish worlds my fellow customers hailed from.
Grinning, Alont seized the back of my coat and hustled me outside. The double doors swung closed behind us and I stood shivering in the bitter wind, tethered in her grip like an errant poodle. The night sky glittered above us, an river of dark-blue ice.
"You was beginning to look a bit soft around the edges," she said. The biting wind whipped her orange hair across the scar on her cheek. "Means 'nother you is close. Not good to hang out in there too long. Lots of you scattered through all them worlds. Spend too much time in that damned cafe, one comes along and—bam! The two of you might overlap like old Jaeko."
I subtly tried to free myself without success. "He didn't always look like that?"
She looked around, as though searching. "Used to be downright pretty. I danced him in the back room couple of times before he forgot to go home one night and got himself thoroughly spliced."
Had Jaeko once been human, then? The nape of my neck prickled with dread.
"Now, you, you're not pretty," she said, "but I'd hate to see you spliced all the same." She turned, looking over my head, her orange eyes intent. "There!"
I followed her gaze and saw a glimmer of white headlights in the murky air. "What?"
"'Nother world," she said. "Not mine. We don't have them sort of groundcars. They'd get smashed inside a day, tops."
As we watched, an elongated, glimmering green car swept toward us through the shadows. Judging by its sleek lines, it was not from my world either. Two passengers sat inside, but neither seemed to be driving. Their faces were illuminated pale blue by the interior lights. Absorbed in conversation, they didn't seem to notice us.
"I recognize the clothes," Alont said. "Soft sort of place. Been there a few times. They talk nice enough, but got no bottom."
"What's your world like?" Crystallized breath hung around us like a fog. Shivering overtook me and I fought to keep my teeth from chattering. Was it this cold on all the worlds tonight?
"Tough," she said, then grinned so that the scar on her face stood out. "No one on my world takes guff off no one." She stared up at the sky. "
No one lives too long either. You just do what you want while you can."
I tucked my rapidly numbing hands under my arms. "So why do you come here?"
"Why do you?" Her eyes mirrored the frosty stars above. "I always ask you that. Figure one of you might actually be able to tell me some night."
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "We've never met before."
"Not this you and me," she said.
Two Otts burst through the door and stared at us. Alont threw back her head and snarled, brandishing me like a weapon in her left hand, her knife in her right. Hanging there, I did my best to look fierce as well.
They hesitated, then dropped their eyes and moved on. She followed them with her savage gaze, bare breasts heaving. Her teeth gleamed pink and green in the light from the cafe's neon. "Too bad," she said as the pair disappeared into the darkness. "A tussle would've cleared my head right nice."