“But you draw nothing.”
The bronze man tapped beside his left eye. The clink echoed across the near plain. “I draw everything I see.”
They saw an ice bear the next day. The bronze man may or may not have drawn it but Farven resisted the impulse to kill it. One man with a spear could get himself maimed taking on a full grown ice bear. He didn’t know that he could count on the bronze man to help him, or how well the metallic stranger would fare in a fight.
He did not know enough about golems to be afraid of one.
*
Inchen Island stretched a thin long crescent parallel to the northern coast. It took four hours to ride along the coast from one of its sides to the other. But the bronze man wanted to traverse the frozen sea and map it proper.
“There are birdmen there,” said Farven. “And I have never been on it. My father taught me not to cross the frozen sea.”
“But I must go,” said the bronze man.
Farven shook his hooded head. “Then you go alone.”
“Will you wait for me?” said the golem. “If I do not return in three days, then you may return to your village.”
Farven looked out over the endless white, under which who knew what crawled, and pulled his fur-lined hood tighter and nodded. “I can wait.”
The bronze man left most of his supplies at the camp. He didn’t really need them anyway. Then he rode across the frozen sea until he and his sled were but a speck in the blue ice.
Farven waited three days. He fished and slept and fished and slept. The bronze man returned on the third day. There was a dog missing from his sled.
“Birdmen,” said the bronze man. “They do not fly.”
Farven began to grow uneasy, then, as they ventured further east towards the territory of the birdmen. The birdmen ranged far and were stealthy and had whispered to eldritch gods. One time his great-grandfather had come upon a birdman in his sleep and slit its throat and drank its blood and been transformed into a hawk for an hour.
“You believe this?” asked the bronze man.
Farven didn’t understand the question.
The surveyor and his guide rode on. Most of what they saw was nondescript, more of the same, snow and ice. But then they came across a birdman camp that had not yet sank under the snow. A skull totem still stood.
The bronze man said he wished to inspect the camp.
“We should leave now,” said Farven. “Birdmen are treacherous fiends.”
“You can stay with the dogs, then.”
The bronze man walked into the camp and went to the skull totem and looked into its empty eye sockets.
“This is still your territory?” he called back.
Six figures rose from the snow, shook off their snow covered wings, and threw six black-tipped spears at the bronze man. Two of the spears broke in half and the other four bounced off. Farven grabbed a spear of his own and flung it through the light snowfall to pierce the back of the nearest birdman. Then he reached for another. But it was too late.
The birdmen were all on fire. Eight lines of flame flicked out from the bronze man’s fingertips. It smelled of feather and fear. They dropped one by one into the melting snow until the last birdman fell and the bronze man stopped pointing fire.
Farven did not think to ask the bronze man where he got his fuel from for several hours.
“I am the fuel eternal,” the golem said.
*
The northernmost point of the Seniumlands was the Beak, a bent peninsula that jutted out into the frozen sea like a hook. Farven had only been there twice in his life: once during his spirit quest and once to bury his great-grandfather.
Beyond the tip of the point was blue ice that stretched forth across the frozen sea, and, out across it, far, so far, there was a wide strip of black land that seemed to stretch from one side of the earth to the other.
“What lies there?” asked the bronze man.
“That is the land of the Dead Gods.”
The bronze man stood still, as always. He had no need to fidget. “I have not heard of this before,” he said.
“It is a secret place,” said Farven. “Where the Dead Gods hold sway. Only a shaman can go there and return, and only then in spirit form. My great-grandfather went there once, in the form of a fox, and was nearly strangled by V’lothen. When my grandfather woke again, back in the village, his hair had turned white. He had many strange visions after that.”
“What is this V’lothen?”
Farven found himself speaking louder as the winds that bore the snow picked up in frenzy. “The Great Squid. He who slithers in the deep.”
The bronze man spoke louder as well but seemingly without increased urgency or strain. “I have heard of a squid god in the Ullit Isles. But he, it is said, protects drowned sailors and mermaids.”
“V’lothen would protect no man or beast. V’lothen is the dark at the edge of the ice.”
The wind died down then, there on the edge of the world.
“I must go there,” said the bronze man. “To the land across the frozen sea.”
Farven shook his hooded head and said, “No man can step foot on the land of the Dead Gods.”
“I am no man,” said the golem. “And I am not afraid.”
The bronze man looked over at the second son of the village elder. There was no trepidation in his eyes, of course, only that dull green glow.
“You will come no further?” he asked.
“I cannot.”
“Then we part here. You may return to your village, Farven son of Locheg. I would not have you violate the mores of your people. You have guided me far and well and for that I am grateful.”
Farven almost pleaded with the bronze man but he reminded himself that the golem feared neither death nor gods.
“I will wait here three days, as I did once before. If you are not back then, I shall return to my village.”
“Very well,” said the bronze man.
The Beak was so steep that there was no way to get the dogs and sled down to the ice easily. So they had to be lowered by rope, painstakingly, dog by dog, and then the sled itself. Down below, by himself, the bronze man re-tied the dogs, mounted on the sled, and started off across the frozen sea.
Farven watched from the cliff at the end of the Beak until he could make out neither metal man nor dog nor sled. Then he made fire in the old way and sat atop the buried bones of his ancestors.
*
The world was white and the sky was black and the fire was dead and his dogs were silent and the ghost of his great-grandfather stood above him.
“Go home,” it said.
Farven woke. He sat up and looked at the spot before the dead fire where his great-grandfather had been and then he looked back out over that nigh endless ice to the edge of that black landmass beyond and he whispered a prayer for the bronze man.
Then he broke camp and readied his dogs and started home. He knew better than to ignore the advice of his great-grandfather.
He was almost off the Beak and back on the mainland when the world shuddered. When he turned back towards the land of the Dead Gods, he saw a titanic cloud of purple and black that funnelled, ever wider, up from frozen sea, spun by the winds of a thousand snowstorms.
The bronze man had met the gods at last.
*
The way back was rougher. Winter was coming and the blankets of storm and biting ice were becoming more constant and substantial. Once or twice Farven spied a phantom in his peripheral vision and once he spotted the muddied footprint of a wraith. He sped on. At night, before he slept, he wondered if he would be visited by the spirit of the bronze man. But he never was.
The sky was hurling frosted fury down at the earth the morning the second son of the village elder returned to the village. Farven went to his father and woke him.
“The bronze man is dead,” he said.
Then Farven went home. He crawled into bed with his young wife. She rolled over in her sleep, opened he
r eyes as if she wasn’t surprised to see him, and said, “Your beard is going grey.”
*
The next summer an almost overloaded sled from the southern lords arrived, loaded with fur and wine and spice and tools. The man who drove the sled told them that this was their reward.
The village elder told the man that Farven had been the bronze man’s guide. The man asked to speak with Farven in private and the two of them walked to the hill that overlooked the village.
The man from the south took down his hood and began to unwrap his headscarf.
“You survived?” asked Farven.
“You mistake me for my brother.” The bronze man unwrapped the rest of his headscarf and then raised his hood again. “I have been sent to complete his quest, to explore the eastern coast from the Beak back down.”
“I cannot guide you there,” said Farven. “I have an infant child now and would not dare venture so close to the island of the Dead Gods again.”
“I need no guide,” said the bronze man, “for land I’ve already seen. But I have use of one along the eastern coast, beyond the Beak.”
“Birdmen will not guide you,” said Farven. “They would rather have your eyes for totems.”
“We shall see.”
“And what of the land of the Dead Gods?” asked Farven. “Do you intend to cross the frozen sea as your double did?”
The bronze man’s emerald eyes dimmed. “That land is meant for no map,” he said.
* * *
Lee Blevins
Lee Blevins lives in Lexington, Kentucky. He's a stand up comic and a sit down tragedian. He's on Twitter @BleeSevens.
THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD’S SKIN
Adam R. Shannon
There was forever the smell of smoke.
It coated the world in a haze of dilute milk. Wade remembered when he could see down the slope to the neighbors’ houses. He remembered clarity and detail, stars and sunlight.
Some of those lost homes, he supposed, held bodies. Stifling bedrooms like smokehouses contained the people who died when the taps went dry. His dad wouldn’t tell him about it, and wouldn’t let him go along foraging, no matter how much he begged not to be left alone.
What do you call a house like that? Not inhabited, not quite abandoned. Like a film set, with dry toilets and mold growing in the basement, artfully arranged façades in a movie with an uncertain ending.
*
At first there had been nothing on the radio, just an empty, radio-telescope hiss. Silence from the heart of the galaxy. Then, days later, one station with solemn voices, and music that reminded Wade of the scenes in films when the villain had taken everything from the hero, brought him to his knees in the rain, and all appeared lost. A rush and swell of violins, tapered to a single, quavering string, like a lost hiker losing his voice after days of crying out fruitlessly for help.
The interlude repeated every quarter hour. Their lives had been scored. The commentators were reverent and solemn. As weeks passed, the music played less and less.
Wade’s father had turned off the radio, saying they had to conserve the remaining batteries.
“We just need to hang in a while longer,” his father said. “They’ll get to us.”
But they didn’t, and soon Wade was out of toothpaste. They were down to the last dregs of brown water at the bottom of the rain barrels, and he didn’t even bother to filter it through an old shirt the way he used to. Mosquito larvae convulsed in the glass where he dipped his toothbrush.
*
His father was out gathering food. They’d improvised a little cart he could tow behind the bike, up and down the mountain road. It was too dangerous to use the car, too likely to attract unwanted attention. They no longer even used it to charge their phones, which had never regained a signal anyway.
Wade went down to the perpetual twilight of the basement. He and his father had laid out all the outdoor supplies, back when they were treating it as nothing more than an elaborate camping trip. Each of them had a backpack prepared, in case they had to leave in a hurry. Wade rooted blindly through a plastic box, identifying a pack of safety matches and the soft bundle of a sleeping bag liner. His fingers fastened on the handle of a folding knife. He deployed it in the dark, liking the soft thud in his palm as the blade locked into place.
Upstairs, he cut open the toothpaste tube and scraped blue residue on to his damp toothbrush. Everything was dwindling. No more batteries, no radio, no phone, no toothpaste, no water. No sun or stars.
He regarded the edge of the blade. The thought of descending again into the mildewed gloom under the cracked floorboards depressed him.
At once, the world slid sideways, like a skip in a video feed. One moment he was standing in the dim mirror, the next he was stumbling into a wall. The house shivered, floorboards creaking and squealing like frightened ghosts. Then it was silent.
The knife was still in his hand, braced against the doorframe for support, the point directed back at his throat. He could have fallen on it. He turned the implication over in his mind. Ambulances and emergency rooms had been erased, like dead characters in a TV show, written out of the narrative. Even his father wasn’t there to help.
Wade swallowed. His father had been gone a day.
He folded the knife and slid it into his pocket.
Wade’s father had set out a can of green beans on the table before he left. The can would serve as breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with the juice for dessert. Wade had nodded and watched him pedal off. For the rest of the day, he avoided the sight of the can as best he could. It was like a black hole that deformed the rest of the house around it, twisting the corridors and warping the floors so that no matter where Wade went, he found himself turning a corner to confront it again.
He was full of emptiness. His hunger was almost a thing in itself, an animal that had never known a human touch. It raged against a shrinking cage.
He didn’t eat, and some time later, as the grey smear of sun fell exhausted behind the hillside, he put the can back, arranging it behind the others. There were five left: pineapple chunks, green beans, chickpeas, a small but prized can of little sausages, and a jar of alfredo sauce. He hated alfredo sauce, but when the time came, he’d ladle it out with a spoon and eat it straight.
His dad never kept track of their food stores. At first, he’d been so confident of imminent rescue that he paid little attention to their supply levels. Later, as food dwindled, he simply avoided the empty pantry. He’d grab whatever food his hand fell on, as if the cupboard held captive snakes, and that was what they ate that day. Wade began rationing their remaining cans, and it became his job to tell his father when another foraging trip was necessary.
More than anything, more even than food, Wade wanted his dad to come home. He was supposed to be back by nightfall, and already the house was falling into grey, the details swimming in mist.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been late; a month ago, his father got a flat tire on the way home, and he didn’t return until darkness had filled the house. Wade had grown more and more anxious, walking from one room to another, his left hand tracing the walls, his right arm clenched around his stomach as if he might throw up.
He’d settled on the porch, and when he heard the creak of the bicycle, he nearly cried with relief. His father pretended not to notice his anxiety, or didn’t recognize it.
In the living room, a new crack snaked horizontally from one wall to another, a long, crumbling frown. He slid his fingertips along it, his stomach hurting, then smeared white dust on his grubby pants. The house had a mouth, and behind it was emptiness and need.
Wade went out on the small porch, sat on the steps and watched the driveway. The bike had a gentle, rhythmic creak that reminded him of a vague memory—peddling around in front of the house with training wheels, perhaps, or riding in a long-discarded stroller. He tuned into that sound like a radio, his hope and eagerness fooling him over and over into thinking a bird’s cry or windblown tree
limb was his dad peddling up the paved road.
It came again: a whisper like an ungreased bicycle chain. He stood up, peered into the trees, then sat down, defeated.
He wanted his dad back. He wanted everyone back from wherever they’d gone, back the way they were before. Now everyone was wandering the blind ways of lost hikers. He wanted things back the way they were before the quake and the great wave and the fires scoured their lives clean of recognizable details, before the radio went quiet and the stars went out and the world was muffled in grey.
He hadn’t been happy before, not exactly. But he had known where he was in the world, before his mother was written out of the story, changed from a person into wet debris. Before there was a musical soundtrack, and someone, somewhere out there, was enraptured by videos of a disaster in which he was just an insignificant part, no more than a dying blade of grass.
The world went slowly blind as it slid into evening. Another gentle tremor like an ocean roll came and subsided. It shook Wade back to his feet.
He picked his way out to the end of the driveway, unable to see his own body in the soundless blank.
“Dad!” Wade yelled. His voice was muffled, and he tasted smoke. He drew it in on ragged breaths: the vaporized remains of houses, trees, pets, and people. He wondered if it bore a few molecules of his mother, carried on the hot vapors of an oxidizing world.
There was the faintest sound, a static hiss. He turned in place, a radio telescope scanning for signs of life, but couldn’t locate the source. It seemed to come from everywhere, a distant thrum of mingled voices, whispered conversations just beyond the range of his hearing. Then it was gone.
Wade couldn’t see the house, no longer had any idea which direction he was facing. The night closed over him like water, smoke burning in each shuddering breath, drowning him.
He ran, and fell headlong into the gravel. His palms burned.
People who got lost in the woods were seldom really lost, at first. He’d read that. In the first few moments, they were really just disoriented, and standing somewhere they’d already been, a familiar place on the map. It was what they did next that doomed them. They panicked, and they ran, in the mistaken assumption they’d see something that made sense again.
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