Sword and Sorceress XXVII

by Unknown

  The Shroud Maiden raised an eyebrow. The pressure on Shada’s arms eased.

  “Whatever I want?” Lisle put cold fingers to Shada’s throat.

  “Anything.” She was playing for time. A few more minutes to live were minutes to think of a way out. But no brilliant stratagem presented itself.

  “I want not to be the thing that I am,” Lisle said. “Can you give me my life back?”

  “The mages of the Citadel—”

  Lisle slapped her across the face. “Once upon a time I was a proper princess. I was pretty and well mannered and it did me little good when the Bone Dancers came and demanded me. So many mighty warriors in our castle. So many great mages. They all bowed low and handed me over to the monsters.”

  “I’m sorry,” Shada grunted. “But why do it to us?”

  “The Bone Dancers tore out my heart and made me what I am,” Lisle said, oblivious to a passing whorl of cloud stripping the flesh from half her face. “Later, they made the mistake of teaching me things. And then I destroyed them.”

  “Sienna and I can help you.”

  “There’s no helping what I am.” Tiny spiders scuttled across the Maiden’s face. “So what I want are friends who are like me. Which Sienna will soon be.”

  Behind Lisle two rotting girls held Sienna while a third ripped open the front of her dress. Sienna bit her lip so hard blood coursed down her chin.

  They were going to tear her heart out.

  Shada thrashed and kicked and only managed to reignite the agony along her arms.

  “I want Sienna to take tea with me.” Lisle nodded to the swollen corpses holding Shada. “And I want you to die.”

  Hard fingers pulled Shada’s arms still further apart. Shocks of pain arced between her shoulders. At any moment the muscle and ligament would give way and her arms would be pulled from their sockets. Her heart raced, pulverizing her ribs.

  She couldn’t save Sienna. She couldn’t save herself. She had failed. Her throat tightened and her stomach convulsed, as if terror was a physical malady overwhelming her body.

  “Shada!” A dark figure bounded into the circle of princesses and dove into the weeds.

  “Dominic!” Shada yelled. “Help Sienna!”

  As the wights fell on him Dominic grabbed Angel’s Kiss and whipped it sidearm at Shada.

  She flinched as the blade sank hilt-deep into the eye of the girl holding her. And then she understood what he had done. The point of the knife sunk deep into her brain, the now truly dead girl released Shada’s aching arm.

  Shada pulled the dagger free with her right hand and drove it into the eye of the wight on her left.

  The corpses collapsed. She was free.

  Shada leapt at Lisle, her kick spinning the Maiden around. She shoved Sienna clear as Lisle opened her black eyes wide.

  The Maiden’s annihilating gaze stopped Shada cold. Spiders coated her right hand. She struggled against the impulse to throw the disgusting dagger into the dirt. Maggots crawled through her hair, wriggled beneath her tights. Her limbs grew heavy with the weight of them.

  “You can’t fight me.” Lisle moved closer, talons clicking. “I’m the thousand little mouths that can’t wait for your heart to stop beating so we can devour the dead meat you’re about to become. The terror of me paralyzes you. I am your death, Princess. And I am eternal.”

  And Shada was not. She had imagined herself fearless, but she was mortal, and weak, and frightened. Just like everybody else.

  She drove the blade under Lisle’s ribs, through her stomach, and up into her chest.

  Fear itself didn’t paralyze nearly so much as the exhausting denial of it. Accepting her terror, Shada found she could step past it and let her body do what it did better at than everybody else.

  Stab things.

  Lisle gasped. “You hurt me.”

  Shada threw an arm around the Maiden’s shoulder and pulled her close, shoving the blade in deeper. Gray flesh smoked and bubbled in Shada’s brutal embrace. Lisle’s features moistened and dissolved, the writhing body collapsing into a pile of oily bones.

  One by one the princesses fell to the ground, now only corpses, long dead.

  #

  The next morning Shada woke certain that something was wrong. She wandered as if in a dream through deserted Citadel corridors in the hushed minutes before dawn, the far horizon glowing blue as a robin’s egg.

  The vast space of King’s Hall was empty but for a lone figure standing before the throne.

  “Dominic.” She realized what was wrong. Her Shield of a single day wasn’t by her side. He had saved her life. She’d been blessed with a bodyguard of exceptional intelligence and bravery and she wanted him to know that she knew it.

  The figure turned. It wasn’t Dominic. Sienna looked nothing like him, and like she hadn’t slept at all. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “He was relieved of his cloak when you fled the Citadel. He’s finished in the Scarlet Guard.”

  Shada felt as if she’d been punched in the gut. “But he came for me last night.”

  “That was his decision.” Sienna looked away. “The Guard is done with him.”

  Shada remembered the shame and fury in his eyes when they’d fought. This was why he’d been so angry. She felt a faint shame of her own.

  “It was stupid,” Sienna said. “Your gambit could have destroyed us all.”

  “You’re welcome.” Darts of anger pricked Shada’s skin.

  “Thank you. Of course.” Sienna sounded vastly annoyed that Shada had saved her life. “But you’re not invincible. You have to learn to think.”

  “If I was as thoughtful as Gregory you’d be criticizing me with a big hole in your chest.” But Shada understood what she meant. Frightened people made poor decisions, but so did those too stubborn to be afraid. Fortunately Dominic had been frightened enough for both of them and acted accordingly. Without his fear, neither she nor Sienna would be seeing this sunrise.

  “Fair enough,” Sienna whispered.

  Fear as an ally would take some getting used to. At this moment Shada’s great fear was that she might ever again behave as stupidly as she had with Dominic. She wondered if battling wights was the easy part, that to prove worthy of this throne the truly frightening task was making sense of all the endlessly confusing people orbiting it.

  Her heart beating loudly, Shada set off for the proving grounds, eager to find something to hit.

  The Rising

  by Pauline J. Alama

  As anyone who has ever tried to bake bread from scratch knows, yeast can be temperamental. But in this story, yeast is truly—and literally—powerful.

  Pauline J. Alama is the author of the quest fantasy THE EYE OF NIGHT (Bantam Spectra, 2002). Her short fiction has appeared in volumes 18, 23, 25, and 26 of SWORD & SORCERESS as well as in Penumbra, Realms of Fantasy, and Abyss & Apex. When not spinning tales, she can be found writing grant proposals, avoiding housework, singing, fooling around with a guitar, sharing books with her son, spoiling her cats, or fuming about politics.

  ****

  “We won’t be caught,” Nash told Nima. “And even if we are, what have we got to lose? You can’t afford to starve—especially with the baby coming.” He knotted a handful of grain in his head-cloth, then tied the cloth back over his curly hair. “See? It’s easy.”

  “I don’t know,” Nima said. “The overseer’s so suspicious this year. Ssh! Someone’s coming.”

  They went back to their harvesting, bending their weary backs to cut the sheaves and bundle them. It was well timed, because Haxal the overseer came striding between the rows of wheat. “Make haste,” he said. “Lord Gessig wants his full harvest in the silos by tomorrow.”

  “Sir,” Nima piped up, “when may his lordship’s humble workers glean for our own use?” It was late in the harvest, and the fields were nearly stripped; she had begun to whether anything would be left for the gleaning time.

  Haxal did not meet her eyes
. “Day laborers who take their wages in coin will not be paid in crops as well. The gleanings will only be for those who belong to Lord Gessig for life.”

  “But grain costs so much this year! We’re starving on our wages.”

  “Then take the iron ring of slavery, and get your meals from the lord’s hall every day. There’s no shame in belonging to a great house,” said Haxal.

  Nima followed Haxal’s gaze downward. Sure enough, the overseer himself now wore an iron ring about his ankle: lighter and more ornate than a common field slave’s ring, it nonetheless marked him as Lord Gessig’s chattel, merely a higher form of property than those he commanded.

  There always seemed to be a depth of misery below the one where she stood, Nima reflected. Her parents had owned their little plot of land till debt swallowed it. She had gone to work for Lord Gessig in the hope of buying back her parents’ farm. Now, it seemed, she could not even afford to own herself, much less the land she stood upon. Should she bow to necessity and become a slave? Would it buy her, at least, food and safety? Or would she bear her child into slavery only to starve anyway when she had nothing left to sell—not even herself?

  “Great God preserve me from that.” She bent again to her task, harvesting fine wheat that she would not taste.

  Luck was with them: Nima found a few edible weeds among the rows of grain. Their roots were deep in the ground, a chore to grub out, but thick and meaty, well worth the effort. They came out caked in dirt but she dared not stop work long enough to clean them.

  “You have them,” Nash said. “I’m not so hungry.”

  She suspected he was lying, but gobbled them eagerly anyway, glad for something to fill her stomach.

  When the sun sank low and the field hands at last were free to leave, Nima and Nash lined up to collect the day’s wage. She was surprised to see bare shoulders ahead of her in line: it was hot work harvesting, but with autumn advancing, a cold wind blew over the fields at day’s end. It was not until they came within clear sight of the overseer that they realized what was going on.

  “Strip,” ordered Haxal.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Take off your clothes: let me see that you’re not taking anything with you that isn’t yours.”

  Trembling, she removed her head cloth, grateful that she hadn’t had time to take Nash’s advice and stow grain there.

  “Go on,” Haxal said stolidly.

  She fingered the neck of her robe. “Must I? It seems so shameless.”

  “No shame in doing what every honest field hand has done. No shame in proving you’re not a thief.”

  She moved with deliberate slowness, hoping she might give Nash time for some last cunning dodge. But the only idea he had left was to run.

  “THIEF!” With a quickness that belied his size, Haxal slung a stone at the fleeing man.

  Struck by the stone, the head-cloth burst open, spilling the precious grain that was to have saved them from starvation. Nash fell to earth and did not rise. Nima ran to him and tried to raise him, but his head gushed like a pierced melon, and the breath was gone from his body.

  “You killed him!” she shrieked at the overseer. “For a handful of wheat, you killed him.” Reckless with grief, she pulled off her robe and brandished her nakedness at him like a war-charm. “There! Are you satisfied? Great God curse you! May you see your mother like this!”

  #

  Grief was a stone in Nima’s heart, but it was a stone she could carry, as she had carried so many burdens before. Widowed, penniless, grieving, unpaid for her hard day’s labor, but free, she walked the path of the market-carts that she had never followed before, the road to the City.

  The City was a new world to her, a wonder of thick stone walls and pointed arches, looming tall houses with more than one story to them, prophets and charlatans clamoring for attention, horses clattering down stone streets that bruised her bare feet. But one thing about it was familiar: it was as hungry as the countryside.

  Whole families went begging from door to door. Nima scoffed at them at first—surely that man, that woman could work for their living—and went to offer herself for hire at all the shops in the town. But no one wanted an apprentice; no one wanted a maid-of-all-work; no one wanted an under-gardener; no one wanted a pot-scrubber or a stable-mucker or a ditch-digger. “What do you think I can hire you with?” a potter said with a mirthless laugh. “In this cursed season, you think anyone’s buying a bowl to remember wine by, or a dish with no bread on it?”

  And so Nima joined the beggars in the streets, only to meet new disappointment. “We hardly have enough to feed ourselves,” one housewife told her. Another said, “We ate nothing today.” Even shops were starting to close, the craftsmen packing carts with their tools to travel out of the City. Nima wondered where they would go: back where she had come from, to bind themselves in slavery for a meager promise of being fed?

  All her life, Nima had heard that the City was rich, that while the country people ate coarse barley and wild greens, the City people got the best wheat grown in the countryside, and the olives and grapes and apricots besides. But it almost seemed the City was poorer than the country in this year of unnatural disasters: thunder that brought no rain, labor that brought no livelihood. It was like finding the sun had no more light, the ocean no more water. In the country, the barley crop had been disappointing, but there was wheat for those who could afford it, weeds and wild roots for those who could not. Nima pulled a few unfamiliar weeds from between the cobbles of the street. Not even the most desperate of the beggars fought her for them. Were they poisonous? Too starving to care, she ate them. They were so stringy she could hardly gag them down, but she didn’t die, and they quieted her empty stomach a while.

  Toward sunset, she smelled something tantalizingly like bread. Following her nose to a little shop made of sun-baked mud and timber, she slipped in without knocking or asking permission. “Blessings upon your hands and head, neighbor,” she said hastily, hoping no one would dare turn a blessing out of their door.

  “Blessings upon you, little girl,” said the woman within. She had broad shoulders, a rounded nose like a knob of dough, and streaky gray-brown hair so like her dough-smeared apron that she almost seemed to have grown in one piece out of the shop floor, apron and all. “But my bakery is closed, child, and likely to stay so for longer than I care to think.”

  “I haven’t come to buy,” Nima said. “That is, not for money—but maybe for work? Even an old stale crust would be such a godsend!”

  The baker shook her head. “There’s nothing left. Not even a crust.”

  “If I clean your shop tonight, will you give me a loaf of your next baking?’

  “If I were a thief and a fraud, I’d take you at your word,” said the baker with a sardonic twist of her mouth. “Even the miller had no flour to sell me today. He said only the great lords have any, and they’re not selling. Here, take this for what it’s worth.” She placed some coins in the Nima’s hand—more money than Nima had ever owned!—and tenderly wrapped the young woman’s fingers over them. “If anyone will sell you wheat for that, let me know. I sometimes think the only way I’ll get something to bake will be if I go out to the country and harvest it myself.”

  “They’d never let you,” Nima said. “We harvested all day in the scorching sun, and before we could go home, they stripped us naked to make sure we hadn’t taken anything away with us.”

  “Then there is a harvest? People are saying it failed.”

  “The barley was poor this year, but there’s plenty of wheat, the finest I ever saw, all stacked away in Lord Gessig’s granary. My man Nash tried to take a handful—grain that we planted, and tended, and harvested—and they killed him for it.” The tears she had been too numb to shed sprang to her eyes. “I ran away to the City, hoping I could earn a living here. But it almost seems there’s no food in the City.”

  “What’s your name, neighbor?”

  “Nima.”

  �
��I am Selah the Baker—or I was, while I had something to bake. What’s a baker in famine-time? But I never imagined that even those that gather the harvest don’t dare taste it. How does His Lordship expect to keep enough hands to plant next year’s crop?”

  “He pays us, but the wage isn’t enough to buy the grain we harvest. The overseer says if we can’t make ends meet on our wages, we can be paid in food if we sell ourselves into slavery. More and more do.”

  “But you didn’t,” Selah observed.

  “I don’t want my child born into slavery. But if I don’t eat, there may not be enough of me to bear a child.” Lifting her head, she drew a deep, savoring draft of air. “I was sure I smelled food—something brewing, at least, if not baking.”

  “No, there’s nothing to drink either,” Selah said, but her tone sounded so guarded, Nima felt certain she was hiding something.

  With the boldness of desperation, Nima slipped around to the back room of the shop. “What of that dough there?”

  “Don’t touch that.” Selah grabbed her wrist.

  “When will that be baked?”

  “Neighbor, the day I bake that, I might as well add my heart’s blood to it, for I’ll be finished. That’s the rising.”

  “Rising?”

  “Some call it the yeast, but that’s not quite right. Yeast is the spirit within it. Whenever I bake, I leave aside a bit of the dough so the yeast will survive. Then a piece of it is the rising for the next batch: I work it into the dough, and it mingles the yeast in every part of it, changing it, making it rise. I brought it with me from our village when I moved to the City, and fed it new flour and honey when we settled in this new shop. If I bake the whole of it, I may get a new rising from another baker, or from the yeasts in the air, but it won’t be the same one I inherited, and my baking will never be the same.”

  “Where did it come from?” Nima asked.

  “I inherited the rising from my mother, who inherited it from her mother, and so on, and so on.”

  “There must have been a beginning,” Nima said.