by Nisi Shawl
“A Hinterland convert.” He shakes his head. “Who heads a mission in Faulk. Faulk. Not exactly a place of inspiration. But you have done one good deed, convert, though unintentionally. You’ve created for me an incredible opportunity.”
“You took command to save the men. I understand that…”
He grunts. “I’m still going to save the men. And many more. We’re heading for the Atoll. No doubt it will be heavily guarded. If you want to survive this, and take back your trophy to the Abbot, you’ll cooperate. You don’t have a choice in the matter.”
“Captain Hautalo, please. For the love of the Everlasting, don’t do this. Stop this madness!”
“Yes,” he says, “for the love the Everlasting, I will stop this madness.”
He shuts and bolts the door.
◊
…I’ve never overseen mass conversions to the faith, nor contributed to the sacred history of the church through Pilgrimage. I’d been assaulted by my Hinterland brethren on more than one occasion, endured a volley of stones, and fled a mob under cover of darkness to a neighboring village—shameful incidences which had me recalled to the Rectory to give account of myself.
Considering my many difficulties, Abbot Diyari decided it best to send me away, to Faulk.
I begged him to reconsider. Faulk was a small community: safe, reliable in its meager but steady support, conservative, uninteresting.
He told me our talents and our appointments must not be mutually exclusive; that they must complement each other.
I resisted, and declared there was so much more I wanted to do, so much more I could do. For the church. For him.
He told me, yes, yes there was.
And I would do it in Faulk.
◊
Day 19
The ship’s portside guns thunder into the dying light of day. Raider ships are there, black needles cutting through the water, advancing upon our convoy with great speed.
The medic helped me guide Rydra up on deck. We are escorted by two guards. Jenko is there, holding the port railing as the ship rises and falls. A storm is brewing. A thin rain sprays our faces.
The Daystar and the Azoria begin fanning out, forcing the enemy line to fracture. A group of raider ships break away and head straight for us.
Jenko signals a crewman, who disappears into a hatch. The boy is brought on deck, struggling in Marl’s clutches.
“What are you doing?” I say, cradling Rydra with one arm.
Jenko waves to the men, who haul the boy across the deck and tie him to the cargo crane. Marl works a lever. The arm rises up. The boy dangles there, howling discordant notes.
The horror of perception grips me. “Jenko, no!”
Rydra, eyes half open, turns her head to the boy and twists in an attempt to break free. The medic stumbles, crashes into the railing, taking me and Rydra with him.
The raiders are closing on us. Sporadic gunfire lights up the night. The Azoria is on fire.
A speaker crackles and Hautalo’s voice booms through the air: “Target atoll, dead ahead. All hands ready. We’re going to make a break for it.”
I can just make out Hautalo at the bridge window. He turns and says something to the helmsman. I feel the engines increase their pounding. We pick up speed, pulling ahead of the other two carriers.
I begin to tremble, not just my hands or legs, but my entire body. I feel as if I am suffocating. I see my prize slip away: a revered place among my honored Brothers denied, and the proud father turning his back on me, as he did all those years ago.
I stare at the boy. A cold, slow fear drips down my body, trickles over my scars.
I cry out: “Give me my son!”
Jenko signals Marl. He turns the wheel, and the crane arm rotates and swings out over the sea. The boy’s panic-stricken song pierces through the sounds of crashing waves.
Rydra convulses and looks up, eyes now wide. And from her throat comes a terrible sound: deep, dissonant, like a church organ growling.
Jenko comes over, one hand resting on the pistol holstered at his side. The medic’s face is a sheet of white. “I’ll take her.” Jenko reaches out and grips Rydra’s arm. The medic moves back to stand with the guards.
Jenko shakes her with fury. “Come on, you monster. You can do better than that.”
Swallowing the bile in my throat I gather my courage and shove my elbow into Jenko’s face. He lets go of Rydra and stumbles back; the woman wobbles and falls over, and I let her weight take me with her. Before he can act I reach out, snatch the long blade from the sheath on his boot, and cut the holy binds around her wrists.
Now free, she loses the pale color of her nakedness and her body changes, becomes less substantial, almost translucent, as though she is but a wisp of illuminated cloud.
She draws herself up to her full height; the soft features of her face alter and she is something altogether different, a creature both beautiful and terrifying.
In one swift motion, Rydra extends her arms at the elbows, flexes her fingers, and from her body comes a great swooshing sound, as though a gas primer had just been lit. A wall of air, only visible by its trail across the water, speeds outward to shatter the advancing raider ships into kindling.
Gunners abandon their posts and run for the deck house, mid-ship. Jenko sways between rage and horror. He pulls out his pistol, but I spring up to block his aim. Knife still in my hand, he must think I’m trying to kill him. There is a popping noise and my shoulder explodes with fire. The vessel heaves up under me and my face hits the cold, wet deck.
A scream. I look up just in time to see Jenko and the armed guards being flung overboard in a gust of wind. Three more armed men stumble forward and raise their weapons. Rydra emits one discordant sound, a grinding of notes, and the men are hurled against the bulkhead of the deck house. Cracked skulls smear red and gray across white paint.
Hautalo is scrambling down the stairs of the bridge tower, rifle in hand. He stops, lets off a warning shot into the air, and continues down.
Rydra ignores him, and me, and moves toward the crane and the boy, still hanging over the sea, crying and wailing. Marl has no chance. With a flex of her fingers, Rydra sends him flying into the storm.
“Stop!” Hautalo runs ahead of her, lets off another shot. She halts and looks at him, eyes slits. He begins to walk backward, slowly, toward the crane controls. Working the crane’s wheel he swings the boy back over the deck. The child hangs there, crying in fractured arpeggios.
I pull myself to my knees. The sleeve of my robe is heavy with warm blood. Pain travels in waves down my arm.
The sea near us is full of debris and dead bodies. The other raider groups are concentrating on our sister ships in the distance behind us. The Daystar is taking heavy fire. The Azoria is listing. In minutes, she will sink.
Hautalo remains where he stands, rifle in hand.
Rydra’s throat grumbles with dark tones.
“Captain,” I say into the rain. “I’m sorry….”
His face is pregnant with loathing. “You filthy Hinterland son of a bitch!”
I can hear the rifle cock.
The creases on either side of Rydra’ spine ripple. In a motion as rapid and as fluid as a bird’s she extends great wings, thin membranes that glow with a silver-white light.
I swallow a deep helping of air, like an infant taking its first breath of life. If terror has gripped Hautalo he doesn’t show it.
Hautalo is no fool. He knows the convoy is lost. His hope has died, along with all the souls he’s needlessly committed to the deep. There is nothing he can do now. Except, maybe, flee the area, and if we make it home, face an inquest for murder and mutiny.
“I should kill you, Sunde!”
He raises the rifle.
But he aims it at the boy.
Rydra rushes him with a speed that is inhuman, lifts him up into the air. The gun goes off. A shot into the darkness. They hover above the ship for only a few seconds; then she pulls him up into the
sky with her, into the whirling tempest, wings flapping furiously.
His screams are lost in a cacophony of cyclonic arpeggios.
Day 31
A gull cries somewhere overhead, and the smell of land is in the air. Our vessel limps toward the dock at Rik-Tarshin, bleeding smoke, engines emitting a sickly groan.
My shoulder still aches. The medic could not remove the bullet, but at least he has stopped the bleeding….
Crist is in command now. Crist, the man with the broken nose who stood by one doomed captain, and stood up against another.
And we’ve received no word of the Marigold, or the Venture.
Days of anxious sailing, and we finally met up with another convoy. Together, we made landfall only once, at a small port town whose name escapes me. A few crewmen got off. The boy went with them, the boy I’d cared for, nurtured. The boy I’d hoped, one day, would be a seminarian, a scholar of the faith, and ordained as a Brother. The son of a proud father….
I hang high above the deck now, tied to the cargo crane. As the ship nears the dock I cannot cast my eyes upon the Rectory, standing tall and proud on a hillside. But I can almost feel its heavy shadow reaching out to me.
And I know Abbot Diyari will be there, waiting, that foreign man who instructs me in strange ways and guides me with strange motives and calls me son.
Sweet arpeggios, swift and bright—the language of my people, the people of the Hinterlands—play along the gusts that come forward to touch my beaten face and taunt my ears.
I rest my head into the wind, wishing I knew how to respond.
Kickenders
Kit Reed
“I dunno, Mel, who do you think we should get to end this?”
“End what?”
I love Melanie, but she doesn’t always get it—unless she is pretending. I jerk my head at The Sanctum, the closed door, the man behind it drooling over our secret places, that lascivious toad. “Him, you idiot. Him.”
We both know who but she says, “Oooh, Dumbo,” because she loves the way it sounds. That overbearing, lecherous piece of crap Chester Underworth, whose X-ray eyes strip you down to your Bikini wax, a.k.a. the boss. Correction. The default boss because Cecil Underworth is in bad shape and the job fell into the hands of his only son. Mel tries, “Sexual harassment suit?”
“I said end this, not drag it out.” It’s so late that we’re the only two still here, and it won’t matter how late we stay. Every night Dumbo outwaits us, so it’s a wind sprint across the parking lot to the safety of our cars night after night after night; we could show you bruises on certain soft places as proof. We have to put up with it, for Dumbo is our boss. Fortunately, his precious open office plan, wherein our cubicles are open on three sides so Our Leader can see up our skirts, does not include his. The Sanctum has teak walls chest-high. Two-ply frosted glass covers the rest. He’s in there early and late, probably trolling the Internets for incriminating particles—our emails, text messages, and, for God’s sake, subversive tweets, hoping to find scantily clad selfies of me and Mel and Sophia on the web, and she’s old.
“What if we torch the place?” Mel and I are colluding outside the women’s bathroom—naked babe silhouette stenciled on the pink door that Dumbo special-ordered, with frilly letters reading: GIRLZ. Like that puts us in our place. If he emerges in the middle of this discussion, we make like we’re either coming out or going in.
I say through my teeth, “Keep it down.”
She says brightly, “Or we could quit.”
“And lose our jobs? Don’t make me spell it out, Melanie. We don’t go. He does.”
Like that she says, “I know a guy.”
“And he’ll…”
“Take care of the problem.” She is poised. “Senski.”
Thus she drives the stake into Dumbo’s heart. Even her tone creeps me out. Everybody knows about Senski, but nobody knows what he’s famous for. All we know is his watchword, I am very good at what I do, the problem being that nobody will tell you exactly what he does. I blow off the idea with a what-the-fuck shrug. “Can’t afford him.”
“Sarah…” Mel sags.
“But we have to do something or UNDERWORTHOVERWRITE goes belly up. Dumbo’s bleeding us dry.” The percs alone! High-end trips to exotic spots, “company” cars that only he can drive, on-call limo with salaried chauffeur to take him home whenever he’s too drunk to drive home with his hooker du jour. Plus high performance bonuses. Every Thanksgiving, New Year’s, Presidents’ Weekend, on every known and made-up holiday, Dumbo writes a big fat check to the most valued employee: you guessed it. Him.
“Sophia says we’re running in the red and it’s only a matter of time. If the company goes under, we’re kaput.”
“Sarah, shut up!”
“In this economy, we’re screwed.” Face it, there are no other jobs out there for engravers like us. UNDERWORTHOVERWRITE is the last of its kind. Only high rollers can afford U.O.’s services. We incise your calling cards/wedding invitations/letterheads into precious metals with this diamond stylus that other companies abandoned years ago. We’ve been replaced by machines. Only UNDERWORTHOVERWRITE creates hand-engraved designer one-offs like ours, a unique design on hand-crafted plates that, after we’ve produced your order on creamy stock finer than silk and stronger than steel, will self-destruct. You can’t get that just anywhere. Without these jobs, we’re shit out of luck. Gulp. “So this is it.”
And if Mel and I are alone in the office at this hour while Dumbo lurks, he has his reasons, and ours? Long hours, no overtime, or Edgar starts training the first popsy smart enough to learn and maybe a little more willing to let Dumbo…oh, never mind.
Mel nods. “Understood.”
“Whatever it takes.”
Oh, yes we do despise the man. His father used to come into the office every day, back when he could still walk. Cecil Underworth was a real craftsman, stopped by your bench to admire your work. He built this business, and kept designing until it got so bad that he couldn’t see. He used to run his hand over the design you were working on, reading it with his fingertips. Then he’d say “Lovely, lovely,” and back away with the smile that signified a performance bonus on your next check.
Then Chester Underworth got home from his trip around the world on the company dime. “He brought special chocolates from Thailand and we had a celebration,” nice old Cecil told us the next morning, but all the excitement wore him out and he had to go home. It was the last time he came in. When he got better he called three lawyers to his bedside and turned the company over to Dumbo—signed and sealed the papers and lapsed into a cathartic state.
Now he spends his days strapped in a wicker wheelchair, according to Sophia after she went to the house with the company books. The felon Chester hired to take care of him parks in the one patch of sunlight in that cavernous old house and comes back when it gets dark. Then he doses poor Cecil with something, and puts him back to bed.
OK, this is weird. Until Dumbo came back with those special chocolates, Cecil was in charge.
Now Chester is. No, Mr. Underworth, I will not call you Chet. In addition to being an incompetent and a failed murderer vacuuming up money like an aardvark on an anthill, he’s a lecherous fuck, riding herd on an office filled with women because we’re cheaper than men and—groan—easier to replace, a fact Dumbo uses to push us around.
It is what it is, which means that most days I get done after midnight if I’m lucky, and if I can’t outrun Dumbo he’ll cop another squeeze, spraying whiskey and gross endearments at me on the eternal footrace to the car.
Oh, yes I am despairing. “It’s him or us!”
Mel shakes her fist. “It’s him or us.”
“Damn straight!”
“Shit, Sarah, here he comes!”
The rest, we will have to do later. That, at least is agreed.
“Ladies,” Dumbo smarms, while his eyes strip us like a TSA scanner. “Let’s knock off early and go somewhere quiet for some nice, get
-acquainted drinks.” Evil grin. “Us three.”
I forget what we blurted but I remember how fast we ran—it’s easy to elude Dumbo if you can race the elevator down five flights of stairs. We were in our cars and out of there before he crunched through the front hedge, lumbering our way.
We regrouped at Mel’s.
A little wine does wonders. Melanie says, “I bet Senski would do it if we had the money.”
“If we knew what Senski does.”
“Whatever he does, it works. I heard if you put down ten K, Senski solves all problems!”
“Like we have that kind of jack. Like it works.”
“Don’t be so negative, Sarah. Remember, ‘I am very good at what I do.’ It’s true! Really. All we have to do is get the…”
“Jack.” Then I hit rock bottom. “And we’re raising that—how?”
Just like that, she comes back with: “Jumpfunders!” Clever witch.
Still it makes me uneasy, don’t know how, can’t say exactly why; an old story pops into my head and digs in its claws, hanging upside down like a bat. You know, “The Monkey’s Paw?” In the end you get what you want, it’s just not what you meant when you said you wanted it. “Like, we’re crowd-sourcing funding for a…hit man?”
Mel says, “As if! We could go to jail for that. Ask the wrong person in some bar and they go all 911 on you. Trust me, Senski is the positive solution.”
“Try that on jumpfunders.com and see what you get. WE WANT MONEY FOR A GUY. It totally won’t wash, so forget it.”
She looks ready to hit me. “We already have a guy.”
“That we don’t know what he does.” Even saying it makes me despondent.
“My point.”
“I’ll think of something, just give me time.”
“I’ve already thought of something!”
We’re like puppies trapped in a gerbil wheel. Five more minutes and we’ll start to fight. “OK, OK.”
But Melanie sags. “But who wants to fund somebody that they don’t know what he does?”
“Idea, idea!” Late as it is, nasty as my mouth tastes right now, I have to grin. “We’re crowd-sourcing a movie called EUPHEMISM!”