Free Stories 2011

by Patrick Lundrigan, Larry Correia, Travis S. Taylor

  “Jame loves you,” she blurted out, hearing her own resentment.

  He laughed, a horrible, wet, tearing sound. “Close.”

  “All right. She hates you.”

  “Closer. We are of one blood, she and I. Help me or not, then, but if so, do it for her sake and your own. They will be after her and all of her friends now to serve as scapegoats for the Sirdan’s death.”

  A tremor ran through the air, through the ground. Buildings swayed. Farther away, some fell. With a grinding as if of teeth, a crack edged out into the square.

  Patches had been thrown to her knees on the flags. “What is it?” she gasped.

  “Can’t you feel it? At last someone has really annoyed our Talisman.”

  To the north, toward the Temple District, lights bloomed out of the dense, crazy quilt of streets followed by more concussions and a chorus of strange, discordant cries. The crack grated closer, as if something were prying open the flags’ stony lips.

  Patches felt her brain swell against the walls of her skull. So much power ....

  She lurched to her feet. “This has something to do with the Talisman, all right. The weirdest shit always does. But what and why?”

  He was panting now, straining more to die than to live. “Shall I ... tell you ... a story? The Sirdan sent me to steal ... a certain Book Bound in Pale Leather ... from Jame. I did. It probably killed him. I assume that now she has given it to that fool Ishtier ...”

  “Why? She hates him!”

  “Because her friend Marc caught her in the temple of Abarraden ... but let her go ... when he realized who she was. He thinks ... he has forsworn his oath as a guard and so ... has lost his honor. The only way ... to get it back is through ... an honorable death. So he has put himself into Ishtier’s hands.”

  “But the Eye is only glass. The period of jeopardy for any thief will be over by now. He’s as safe as the Talisman is.”

  “Ishtier won’t care about that. He only lusts ... after power.”

  The ground shuddered again. Orange light flooded out between the surrounding houses and moved, casting brilliant, flickering bars, down an adjacent street. It was headed southward, toward the Lower Town. All in its wake burned.

  “My family ...!”

  “Go ... to them. I am ... dead meat. I hope.”

  As she reached the edge of the square, Patches looked back. With a mighty gnashing of stone teeth, the crack had reached its center, and swallowed the Mercy Seat whole.

  As she ran, the city came alive around her. Strange shadows flitted from eave to eave. Lights burst from cracks. Monstrous forms lurched around corners, and fled when they saw her. Some gave chase for a block or two wailing “Worship me, worship me!” Others huddled in corners chittering in terror. It was clear to her what had happened: With that burst of power, all the gods had outgrown their temples and were finding themselves, for the first time in their immortal lives, cast out on the streets.

  Patches kept pace with the blazing light, one street over. Seen directly as it passed intersections, it dazzled the eyes, but glimpsed askance it resolved itself into giant, fiery wheels rolling on and on. Dally had once taken her and Jame to meet his divine step-father. Not that one could see much in the temple because of the light – all the priests there had long since been stricken blind – but she now recognized Dalis-sar’s sun chariot. More and more, the current situation seemed to relate to the Kencyr, if not entirely: following the chariot came a small, dark cloud and in it a hopping green form: Gorgo, formerly the Lugubrious, bringing with him his own miniature rain storm to quench the terrible fire that went before him.

  Seeing where they were, Patches sprinted ahead. North of the Lower Town lay the ring of desolation that surrounded the Kencyr temple, oldest and most shunned in the city. Given its effects on the neighboring architecture, most of which had been reduced to rubble, no wonder the formal Temple district had chosen to establish itself somewhere else.

  Waves of power emanated from it, causing dust to ripple on the road and Patches’ short hair to bristle like a hedgehog’s. She could sense that this was the epicenter of the recent earthquake and the subsequent untempling of the gods. No doubt the Talisman had had something to do with that too. The image rose in her mind of Jame dancing at the Res AB’tyrr, all but seducing her audience and controlling the complex emotions that she herself provoked. Tonight must have been a mighty dance indeed, to channel the power of a god.

  There was the temple, tall, black, stark, more like a work of nature than of man. Its door opened and Jame emerged. She ran toward Patches – no, toward the corner around which Dalis-sar’s flames were just beginning to lick.

  Patches waved her arms. “No!” she tried to shout, and heard her voice emerge in a dust-choked croak. “Stop!”

  Here came the fiery chariot, and all around it everything burned.

  Jame’s voice soared over the holocaust: “Bane! It’s name is Bane!”

  The blazing wheels rolled past, leaving a huddled figure in its wake. A big man, Marc, knelt beside the Talisman beating out the flames that Gorgo’s rain had failed to extinguish.

  Patches wanted to go to her, not to see if she was all right – in the end, Jame always was – but just to say hello, or good-bye, or thank you. Whatever else happened, she had the aching sense that this was the Talisman’s last night in Tai-tastigon.

  Marc helped Jame up. They were going. Time Patches was gone too, after the flaming warrior, toward the ruins of the Lower Town where her family awaited her, by the shortest route possible.

  IV

  Once the Lower Town had been like any other district of the city, if poorer than most. Patches remembered the shabby, bustling streets, the cries of peddlers, workmen, and mothers gathering in their broods for the evening meal. That was before the Lower Town Monster had come to hunt the midnight lanes, to follow the stifled cries of children as they hid beneath their covers. Had that only been seven years ago? Scramp had already run away, eventually to worm his way into the Thieves’ Guild. He had never come back. Patches did whenever she could, bringing whatever trifles her master allowed her to keep to trade for food or sometimes for a toy, with which her six younger sibling solemnly played, each in turn.

  There was the house now, the last one occupied on its particular street.

  “Ma!” she called, opening the door into a dark room.

  Steel struck flint and a candle flared.

  Half a dozen men in royal blue d’hens waited for her.

  Too late to run. Besides, there were her brothers and sisters lined up against the back wall, so alike in their wizened features that only age and height served to distinguish them. She could have joined the head of that line without breaking it. Her mother stood before them, expressionless as usual, her hands clasped tightly in front of her spotless apron, her silver wedding ring glimmering in the half-light.

  “What do you want?” Patches demanded, trying not to squeak.

  “Need you ask?” The man with the flint tucked it back into his pocket. She recognized him as one of Men-dalis’s intelligence agents, Senci by name. “Why, the Talisman, of course. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Patches lied, or was it the truth? She had no definite idea where Jame had gone, but she could guess. Surely these men could too. Even now, were others of their number visiting the Res AB’tyrr? “I know why Theocandi’s folk are after her, but why are you?”

  “And they said that you were clever. The Talisman’s Trinket indeed. We can’t have people assassinating our guild lords, now, can we? As the new Sirdan, m’lord Men-dalis takes a dim view of such a precedent.”

  Patches unobtrusively signaled to her siblings. They left the wall, each to choose a man and to stand staring up at him with wide, blank eyes. The thieves seemed to find this disconcerting, especially the one faced with the baby, who sat on his foot and wrapped its arms around his leg.

  “Get off,” he hissed at it, but subsided, embarrassed, as the others turned, briefly,
to regard him.

  Patches returned to Senci. “Has there been a new election?”

  “We needn’t bother with that. Who else is there, after all, to fill the office? There will be time, when things settle down, to revisit such niceties.”

  Patches felt oddly disconcerted. She hadn’t chosen a side in the past election anymore than Jame had, neither of them having seen any reason to favor one candidate over the other. For her, politics had always been someone else’s business. To be excluded from them altogether, though ....

  “You want to distract the guild,” she said. “Bane was right: You want a scapegoat.”

  Just then the door creaked open, making everyone start. The figure on the threshold was black-robed and small, but instantly recognizable as Men-dalis’s master spy, the Creeper.

  “It’s coming,” he said in his hoarse whisper.

  Senci rose, knocking over his chair. The others stirred and murmured uneasily. “Er ... what’s coming?” asked one.

  Patches moved to stand by her mother. She found that her knees were shaking. “If you lived in the Lower Town, you would know.”

  “Oh. That. Er ... run?”

  As children dodged out of their way, the intruders scrambled out the door, Senci first among them.

  Patches found herself standing on the threshold beside the Creeper. Only children need fear the Lower Town Monster, she told herself, and she was no longer a child; but her siblings were. She closed the door. Inside, a bar dropped across the frame and the light went out.

  The street stretched north and south before her, lined with abandoned, decaying houses, washed with silvery moonlight. Patches felt her heart pounding in her throat. The Monster had been the bogeyman of her childhood.

  “If you don’t behave,” mothers had warned their babies for generations, “it will come and gobble up your soul.”

  That had only been a story when she was younger, but then children had started to disappear – more and more of them – until the Lower Tower was a ghost quarter. And still Patches had never seen the thing itself.

  She did now. It crawled toward her down the street like a prone shadow. Long, tenebrous fingers groped ahead of it, catching in the cracks between the cobblestones, pulling it forward. Others probed in passing at shuttered windows and traced the edges of barred doors. It seemed to lie flat to the ground until it raised its head. Black, featureless, unearthly, it fixed its attention on Patches. Maybe she wasn’t as grown up as she had thought. It crept toward her, and the stones limned with frost at its touch. Patches cringed back against the door. If she pounded on it now, would her mother let her in? No, not with six other offspring to protect.

  Then it hesitated.

  Light flared behind it as fiery wheels rolled around the corner. It sank into a black pool and waited. On came Dalis-sar’s chariot, in a storm of flame and swirling ash. Tongues of fire leaped from roof to roof as it advanced until the very air seemed to burn. The wheels reached the shadow and sank into it between cobblestones which shattered at the sudden change of temperature. The charioteer bellowed with rage. His flaming whip lashed at the shadows that crept up the sides of his vehicle, lacing them with frost.

  “To kill a demon,” the Creeper whispered in Patches’ ear, “you need fire, water, and its true name.”

  Who or what was the Lower Town Monster? If a demon, that implied a detached soul, one who preyed on children. What predator had lost his soul some seven years ago?

  Patches found herself running toward the struggling chaos of fire and shadow. “It’s name is Bane!” she shouted at the charioteer, as Jame had before her. “Bane!”

  The shadows were melting. Back they sank between the stones, into the ground, with the ghost of a wail. In their wake, everything burned, and then came rain. Gorgo hopped about the street in a victory dance, little claps of thunder and lightning clashing over his green head, sizzling on the flaming wheels, on the shoulders of the man who stood on the smoldering platform, drooping with fatigue.

  “Well done, little sister,” he said to Patches with a tired smile, then faded into a shining ghost, into a memory. Moonlight flooded the broken street in his wake.

  Patches could feel it: all over the city, the gods were shrinking as they expended their power enough to fit back into their temples. Most went with profound relief.

  The Creeper touched her shoulder. She recoiled from him. Half seen in the shadow of his hood, his face was as prematurely wrinkled as her own, his stature as dwarfish. And he stank, like bad dreams and old blood.

  Here was the true bogeyman, Patches thought, Dalis-sar’s shadow and dark genius. Would anything that had happened tonight have happened without him? But it was partly her fault too.

  “I didn’t tell Jame that I saw you and Men-dalis meet Dally the night of the election and take him away. I didn’t lie to her, but I didn’t tell her the whole truth either.”

  “Daughter ...”

  “Leave me alone! I thought, ’Good: He’s going back to the fortress, to his own kind.’ She was too good for him anyway. I thought you would keep him safe. But you didn’t. You killed him in Bane’s style to start a guild war. Why, damn you?”

  “We caught him sneaking back from her. Men-dalis believed that his brother had betrayed him to Theocandi through her and so lost him the election.”

  “Because you told him so! I didn’t like Dally, but he was never disloyal. And Jame couldn’t care less about politics. You’re the Creeper, the spy masters’ master. You know that. You just wanted a war to overthrow the election, didn’t you?”

  The hooded shoulders shrugged.

  “All politics are war. All wars have casualties.”

  #

  “Dally, Bane, Theocandi, even Jame if you can catch her. Well, she’s too good for you too, you ... you filthy bogle!”

  And she punched him in the nose.

  Or tried to.

  Her fist sank into the cowl and tangled there in fusty cloth. The cloak clung to her fold on fold as if it were trying to swallow her. In it she felt something small, round, and hard. Without thinking, she grabbed it. The cloak flew up in her face, over her head, but she fought it off. In an instant, it withdrew and fled, again draping a dwarfish form, down the street and away.

  Patches looked at what she had seized. It was a plain silver ring, identical to her mother’s.

  V

  At the Res AB’tyrr she found six thieves’ guildsmen, all unconscious, and Marc’s fellow guard, Sart Nine-toes.

  “Came looking for the lass, they did,” he explained, cracking his knuckles. “I settled for them ... well, we did.”

  The Widow Cleppetania put down the frying pan she had snatched up on Patches’s precipitous entrance. The rest of the inn’s servants peered cautiously out of the kitchen, as if unsure where cutlery would be flying next.

  “If you’re looking for them too,” she said, “they’ve gone. The city being what it is tonight and is likely to be in the foreseeable future, it seemed wisest.”

  Patches hopped from foot to foot. All night she had been a step behind Jame. “Gone where?”

  “Out the western gate, bound to cross the Ebonbane for the Central Lands. Jame said something about going home.”

  “But the high passes aren’t open yet!”

  “Try telling her that, and yet they’ll probably be safer there than here.”

  Patches had to admit that Cleppetty was right as she scurried through the streets toward the western gate. Even this far from the temple district, fires still burned and shadows slunk from cover to cover. A wall hiccupped, having swallowed the adjacent house. The fin of a leviathan surfaced in a puddle.

  As for the thieves, they would be out in force as soon as they realized that the Sirdan’s supposed assassin had left her usual haunts. Would Men-dalis be able to keep the power that he had seized? Might it even be better if he did? The city tottered on the edge of chaos. A strong hand might bring it back into balance – but the hand of a liar and a fratricide?
Was this what the Creeper had meant by politics? Whatever happened, things would never be the same again.

  Here was the western gate, standing open. Patches stopped on the threshold, panting and holding a savage stitch in her side. The road to the mountains stretched out before her like a silken ribbon. Not so far down it walked three figures, one very tall, one very short: Marc, Jame’s hunting cat Jorin, and between them, Jame herself.

  Patches almost called out to them. They would hear. They could still turn and come back. But her voice caught in her throat.

  ... going home ...

  Jame had only, ever, been passing through. Her fate lay ahead, down the path that she had begun to trod tonight.

  Patches’ home lay behind her, scarred as it was with fire, shadow, and boiling strife. That was the Talisman’s legacy, whatever she had meant, and it was the Trinket’s fate to cope with the mess that her mentor had left behind.

  So it was. So it must be.

  Patches stood watching until the three were beyond earshot, until she could hardly tell which was which.

  “Good-bye,” she breathed at last, and turned to face her inheritance.

  Murder at Ford’s Theater

  by Bob Conroy

  Good Friday, 1865

  Jerry Carney was fascinated by the theater. Life there was colorful, brash, and bold—everything that life at home with his widowed mother wasn’t. She was stern and unforgiving. She incorrectly imagined she saw too much of her hard-drinking and wife-beating late husband in her only son. Worse, she fervently believed that anyone connected to the theater was also connected to Satan and likely going straight to hell. She had, of course, forbidden him from going anywhere near Ford’s Theater. Jerry, of course, disobeyed her at each and every opportunity.

  At thirteen, he was becoming fascinated by the actresses, many of whom were heavily made up, and far more open and friendly than any of the older women he knew. He defined older as anyone born before he’d been. That the women had noticeable breasts and hips was also intriguing and sometimes caused embarrassing changes to his body that he tried to hide.