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by Nathan Shumate


  “And you, my friend, are indeed a wit—or at least, you are halfway there.”

  There, the first infinitesimal crack in Churel Lobishomen’s psychic armour, the merest flutter of an eyelid beneath the demon-faced mask.

  “If you have one fault,” Lobishomen said, “It is that you live.” A small, bass note of venom in his voice, perhaps.

  A crack, yes, a crack. So small that, had Churel Lobishomen worn plate, not even the thinnest misericorde blade could have penetrated. If a killing blow could be struck, it must be struck now.

  Ossoro Volante steadied himself, moving his feet upon the smooth flagstones. Readied himself to speak the words of Niverad Durant: may the gods bless his idiot tongue and keep him in hell no more than seven lifetimes.

  “Such remarks are counter-productive.” he said. “I pity those who are so insecure that they must elevate themselves at the expense of others.”

  Silence. Ossoro Volante could feel his heart flutter in his chest, pushing against his sternum as though it wished to be free. Were the words enough, had the crack been nothing but an illusion?

  Then, the soft sound of silk upon silk, growing louder with every passing moment. Koln Jhakin applauding. He tapped the fingers of his left hand upon the back of his right. Beside him, an elegant woman in an emerald gown mirrored his gesture. Beside her a captain joined in.

  They knew, they knew in that moment that something splendid had happened, something that shattered a millennia of tradition with a few words, with the muted approval of the watching crowd.

  Churel Lobishomen knew it too. Without speaking, he turned his heel and walked towards the Serpent Gate. A traditionalist to the end, for what better place was there for such a man to greet the Malignant Sun?

  The crowd parted as he moved through it, but no one offered him a word—either spiteful or sorrowful—nor did they try to stop him. Some traditions must be preserved, after all.

  Ossoro Volante watched him go. Another man might have felt pity for his vanquished foe, the briefest moment of regret, perhaps. But not Ossoro Volonte.

  In this, his moment of triumph, he had no place for sentiment. Let the crowds flock to him, the sycophants and grovelers and the bootlickers: let them pour endless flattery into his ears to keep his killing words at bay.

  Koln Jhakin came and stood by his side—yes, of course it would be Jhakin first—staring at him with barely concealed awe.

  “My dear Volante,” he said, his voice lispingly affected. “I never thought to see the day…”

  “And that is your major fault, sir,” Volante said without glancing at the man. “You think when you should speak and speak when you should think.” The first act of his rule, to cut away the dead wood that had surrounded his usurper.

  And then his weapon was turned upon its master.

  “Such remarks are counter-productive.” Koln Jhakin said. “I pity those who are so insecure…”

  Ossoro Volante did not wait for him to finish. His rule over the esthetes of PameMurias had ended before it began. Unwittingly and unwillingly he had liberated them: freed them from slander and gossip, from insinuation and innuendo, from men like Churel Lobishomen.

  From men like himself.

  And in that moment what else was there to do but cling to tradition?

  Out through the Arch of Knives, down the Rue Flussier with its unspeaking crowds, past the gentlemen and ladies upon the steps of Vogelin Walk, a mute gaudy flock. Down to the Serpent Gate. No, not the Serpent Gate, for Churel Lobishomen stood there.

  The Gate of Sundered Princes, then. Yes, he approved of the symbolism. There to meet the Malignant Sun.

  Yet he could take some small consolation that perhaps, just perhaps, he had created a new tradition for the cognoscente. One where restraint would be valued above words, where no man might defame another. Where cruel wit and aphorism were hidden away.

  PameMurias, City of Silence.

  ALL COATED IN BONEMEAL

  Bartholomew Klick

  Marlene gave her empty lockbox a long, cold stare. Her pinky finger had rested there for centuries, only disturbed for her most important rites. Then a Chihuahua stole it—filthy little purse-dweller!

  Of all the necromantic tools, a spell-weaver’s severed limb was the most powerful; every neophyte learned this, but few were dedicated enough to their art to make the sacrifice, and most of them were too dense to consider using a limb they didn’t need. Marlene had settled on her pinky finger—just as a start. The great necromancer Saul used his whole right arm, but at his level of skill, he had no need of the appendage.

  The loss of her focus couldn’t have come at a worse time, not without divine intervention. She could go downstairs and finish the rite of amalgamation, and instead of asking the fresh corpse in the basement useful questions (“What route will the Prime Minister take to his hotel? At what time? How many guards will he have? Are any of them Archons?”), she could force it to leave its mortal coil and find her pinky. A horrible waste.

  At the same time, Marlene couldn’t really blame Mrs. Maples, the dog’s owner. Pure spirits had a tendency to befuddle necromancy just by being near it, and Mrs. Maples could only have been purer if God Himself had sifted her. Why else would an Archon be parading around as her house-pet?

  ***

  When the doorbell rang that morning, just a few weeks prior, Marlene almost ignored it. Nothing could be traced back to her, after all—only to a few freshly slain teenagers. And if the police weren’t at the door, she had no real reason to answer it. But the voice on the other side of the door (“I know you’re in there, Dearie, give it up”) sounded so inviting, so warm and so friendly. Friendly people always had the best corpses, and Marlene did need supplies. Ink, mostly, and paper—both of which the person at the front door could provide nicely.

  The price of cadavers had sky-rocketed in the last century, and good parts rarely came knocking these days. The last freebies had been a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses who’d come by a month or so back, and remembering them made Marlene hesitate.

  Marlene pressed her eye to the peephole. The woman outside wore a periwinkle and flower-patterned muumuu, and Marlene let out a tiny sigh of relief. Not a fanatic. The old woman outside looked acceptable, even if she probably had false teeth.

  “A moment,” Marlene said. It was the first time she’d spoken English in a while. She spent a moment behind the old, rotting door and tried to remember her smile. Not the normal one; she used that every day, and it made most people avoid her. No, she needed something closer to the smile she had once used on suitors.

  She opened the door and unleashed the ancient smile. She felt her mouth curve into its normal position, and then winced. (Goodbye, visitor.)

  But the old woman in the muumuu gave a gentle smile back, and then shoved her way past Marlene and into the house. What delight! Marlene hadn’t been offended in years. She scraped her mind for her finest cries of outrage.

  “What in the unnamed hells do you think you’re doing?” Marlene screeched. (She never got to screech, anymore. It felt wondrous on the vocal cords!)

  Mrs. Maples introduced herself.

  “I’m your new neighbor,” she said. “And I’ve decided we should be neighborly.” Before Marlene could tell the woman where to shove her community spirit, Mrs. Maples inhaled deeply through her nose, and then, in a manner that suggested no answer would quite work, asked, “A bit musty, dear, don’t you think?”

  Marlene’s wicked smile softened into what she’d intended to use in the first place.

  Had this been some obnoxious salesman (where had those all gone?), Marlene would have shown him the basement, and then relished a day-time harvest. But somehow, Mrs. Maple’s comment rang with empathy, as if she was sorry that Marlene never got to smell flowers anymore, and that the house’s odor hadn’t been offensive, merely noticeable. Mrs. Maples reminded Marlene of the warm meals and pleasant times before—(Silence! There is no before!)

  “Mold,” Marlene said.
“In the wood. Can’t smell it anymore.”

  “Bless you, it’s not that strong,” said Mrs. Maples. “I hope you’ve not eaten. I brought a spot of brunch for us. I never notice you carrying in groceries, so I thought you might enjoy a light snack and some company.”

  Marlene’s smile faded; she let it die. The old woman made some sense now. People in the neighborhood were curious, and the local gossip-monger was trying to do a little investigating.

  “Oh, come now,” said Mrs. Maples. “You’re not as stony as all that. You don’t need to keep up your reputation with me. You might need an egg or stick of butter one morning, and there the store is, closed! But there’s old Mrs. Maples cooking brekky, and she has exactly what you need. Now, where’s the kitchen?”

  The muscles around Marlene’s mouth were sore; smiling even as briefly as she had was something like carrying boulders up a hill. Still, she curved up the edges of her lips again. Mrs. Maples wasn’t making a call so that she could gossip later. Women, Marlene reminded herself, hadn’t done that for hundreds of years. Today’s women, even the old ones, were too busy.

  Marlene nodded in the kitchen’s direction. Every step they took led farther from the basement.

  ***

  Inside of five minutes, they were dusting the dishes together so that Maples could make tea.

  “I’ve never seen such thick dust in cups,” Maples said, scooping out her seventh teacup, rinsing it at the faucet, and then setting it in the dish holder.

  “Eat out a lot,” Marlene said, still trying to figure out how Maples was moving through the plates so fast, or if she would be doing it so cheerily if she realized that most of the “dust” was bonemeal.

  “So, how did you lose your finger, Dearie?”

  And crafting the lie filled Marlene’s innards with a light sensation she hadn’t felt in centuries. The words flowed from her mouth like meat from a grinder, and Maples took every syllable as gospel truth. As she moved further and further through the lie, she caught herself in small mistakes. But she didn’t care. She’d take Maples to the basement soon. In the meantime, it felt good to have someone listen.

  “Awful, those factories,” Maples said, when Marlene had finished lying. “Awful places. I’m so glad you found your way into the mortuary sciences. They do seem to suit you.”

  Finally, the last of the dishes had been deemed usable. Maples filled a teakettle with water, set it to boil, and then produced a tin of biscotti. The lid came off with a pop, and a foreign scent leeched into the kitchen. It reminded Marlene of outside.

  Maples held out the tin.

  “Don’t be shy, now,” she said. “You’re nail-thin, Dearie, and these’ll help that. They’re no crumpets, but I imagine they’ll suit the tea.”

  Marlene pulled one from the metal tube; it flaked like old peels of flesh, and it was a bit longer than her hand. It crunched in her mouth, and she went through the motions of eating. For a moment, she even thought she tasted something. It had probably just been a memory, much like in the few dreams Marlene still had. But all the same, she found the brittle bread pleasing.

  She never got around to showing Maples the basement.

  ***

  Maples brought the Chihuahua over every now and then to their weekly tea visits. It mostly slept in Maple’s handbag, and had only gone sniffing around once or twice.

  The lies were getting harder to maintain, but that was the fun of it! Every so often Maples would bring up some mild contradiction (“Wasn’t your boss a woman last week? My, the turnover that office must see!”) but Marlene always managed to flit away from closer scrutiny (“Uh- huh. Fire managers by the boat-load”).

  Somehow, playing this game, Marlene had never taken a close enough look at the idiotic dog. How could she have missed all the signs? Animals were terrified of her house, yet this creature slept soundly, and even looked around without so much as a yip.

  That day—when her pinky vanished—the lying game went as usual, except, at parting, Maples noticed her missing dog. “Oh! She’s gone exploring, then,” Maples said. “Ruthie! Here, girl!”

  The dog scrambled down the steps and dove into Maples’s gigantic purse. It was only when Marlene looked away that she saw the golden wings in her peripheral vision. There they were, plain as sunlight, jutting out of the handbag. Marlene knew it was time to show Maples the basement.

  (But it isn’t her fault that she had an Archon for a pet! She probably doesn’t even realize it.)

  But there was also no social excuse that would allow Marlene access to the handbag so that she could kill the dog. (Or was there? “Excuse me, Mrs. Maples, your dog is a messenger from heaven and has probably stolen something of mine. Might I wring its neck?”)

  “Hey,” Marlene said. Basement time!

  “Yes?” Maples asked. She’d made all the signs of getting ready to leave, and would have looked normal except for the wings sticking out of her purse.

  The words crumbled to dust in Marlene’s mouth. An image of Maples climbing down the basement steps popped into Marlene’s head. It reminded her of the time she watched a horse slip down into quicksand. Could Maples’s eyes widen like that? Could she scream? Marlene had no curiosity for these questions. A feeling, the meaning of which Marlene did not remember, twirled in her stomach.

  “I’ll cook next week,” Marlene finished.

  “That’s lovely,” Maples said. “I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”

  So Marlene watched as the old woman and the divine guardian in her purse vanished down the sidewalk. The dog had come from upstairs; it could only have tampered with one thing.

  Killing a few worthless teenagers or the leader of a nation—that, Marlene could do. But the prospect of going next door, fighting with Mrs. Maples’s pet Archon, and risking having all her lies unfold (having to see the shock of betrayal in her friend’s eyes) was more than Marlene could bear.

  She looked from the empty lockbox where her withered digit once sat, and then up to the clock. Barely noon. She had seven hours to finish the flesh-golem and question the corpse. Plenty of time for a Prime Minister to die.

  Marlene sighed at the empty lockbox and clicked it shut. Then, in her kitchen, which had been strangely clean and usable for weeks now, she put her good hand on the chopping board, and raised the meat-cleaver over her head.

  What was a pinky between friends?

  POSSESSED OF TALENT

  Thomas Allein

  Ross holds the paintbrush like a delicate thing, as if the handle, thick as a thumb, could crack at any moment. The horsehair tip barely touches the rough canvas, but the paint still leaves thick, dark lines. He works slowly, painfully slowly, going over the same lines multiple times with no obvious effect. The colors are all the kind one would see in the middle of a hurricane, all steel grays and navy blues with the occasional flash of thunderbolt gold.

  During the three hours in which he’s painting, he steps back from the canvas only twice. On these two rare occasions, he stands a few feet back and his gaze darts all across the work in progress, jumping from detail to detail. Eyes full of worry and dread, he takes in everything about his work: the light gray curves in the lower left-hand corner, the thin yellow lines hopping between midnight blue swathes, the flecks of black and dark brown so small one would have to know they were there to notice them. Notably, however, his gaze never drifts towards the focus of the painting—the center of the canvas, from which an eye with an iris the color of dark lavender stares out.

  ***

  Ross spent his childhood in Arizona in a small town out in the middle of the desert which only survived due to the interstate highway flowing through it. He grew up as an only child, but his parents gave birth to another son when he was eleven. Ross did well enough in school to go to a public college in Minnesota with a number of scholarships, and there he majored in Communications.

  This is all background information, the large brush strokes that fill the canvas with ambiance. Next comes the midground,
the detail added to support and enhance the foreground:

  Shortly after graduation, Ross met a girl. Her name was Jessica by birth, but she only ever spelled it “Jessyka.” She was a pleasant girl who wore Greenpeace stickers and pink ribbons but hardly ever mentioned them to anybody. Ross liked her well enough.

  After some time, they moved to a vaguely suburban town in Pennsylvania together. A change in atmosphere would invigorate their lives, they told themselves, and invigorate each other. Plus, Jessyka had found an internship with a veterinarian’s office nearby and Ross was eying a cozy job as a bank teller—he was ready to begin a long ascent up the ranks towards the mysterious goal called success.

  ***

  By now, he’s been fired from his job. The phone doesn’t ring—the phone was the first thing to go—so he doesn’t know for sure, but he hasn’t shown up for work in nearly three weeks, so he’s most definitely been let go.

  As he steps away from the painting and heads towards the dimly lit kitchen, he wonders how many times Jessyka has tried contacting him.

  ***

  Cohabitation didn’t work out too well. The apartment was far too small and Jessyka always insisted on having her friends over at random times in the day. However, they still liked each other, and they had put too many resources into one another to simply crumble apart, so Ross moved away to a tiny closet of a place in a separate building, but only just across the street. For the next month, Ross lived a satisfactory life.

  ***

  The second thing to go was the doorbell. Because of this, Ross nearly missed the cableman who came to fix the phone. After two long hours of fiddling with an array of wires and gadgetry, the cableman announced with frustration that he didn’t see a single thing wrong, and that he’d return in two days with an even better array of wires and gadgetry. He didn’t come back. Ross tried contacting him again in his office three days later, but no reply came. He tried to get in touch with a different company, but that proved just as unsuccessful.

 

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