Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  “You gonna sit there all night staring at the clouds or what?”

  “Can’t go down,” I muttered. “Too far to jump to the Boaser building, and the Alleyn’s roof is too sharp… what’s with these clouds?”

  The clouds were pushing in over the gutters, boxing me in to a space about ten feet wide. If they were clouds, which was becoming less likely with every passing second. They were clearly things that looked like clouds but were actually something else extremely horrible that I didn’t know about and should never have had to even glimpse, let alone get up close and personal with.

  “We’ll have to translate,” I said. “What are you over there?”

  “You’ll find out,” said the gargoyle.

  I did the dance as the clouds rushed in and just as their ghastly grey wispy tendrils were about to grab sensitive portions of my anatomy, I spoke the Word, and the gargoyle and I were suddenly somewhere else and I was no longer a Scotty dog and the gargoyle was no longer a small piece of gothic sculpture.

  We were in a nondescript office corridor and she was a six-foot-six mahogany-skinned nightclub bouncer with a shaved head, wearing red wraparound sunglasses, a gold racing suit unbuttoned to the midriff and a mayoral-style chain of tiny ceramicised advertising patches from numerous oil and tyre companies that was doing very little to conceal her rather fascinating cleavage.

  I, on the other hand, was back to my normal unprepossessing human self.

  “Well, hello,” I smirked, turning on the charm.

  She smacked the sex charm out of my hand and slapped my cheek for good measure.

  “What’s got into you, moron? Your life’s in danger. Besides, I’m simply not attracted to little men with weak sorcery.”

  “You didn’t have to break my charm,” I complained as I picked the pieces of the charm off the floor and clicked them together. Then just to be sure she wasn’t toying with me, I tried my roguish smile and added, “Maybe you’d like to handle something—”

  When I picked myself up off the floor she was grinding the remains of the charm into dust under her heel.

  “Now I can believe you tried to hump a vampire,” she said. “You must be desperate. Whatever gave you the idea that you would enjoy cold undead flesh anyway?”

  “Books,” I muttered. “Lot of ’em. Vampire hunters. Sexy undead. Thought some of it must be true. Leakage of reality from the netherworld…”

  “You should know better than that.”

  “OK, the vampire sex wasn’t so pleasant,” I protested. “But I’m going to try a werewolf gal next, they’re warm-blooded—”

  This time I lay on the ground a bit longer before I got up, while the former gargoyle stood over me, frowning.

  “That’s to teach you to stop dreaming with your dick. Now get up. They’ll be on our trail in a minute or two.”

  “What do I call you?” I asked gingerly. My lower lip was already starting to swell up from the latest punch. “I can’t call you gargoyle.”

  “Call me Gurl.”

  “Girl? What kind of name is—”

  “Gurl, with a ‘u’. Can’t you hear the difference? Uh oh—”

  Both of us turned at the same time, just as the ceiling tiles exploded and something bright and shimmering blue dropped in, cold blasting ahead of it, sucking the breath out of my lungs. I had the .45 in my hand and I just managed to squeeze off two shots before my trigger finger froze, the gunshots booming in the enclosed space.

  There was a horrible, high-pressure screech and then the thing collapsed in on itself and turned into a low wave of dirty iced water that rushed past me high enough to permanently stain the crotch of my pants. Gurl, of course, had managed to jump up and hang from a light fixture, escaping the air-conditioning elemental’s final act of terror.

  As warmth and feeling slowly returned to my hand, I eased my finger off the trigger, groaning slightly with the pain. Inside, I was giving thanks to Granny for packing a decent pistol with a full arcane load. A lot of folk who travel between the realms go for smaller caliber stuff, easy to conceal snub-nosed .38s, or 9mm autos with a big magazine, fourteen or fifteen rounds. But when it comes to stopping power, you can’t beat a good old-fashioned Colt .45 with a 230gr Federal Hi-Shok round jacketed in silver. Well, of course, you can beat it with say a 10 gauge riot gun firing solid silver slugs or just the sheer firepower of a nice automatic weapon like a MAC-10 or an MP5K PDW or if the shit is really serious and you’ve got the room, some sort of light anti-armor weapon, like what they used to call a LAW, or SRAW, though nowadays if you can get your hands on an AT4—

  “Wipe that drool off your face and let’s move!” snapped Gurl.“That elemental was only the first across. Move it!”

  “Uh,” I grunted. What the hell was going on? I’d never had an internal monologue about the relative stopping power of various firearms before. And come to think of it, I never used to have a sex charm. Or wanted to fuck a vampire. I mean, I had a girlfriend… or I used to. Come to think about it, I wasn’t even sure what had been going on in the last few weeks…

  “I’ve been cursed,” I croaked as Gurl dragged me down the corridor and down the internal fire escape.

  “No shit!” snapped Gurl. “You only just realize that?”

  “Yeah. It’s just not me, this fascination with firearms and sex with the undead and—”

  Gurl caught me as I tripped over the landing, arresting my movement an inch before I collided head first with the wall.

  “Clumsiness,” I finished weakly.

  Gurl pushed the door open with her little finger and caught me again as I almost fell down the stairs.

  “Concentrate!” she snapped. “It’s a curse, remember? It can only get you when your mind wanders.”

  Like after four hours of Granny lecturing me. That was enough to make my mind wander about as far as any mind could go, thus letting the curse get a really good grip.

  I concentrated. Steps, I told myself. Keep the feet on the steps. But who the hell would want to curse me? What had I been doing these last few weeks? Besides jumping vampire bones? What was happening with my current case? I could lose my investigator’s licence—”

  “I said concentrate!” said Gurl. She hauled me back and pushed me through the door to the lobby. “Do you recognize where we are?”

  “The lobby of a building,” I said weakly and then, “Ow! What did you do that for?”

  Gurl ignored me. Lithe as a… a really lithe kind of animal that I couldn’t quite think of… she ran to the revolving door and looked out. While she looked out, I looked around. It was a lobby, so I was right, there. But there was no one in it, despite the sunshine coming in through the front windows and the door. And the black-letter on white marble signboard had a lot of very strange entries. I mean the words weren’t even English. Come to think about it, the letters weren’t even English. Or Chinese. Or Cyrillic. This was a symbol puzzle, the kind that a top-flight private eye could solve in a few minutes, so I could do it in thirty seconds…

  “Hold on,”I said. “What’s this private eye crap? I’m not an investigator in the alter-world! I’m a gardener. I own a company that does office plants! Green Thumb Inc., that’s me! What the hell is going on?”

  “Shut up!” said Gurl. “Listen.”

  I shut up and listened. It was quiet. Very quiet. Way too quiet for any kind of office block in the city. There should have been traffic noises. People shouting. Annoying beep-beep-beep sounds from pedestrian crossings and stupid escalating ringtones designed to deafen everyone except the owner of the phone.

  “You idiot,” said Gurl. “You’ve translated us to an ur-space.”

  “No I haven’t,” I protested. “Listen, I can hear something.”

  The something got louder and clearer. It was the distant baying of a very large number of hounds. Nasty, strangely metallic hounds. It sounded like a cross between a hundred hubcaps falling off the back of a truck on to a hard road and a similar number of dogs waiting in line to ge
t neutered at the vet’s.

  “Uh, not anything normal though,” I conceded. “Uh, sorry. I guess this is an ur-space. We must be close though, or you’d still be a gargoyle.”

  “Translate us!” demanded Gurl. The baying was getting louder, and it was coming from both outside the building and from the stairwell. It could only be a sorcerous hunting pack of fire wrought hounds or maybe red iron firedogs or perhaps even brazen wolves, the kind of enemy where you wanted a nice secure pillbox with a narrow firing slit and a tripod-mounted M60 or better still a .50 cal, several boxes of silver-mercury explosive-tipped ammo, a few spare barrels—

  “Concentrate! Translate us, wizard!”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. I’d forgotten I was a wizard too, a green wizard, not a somewhat sorcerous private eye with a proclivity for bizarre sex and firearms. “It’s too soon to do the dance again. I’ll have to do… uh… something else.”

  “Be quick,” said Gurl. She took a fire extinguisher and wedged it in the revolving door, then tore off the top of the reception desk and ripped it into three pieces. She chose one length as a club and put the other two through the handles of the stair door, barring it shut.

  The desk was two-inch hardwood, so I was reminded once again to treat Gurl with respect. It wasn’t so difficult, not since the sex charm had been destroyed. But my mind kept up its clumsy wandering, trying to go down paths liberally strewn with lady werewolves toting firearms. The curse was fighting my efforts to shake it off, and that meant that I had to get an unusually large and powerful handgun, perhaps a S&W Model 500 .50 revolver and hunt down the perpetrator—

  I shook my head. The curse was too strong. If it had been a spell it would have been weakened in the translation from the nether-world and I could defeat the residual effects by mere force of will. That meant there was a curse locus on me somewhere, something powerful enough to stay with me through a shape change and a translation.

  I put my hand in my mouth and felt my teeth, quickly pulling each one to see if any were loose. One was. It came out with a stench of sulphurous gas that nearly choked me. Coughing and wheezing, I drop-kicked the tooth to the far side of the lobby.

  Just then the first of the hounds arrived at the bottom of the stairs. The baying got a lot louder and now it was accompanied by terrible thuds and ominous cracking sounds as they threw themselves against the door.

  I took stock very quickly. I had none of my usual apparatus. No trowel, no fertilizer, no seedlings, no selections of bark. Just a .45 pistol with perhaps five rounds in it which I was suddenly less interested in… and a red leather bag with a copper coin and a bean of unknown provenance. I could probably use the bean, but green magic is slow. I had to do something fast, but I didn’t have anything…

  Except that cursed tooth I’d just thrown away.

  “Hold them off for a minute!” I shouted, as I dived across the floor and picked up the tooth again. I held it in my left hand as I took out the copper coin, holding that in my right fist as I mentally reached out to pull in whatever sorcerous power there was in this ur-space. Ivory, or ivory-equivalent, and copper were certainly not green magic, but people—particularly my enemies—often forgot that I wasn’t just a green wizard.

  I’d forgotten myself, but fear is a powerful mnemonic catalyst. I was also the owner of a not very successful office plant business that survived thanks to a grandmotherly subsidy in the alter-world. Not that this was relevant in the current circumstance. What was relevant was that in the nether-world I was a green wizard of the fourth circle (so only ninth-lowest of the low). But not only that, thanks to my grandmother’s insistence on me signing up when I was twenty-one for three of the most miserable and toughest years of my life, I was also a duty-served Knight of the Bright Hill and so I could call upon aid from any of its outlying garrisons. Well, I could if I was prepared to pay for it in extra years of service.

  Funnily enough, with imminent death by tooth and claw only the other side of a door and my only ally an admittedly extremely tough door-bitch, I was prepared to pay; and with ivory and copper, I could call in someone very heavy duty.

  At least I hoped I could. I had no idea where we were, which garrison was closest, and even if anyone useful would be there. But at that point, even a knocked-kneed ancient arbalist would be better than nothing.

  As my call went out, there was a particularly loud thud, a very sharp crack and the door burst open. A firedog pushed its flat, red-hot head through the smashed timbers and looked puzzled as Gurl smashed her club on its skull. The club burst into flames. The firedog growled, and swiped at Gurl with one very large, very hot paw. She leaped back, and it thrust itself almost through, its hindquarters stuck for the four or five seconds it would take for the door to finish burning down. At the same time, the revolving door shrieked and the top of the fire extinguisher blew off, a fountain of foam gushing towards the ceiling. Firedogs backed away from the foam, their burning rear-ends melting holes in the glass.

  There was a lot of smoke, a lot of baying and quite a lot of screaming. Mostly that was Gurl’s battle cry but I suspect some of it was more the pathetic scared kind coming out of my own throat.

  There was also the shimmering sound of distant cymbals being struck with feathered hammers, and the floor shook as something very heavy arrived.

  “Sir Gardner,” said a voice behind me. “You beseech my aid?”

  I didn’t so much turn as revolve on the spot.

  “Yes!” I said. There was so much smoke that it was hard to see our reinforcement. But as she took up so much of the lobby it was kind of hard to come to grips with the totality of her anyway. There was the sheen of bright scales, the glitter of a line of diamond teeth, the sudden sweep of a surprisingly prehensile tail about the size of a dozen fire hoses braided together, a couple of talons the size of the firedogs… and then there weren’t any firedogs. Just distant yelping that rapidly got more distant, and a nasty crunching sound, which would be the two or three of the pack that didn’t turn tail fast enough.

  I lay on the floor where the air was kind of OK and gasped. Gurl leopard-crawled across to me and propped nearby.

  “It knows I’m with you, right?”

  “She,” I whispered. “Lady Alyss of the Corben Ravelin.”

  I raised my head a little and peered into the smoke.

  “Gramercy, Lady Alyss,” I said.

  “A trifle,” replied the dragon. “Have you the tokens?”

  I threw the coin and the tooth up to where I thought her head was. Smoke swirled and parted, and I caught a glimpse of Alyss’s serpentine head, dark as gunmetal, in stark contrast to her shining wings and body.

  “Ach,” grunted the dragon. There was a ghastly hawking sound and then the tooth shot past me like a stone from a slingshot and shattered on the floor. “A most disagreeable curse lay on that tooth, Sir Gardner.”

  “I regret that I was forced to rely upon such a token, and I apologise unreservedly for its use,” I said. Possibly I had just got myself out of the skillet and onto the stove. Alyss was notoriously touchy about her honor, and I would have no chance fighting a duel with her. Even with all my stuff, and all my wits about me.

  “Indeed,” sniffed Alyss, her intake of breath clearing out most of the smoke. “I shall let the matter pass, as you were clearly in extremis, Sir Gardner. Till we meet again, at the Ebb Muster.”

  “Till we meet again, Lady Alyss,” I said, standing up to bow. I’d just scored another obligation. Calling one of the Order’s dragons was worth at least two years’ service from the likes of me, and Lady Alyss had just made it official. Come the Ebb Muster, I had to report or be forsworn.

  Of course, I’d be well dead by then, because Grandma’s folk would catch up with me long before then. Or whoever put the curse on me in the first place.

  Lady Alyss vanished, taking the remainder of the smoke with her, except for a little bit in my lungs that I had to cough out. Gurl clapped me on the back so hard I thought one of my natural teeth
might fly out.

  “The bastards got me at the dentist,” I said, once I’d stopped coughing. “Or one of them was the dentist.I never should have let them give me the gas; they must have translated me while I was under, implanted the cursed tooth and then sent me back.”

  “Afraid of the pain, were you?” said Gurl. “Somehow I’m not surprised.”

  “Come on, it was a crown replacement,” I said. “But I could have taken the pain, I just enjoy the gas… oh shit. A crown replacement. That is fiendishly clever. A cursed tooth for a crown replacement… Granny the witch-queen… they made me into an assassin that would kill with bad luck!”

  “Got to give them points for that,” said Gurl. “Has to be the new queen that set it up, I guess, and we get offed by the either the old queen’s guards or the new queen’s friends.”

  “I’m sure that’s their plan,” I said. My brain was finally getting itself into thinking order. “But if we can survive Granny’s guards, we might have a chance.”

  “Why?”

  “Because no one can guarantee who the new witch-queen will be. It’s not something you can plan on, or subvert. I mean there’s at least a hundred and one heirs of the blood, by birth or adoption. Each heir gets to hold the old witch-queen’s knife, and put on the necklace and the stupid hat, and those three things choose… or not. The consequences of them not choosing are severe, so most potential heirs don’t even try. Besides, who would actually want the job?”

  “Whoever it is, we’d better find somewhere to hide out right now,” said Gurl. “It’ll be bats next. Or the Inner Coven. We’ll have the best chance in the alter-world. Can you get us there yet?”

  “Hang on a minute,” I said. “I’m thinking.”

  “We have to—”

  “Shhh!”

  I was thinking. Very hard. The central part of it being my own question: Who would want the job? Even Granny used to talk about giving it up.