by Mike Allen
“Why did he smash you?” Chiufi panted.
“To get the scroll out of my head and know the secrets it holds for himself,” said Palinday. “To use them, or sell them to the highest bidder.”
Chiufi looked around. “Which way?”
“I don’t recognise the street,” said Palinday. “But we left the river east and north of my master’s house. Go south and then west.”
Chiufi turned uncertainly.
“That way!” Palinday snapped.
Behra felt a familiar pressure against her thoughts. “He’s coming,” she gasped.
Chiufi caught her wrist again. “Run!”
She stumbled after.
On through the streets they ran, Chiufi dragging her along, sometimes holding her up, Palinday’s head held up in his other hand. The doll barked directions, guiding them deeper into the city. A sharp pain started in Behra’s side.
The sense of their father behind them grew stronger and stronger. “He’s coming!”
“Not far!” cried Palinday. “My master will be there.”
“I can’t,” Behra wept.
“Keep going,” Chiufi said, his own voice almost a sob.
“He’s coming.”
Closer. And closer. She could feel the killing fury in him. And power—more than she had ever felt him hold.
Chiufi would die if he caught them. She would be flogged, no doubt, and returned to her hut and chain. But Chiufi would die.
For his sake, Behra kept running.
“Here!” Palinday shrieked. “Here, on the left! The third house along!”
The townhouse was one of a row fronted by gated courtyards. Behra swayed, barely able to stay upright, staring up at the house in confusion. Surely the King’s Magician must live in a palace?
Chiufi rattled the bars of the gate and shouted. “My Lord! Open up!”
Palinday gave a wail of dismay. “My master isn’t here! He’s supposed to be here!”
Their father’s presence was overwhelming. He’s here, she thought. Her tongue refused to cooperate. He’s here!
“Hold me to the lock,” said Palinday.
Chiufi did so. The doll whispered into the keyhole and, with a loud clang, the gate sprang open.
“Chiufi!” Behra gasped.
There was a bellow from the corner of the street.
“Inside!” cried Palinday. “He won’t be able to pass the gate.”
Chiufi flung Behra through and slammed the bars shut behind them.
She almost fell, but he lifted her and dragged her across the courtyard towards the door of the house.
“Talais ac ulh,” she mouthed, caught up in her father’s spell. She felt it gather strength, wanted to shout a warning. “Telais maliel ap naghai.”
With a scream, she wrenched herself free.
The air detonated between her and Chiufi. He was hurled away from her by the impact of the spell. Behra sprawled, twisted to see her brother bounce off the stones. Palinday’s head sailed through the air to smash against the wall of the house.
Chiufi’s screams rose to a shriek. Blood bubbled from his eyes, ears and nose.
“Chiufi!” Behra cried. She lurched upright, thrust her hand into the arc of power between her father and brother, thinking madly to bat the killing magic back towards Aghor.
She felt her fingerbones snap, the skin on her hand blistering and bursting. The force of the spell spun her around and back to her knees. There was a cry of surprise from outside the gate.
Behra whimpered, cradling her shattered hand. Tremors ran through Chiufi, then he lay frighteningly still.
She felt her father building another spell. “No,” she said. “No.” She drew in power, felt the air crackle against her skin. “Silbuim meneich,” she said aloud—her spell, not his.
Aghor disappeared in a flash. Heat washed back over her. She heard the thin screams of her sisters, felt her father’s shock, his pain, his rage quickly returning.
“No!” She got to her feet, lifting her hands, broken and whole, towards him. “Silbuim meneich!”
This spell had far more force, but this time he was ready, too. More of the blast bounced back through the gate, knocking Behra over. She thrashed about, beating at the flames on her smock and hair.
There was silence from her father, no sense of the chord that had joined her to him.
Shaking, she crawled over to Chiufi. He still wasn’t moving. She reached out to him with her good hand, fingers fluttering over his face. His chest rose, suddenly, and fell. Then again. Her vision blurred.
A clatter of hooves outside the gate made her look up.
Her father lay prone on the road. A horseman loomed over him. Aghor raised a hand weakly. The rider held out a forked staff to touch his fingers. Behra felt the words of power pass between them. Aghor’s back arched, and he slumped and fell still.
The rider dismounted. He pushed open the gate and strode across the yard. Behra shrank back. Pale eyes bored into her from under thick white brows. He went straight past her, stepping over Chiufi, to where Palinday’s head had smashed against the wall.
The old man stooped, then straightened with a tiny paper scroll in his hand. “Ah, my friend,” he murmured. “I sensed too late that it was you the Hound had cornered on that barge, and then you ran away from me.”
His gaze fell once more on Behra.
“Please,” she said, “help my brother.”
* * *
A knock at the door woke Behra from her doze. She jerked her head away from the wall behind her chair. Chiufi lay unconscious in the bed, bandages swathing his eyes and ears. His mouth was open and slack, but his chest rose and fell.
The door opened and a man with polished black skin came in. No, not a man—a golem, though he was dressed like a man and moved as smoothly.
The ebony golem saw her awake. His sculpted face shifted fractionally, approximating a smile.
“Behra.”
The voice was nearly the same—deeper, but tinkling with music. And he still had blue gemstone eyes.
Behra stared in wonder as Palinday came to perch on the edge of Chiufi’s bed.
“I told you I was in disguise,” he said. He reached across to brush his hand gently across her splinted fingers. He squeezed her good hand, his touch cold and unyielding. “You are safe.”
“And my father?”
“My Lord Emieldraeu has laid a geas upon him. He cannot approach you or do you harm. You are safe.” He patted her fingers. “You had already beaten him, you know, before my master intervened.”
Behra shook her head. It was too much, too overwhelming. “Chiufi?”
Palinday’s voice softened. “He will live. My master believes he will regain most of his hearing and his voice, in time. His heart and lungs, too, will mostly heal.”
He raised his hand to wipe her cheek with his fingertip. “Do not blame yourself. You did what was needed—both of you,” he said. “Lord Tibuir was plotting rebellion. Now the King can strike first, before Tibuir is ready. You and your brother may have saved Ornomagne from a terrible civil war.” Behra thought that if he was a man, he would have sighed. “Or made it less terrible, at least. And you saved yourselves.”
Behra was only half listening. “What of his eyes?”
“Ah.”
She imagined him blinded for life, yet another terrible hurt, taken for her sake. It was too much to bear.
She saw Palinday’s mouth stretch into another fractional smile, his fingers reach into the pocket of his vest. He turned Behra’s hand over and dropped something into her palm. She looked down at a pair of glass orbs. Set into each was a faceted blue gemstone identical to Palinday’s eyes.
“His eyes cannot be saved,” the golem said, “but he will be well cared for.”
ON THE LEITMOTIF OF THE TRICKSTER CONSTELLATION IN NORTHERN HEMISPHERIC STAR CHARTS, POST-APOCALYPSE
Nicole Kornher-Stace
The One Who Got Away
Area: 513.842 sq. deg. (appx
. 1.29%)
from the Palisade Chart: pine pitch, birch bark
Winter
Seven stars: three major, four minor. Six represent the head, heart, hands and feet of an androgynous child; the seventh, an object gripped in the child’s left fist. Regrettably, this object’s identity remains a puzzle that has thwarted both the restoration efforts of our team and the scrutiny of every expert in the field: this sector of the chart, including roughly 1/3 of the lower-left quadrant of the One (to say nothing of its neighbor, the Flensed Bride, foxed down to her caption—see fig. 1), is obliterate. A further unhappy consequence of this damage: it is impossible to tell whether the child in question is hugging itself (as children will, against cold or loneliness or fear) or if its wrists are tied.
Any scholar of the charts will forgive me—posthumously, at least—for saying that the trickster constellations prove, time and time again, the trickiest to study: whereas the constellations out of history (e.g., the Payload, the Comet, the Exodus, the Pest), those shaped by daily circumstance (the Huntsman, the Pitfall, the Bear), and those obviously conjured by minds seeking to realize them with wish (the Wellspring, the Garden) tend to leave us careful breadcrumb trails to follow, in the form of Songkeepers, journals, and old books, the trickster constellations set us a puzzle on the best of days, an ambush on the worst, and it is utterly in keeping with the trickster’s own motif that, at times, even the most meticulous of combings comes up emptyhanded, yielding little but a tag-end or a fragment of a tale—or, in the case of this odd little constellation, nothing.
In default of contextual evidence, the imagination picks at clues, thumb-and-forefinger, as if at a spider in the stewpot, or undetonated ordnance in the path. From this figure’s caption we can glean it “got away,” but from what? When? And how? Is it a refugee? An escaped prisoner? A ghost?
Of a certainty this was the constellation mothers made offerings to, when their infants’ fevers spiked, and the one whose name lost wanderers invoked on lonely roads—but why? Those who threw themselves upon this trickster’s questionable mercies did not lead easy lives. Their very bones assure us of this: soft with radiation, pitted with disease. Their toothless skulls give tongue to songs of loss. Was the object of these prayers then to be returned unto oneself, one’s place, one’s family—or to be spirited away from all of these, propelled headlong into some gentler tale?
If so, this may explain occasional depictions of the One alongside a waterspout or cyclone, natural phenomena which folk belief endows with an almost mystic sense of quid pro quo; they were widely thought to serve as conduits or tunnels drawing souls from this plane into another, and those from others into this, thus counterpoising each potential world against the rest.
Similar formations in other charts: the Changeling (Trench Chart, NQ3), Death (Sail Chart, NQ3)
* * *
When Archivist Wasp found the bottle on her doorstep, she knew at once the ghosts had left it there, because it smelled of salt. Most of what she found there in the dawn still wore a stink of dirt and ash, from where someone had exhumed it; or of dirt and sweat and cooking, the close smells of a little house, from where someone had sewn or pieced or woven it in the few hours of ashy light each day allotted. A heel of acorn-flour bread, a clutch of stunted onions and a seashell; a scarf knitted of nettle yarn and a pair of horseleather gloves, clumsily stitched and too short in the fingers, but warming as she tugged them on. A bright orange plastic pitcher, clouded with its ancientness and warped with some past heat, which sloshed with rainwater as she dethroned it from its place of honor in the cairn of offerings. The movement dislodged a sharpening-stone and a sort of torque someone had fashioned out of scavengings: empty cartridges and tarnished rings and bits of colored glass flanking a single tiny locket with a blue-and-white enamel windmill on the front. And someone had shored up her sagging doorframe with the same bits of salvage that the rest of the Archivist-hut had been pieced of for as long as Wasp had known. Underneath it all, at the time of the first Archivist, it could have been made of anything.
Fear-gifts, blood-gifts, bribes. Most days she left the lot of it to the snuffling shrine-dogs who prowled her hut to ensure her obedience—first subtracting maybe a few dried apples, maybe a bullet for a gun she may yet find, maybe some corpse’s stolen shoes—only to have new cairns rebuilt by eager hands during the night. After all, there was no other sword between the living and the ghosts than her; no other intercessor, no other keeper of the door. She could purge a poltergeist, send the shades of cradle-deaths to quicken fallow wombs, tether a ghost in place with salt to ward a scraggled field against the tithing of the crows. And it was she who gleaned the shards of histories and pieced them, tipped voice like sips of water down the throat of a dead world.
And she’d gladly let the gifts rot down to mulch, and their givers along with them.
But the bottle smelled cold and clean and salt as seas she knew were salt because the ghosts had told her so. The smell on it, and the whitegreen of the glass, put her in mind of licking icicles. Though the icicles she knew were riddled with flaws and streaks of grit, she believed the ghost who’d said the icicles of the Well-Before had frozen clear as windowpanes.
(“As what?” Wasp had asked. “Windowpanes,” the ghost had repeated. Then, “Crystal,” it had offered to her blank look. “Plastic sheeting?” At last she’d understood. In her head—for she possessed neither paper nor the letters to put on it—she’d written windowpanes. Written crystal. And tipped the ghost out of its jar to go its way.)
She turned the bottle back and forth in the light, watching how the glass warped the roll of paper within. Of course the ghosts had not brought it there, any more than the sea could bring her shells; only that their migrations had disinterred it from wherever it had been concealed and someone had found it, plucked it gingerly from the ground as though it might well bite, and brought it to the only person any of them knew who’d bite back harder.
Also odd: the sheet of paper inside the bottle was nothing like the ones she’d seen from time to time on traders’ wagons or bound into books in the Songkeeper’s hut, burned or drowned or gnawed or sweet with rot. She sat on the rock that was her front step—gingerly, still sore from her last escape attempt, a week ago now by the moon—and studied it, flattened against the tamped-earth path to her hut. The paper unrolled to the length of one of Wasp’s long strides and was peppered with as many dots as there were windfalls in an orchard, skulls in a slagpit, or beans in a bowl.
A map, thought Wasp, who had seen such things before. A map of stars.
And then she grew very thoughtful, did Wasp with the ache still in her calves from the fleeing, with the rawness still in her lungs and a lattice of welts from the thornfield she had pushed through with the clamor of the hunt right on her heels, with the smell of the shrine-dogs still in her hair from the last time they’d run her down. With the scars on her ankles from the first time the Catchkeep-priest had had to drag her back, spitting and slashing, and smashed her feet between two stones. Sheer dumb luck, perhaps, or force of rage, she’d healed.
The next day, hunting, she packed the saltlick and the fruit and blade and bells as usual, but left her jars behind. She brought the map instead.
Catchkeep
Area: 300.492 sq. deg. (appx. 0.73%)
from the Dogwagon Chart: leather tooling, horsehide
Autumn
Sixteen stars: six major, ten minor, most of the latter representing teeth. This dog’s jaw is like a beartrap, too huge for her head, dwarfing even the massive barrel of her chest and the bulging muscles of her thighs. Even today it proves no challenge to see her as the crafters of this chart must have done, the ones who venerated her deeply enough to hold her fellow dogs in such high regard—the pistons of her legs, the forges of her eyes, the fey flux of that awful guileful grin—and in truth it remains almost instinctive in the modern heart to cheer her on each night as she runs the moon to earth behind the hills. But she is Catchkeep, ghostherde
r and sentinel, constant as the stars that shape her nightly steeplechase; and when the lot of us is done to dust, she will not miss our rallying.
Of all this trickster’s stories—“Catchkeep Chases the Comet’s Tail,” “Catchkeep’s Biting Contest with Grandmother Shark,” etc.—the one that comes to us the most well-preserved by far is “Catchkeep’s Bequest,” wherein a few short paragraphs (or, more pertinent to the experience of its original audience, a few minutes’ telling) find that inimitable bitch whelping the First Litter, passing the Earth itself as afterbirth, then fashioning the world’s first people out of dogs’ skeletons rearranged to stand upright, inadvertently killing many when she tries to scruff those who dare disobey. It ends with Catchkeep commandeering the first makeshift vehicle of these people, who grew foolhardy or daft enough to try and tame her, and in so doing forming her sister constellation, the Empty Wagon (NQ3, fig. 2)—possibly a glorification of that people’s own wagons, constructed of rusted-out automobile chassis welded to whatever scaffolding and stretched with whatever rotten fabric or brittle leather was to hand?
“The lot of you,” said Catchkeep, “can go screw.” And she took their wagon and drove it hard across the hills until all the dogs fell down dead in their traces, glowing bright as arc lights through the ash. Then she lifted each of them in her great jaws and tossed them up into the sky, gently as a bitch tumbling pups, and they dug in their footholds on the dark and paced their circles and curled up to sleep the sleep of stars.
What she is perhaps best known as, however, is a herder of spirits: both those of the dead and the unborn. In this aspect she earns the fear of the diseased, the chased, and the condemned, whose souls it is her charge to bear away; also the veneration of the fallow-wombed, whose custom it was to set out the choicest bits of meat after their evening meal, in hopes of luring Catchkeep to the door.
Her former, baneful aspect is illustrated in a scrap of doggerel, perhaps a fraction of a larger piece of verse, found scrawled on a bit of scorch-edged paper rolled into a tube and tied off with a string, worn in a horsehide pouch as a crude little talisman against her inexorable teeth: