Conmergence: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction

by Maya, Tara

  Meanwhile, another soldier had crept into the attic from outside, through the casement window. Sajiana strove to cry out, to warn the brink, in vain. The newcomer slashed his kora directly into the back of the brink’s neck. The blow nearly severed his head from his body.

  The brink turned around and knocked the soldier out the window. The brink’s head lolled at a silly angle. This development did not distress or slow the brink, but it shocked Yorch long enough for him to forget to maintain his hold over his soldiers. They fled at once.

  "You’re a brink!" Yorch stammered. "Wait, please! Don’t kill me. We can reach an accommodation, I’m sure of it! Besides, all the wealth of this house is a glamour. If you kill me, who will maintain it for you? I will paint you anything you want -- anything!"

  "I am not a brink," said the brink. "And I don’t want your bribes, you vile dog!"

  For emphasis, the brink beheaded Yorch.

  The brink finally noticed the odd state of his own head. He yanked out the blade still lodged in it and adjusted his head back on his neck. His skin smoothed over the wound, restoring him to perfect health.

  The brink stared at the bloody kora, then turned to Sajiana in panic. "How did I do that?"

  "You’re a brink."

  "How did I survive that wound? It would have killed any man!"

  "You’re not a man, you’re a brink."

  "Stop saying that!" He waved his sword.

  The death of Yorch had, unfortunately, not altered the magic that bound Sajiana and the other servants of the mansion to the painting. Yorch’s last commands no longer held true, so she was able to sit up and try to hide her nakedness with her hair and her arms. Yet, her spirit remained knotted to the house through the painting. She would not be able to leave as long as the painting survived. Since she was in the painting, she could not destroy it herself. She itched to grab Yorch’s kora where it had clattered to the floor, but although she expected her swordsmanship a little surpassed Yorch’s, she knew it would not be up to par to defeat the brink. Even if a stab would have killed him, which it obviously wouldn’t.

  "Will you kill me too, brink?" she asked without much hope.

  He sheathed his kora. "I can’t," he said. "Even if I wanted to. You hold me hostage, even as Yorch held you. I came here because you summoned me."

  "You were able to slip out of my other drawing easily enough."

  "This one would not let me go. I tried."

  Sajiana felt a brief, irrational surge of pride in her work. It passed quickly, as she recalled that she too, remained bound. And there was a simple way for the brink to destroy her and free himself without attacking her directly.

  "If I burn this painting, it will destroy this mansion, including the picture you drew," he said, walking to the canvas. "And it will destroy everyone painted into it, including you. That will free me, won’t it?"

  She didn’t answer, but that was answer enough.

  "Couldn’t you just promise not to hunt me any more? An exchange. I cut the knots on this painting. You cut the knots on the drawing you made of me."

  She pushed away the temptation to lie. "I have a duty to Mangcansten."

  His huge, moist eyes pleaded with her. "Am I really a brink? How can I be a creature painted into existence when I remember my whole life? Brinks do not grow from childhood to adulthood. They are always as they were first painted."

  "You remember being a child?"

  "Yes." A thought brought despair to his face. "Could all my memories be false?"

  "No. If you were a brink, you would not remember anything before you were brought to life that had not been in your painting."

  "Then… I am human."

  "No. If you were a man, you would be dead. You said it yourself."

  "Am I immortal?"

  Sajiana thought she must be a fool to tell him his strength if he did not know it. Yet she found herself answering gently, "No. But you cannot be killed by a man or by a woman, by a manmade object or an unmade object, inside or outside, on the land or on the sea, during the day or during the night. Only a glamourer can destroy you."

  He absorbed that.

  "Tell me what you remember," she prompted. "Was there anything… uhm, unusual about your family?"

  "You might say so." He measured his trust of her, and must have found it small. Perhaps he deemed her no better than Yorch. "For many years, my parents could not have children. My mother said that she was…fortunate…that she finally had me."

  "Did you mother paint?"

  His pained silence answered her.

  Sajiana whistled through her teeth. "No wonder you remember your childhood. Did you…" – it was a ridiculous question to ask a brink, "do you have a name?"

  "Drajorian."

  She raised her brows. "Your parents were bold to name a brink after the heir to the throne of Cammar."

  "Apparently my parents were bold in ways I never imagined," he said dryly. "I knew my mother could be a stubborn woman. But this….You must understand, I was not raised in an isolated hamlet. I grew up surrounded by luminaries. None of them could have suspected, or there would have been consequences years ago."

  She wondered how a powerful brink could have gone undetected so long. And what had changed so that suddenly Mangcansten had noticed him? "She must have first painted you as a baby."

  "But then wouldn’t I have remained a baby?"

  "Not if she kept changing the portrait." She glanced over at the large painting that Yorch must have begun more than twenty years ago, that he had been touching up even now. "Year by year… maybe even day by day…"

  He bowed his head. "So it is true. I am a monster."

  There wasn’t much Sajiana could say to that.

  All at once, a yowl of despair issued from his throat. He raced to the painting, his hatchet-like kora sword raised over his head. Sajiana braced herself. She wondered if it would feel as though her flesh were being cut if he slashed the painting to shreds.

  Instead, she felt a burden lift from her.

  He had cut the knots.

  The twenty-year old knots drifted away from the painting. From all over the mansion, the glad cries of servants and soldiers burst out. Then the mansion dissolved. Sajiana and the brink and two dozen or so others stood in the middle of a weed-strewn field. Here and there, real objects and pieces of furniture that had not been part of the glamour poked out of the grass. Sajiana recognized her rucksack and ran to it. She pulled on her traveling clothes with a deep sense of relief.

  The brink followed her. He recovered her portfolio. The brink pulled out the drawing she had done of him and handed it to her, knot and all.

  "Finish your job," he said. "Burn it."

  The wind ruffled his hair. He stared at her with those limpid, haunted eyes.

  Sajiana took the paper. It trembled in her fingers.

  "If I untie the knots," she said, "They’ll sense it. They can sense a brink from across the earth. They’ll just send someone else after you."

  "Burn it."

  "I can’t."

  "I’d rather it be now. I’d rather it be you."

  "I can’t." She picked up her portfolio and put the drawing, still knotted, into her satchel. "If I don’t burn it, but don’t untie it, they won’t sense you. I won’t tug on your will. I won’t summon you. You won’t even know I still have your portrait."

  He stared at her, full of questions.

  "Go," she said. "Be free. It’s a command."

  Long after the brink had gone, and after Sajiana resumed her return trek across the moor to Mangcansten, she took the portrait out again. She studied the tousled hair and large eyes, the shadows on the face, the play of lights across the shoulders, the stance. She did not summon. She did not call. After a time, she sighed, and put the portrait away. She didn’t knot a glamour cottage that night. She wanted to sleep under the stars.

  Comments on Drawn to the Brink

  This is another story from The Painted World universe. It’s an independ
ent story, but also a loose sequel to, "Portrait of a Pretender." It first appeared in WomanScapes, an anthology published by DLSIJ Press.

  I do a bit of oil painting, though not enough to acquire a true knack for it. For a while, I did paint every day, which I enjoyed. My painting also improved. I even opened a store on eBay and sold whimsical pictures of mermaids and big-eyed girls. This was shortly after I married and had my first child. I was desperate to "monetize" my creative efforts as an excuse to keep at them. I was still writing. That wasn’t bringing in a lot of money, although I did sell two short romance novels to an ebook publisher, which, altogether, earned me about six thousand dollars in the first couple months and then a trickle of royalties. My husband was working two jobs to pay our mortgage, and I was earning just a few hundred dollars a month. It wasn’t fair to him.

  When I went back to grad school, I had to put the painting aside. If I had a dozen clones of myself, I think one would become a painter, but as it is, I decided to focus on writing. I enjoyed one art as a hobby, but (still) hoped to make the other a career. So if I couldn’t paint (professionally), at least I could write about painting.

  Originally The Painted World stories were intended to be part of a novel. However, I was having no luck selling my fantasy novels at this point. My romance novels were ebooks and didn’t seem to count for much in the eyes of traditional publishing. I attended conventions, even one in New York, hosted by Backspace, where I met agents and had a number of requests for partials and fulls of Initiate, Book One of The Unfinished Song. I was hopeful one of those encounters would win me an offer of representation and a publishing contract with a Big House. Agents, editors and other writers gave me conflicting advice. Some said I should start on another novel right away. Others said I should try short stories to become known. I didn’t want to invest another five or ten years perfecting a grand epic, only to start banging my head against the query wall again. There had to be a better way, I figured, some way I could publish as I went, without year+plus intervals between production and publication.

  I hoped that short story sales would gain me some credits in the genre of science fiction and fantasy. This was typically the route that aspiring sf and f writers took, right? Publish in fanzines, then little magazines, then prestigious magazines and anthologies. The trouble is, I’m not much of a short story writer, so I tried to cheat by breaking up a novel idea into its component parts. I dealt separately with the plots at the palace and the adventures of two glamourers, Sajiana and her rival from another Lodge, Fioma, out on the wild moors. I took for my inspiration the sword and sorcery short stories of Mercedes Lackey, featuring Tarma & Kethry.

  To a certain extent, this worked. Many of the stories in this anthology appeared here and there over the years. In another sense, my plan was another flop. None of my short story credits amounted to much. The publications weren’t grandiose enough for me to brag about in query letters, and even my friends often couldn’t track down the stories after they faded from the front page.

  Before this story found its original home in WomanScapes, it was turned down by a few editors who didn’t like the open ending. I was reluctant to change it because I knew Sajiana and Drajorian would meet again. In fact, I have elaborate plans for the further adventures of Sajiana and Drajorian and Fioma and Othmodian and Lyadra. King Arnthom’s death is yet to be avenged, and there are evil forces stirring in Cammar, things even worse than brinks.

  Grace

  I heard a story once, and I should caution that I don't know if it's true. If it were about a dream come true, I would have reason to doubt it, but it is rather about disappointment come true, so I find it believable.

  A woman born in a Central American country in the midst of a civil war fled from the violence as a child. Her name, shall we say, was Grace. She was terrified that she would die, but one night she had a dream, in which an angelic figure, or maybe a woman who looked like her dead grandmother, or maybe the Virgin Mary -- I don't remember, and maybe she herself didn't either, by the time she shared the story -- told her, "You will not die because you are going to achieve a Great Thing in your life, and God will keep you alive."

  Grace was greatly cheered, not only by the knowledge that she was going to live, but that she would live with purpose, with an important destiny. As a child, she never told anyone her dream, but she cherished it in her heart, and thought back on it often. At first, the fact she and her family were able to make it into the United States seemed to confirm her dream, as did her excellent progress learning English, her good grades in high school and then college.

  Yet decades slipped by, and though she married satisfactorily, and bore children she loved, she could not help but notice the dreary ordinariness of her life, the extremely non-special destiny that now seemed her lot, with no great, heaven-blessed achievement in sight. She aged and fattened and grayed, and by the time she pressed fifty, she felt worn out, worn down, disillusioned and despairing.

  It was at this point that Grace finally shared her dream with a group of women who met with a psychologist for depression. The other women suggested to her that perhaps she had overlooked the obvious: perhaps God had kept her alive precisely to live and love, that in His eyes this was a Great Thing, maybe the Greatest thing. And if this were a story of a dream come true, or a Hallmark movie, Grace would have agreed and felt renewed gratitude and love for her family.

  I warned you, however, that it was a story of a disappointment come true. The woman pretended to agree with the group, but in her heart, she was not comforted. She didn't want to be "special" in an ordinary way, treasured, like the sparrow, by God alone, she wanted to be special in the extraordinary way, recognized by thousands, or better still, hundreds of thousands of other human beings. She wanted to be famous, successful and important. That was how she had understood God's promise to her as a child, which was the dream that had sustained her. And though she recognized now, as an adult, that she had no right to expect to be important, certainly no right to demand it from destiny, still, she rebelled. She acknowledged, privately, the folly of her hubris, but this only deepened her bitterness.

  God had lied to her.

  When I heard this story, I was angry at the woman for her refusal to be comforted. Because, if she had been comforted by the women's interpretation of her dream, I felt, the story would have had a happy ending after all. She would have found grace where she least expected it. And yet, I was also aware that I was a hypocrite. Because, although I had never escaped a civil war, or been promised anything by an angel in a dream, nonetheless, as a child I had cherished the exact same hope, and as an adult, I awakened to the same disappointment.

  Comments on Grace

  I can’t sustain gloom for the length of a novel. I love happy endings. But my short stories frequently end in tragedy or at least melancholy. When I am depressed, my response is to write a story, the bleaker the better. For unknown reasons, that revives my spirits.

  This story is not really fiction. I did know a woman who had a dream, and one day, when I had received my third reject letter in one week, I wrote this story about her, but really about myself. I think all artists are secretly egomaniacs, and I’m hardly special in that respect. Despite the constant temptation to grandiosity, I tried to keep my expectations modest. I wanted to write for a living—by which I mean earn a living wage—but I didn’t expect to get rich from it.

  By the time I wrote Grace, ten years had passed from the time I’d run away from home to be a writer. I’d traveled around the world, found a cyborg to marry, spawned a few hellbeasts, er, children, and decided to return to school.

  I gave in to the voice of reason and common sense, and worked to become a college professor. At first, I tried to write fiction while going to school, but gradually, work overwhelmed me or drained me. I sent out queries, and these were rejected at various stages. If I received a rejection after sending out a partial or a full, this was a cause for celebration—a better class of failure. I reached the "f
ull" stage more often now, but I was running out of agents to spam. I spent as much time crafting query letters as I did writing new material. I obsessed over revisions. I become depressed and self-doubting. I promised myself I would write as soon as I had time. But as babies appeared and as financial burdens increased, I had less and less time, and I felt more and more guilty for not bringing in a sustainable income. Years went by, and I constantly fiddled with my novel, or dashed out morbid short stories. I seemed to have fallen into a rut.

  I had been working on my epic The Unfinished Song for an entire decade. (In related news, although 2000-2010 was supposed to a bring a manned space voyage to Jupiter to witness it turning into a star, reality had turned out to be a cancelled space program. Reality was really letting me down.) I read agents’ blogs and editors’ blogs, and they universally agreed that if you shopped your novel that long, you were a lunatic who ought to get over yourself already and write something new. This depressed me tremendously, and instead of heeding the advice, I kept researching new bits for my novel. I told myself to give up the idea of writing as a career. Yet I couldn’t let go. I had become so obsessed with learning the publishing side of the business, I sometimes forgot why I was writing at all. At times, I hated it. I definitely hated my novel. It was the worst dreck in the universe. Why would anyone want to read it?