Tesseracts Seventeen

by Colleen Anderson

  Tashi kept swinging as she climbed, trying to keep her body a moving target. Her hands were scraped raw by the rope. She clamped her jaw tight, refusing to give in to weakness. A third snow leopard hissed just above her, its pale green eyes like glass. She dug small rocks out of the cracks and threw them at the snow leopard, muttering a prayer of apology. The cat hissed again. Declan reached the second rope and hauled himself up out range of the other two cats and the barrage of teeth.

  A tooth scraped the side of her arm and she cried out. A wave of nausea and weakness swept through her. Declan kept climbing, grimly pulling a tiger’s tooth out of his thigh. “That’s a week of truth-dreams gone,” he muttered.

  Tashi stopped him before he could fling the tooth away. “Wait,” she said. “Throw it back to her.”

  He twisted, throwing it as hard as he could. The old woman cursed shrilly, stumbling out of the way. Tashi tossed her own spelled tooth, aiming for the snow leopard. It yowled, also leaping sideways. Tashi and Declan finally reached the ledge and began to run. The old woman and her leopards abandoned them for easier prey.

  Declan took Tashi to another ledge so high up they had to climb two more ladders. Inside a small cave tucked behind a few twisted cedars was a nest of furs and bone wind chimes. “The chimes will keep hungry spirits away,” Declan explained. He pointed to a clay dish with a lid, painted white. “Put a pinch of salt under your tongue before you sleep as well. So the demons can’t claim you for their own.”

  Tashi nodded, still catching her breath. Another strike and the old woman might have added Tashi’s teeth to her headdress.

  She looked over the ledge. The torches were like the stars— the world turned upside down for the second time that day. Declan pointed out the clearing for the luck circle, and the lights of the sentinels’lamps all around them. The catacombs stretched out long and narrow, with the valley in the middle, bulging like a mongoose in a snake’s belly. On one end, the stone steps and on the other, more mountains and rocks.

  “Where does it go?” Tashi asked, nestling gratefully in a hide blanket that smelled like a wet yak, like home.

  “Just to more mountains that’ll kill you before you even cross the first one. There aren’t bone fields or sentinels that way and they can’t even get in there to set the luck-wards that keep us prisoner. Some luck-singer always tries to escape, but they always die alone up the mountain.” He shrugged dismissively. “So it goes nowhere.”

  Tashi wasn’t convinced. “Everything goes somewhere.”

  It wasn’t long before the vultures sought her out again.

  In the wilds of the catacombs, hierarchy was even stricter than in the towns and royal cities. To be unknown was to be dangerous. Tashi saw them coming, and knowing she had no escape, she waited with the kind of patience only a mountain shepherd would know. She had once controlled two herds during an unexpected snowfall, which had made a nearby shepherd delirious with fever. She tracked yak with only a song and a staff. Seven luck-singers were easier to track, if harder to reason with.

  She had walked too far along the riverbed, following it into the shadows as the mountains clustered closer and closer together. She knew that aside from the bloodbirds, wolves and snow leopards paced unseen at her side.

  Declan was prowling the caves, convinced he had missed a clue that would lead him to his Calla. Tashi didn’t have the heart to tell him that sometimes the herd split, yak wandered away and could not be found. Mountain spirits might have claimed Calla long ago, or else the Sultana with her palace of gold.

  On her return to the main caves, the vultures blocked her way. Magic snapped between the luck-singers, maddening the bloodbirds circling overhead.

  They closed in around her with bone daggers and sharpened tiger teeth. Tashi had a red dress and an apron embroidered on long winter nights, but nothing to defend herself.

  “I’ll have that red hair of yours,” one woman said. “For my spells.”

  Tashi had no idea if she even had any magic, never mind if it was stored in her red hair. She had no intention of letting them find out.

  The woman’s hand closed around her wrist, burning blisters into her flesh again. Tashi yanked herself free. She was strong, but still hopelessly outnumbered. She called on the calm of the mountains, of a herd of yak eating grass, of the wind off the crags.

  It started slowly at first, a faint pulse in her fingertips, a prickle in her chest.

  Then she became a column of fire, burning starlight, scorching moonlight. It poured out of her, unbidden and uncontrollable. She saw nothing but the flash of icy light searing everything. The luck-singers cried out but they too were lost in the blinding light. Their magic pushed against her and was incinerated.

  When she could see again, they cowered before her, clothes burned into tatters, bodies naked and pale as peeled potatoes boiled for soup.

  She didn’t need her warrior family to tell her she’d made her first true enemies.

  And discovered her first weapon.

  Declan found her huddled and shivering under a yew tree. “I guess your luck found you,” he said. She nodded weakly. He cursed. “If the old woman hadn’t stolen a week of truth-dreams from me, I’d have been able to tell you to avoid this place.”

  “I thought magic was supposed to make you stronger,” she said through chattering teeth.

  “The first time’s always the worst. You just need to find your anchor,” he reminded her wrapping her in the fur that had been draped around his shoulders. “To make your magic more powerful, and make you better able to survive it. If you’re really lucky it’s something simple like stone or fire.”

  “And if I’m not lucky?”

  “Then you’ll make do.” He had carried her back to the cave and tucked her under her favorite pelts. “There are other ways to channel your luck, through spells and swords and such. They’re clumsy but better than nothing. For now just try to sleep.”

  She was so tired she felt as though she was made of snow melting away. She struggled to keep her eyes open. “But I still don’t know what I can do.”

  He frowned at her. “How did you stop the vultures then?”

  “I don’t know. I called on the mountain, and it answered. It wasn’t telling the future like you do, or the fire-touch like that vulture woman. I was full of light; it just poured out of me. ”

  He gaped at her. “You’re a calix.” Her eyes drifted shut despite the urgency in his voice. “Tashi!” His big hand closed over her shoulder. “A calix carries magic in its purest form, and can pull it from anyone or anything. You aren’t limited to a particular talent.” He didn’t sound impressed, only scared. “The Sultana will want you,” he said. “Worse, she’ll need you.”

  Tashi didn’t have the energy to think about the Sultana. “Did you find your Calla?” she croaked.

  “No,” he said, frustrated. “She’s nowhere.”

  “You keep saying that,” Tashi replied before she fell into a dreamless sleep. “But I don’t believe in nowhere.”

  Declan adopted her, or she him; she wasn’t entirely sure. He showed her which caves to avoid, the ones with sleeping bears or the bones of angry luck-singers, long dead. He showed her how to collect water for drinking, which flowers tasted sweet and how to trade for lamp oil. She taught him why yogurt made with camel milk turned green but yak milk stayed white, and woke him when he screamed in his sleep, finally finding Calla. He never spoke of his nightmares, only sat in a cold sweat until she forced him to drink hot tea with butter and sang him the songs she’d sung to the herds when storms came. She told him stories about making rose-petal cakes, custards and berry tarts; and how the smell of baking sugar made her happy in a way she could never explain to her family. They wanted battles and war trophies; she wanted a stone oven and the early morning hours baking fresh bread for the village.

  She
didn’t feel any different and began to wonder if she’d simply burned away all of her luck fighting the vultures.

  The Riders came in the middle of the day, between the times of power, but with the moon still hanging in the sky, bleached and faded; the Bone Mother. She and Declan watched them ride down the wide stone steps, their protective amulets glowing.

  “If you let them find you, they’ll take you to the Sultana,” Declan said. “It’s supposed to be an honour.”

  “The same Sultana who sent me here,” Tashi pointed out. “I don’t feel particularly honoured.”

  “They say she lives in a palace with gold walls and fountains that run with wine.”

  Tashi didn’t step out of the dusty shadows of the ledge.

  “The Sultana’s definitely heard about you now. It’s been months since the Riders came down into the catacombs.”

  “And if I don’t want to go?”

  Declan stared at her, as if no one had ever asked that question before. “If you don’t go,” he replied finally, “then you stay here. With the luck circles, the demons and the vultures. There is nowhere else.”

  “That’s what you said about the other side of the catacombs. That it goes nowhere,” Tashi replied, an unfamiliar burning in her belly. Suddenly she didn’t feel like the mountain girl who confounded her family by preferring the company of yaks and the cold wind to swords and spears.

  It occurred to her, watching Riders approaching like ants, that she wasn’t that same girl.

  Her famous warrior family weren’t true fighters after all. When the Riders came, did they fight? When their youngest daughter was taken to a bleak and uncertain future, did they fight? Wasn’t that what they were supposed to do?

  Fighting and fighting back were clearly two very different things.

  And in that moment, without a weapon or a single drop of blood spilled, she knew she was the real fighter.

  She closed her eyes, willing her magic to fill her like a cup. Like the calix, she was a chalice. She remembered the light making her into a pillar of cold fire.

  A rain of stones crumbled off the mountain side. A snow leopard growled, the sound reverberating.

  There was an answering tingle in her chest, just like before, but nothing else.

  “They’re coming,” Declan warned her.

  “It’s not working,” Tashi replied tightly. “What good is being a calix if I’m empty?”

  As the Riders advanced, their horses began to buck, rearing with savage precision. They were accustomed to magic, to demons, and bone fields, but on this day, they went wild. A Rider fell out of his saddle and was dragged away by one of the vultures. The horses bit at the air and screamed, sounding human.

  “You wanted to know what my anchor is?” Declan glanced at Tashi. “Horses. And the link goes both way. They don’t only make my dreams stronger, they allow me to send them out. And horses,” he explained, “don’t like dreams of fire. Even when they’re awake.”

  Murmurs went through the caverns like a windstorm. Tashi had heard the stories of other luck-singers being killed in the hope the Sultana would choose another of them instead. She never had, but sometimes hope was more a sword than a shield.

  Tashi took the bone dagger from Declan’s hand. He crouched slightly, ready to fight at her side. Instead, she unceremoniously sawed through her thick braid of red hair.

  “There’s a hundred ways to win a war, and only one way to lose,” she told him. “And that’s by not fighting back.”

  “The Sultana will keep sending Sentinels and Riders and luck-singers after you.”

  “I know,” she flung her hands out, frustrated. “But I—”

  The mountains growled.

  Dust billowed and trees snapped as the avalanche poured out stones like water.

  Tashi froze, even as Declan yanked her to the relative safety of a hulking boulder. She thought of her uncanny ability to navigate outcroppings, log bridges and grasslands; of how she only felt truly home when she was in the mountains.

  She wrapped the snow peaks, the shadows and stunted cedars, the rocks and dust of the mountains around her like a shawl.

  Like Declan’s horses, the mountain heard her.

  Pebbles, stones and great slices of rock sheared away, landing in great jagged piles at the bottom of the ravine. Tashi felt the bellow of the landslide in her teeth and bones. The moment stretched on and on, a stampede of invisible hooves all around them. When the silence finally fell, Declan stared at her, wide-eyed, covered in dust. “I think you’ve found your anchor,” he said. Snow slid down the broken teeth of the mountain.

  Tashi turned her back on the Riders and the Sultana. She climbed down into the ravine, as the others searched the caves and the crevices or stared at the wall of stone that had descended between them like a sword. One of the Riders blew a war horn and bellowed a reward for Tashi’s capture. The vultures pressed at the stone barrier but could not get through.

  “Where are we going?” Declan asked, following.

  She tossed him a grin over her shoulder.

  “Anywhere.”

  * * * * *

  Alyxandra Harvey was born during an ice storm in Montreal. She lives in Ontario with her husband, dogs and a few resident ghosts who are allowed to stay as long as they keep company manners. She likes caramel lattes, tattoos and books. She is the author of The Drake Chronicles, Haunting Violet, Stolen Away and a poetry collection Briar Rose.

  Secret Recipes

  Costi Gurgu

  The stench oozed from the archive’s walls like spider oil. Morminiu choked, and covered his mouth with a scarf. Raising the lantern filled with a fresh swarm of glowworms, he studied the subterranean repository. Rows and rows of shelves ran the length of the long room, all overflowing with documents. Apparently everything seemed to be in order. But something had putrefied among the documents— overnight.

  He moved between the shelves, checking each aisle. The closer he came to the secret entrance to the vyr units room, the stronger the smell. His eyes watered.

  He moved straight to the secret entrance. The smell came from there. He was afraid of what that might mean.

  He knew by heart where the hidden door was. He bent and spat on a spot covered by brown moss. Seconds later his spit was recognized and the mechanism inside the stone wall slid aside. Morminiu pushed the door open and stopped on the threshold, staring in confusion at the scene before him. When his lungs remembered to do their job, he bent over and threw up.

  Only the day before, he had configured and then hide the new vyr brain he’d bought from a phril who claimed he was a swamp pirate from the Far South. Morminiu had paid three of his own original Recipes for it. The unit was such an advanced piece of technology that he suspected it was more than a vyr. Its external structure was completely different and it was too fast for a vyr brain. Hitissh Plabos should never find out about the bargain.

  Eventually Morminiu turned toward the nutritive basins. Considering the result, he should have told Plabos; it was for his master to make such decisions. Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he tried to breathe normally, and focused.

  Corbeni Castle had four nutritive basins, carved into the stone floor. Three of them held the old vyr brains, each containing a copy of the entire Recipes archive, the whole Essential Book of Plabos, in triplicate for insurance against corruption. The Book represented the Master Recipear’s fortune, the reason for his existence and in the end, even Morminiu’s, as Plabos’ last and only disciple.

  Morminiu had configured and connected the vyr brain to the other three’s network and transferred into it the same Essential Book, along with his own Recipes, which practically doubled the length of Plabos’ masterwork. Somehow his new unit, the technical marvel from the Far South, from outside the Green Kingdom, had vanished from the fourth basin with all the Re
cipes.

  The green nutritive liquid filling the basins had been corrupted to a blood-red slime that spread up the basin walls. At the bottoms lay the flesh of the vyr brains, covered in mucilaginous sores. The crystalidic swarms that gave them life, and trafficked the information floated in a putrefied state in the red liquid. The transitive vurms stretching from one basin to another to connect the vyr brains into a local network had swollen until their skin cracked and white foam billowed over the lips of the wounds.

  The carcasses of Master Plabos’ vyr brains — the corpses of his Recipes archive — were the source of the stench. The master’s life, his art and that of nine generations of Master Recipears before him— everything, destroyed. And the new brain gone.

  Premeditation, Morminiu realized immediately; not only had the swamp pirate sold him an infected brain, but he’d sold it to him with the goal of stealing Plabos’ fortune. That vyr brain’s contents were now worth more than half the king’s wealth.

  But the castle was too well guarded. The pirates had somebody inside. Someone that Plabos trusted, who could access the vyr units without raising concern. Someone who knew the swamps well enough to be able to rendezvous with the pirates and receive payment. All this must have happened recently as traces of moisture still surrounded the basins.

  Morminiu ran from the archive. He had to act fast, before Plabos found out— but more importantly, before the traitor could get away.

  “Morminiu!”

  The Hitissh’s voice froze the blood in his veins.

  Plabos stood on the uppermost step of the kitchen entrance. “What are you doing? And what’s that smell?”

  Swallowing, Plabos’ disciple closed the archive door behind him and looked uncertainly at the old phril.

  “Are you mad?” Plabos continued. “You have your final examination today! Master Julslou should be here at any moment. I thought I’d find you properly dressed for the ritual and preparing your kitchen!”