by Aidan Moher
The Hero of Uwe'hhieyth
We weren't alone on Uwe'hhieyth. Just blind to our neighbours.
They came from the ground. Not from caves, crevasses or valleys, literally up from the ground, like locusts. We were not armed—civil war did not exist yet on our young planet—and could not defend ourselves. They were darker than a starless night and brought shadows with them; shadows that somehow drowned out the light of Uwe'hhieyth's twin moons. Imagine fighting shadows whose very touch would chill the blood in your veins and freeze you from the inside. Imagine fighting thousands of them, endless waves, night after night. We did not last long.
Those few of us who survived fled. We were mostly young men and women living away from their families in one of the three airborne academies that all Unitarian citizens were required to attend from ages ten through thirteen. Like cowards, we fled. No more than twenty thousand or so made it to the ship.
Five thousand six hundred and thirteen days later, after a stop of several years on the massive Unitarian refugee station, Cygnus 3118, our ship, The Spirit of a Sudden Wind, was on course back to Uwe'hhieyth with a simple mission: recovery.
Praise for Tide of Shadows and Other Stories
One of the "May Science Fiction And Fantasy Books Everyone Will Be Talking About." - io9
"Each of the stories is like a little clock: beautifully crafted, intricate, distinctively handmade, with a dozen tiny complications in its inner workings. The range is unreal: space stations, angel wings, fairytale dragons, ancient shadow monsters...all unconnected, and yet it feels like it's all part of a bigger whole. It's exquisite." - Rob Boffard, author of Tracer
"The greatest strengths of this delightful collection lie in its variety and scope. There are only five stories, but Moher makes the most of them, moving easily between rhetorical modes, narrative structures, and invented voices." - Brian Staveley, author of The Emperor's Blades
"Offering a little something for everyone, Tide of Shadows and Other Stories is a collection of tales that know precisely how to engage the reader, and exactly how to find a climax without overstaying their welcome." - Beauty in Ruins
"A brilliant piece of writing, beautiful and surreal." - We the Nerdy
Books by Aidan Moher
Tide of Shadows and Other Stories
Tide of Shadows
and Other Stories
Aidan Moher
Published by A Dribble of Ink
http://adribbleofink.com
Copyright © 2015 Aidan Moher
All rights reserved. The scanning uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book is prohibited without written permission of the publisher. If you would like to use material from this book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected] with your request. Thank you.
AISN: B00VR2LEMI
Cover illustration by Kuldar Leement
Cover design by Aidan Moher
eBook conversion and design by Aidan Moher
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This collection is dedicated to my beautiful wife, who was there from the first word to the last.
Table of Contents
Preface
A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes
The Girl with Wings of Iron and Down
Of Parnassus and Princes, Damsels and Dragons
The Colour of the Sky on the Day the World Ended
Tide of Shadows
Author Biography
Preface
If you don’t know any better, books seem like very quiet things. They sit bound on your shelf, on the back of the toilet, in your purse, not making much noise at all. They’re innocuous and raise no fuss at being carted around everywhere you go. They’re the perfect companion.
Stories, however, have loud, loud voices.
I chose each of the stories in this collection because of all those I’ve written through the years, they have been the squeaky wheels. Not every story deserves to be read (lord knows I have a trunk full of stories that shall remain forever hidden from daylight and the eyes of innocent readers), but when a story refuses to stay quiet, when I can still hear it murmuring away years after I’ve written it, then I’m only doing due diligence as an author (and now a publisher) to let it free.
“A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes” is the story of a young man reliving the last moments of his fellow soldiers’ lives; “The Girl with Wings of Iron and Down” tells the tale of a broken family and a girl with mechanical wings; in “Of Parnassus and Princes, Damsels and Dragons,” we’re introduced to a typical prince, princess, and dragon, and a not-so-typical love triangle; “The Colour of the Sky on the Day the World Ended” follows a girl and her ghost dog as they search for a bright light in the darkness; and “Tide of Shadows” is about a soldier and his lover, a mother, and planetwide genocide.
I’ve been a writer since before I can remember, but “Tide of Shadows and Other Stories” marks my first foray as a publisher. I’ve always considered writing to be very self-centred—ultimately, it’s something I do for myself, an exercise to satisfy the curious parts of my mind that will not stay still. Publishing, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite: it is taking something that is near to me, something that I’ve had complete reign over from the first word to the last, and preparing it for transfer to my readers. Once this book is out on bookshelves (or eReaders), the stories are no longer mine. They belong to the readers. This is a new, exciting, and scary thought.
In addition to the stories themselves, I’ve included story notes that are my attempt to turn fresh eyes on tales I wrote over the years. Whether it’s an examination of the story’s origins or a look at how things might be different if I wrote the story now, I hope you’ll find something of value in the anecdotes I’ve recorded. Perhaps my insights might make it enjoyable to reread the collection with a new or different perspective.
So, then, I bid adieu to these five stories as they pass from my hand to yours. I have only one request of you as a reader: please take care of them for me, will ya?
~Aidan Moher
Victoria, March 21, 2015
A Night for Spirits
and Snowflakes
1
The dead man watched with glazed eyes as I dug his grave. My blade bit into the frozen earth. I pulled hard and it came grudgingly free. I struck again and hit a stone—a new dent in the dull sword. I was too cold to feel the shock, too tired to care.
The grave—the first of four—came slowly, revealed one swing at a time.
The forest was still, a twisted play on the chaos that had whipped through the trees just hours before. Those moments of slaughter, that maelstrom of death's laughter, were over. The only reminder of the battle was me, weary and digging graves for my fallen brothers. It is what my long-dead, never-buried father would have done.
The other bodies, those of the barbarians who had set upon us, could rot—picked clean by howling wolves until they were nothing more than the skeletal remains of fathers, brothers, and sons.
For all I cared, they could feed the spirits of the dead and be forgotten.
Dawn's blush fell across the forest, the soft kiss of morning's first light. Sinuous tendrils of mist curled from the wet ground to dance slowly around my feet. The trees around me towered like sentinels reaching for dawn’s light, watching my trial with ancient disinterest.
The morning was silent. No birds sang. No breeze whispered through tree limbs. The rising sun was a kindred soul, a comp
anion in my time of mourning—but so much stronger than a weak boy crying for the forgotten dead.
A chop of my sword shattered the silence. The frozen ground was hard as stone.
I looked at the first corpse. He had the slanted eyes and amber skin of an islander from the Sinking Moon Islands. Dandelion, we called him, though we really meant "Dandy Lion." He was a fop and always talking of heroes and villains, knights and dragons—no head in the real world. Not one of our original crew, but a brother just the same. His throat was slit and blood caked his chest, dark and frozen now. He looked confused—and so young.
Not that it mattered anymore.
The grave was less than a foot deep, not enough for a body. Piled stones alone might do, but the dead deserved better.
It would have been easier to burn the bodies, but that is not the way taught to my people. We come from the earth, and to its cold embrace we must return. Hell is hot; the ground is cold.
Despite the chill air, I began to sweat. My bloody shirt stuck to my back; my brow dripped. I prayed for the sun to heat the ground, to lift some burden from my shoulders.
I dug. My blade broke, so I picked up another. The northern sword felt strange in my hands: the hilt too long, the balance unusual. I dug until the hole was deep enough for the body.
I gathered a pile of stones. It was a relief to walk around, to stretch out the screaming muscles in my arms, my neck, and my back. I did not know how many stones to collect, so I gathered all I could find. When I was done, the sun was past its peak, descending back toward the dark promises of night.
I rolled the body into the grave. It landed face down. With my hands, I poured the first of the black soil over the corpse.
Dandelion watches the dark with tired eyes. He's drawn the worst watch—during the deepest part of the night, when the red face of the sun is a far-off dream. Not that it's much better even at midday. Still freeze-your-balls-off cold. At least he'll be able to feel his feet once the sun's up and they started walking again.
Oh, the things we'll do for the clink of two coins in our pocket. It isn't the first time he's had the thought, and likely won't be the last, either. People say he’s daft, but he just likes to point out the truths in life—the way things are, not the way you think they should be. Ain't no daftness in that.
Not that any of it matters much up here in the cold, endless north. There weren't no art in the tundra. No theatre. No music. Least none that the Northmen didn't make themselves—even the best of them singin' was hardly music. It was too bad his lute was broken. Now, that instrument made some damn fine music. "Bastard tagalong Northman, breakin' it over his knee," he mutters to nobody. Northmen don't know music, and that's one o' those truths to life.
Dandelion plucks at invisible strings, a phantom lute his only companion. Just a simple melody of silent notes to keep the ghosts at bay.
And why keep postin' a guard every night? It's been days or weeks since they've seen another soul besides themselves—feels like years, even. There was the buck they shot a week back. Pity to leave all that meat steaming in the snow. It'd sure feel mighty fine now, resting in the pit o' his belly. Better than stringy dried rabbit. But who's he to argue? Tahir said they needed to watch for northern ghosts, watch out for anybody on their trail. Dandelion certainly wasn't gonna fight him on it, put his neck on the choppin' block. Tahir’s the boss, Dandelion thought, and they'd be nowhere better if it weren't for him.
"Probably in hell. That’s where we'd be without him,” Dandelion mutters, though the watchman isn't supposed to make a sound. "Precautions," Tahir had said. "They keep you alive up here."
At least it's hot in hell. There ain't no snow falling from the sky, no cold in the ground.
Dandelion chuckles at his own wit—impressive still, even with ice on the brain.
Snap.
"Who's there?" Dandelion whispers. Time for a change already? Each watch was goin' faster than the last. Never thought he'd get used to these endless nights, 'specially not with the spectre of the Massacre at his back.
Snick. That was metal—like a blade sliding from a scabbard.
"Not funny," Dandelion says to the shadows. He still can't see who's coming through the trees, but the sound of their approach is just a whisper under the wind. "Is it time already? I was just gettin' comfortable out here!" A pause. "Who's there?" Dandelion stands, a hand on the pommel of his battered blade. A shadow stalks through the trees, a big body, hand raised in greeting.
Must be the Northman. He doesn't say much, not with that broken tongue o' his.
Dandelion raises his own hand. He feels like one of the heroes from the theatre, greeting a brave companion in the dead of night. "Hail, good sir!" he calls, mimicking the actors he’d seen on stage.
The shadow drops its hand suddenly, a swift chop of the air. It is the only warning given before a callused hand clamps over Dandelion's mouth. He bites the hand, tastes blood. He’s pushed to his knees, and his head is yanked back. A feeble cry is lost in his assailant's hand.
A line of heat blossoms across his neck then spills down his chest. He doesn't know what has happened until he remembers a play he saw once, at a theatre in Innskarrl. The hero, a dashing youth called the Spitting Dragon, had, as always, slain the demon prince, shorn off his head. As the lifeless head rolled around on stage, red syrup erupted from the dummy—the spurting fake blood set the crowd afire with cheers, hurrahs, and cries of dismay in equal force.
Dandelion tries to cry out, to warn his friends, but all he can manage is a pathetic gurgle. Warmth spreads through his body as the first tendrils of hell wrap themselves around his sin.
At least he'd finally be warm. But is there theatre in hell?
2
The shield lay hidden among the leftovers of battle, half-covered by a cloak beside a bedroll. It was my shield, though I had never blocked a blow with it nor held it with my hands except to scour the rust when the Old Knight was still alive. It had been his shield then.
I was his squire, and proud to be so. He treated me fairly, as knights go. He fed me, never beat me too badly, and promised me his shield when I was old enough to wield it, old enough to bear its weight—emotional and physical both.
The Old Knight was not one of the bodies left for me to bury. He died in the Massacre, struck down by the heavy blade of a Northman. Just like that. Dead. As a piece of flotsam on the boiling sea of battle, I had watched it happen. Looking back now, I am amazed I was not killed immediately during that bloody battle. I was a still target among the moving many.
I watched, unable to move, as Tahir appeared from out of the storm of swords. He was covered in blood—his own and others'. His helmet was dented. His shield was cloven in two and dangled from the leather straps around his arm. He saw the Old Knight, dropped the broken shield, and stooped over the body to replace one shield with another.
Time seemed to slow as our eyes met. He challenged me to say anything, to claim the shield as my own. I said nothing, and he was swept away by the flow of battle. I was broken by the death of the Old Knight—a coward—so I hid among the chaos as best I could. I killed a man who wasn't looking out for someone so small. I stabbed the back of his knee, slit his throat.
One kill. Was I now a knight? A weak, cowardly knight, perhaps. The rules are different in this land of barbarians.
I let the memory of that day dissipate, too painful to hold on to for so long. My master's shield had a lion painted on it—a crude crest that reminded me of home. He'd had it painted after saving a young boy from a lion, cementing his glory and fame among my people. I was that young boy. It was supposed to be my crest, but I lost it to Tahir through cowardice. And now, far from where the Old Knight had been killed, I reclaimed it—not through valour but through luck. Tahir—my enemy and travelling companion—was dead and I lived. He could not steal it from me again. The shield had done him little good in the end.
I picked it up. It was heavy as my heart as I placed it with the rest of my pilfered ite
ms.
Sitting next to the bedroll was Tahir's journal. The leather cover was scarred from the hard life it chronicled. I flipped through the pages. No words, only scribbled images.
I dropped the book in Tahir's grave. He deserved at least the comfort of his drawings, even if his greed and poor judgment had led them all to their deaths.
My father was never buried. He rotted under the hot sun, eyes plucked out by vultures and guts picked clean by hyenas. We watched for days as his body was defiled—me, my brothers and sisters. My mother cried but could do nothing. My grandfather watched grim-faced as the son he'd killed bloated under the hot sun.
To be left unburied is to be denied the gods' embrace. My father was a good man, but he rotted alongside murderers and rapists.
He was caught with another man, a childhood friend. My father denied it to no avail. My grandfather was an important man in our village, so he was dishonoured and disgraced by my father's actions. Justice had to be served and dispensed by the hands of those who proclaim it. Hours after he was discovered, my father was dead.
He would not raise a hand against my grandfather, even as the heavy club splintered his skull, even with his children watching, tears streaking their uncomprehending faces. He did not utter a single cry, but his eyes screamed his pain and sadness.
I loved him so much. I was too young to understand why he had to die, too young to be angry at him, no matter what he did.