Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 114

by Neil Clarke

  We rushed to greet him, braids bouncing against our backs. We leaned against the porch’s creaky railing and waved at him, eager to see what he’d brought us.

  As the spring sun shone bright, Pa opened his backpack and pulled out an object wrapped in a red and white-checkered scarf. Carefully and slowly, he untied the knots. I caught a glimpse of metal, a hint of a barrel and grip.

  “Soon,” he said, grinning at us, “you won’t have to be afraid ever again.”

  The Victorians came for Pa the very next day.

  The governess’ fingers curl around my shoulder, claws of a hungry beast. She shouts something incomprehensible to me, face too close to mine. As I meet her cold, emotionless gaze, thick smoke floods my nostrils and mouth. I scream, but the nightmare won’t go away.

  “Fire,” the governess says. “Get out.”

  Still not sure if I’m dreaming or awake, I stumble up from the bed. The governess drags me through the smoke-filled house, out of the door, down the porch’s stone stairs, into the freezing night. All I can do is cough.

  “Saga . . . ” I retch black slime into a snowbank. Before us, the farmhouse spits flames. The doorway gasps acrid smoke. But my little sister is nowhere in sight. “I must go back!”

  “No. Too dangerous. You are sixteen,” the governess replies as if that explained everything. As if in her eyes I’m more valuable because I’m older and more resources have been spent to ensure my survival.

  “And . . . she’s but . . . a child,” I snap back at her, coughing between the words. I sway toward the house even as bright dots swarm my vision. At the stone steps, heat lashes against me, instantly blistering my face and forearms.

  “A girl.” The governess pulls me back from the shoulders, her grip like iron. There’s a strange, distant quality to her voice, as if something deep inside her had just clicked. “I was a girl.”

  There’s no time to lose, and yet I find myself staring at her. Her visage bears a look of utter sadness. It’s as if she finally remembers that she was once fully human and understood emotions, grief and despair.

  “You stay. My clothes, they might protect me.” And without waiting for my answer, the governess thrusts her satchel at me and strides into the flames. For a moment, I can see her black, diminishing shape against the vicious orange. Then she disappears altogether, and all that remains is a faint whisper: “I was a girl.”

  I stomp in the melting snow, as close to the burning house as I can without suffering more burns. A part of me wants to dash after the governess and find my sister. The rational part knows that I would die before being able to help her in any way.

  Loneliness haunts me as I wait. There’s no guarantee I’ll see my dear sister, another human being, ever again. Her fate is in the hands of a convert. I fidget with the satchel. The governess has never let me touch it before. I need something to distract myself. I unclasp the satchel.

  The governess’ most valued possessions seem to be her knitting needles, three balls of red yarn, and my notebook. Curious. I left that on my nightstand. Why did she opt to save it from the fire? Did she on some subconscious level . . .

  A multitude of loud cracks. A terrifying shape emerges from the house. It’s the governess. She half falls, half slides down the stone stairs, her gown sprouting flames, a burning halo of hair around her head. My heart and hopes shrink, for she has returned alone.

  Then Saga peeks out from under the governess’ hem, cheeks stained with smoke and tears.

  “Saga!” I rush to them, pulling my sister up on her own feet, away from the fire. She wraps her arms around my thighs and cries.

  “A girl . . . ” The governess staggers after us, but her feet slip on the slush. The flames on her hair wither. Her scalp has blackened, visage blistered. She looks like a monster, but that she is not.

  “You’re hurt,” I say, feeling dumb and powerless.

  A shudder runs through the governess’ body. She collapses on her knees on the snow. “She . . . she is six.”

  I squat down next to the governess. I pat snow against her cheeks and forehead, and Saga follows my suit. But it’s too late to save her. Her dress disintegrates, the black fabric turning into white flakes, revealing more burns.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper as I help the governess to lie down in the snow. I was so very wrong about her. “I’m so sorry.”

  The governess meets me with an unblinking stare. Though her lashes have burnt, too, the look in her eyes is one of utter peace. “I . . . was . . . a girl.”

  Life flees her scorched body soon after.

  Northern lights claw the cold sky green-blue as Saga and I drag the governess’ body up the slope. Our going through the knee-deep snow is slow, and the governess’ limbs leave behind sooty trails. Yet, we halt only when we’re a safe distance away from the smoldering ruins of our home.

  “What will we do now?” Saga clutches the hem of her nightgown. The air smells of snow and flames, of sorrow and loss.

  The Victorians can sense the death of their kind. They will come to claim our governess’ body soon. And then . . . I’m ashamed to admit it to myself, I expect the Victorians to continue looking after Saga and me. “We wait.”

  “For what?” Saga’s voice breaks as she glances at the governess’ body. The governess lies on her back. The front of her body is charred. Her belly curves inward, hollow apart from the outline of a cube. She’s a convert, but also . . . “You know she was my friend.”

  That remark hurts me more than anything else that came to pass that night. I’ve hated the Victorians my whole life and expected Saga to do likewise. But she bonded with the governess and the governess sacrificed herself to save my sister.

  “I’m sorry. I truly am.”

  “It’s all right. I guess.” Saga takes hold of my hand, her fingers already white-cold. “It will not be the same if they send another governess to take care of us. But I will try my best to welcome her.”

  “I know.” I squeeze her hand. Saga will be able to adjust to anything and befriend anyone regardless of their species or origin. I . . .

  The whiplash boom heralds the portal opening to our right. But this time, I don’t flinch, not even when four stern-faced Victorians stride through the rippling air, followed by a demure woman, our governess-to-be. They don’t look like they’re angry at us, not like they want a life in return for the loss of one of their kind.

  I think of the cube inside the governess’ womb. I think of what I yearn and what I can never have. I can’t bear the thought of sharing my sister with someone I’ll inevitably fear, loathe, and hate. I’m not like Saga. My feelings have roots wedged so deep that no matter how I were to try, I will never be able to overcome them.

  “Saga . . . ” I press the satchel in her hands. She’s the one who matters to me the most. I want to be with her forever, to be loved by her rather than eventually despised. “I’ll have to go with them. And when I return it will seem like I’m gone, but it’ll still be me. At some level, it’ll still be me.”

  When I step through the portal, I still think of the vast city in the stars, looking through space and time at the white-shrouded, blue planet. For if my kind hadn’t intervened, it would have been forever lost.

  “Agneta!” Saga runs to me, arms spread wide for an embrace.

  I don’t respond to her call, for I don’t have a name anymore, only a duty. “How do you do?”

  As I lead Saga to her new home, an abandoned summer cottage on the north side of the lake, I feel nothing but the strangest sort of empathy and sadness toward the one who treats me as if we were the same.

  We are not and will never be. I have an important duty, and that duty fuels me. I must look after this human, this child. I must guide her and protect her from hurting herself.

  I believe her kind calls this sort of devotion love. For some reason I don’t quite understand, I want to prepare her apple jam.

  About the Author

  Leena Likitalo is a writer from Finland, the land
of thousands of lakes and at least as many untold tales. She’s a Writers of the Future 2014 winner and Clarion San Diego graduate. Her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, and Weird Tales. She’s recently finished writing a fantasy novel, The Five Daughters of the Moon, and dreams of being a published novelist one day.

  Coyote Invents the Land of the Dead

  Kij Johnson

  She was there, that is Dee, and her three sisters, who were Tierce, Chena, and Wren, Dee being a coyote or rather Coyote, and her sisters not unlike in their Being, though only a falcon, a dog, and a wren. So there they stood on the cliff, making their minds how to get down to the night beach, a deep steep dark bitch slither it was, though manageable Dee hoped.

  The cliff was a high sandy sharpness, but you, O my darlings, might not remember what it means to pass down that narrow dark, your own life being so past and the dead so quick to forget. Standing on the cliffs what Dee sought was her own ghost-love, named Jace and dead a year but still so recent to her mind that she could sniff her fingers and by a year-gone remembered smell see him long-legged gold-eyed and low-voiced with big hands—and the sisters going along with her because they did not wish to see her do it alone, plus each sought something else that she didn’t explain, not to Dee anyway.

  They had no death-permit for climbing down, but there was no law against trying some of the narrow paths the dead might use. They could try to climb straight down the rocks or along the arroyo, or one or two other possibilities that would give them a skinny slight weak chance of finding the beachy sand and all its dead and massy seashells beneath their feet.

  Or they could find the beach the faster way: throw themselves down and hit the sand with their permit in hand, as the saying is. And that was what they were discussing on the cliff.

  “Well, fuck, and I’ll have to do it the hard way,” Dee said. “I might be just that bit late coming back.” Her quick tumble-voice rippled out from her mouth and plashed against Wren’s pinhole wren ears and Chena’s tufted great dog ears and the fluffed falcon feathers where Tierce’s ears were. All four were what they were, and women also, and more. They were fashioned of myth: that is the way of this story.

  “Or never,” Wren said high and sharp as the whistle from a dry teakettle. “The dead say that, and then they go down the cliffs and they never come back”—light on a brokenwood tree sapless and unlifed, and hopping from foot to foot, so angry was she. “It’s the dead down there, sister. Go and you are dead.”

  Above and behind them were stars and clouds and the moon sliding skyward, the long long rise of it, but there was no sky over the night beach before them and the strange ocean beyond; the sky/star/moon dayworld ended abruptly above the cliff’s edge, just overhead with a curled lip like poor and unfinished knitting, and beyond that just nothing but what is inside an undreamer’s eyelids. Chena reached a long-fingered paw (or was it a hand) and touched a thread trailing from the sky’s end. A sequining star slipped loose and came resting onto her dark muzzle, leaving tracer-lines when she moved her mouth and low in her throat said, “She is dead already, Wren. It is what Dees do that are Coyote, is die.”

  “—And come back:” Dee hoping it was true; ears had heard tales of other Coyotes that made the long climb down that cliff and back too, and brought heaving and snapping up with them fire or jewelling girdles. Or perhaps that was she but not remembering, or it might be a different cliff; Dee did not know.

  “You better hope tales are right,” Tierce said all beak-sharp snap. “You’re a fool to long for your lover when he’s on the night beach. But you’ll go anyway. I know you,” and Wren agreed.

  Dee was toenails-close to the cliff, and dirt and little rocks scrabbled away from her feet and over the edge making no noise as they fell. The others were farther away; and look-back Dee saw outlines of her sisters black against the star-busy dayworld night sky. Their faces were invisible until she lit a match and then a cigarette and held it carefully between her toes or maybe it was fingers, and then the hawk wren and dog eyes all glowed gold. All their eyes were worried-like and sad too, and they were right to be so. Dee had never long longed for anything lost before this, not even her own mother. Only Jace. And Dee was the center of things; bulls-eye on the target, the tight-binding chord of the arc of everything. Touch Dee and the world shivered.

  Turning, Dee: and she stared down. The only light on the beach came from the sky behind them, the cliff’s shadow stretched halfway to the water; plus also fading shifting lines like yarn being rolled, that was surf that went nowhere and not strong; and phosphorescence the color of sodium vapored and trapped inside lamps. Hundreds of feet down or miles or something else? Dee (knowing as all do approaching the night beach) that it would change as she climbed.

  “Well, this is me, then. I’m going,” she said, and dropped her furl-ashed cigarette and started down. The path was a narrow bitter winding of rocks and dirt crushed to dust. She slipped and fell, away through sour thorn-prickling brush, until she slammed against a rock that left her unbreath’d for a while and then she realized she wasn’t breathing anyway. Mist rose from her muzzle but did not in-and-out, only slid steadily free, collecting into a shape at first indefinable; only, she walked down and down and its form clarified and grew more complete, and it was a Coyote like her, curled as though mother-scruffed, hovering a few feet from the cliff at eye-height.

  Dee not a thinker, thus not wondering what this shadow-Coyote meant, whether ghost ka lost soul or child unborn. “The fuck do you want?” Dee said not wanting the answer, and it said nothing and turned and advanced ahead, soundless and then invisible and gone maybe so that she was relieved and worried both, though not the worrying sort.

  Of a sudden, a great light started up behind Dee on the cliff, a surprising blaze of a bonfire, set by her sisters she figured but arcbright as welding or lighthouses, and it warmed her just to see its bright casting across the scree’d cliff. Dee was not the only one with gifts and Being, and Tierce could use the sharp of talon and eye, and set great fires. But Tierce would lose some vision from this: love costs for anyone, hawks and all.

  Twisting-back Dee’s long foot touched a rock and it cascading took its fellows lavanching along and Dee falling too. The path: a startle-start, and a slip-stumble long middle, and then a dead-end; just like life.

  The night beach where Dee landed was of sand. It and foam-stain water hissed and whispered together; Dee folded her ears back to block the sound but it came through anyway, seeping in through the cracks of her. The wet cold air felt thin, though she was at sea level for the lowest sea of all—if air there was; no telling without lungs’ in-and-out. Her shadow was a severalled blur-thing that did not have her shape, cut out by the light of Tierce’s eyes and the half-moon in the half-sky behind, cut now where it had risen to the dayworld’s ceasing, and sloppy with dangling glowing threads.

  The sand around her was heaped everywhere with mounded massy dark shells, pyramided into black piles as high as her waist, and over the sand/water-whisper the piles chirked when a crawling wave touched them. Dee kneeling saw they looked just like dayworld shells, shaped like ears or trumpets or vulvas, but they had no light nor sheen to their curves and they felt colder than they ought. Dee pushed the shells aside with her feet as she walked, and they chunkled against one another.

  A sudden falling crash off a short distance: a small blur-shadowed thing heaved upright and shook itself, and said with Wren’s voice, “The air stopped carrying me.” She sounded indignant, betrayed by her natural element and peevish in any case because of Dee’s as she saw it stupidity. But here she was: love costs a price, as she knew as well, and she was hoping this would not in this case be true but suspected that it would. “I was flying down and it just gave up.”

  “You weren’t supposed to follow,” Dee said. “This is mine to do. Not yours.”

  “Since when do you say what is what for me?” Wren hopped to Dee’s side, and stopped being a blurred shadow and b
ecame herself, drab grey and brown but her eyes bright precise points.

  “At least Chena’s not coming down, is she?” Dee glanced up at the cliff, to the fire Tierce had set. Pushed by the wind, it gusted and vanished and rose again in sheets of flame the colors of brass, of gold bronze copper and blue sapphires.

  Wren opened her mouth and then shut it, not saying anything.

  Dee closed her eyes for a moment. “Fuck.” Now that she looked, she could see a sturdy dark shape down-scrabbling the cliff. Instead of picking out the safe path, Chena was running straight down in a great tumbling of noise and rocks and torn bushes: which ended in Chena landing with a sound that might have been a yelp or might have been a laugh. She loped toward them, kicking shells aside with chirping skrankles of sound.

  “That was fun:” Chena smiling, her tongue hanging out. “I wouldn’t want to go back up, though.”

  “You can’t,” Dee angry said. “And now we’re all dead.”

  “Not yet,” Chena said.

  “Tell me Tierce isn’t coming down.”

  Shaking-head Chena, as Wren, “When did you become the grown-up?” asked.

  Dee thinking When I lost Jace and it stabbed through her again like losing a leg, and every time waking jumping up maybe to run somewhere, and being reminded again when she fell: no leg. Jace, who had been laughing air in her lungs, long-storying tale-making lover of Dee; and all the sun there was, for her.

  Chena shaking her head in any case: “Tierce keeps the fire for us. Have you found your Jace yet? I just see this”—pointing with one clawed toe that may for purposes of this story and your own comfort be seen as a woman’s hand, if it seems she must be either woman or beast but cannot be both; which shows your folly, O my dears.

  Dee looked down at the shells all everywhere, the cerith/whelk/natica coils of them. Some were smaller than her toenail, others broad as her cradling hands. She picked one up, cell-phone-size and black and smoothly curved like a tulip, and held it to her ear. But nothing inside it, not even the sound of her own pounding blood echoing back, though maybe that was no surprise if her pulse were as gone as her breath.