by Sean Wallace
Then he opened his eyes, and saw something that made him say, “No.”
Before them, not ten minutes’ ride from the awful chariot of the White Witch, was a whitewashed village, peaceful in the afternoon sun. Arrayed before it were a score of its men and young women. A few had proper swords or spears; one of the women carried a bow. The others had hoes, scythes, and staves. One woman sat astride a horse; the rest were on foot. From their perch in the air, Marish could see distant figures – families, stooped grandmothers, children in their mothers’ arms – crawling like beetles up the faces of hills.
“Down,” said Marish, and they landed before the village’s defenders, who raised their weapons.
“You’ve got to run,” he said, “you can make it to the hills. You haven’t seen that thing – you haven’t any chance against it.”
A dark man spat on the ground. “We tried that in Gravenge.”
“It splits up,” said a black-bearded man. “Sends littler horrors, and they tear folks up and make them part of it, and you see your fellow’s limbs come after you as part of the thing. And they’re fast. Too fast for us.”
“We just busy it a while,” another man said, “our folk can get far enough away.” But he had a wild look in his eye: the voice of doubt was in him.
“We stop it here,” said the woman on horseback.
Marish led the horse off the carpet, took its blinders off and mounted it. “I’ll stand with you,” he said.
“And welcome,” said the woman on horseback, and her plain face broke into a nervous smile. It was almost pretty that way.
Kadath-Naan stepped off the carpet, and the villagers shied back, readying their weapons.
“This is Kadath-Naan, and you’ll be damned glad you have him,” said Marish.
“Where’s your manners?” snapped the woman on horseback to her people. “I’m Asza,” she said.
No, Marish thought, staring at her. No, but you could have been. He looked away, and after a while they left him alone.
The carpet rose silently off into the air, and soon there was smoke on the horizon, and the knights rode at them, and the chariot rose behind.
“Here we are,” said Asza of the rocky plains, “now make a good accounting of yourselves.”
An arrow sang; a white knight’s horse collapsed. Marish cried “Ha!” and his mount surged forward. The villagers charged, but Kadath-Naan outpaced them all, springing between a pair of knights. He shattered the forelegs of one horse with his spear’s shaft, drove its point through the side of the other rider. Villagers fell on the fallen knight with their scythes.
It was a heady wild thing for Marish to be galloping on such a horse, a far finer horse than ever Redlegs had been, for all Pa’s proud and vain attention to her. The warmth of its flanks, the rhythm of posting into its stride. Marish of Ilmak Dale, riding into a charge of knights: miserable addle-witted fool.
Asza flicked her whip at the eyes of a knight’s horse, veering away. The knight wheeled to follow her, and Marish came on after him. He heard the hooves of another knight pounding the plain behind him in turn.
Ahead the first knight gained on Asza of the rocky plains. Marish took his knife in one hand, and bent his head to his horse’s ear, and whispered to it in wordless murmurs: fine creature, give me everything. And his horse pulled even with Asza’s knight.
Marish swung down, hanging from his pommel – the ground flew by beneath him. He reached across and slipped his knife under the girth that held the knight’s saddle. The knight swiveled, raising his blade to strike – then the girth parted, and he flew from his mount.
Marish struggled up into the saddle, and the second knight was there, armor blazing in the sun. This time Marish was on the sword-arm’s side, and his horse had slowed, and that blade swung up and it could strike Marish’s head from his neck like snapping off a sunflower; time for the peasant to die.
Asza’s whip lashed around the knight’s sword-arm. The knight seized the whip in his other hand. Marish sprang from the saddle. He struck a wall of chainmail and fell with the knight.
The ground was an anvil, the knight a hammer, Marish a rag doll sewn by a poor mad girl and mistaken for a horseshoe. He couldn’t breathe; the world was a ringing blur. The knight found his throat with one mailed glove, and hissed with rage, and pulling himself up drew a dagger from his belt. Marish tried to lift his arms.
Then he saw Asza’s hands fitting a leather noose around the knight’s neck. The knight turned his visored head to see, and Asza yelled, “Yah!” An armored knee cracked against Marish’s head, and then the knight was gone, dragged off over the rocky plains behind Asza’s galloping mare.
Asza of the rocky plains helped Marish to his feet. She had a wild smile, and she hugged him to her breast; pain shot through him, as did the shock of her soft body. Then she pulled away, grinning, and looked over his shoulder back towards the village. And then the grin was gone.
Marish turned. He saw the man with the beard torn apart by a hundred grasping arms and legs. Two bending arms covered with eyes watched carefully as his organs were woven into the chariot. The village burned. A knight leaned from his saddle to cut a fleeing woman down, harvesting her like a stalk of wheat.
“No!” shrieked Asza, and ran towards the village.
Marish tried to run, but he could only hobble, gasping, pain tearing through his side. Asza snatched a spear from the ground and swung up on to a horse. Her hair was like Temur’s, flowing gold. My Asza, my Temur, he thought. I must protect her.
Marish fell; he hit the ground and held on to it like a lover, as if he might fall into the sky. Fool, fool, said the voice of his good sense. That is not your Asza, or your Temur either. She is not yours at all.
He heaved himself up again and lurched on, as Asza of the rocky plains reached the chariot. From above, a lazy plume of flame expanded. The horse reared. The cloud of fire enveloped the woman, the horse, and then was sucked away; the blackened corpses fell to the ground steaming.
Marish stopped running.
The headless creature of fire fell from the chariot – Kadath-Naan was there at the summit of the horror, his spear sunk in its flesh as a lever. But the fire-beast turned as it toppled, and a pillar of fire engulfed the jackal-man. The molten iron of his spear and armor coated his body, and he fell into the grasping arms of the chariot.
Marish lay down on his belly in the grass.
Maybe they will not find me here, said the voice of hope. But it was like listening to idiot words spoken by the wind blowing through a forest. Marish lay on the ground and he hurt. The hurt was a song, and it sang him. Everything was lost and far away. No Asza, no Temur, no Maghd; no quest, no hero, no trickster, no hunter, no father, no groom. The wind came down from the mountains and stirred the grass beside Marish’s nose, where beetles walked.
There was a rustling in the short grass, and a hedgehog came out of it and stood nose to nose with Marish.
“Speak if you can,” Marish whispered, “and grant me a wish.”
The hedgehog snorted. “I’ll not do you any favors, after what you did to Teodor!”
Marish swallowed. “The hedgehog in the sunflowers?”
“Obviously. Murderer.”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t know he was magic! I thought he was just a hedgehog!”
“Just a hedgehog! Just a hedgehog!” It narrowed its eyes, and its prickers stood on end. “Be careful what you call things, Marish of Ilmak Dale. When you name a thing, you say what it is in the world. Names mean more than you know.”
Marish was silent.
“Teodor didn’t like threats, that’s all . . . the stubborn old idiot.”
“I’m sorry about Teodor,” said Marish.
“Yes, well,” said the hedgehog. “I’ll help you, but it will cost you dear.”
“What do you want?”
“How about your soul?” said the hedgehog.
“I’d do that, sure,” said Marish. “It’s not like I need it. But I
don’t have it.”
The hedgehog narrowed its eyes again. From the village, a few thin screams and the soft crackle of flames. It smelled like autumn, and butchering hogs.
“It’s true,” said Marish. “The priest of Ilmak Dale took all our souls and put them in little stones, and hid them. He didn’t want us making bargains like these.”
“Wise man,” said the hedgehog. “But I’ll have to have something. What have you got in you, besides a soul?”
“What do you mean, like, my wits? But I’ll need those.”
“Yes, you will,” said the hedgehog.
“Hope? Not much of that left, though.”
“Not to my taste anyway,” said the hedgehog. “‘Hope is foolish, doubts are wise.’”
“Doubts?” said Marish.
“That’ll do,” said the hedgehog. “But I want them all.”
“All . . . all right,” said Marish. “And now you’re going to help me against the White Witch?”
“I already have,” said the hedgehog.
“You have? Have I got some magic power or other now?” asked Marish. He sat up. The screaming was over: he heard nothing but the fire, and the crunching and squelching and slithering and grinding of the chariot.
“Certainly not,” said the hedgehog. “I haven’t done anything you didn’t see or didn’t hear. But perhaps you weren’t listening.” And it waddled off into the green blades of the grass.
Marish stood and looked after it. He picked at his teeth with a thumbnail, and thought, but he had no idea what the hedgehog meant. But he had no doubts, either, so he started toward the village.
Halfway there, he noticed the dead baby in his pack wriggling, so he took it out and held it in his arms.
As he came into the burning village, he found himself just behind the great fire-spouting lizard-skinned headless thing. It turned and took a breath to burn him alive, and he tossed the baby down its throat. There was a choking sound, and the huge thing shuddered and twitched, and Marish walked on by it.
The great chariot saw him and it swung toward him, a vast mountain of writhing, humming, stinking flesh, a hundred arms reaching. Fists grabbed his shirt, his hair, his trousers, and they lifted him into the air.
He looked at the hand closed around his collar. It was a woman’s hand, fine and fair, and it was wearing the copper ring he’d bought at Halde.
“Temur!” he said in shock.
The arm twitched and slackened; it went white. It reached out: the fingers spread wide; it caressed his cheek gently. And then it dropped from the chariot and lay on the ground beneath.
He knew the hands pulling him aloft. “Lezur the baker!” he whispered, and a pair of doughy hands dropped from the chariot. “Silbon and Felbon!” he cried. “Ter the blind! Sela the blue-eyed!” Marish’s lips trembled to say the names, and the hands slackened and fell to the ground, and away on other parts of the chariot the other parts fell off too; he saw a blue eye roll down from above him and fall to the ground.
“Perdan! Mardid! Pilg and his old mother! Fazt – oh, Fazt, you’ll tell no more jokes! Chibar and his wife, the pretty foreign one!” His face was wet; with every name, a bubble popped open in Marish’s chest, and his throat was thick with some strange feeling. “Pizdar the priest! Fat Deri, far from your smithy! Thin Deri!” When all the hands and arms of Ilmak Dale had fallen off, he was left standing free. He looked at the strange hands coming toward him. “You were a potter,” he said to hands with clay under the nails, and they fell off the chariot. “And you were a butcher,” he said to bloody ones, and they fell too. “A fat farmer, a beautiful young girl, a grandmother, a harlot, a brawler,” he said, and enough hands and feet and heads and organs had slid off the chariot now that it sagged in the middle and pieces of it strove with each other blindly. “Men and women of Eckdale,” Marish said, “men and women of Halde, of Gravenge, of the fields and the swamps and the rocky plains.”
The chariot fell to pieces; some lay silent and still, others which Marish had not named had lost their purchase and thrashed on the ground.
The skin of the great chamber atop the chariot peeled away and the White Witch leapt into the sky. She was three times as tall as any woman; her skin was bone white; one eye was blood red and the other emerald green; her mouth was full of black fangs, and her hair of snakes and lizards. Her hands were full of lightning, and she sailed on to Marish with her fangs wide open.
And around her neck, on a leather thong, she wore a little doll of rags, the size of a child’s hand.
“Maghd of Ilmak Dale,” Marish said, and she was also a young woman with muddy hair and an uncertain smile, and that’s how she landed before Marish.
“Well done, Marish,” said Maghd, and pulled at a muddy lock of her hair, and laughed, and looked at the ground. “Well done! Oh, I’m glad. I’m glad you’ve come.”
“Why did you do it, Maghd?” Marish said. “Oh, why?”
She looked up and her lips twitched and her jaw set. “Can you ask me that? You, Marish?”
She reached across, slowly, and took his hand. She pulled him, and he took a step towards her. She put the back of his hand against her cheek.
“You’d gone out hunting,” she said. “And that Temur of yours” – she said the name as if it tasted of vinegar – “she seen me back of Lezur’s, and for one time I didn’t look down. I looked at her eyes, and she named me a foul witch. And then they were all crowding round . . .” She shrugged. “And I don’t like that. Fussing and crowding and one against the other.” She let go his hand and stooped to pick up a clot of earth, and she crumbled it in her hands. “So I knit them all together. All one thing. They did like it. And they were so fine and great and happy, I forgave them. Even Temur.”
The limbs lay unmoving on the ground; the guts were piled in soft unbreathing hills, like drifts of snow. Maghd’s hands were coated with black crumbs of dirt.
“I reckon they’re done of playing now,” Maghd said, and sighed.
“How?” Marish said. “How’d you do it? Maghd, what are you?”
“Don’t fool so! I’m Maghd, same as ever. I found the souls, that’s all. Dug them up from Pizdar’s garden, sold them to the Spirit of Unwinding Things.” She brushed the dirt from her hands.
“And . . . the children, then? Maghd, the babes?”
She took his hand again, but she didn’t look at him. She lay her cheek against her shoulder and watched the ground. “Babes shouldn’t grow,” she said. “No call to be big and hateful.” She swallowed. “I made them perfect. That’s all.”
Marish’s chest tightened. “And what now?”
She looked at him, and a slow grin crept across her face. “Well now,” she said. “That’s on you, ain’t it, Marish? I got plenty of tricks yet, if you want to keep fighting.” She stepped close to him, and rested her cheek on his chest. Her hair smelled like home: rushes and fire smoke, cold mornings and sheep’s milk. “Or we can gather close. No one to shame us now.” She wrapped her arms around his waist. “It’s all new, Marish, but it ain’t all bad.”
A shadow drifted over them, and Marish looked up to see the djinn on his carpet, peering down. Marish cleared his throat. “Well . . . I suppose we’re all we have left, aren’t we?”
“That’s so,” Maghd breathed softly.
He took her hands in his, and drew back to look at her. “Will you be mine, Maghd?” he said.
“Oh yes,” said Maghd, and smiled the biggest smile of her life.
“Very good,” Marish said, and looked up. “You can take her now.”
The djinn opened the little bottle that was in his hand and Maghd the White Witch flew into it, and he put the cap on. He bowed to Marish, and then he flew away.
Behind Marish the fire beast exploded with a dull boom.
Marish walked out of the village a little ways and sat, and after sitting a while he slept. And then he woke and sat, and then he slept some more. Perhaps he ate as well; he wasn’t sure what. Mostly he looked at his h
ands; they were rough and callused, with dirt under the nails. He watched the wind painting waves in the short grass, around the rocks and bodies lying there.
One morning he woke, and the ruined village was full of jackal-headed men in armor made of discs who were mounted on great red cats with pointed ears, and jackal-headed men in black robes who were measuring for monuments, and jackal-headed men dressed only in loincloths who were digging in the ground.
Marish went to the ones in loincloths and said, “I want to help bury them,” and they gave him a shovel.
FOX BONES. MANY USES.
Alex Dally MacFarlane
A fox’s foreleg bones: humerus, ulna, and radius. Main use: attack. Also used for treating colds and headaches.
The two imperial men were walking in an alarmingly accurate direction.
“Let’s go,” Za said. With only a glance in the direction of her basket, safely hidden among rocks where no one could see it, she opened the fox-ear pouch she wore at her waist and pinched ground foreleg bones from one compartment. For fur-bright fire, she thought as she licked it from her fingers. She made saliva to swallow it down. For strength.
Her brothers did the same, and together – full of power, bursting with it like a rice-wine container over-full and leaking – they descended into the gully and chased the imperial men, with fire at their fingers.
The men had swords. Za and her brothers laughed and circled them, marking how their eyes went wide.
“You’re going to die,” Za said in the Nu language – the imperial language – and traced arcs of fire through the air with her fingers.
“So are you,” one of the men replied, “but only after giving the emperor all your silver, little animal.” He lunged at her, his sword swinging sudden as a midwinter wind.
He fell, covered in Za’s fire, and only screamed for a moment before it burnt away his throat.
The other man died under her brothers’ fire – but he reached for something in his bags and hurled it into the air before they finished killing him.