by Sean Wallace
The first thing Annakpok had done as shaman was build a bier for her mother’s body and sing as it burned down to ashes.
It was still cold enough that Annakpok walked out on to the sea, scattering the ashes around the holes in the ice where her mother had hunted – a gift to the seals, in return for what they had given.
(It was an empty gesture; there were no more seals.)
There would be a feeling of light, her mother had told her. Annakpok would take a breath and know her purpose as shaman, and her power would move through her blood.
The closest Annakpok had come to feeling like a shaman was when she was twelve, and a government agent came to get her mother’s blood sample and register Sitiyok as a natural magician.
The deep-winter sun had already set, and without her mother Annakpok was alone in Umiujaq. Besides the moon on the empty ice, there was no light at all.
The wind stole the ashes from the bowl as she walked; when Annakpok reached land again, she was empty-handed.
That was the last thing Annakpok had done as shaman.
* * *
Anna put herself in the Japanese woman’s way as everyone filed out of the theatre at sunset. The woman didn’t look surprised to see her.
(“Kimiko Hana,” Stephens told her. “Tsukimono-suji. They hold power over magic fox familiars. It’s inherited.”
“Is that spellcasting or natural magic?”
Stephens shrugged.)
Anna watched the fox heads watching her. “Do you kill them to get their power?”
The fox heads shrank back and hissed; Kimiko rested her hand on the stole to quiet them.
“No,” she said, when they were still again. Her voice was carefully neutral. “It’s to remember them after they leave our family. Their children are close to us.” She looked askance at Anna. “Do you . . . have a familiar?”
Anna wondered if a dead narwhal counted. “No,” she said, and then, recklessly, “I don’t even have magic.”
Kimiko raised an eyebrow, kept walking.
Anna followed her down the stairs and across the Amphitheatre, waiting for a reciprocation that never came.
Finally she asked, “What sort of magic have you got?”
“It serves me better not to explain,” Kimiko said. Her dark eyes flashed red. “If you don’t have power, pretend otherwise. If you do, pretend otherwise.”
She stroked the foxes’ heads; under her hand, they sighed.
“What is your power?” Kimiko asked.
Anna said, “I’m great with funerals.”
A woman outside the hotel was selling amulets from a card table.
“Magicked by the sorcerers from the Congress,” she called, holding out a stamped clay bead on a string. “Talismans and charms! Witch-blessed! Shaman-approved!”
Anna didn’t know what the symbols meant, but she could tell they were empty of power. The seller had dusted them all in cinnamon; the smell choked the air.
As Anna passed, the woman thrust it at her brightly. “Need a little magic, miss?”
Yes, Anna thought, and kept walking.
* * *
Anna dreamed of the narwhal, stark and pale against the black rocks. When she walked across the ice to meet it (she was so far away, she should not have wandered), she slipped. She remembered the ice was rotten, and was afraid. She stood where she was, too frightened to move another step and risk falling through the ice and into the water.
On the beach, the narwhal had turned to face her. Its mouth gaped open, revealing Sitiyok inside, standing and waving, gesturing to the shore.
Annakpok could not move, she was so frightened – even when the ice she was standing on sank under her, she stayed where she was. She looked down at the water lapping at her knees – so cold she couldn’t feel herself drowning, so deep that the bottom could not be seen.
The ice gave way under her, and she tilted her face upwards, fighting for her last breath. The sun above her gleamed fox-red.
As the water swallowed her, she opened her hands and felt something slip from them; she had been holding tight to something she could not see.
There is always more than we can see, her mother said.
Her mother was unafraid.
Her mother was waving.
“You look horrible,” Stephens said as they took their seats. “Didn’t you sleep? The papers will think you’re a refugee.”
“And that’s why they recruited you into the Diplomatic Corps,” Anna said.
The environmental referendum ended with spellcasters insisting that they could not possibly be to blame for a weakening of natural magic they did not even use.
“We make a study of the art,” said Maleficio. “Our magic is the result of scholarship. If anything, we begin at a disadvantage, because natural magic rarely chooses us. We are powerless, though we may pretend otherwise.”
Anna looked up. The tips of her fingers itched as if she were stroking fur.
Maleficio threw his arms wide. “Natural magicians have the authority of the ages – they have inherited magic!”
“We have to register like livestock!” someone from the Kenyan delegation called.
Maleficio ignored him. “We spellcasters have to read and practice, and must make the best we can of lesser circumstances, to create what power we can.”
The spellcasters nodded sadly. Anna and James exchanged a look.
Kimiko said, “Then in your infinite scholarship and wisdom, suggest a solution that will enable natural magicians to find enough magic for ourselves without robbing powerless, impoverished spellcasters of all their hard work.”
“No magic!” cried the Congress Director, as a dark rumble spread through the Amphitheatre.
The air crackled, and heat rose from the dozens of angry sorcerers. Adam Maleficio seemed angriest of all, his arm trembling, the air rippling around him.
For a moment, his blue eyes glinted fox-red.
There is always more than we can see.
In the pause between debates, Anna slid into place behind Maleficio. Across the Amphitheatre she could see James and Stephens frowning at her. She ignored them and leaned in. This close, Maleficio smelled of sulfur.
“Tsukimono-suji,” she whispered.
He startled, stiffened. “Who are you?” he asked without looking.
“I’m natural magic. And so are you, foxwitch.”
“I’m a sorcerer,” he hissed. Around them, people were caught up in arguments over who was responsible for making natural magic possible for those who practiced it; no one heard him. “I studied at Stonehenge. I spellcast.”
“You have a fox at home,” she said. “The rest is party tricks.”
She felt, rather than saw him, flinch. “What do you want?”
“Force a vote,” she said. “In our favor.”
He sniffed. “Forget it. I’m not about to switch sides. Besides, the others won’t care if I’m foxblood. I put in the work on spellcasting.”
“Oh sure,” she said. “It’s heartwarming. We’ll wrap up with that story, then,” and she moved as if to rise.
He flailed one arm behind him. “Stop, stop, come back, you horror. What am I putting to a vote?”
In a surprise turnaround, Adam Maleficio made an eloquent case for the responsibility of the magical community to support its own.
“Natural magic was the earliest magic,” he said. “It deserves our respect, our support, and our devotion. I, for one, will be voting to create a coalition that will work to discover a magic strong enough to shield the natural from the ravages it has suffered, and shame, shame, on those who do not join me!”
The spellcasters drew wands, and voted (barely) yes.
As Anna walked the ring of the Amphitheatre back to her seat, she passed the Japanese table. Kimiko caught her eye and beckoned her over.
“What did you do to him? You must have more power than you thought.”
Anna smiled. “I had no power,” she said. “I just pretended otherwise.”
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One of the fox heads looked up and grinned.
When she got back to her seat, the notepaper was waiting for her. James was looking straight ahead; he didn’t even acknowledge she had come back.
Under I have no real magic, James had drawn a question mark.
She folded the paper carefully, rested both hands on it like a talisman.
At home, she waited for dark to go down to the water.
A hundred yards out, in the dim moonlight, she could still see that the narwhal was gone.
She ran.
As she lurched over the rocks, she saw it was not really gone; it hadn’t sprung to life again and swum out to sea (as she had half-hoped).
It was devoured.
The narwhal was eaten clean down to the bones (impossible for birds to manage in three days), and the bones themselves were intact, despite the wind (impossible, impossible). The ribs rose sharply white against the green-black sky, the skin curling like parchment against the black ground as if the wind itself had pulled it gently from the flesh.
Annakpok looked in the sand for tracks. No animal tracks (she expected none), but she was surprised that only her own footprints came out this far.
She walked slowly, tracing the edge of the laid-out hide with her feet as she went, trying to still her pounding heart. She had to listen; she needed to see.
There was no flesh left on the bones at all; she would have suspected that she had been trapped in time, at the summit for a hundred years, except that the bones had not yet begun to dry. They were pearl-white still, the ribs like joyful hands, the tailbones pointing mournfully to the sea.
Anna knelt and plucked the smallest tailbone from the hide. It was the length of her palm, and hollow. She slid it over one finger.
She made rings out of ten vertebrae. They warmed against her skin; when she curled her hands they shifted against one another like she wore gloves of bone.
The ice under her feet was slippery, rotten, but she stepped where the moon reflected thickest. The bones in her hands thrummed as she breathed.
She walked across the sheet ice, out and on, past the light from shore, past her mother’s old hunting grounds, to the edge of the ice-veiled sea. There she stopped, and trembled. The ice rocked gently under her feet, and she knew if she slipped here the sea would swallow her.
It might swallow her in any case. (She thought of her mother inside the mouth of the narwhal, beckoning her home.) It was great magic, what she was attempting. It was beyond her power.
She would be the sacrifice.
Around her the world was flat and black; the wind slid mournfully against her face.
Annakpok held out her open hands before she could be afraid. If she was a shaman, the sea would bring them back to her as narwhals. She had only to wait, and be worthy.
(What are you fighting for?
Everything.)
The bones fell into the water, ten white sparks that disappeared into a black so deep that the bottom could not be seen.
When she turned for the shore, the narwhal’s bones looked like a doorway, like an open hand waving her home.
WARRIOR DREAMS
Cinda Williams Chima
Russell’s new home under the abandoned railroad bridge was defensible, which was always the first priority. Secluded, yet convenient to the soup kitchens downtown. It offered a dry, flat place for his sleeping bag, and some previous occupant had even built a fire ring out of the larger rocks.
The bridge deck kept the snow and sleet off, and because the bridge wasn’t in use, he didn’t have to deal with the rattle-bang of trains. Any kind of noise still awakened the Warrior – the dude born in Kunar Province, in Korengal, in the Swat Valley – even in places like Waziristan, where he never officially was. Any sudden noise left him sweating, heart pounding, fueled by an adrenaline rush that wouldn’t dissipate for hours.
Best of all, the bridge was made of iron – a virtual fortress of iron, in fact, which should’ve been enough to win him a little peace. That and the bottle of Four Roses Yellow Label he’d bought with the last of this month’s check.
But Russell was finding that, for an out-of-the-way place, his new crib on Canal Street was in a high-traffic area for magical creatures. The river was swarming with shellycoats – he heard the soft chiming of their bells all day long. Kappas lurked around the pillars of the bridge, poking their greenish noses out of the water, watching for unwary children. The carcasses of ashrays washed up on shore, disintegrating as soon as the sunlight hit them.
Where were they all coming from? Was there some kind of paranormal convention going on and nobody told him?
The first night, he’d awakened to the adrenaline rush and a pair of red fur boots, inches from his nose.
“Hey!” Russell said, rolling out of danger and grabbing up the iron bar he always kept close. The creature screeched and scrambled backwards, out of range. It was the size of a small child, with a long beard, burning coal eyes, and a ratty red and black fur coat. Like a garden gnome out of a nightmare.
“Listen up, gnomeling,” Russell said, “you sneak up on a person, you’re liable to get clobbered.”
The creature struck a kind of pose, lips drawn back from rotten teeth, one hand extended toward Russell.
“Je suis le Nain Rouge de Detroit,” it began.
Russell shook his head. “En Anglais, s’il vous plait. Je ne parle pas français.”
It scratched its matted beard. “You just did.”
“Did what?”
“Spoke French.”
“Maybe,” Russell said, “but now I’m done.” He leaned back against a bridge pillar and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. At one time, he’d been fluent in five languages, but he’d forgotten a lot since the magic thing began.
The gnomeling let go a sigh of disgust. “I am the Red Dwarf of Detroit,” it repeated. “Harbinger of doom and disaster.”
“I hate to break it to you,” Russell said. “But this isn’t Detroit. It’s Cleveland. Detroit’s a little more to the left.” He pointed with his cigarette. “Just follow the lake, you can’t miss it.”
The dwarf shook his head. “I may be the Red Dwarf of Detroit, but my message is for you.” And then it disappeared.
Way to ruin a good night’s sleep.
The second night, it was the dog. Russell woke to find it snuggled next to him, its huge, furry body like a furnace against his sleeping bag. He nearly strangled it before he realized what it was. He was definitely losing his edge. No way any animal that size should’ve been able to sneak up on him
“Hey,” Russell said, sitting up. “Where’d you come from?” After holding out his hand for a sniff, he scratched the beast behind the ears. It was immense, probably a Newfoundland, or a mix of that and something else.
Russell liked dogs. They accepted a wide range of behavior without question, and they believed in magic, too.
The next morning, Russell shared his meager gleanings from the dumpster behind the Collision Bend Café, and the dog elected to stay with him another night. Russell’s rule was, if a dog stays two nights, it gets a name.
“Is it all right if I call you Roy?” Russell asked. The dog didn’t object, so Roy it was. That night Russell fell asleep, secure in the belief that old Roy had his back.
He awoke to six nixies tugging on his toes with their sinuous fingers. Yanking his feet free, he said, “Ixnay, nixies.”
They swarmed back into the water and commenced to squabbling about what, if anything, they should do with him.
“He sees us!”
“He will tell!”
“We must drown him!”
“Some watchdog you are,” Russell said, glaring at Roy. The Newfie stretched, shook out his long black coat, and trotted off to anoint the bridge for the hundredth time.
After shooing away the nixies, Russell kindled a fire. He hadn’t lost the knack since he’d been chaptered out of the Army. Like riding a goddamn bike. He curled up and tried to go back to slee
p, but he couldn’t shake a sense of imminent danger. The nixies kept muttering, and that didn’t help. He tossed and turned so much that Roy growled, got up, and found a spot on the other side of the fire.
It was no use. Russell sat up. As he did so, the wind stung his face, bringing with it the stench of rotten flesh.
Stick with Lieutenant MacNeely. It’s like he can smell danger.
He searched the embankment that ran down to the water. There. He caught a flicker of movement along the riverbank. The lights from the bridge reflected off a pair of eyes peering out of a tangle of frozen weeds. The eyes disappeared and the weeds shifted and shook, a ribbon of motion coming toward him. Something was creeping closer, stalking him. Something big. Was it plotting with the nixies or was it here on its own?
Warrior Russell planted his feet under him, reached down and gripped his trusty iron bar.
Know your weapon.
You are the weapon.
With a roar, the creature burst from the underbrush, its claws clattering over the concrete as it bounded forward. It was incredibly tall, cadaverously thin, with long, snarled hair. Coming to his knees, Russell waited until it was nearly on top of him, then jack-knifed upward, swinging his iron bar, slamming it into the creature in midair. It screamed, a sound as lonely as a train whistle at night. Then burst into shards of ice that rained down on the riverbank until it looked like his campsite had been hit by a localized hailstorm.
“What the hell was that?” Russell muttered, brushing slush off his parka.
The nixies looked at each other, chattering excitedly, pointing at Russell. One of them slipped beneath the river’s surface and disappeared.
“Where’d she go?” Russell demanded, glaring at them. He stood, cradling the iron bar. “If she went for reinforcements, well, then bring it. I’m Russell G. MacNeely, and I’m not giving up this crib.”
The nixie reappeared a few minutes later, with reinforcements. A reinforcement, rather. The newcomer – a girl – surfaced with scarcely a ripple, regarding Russell with luminous green eyes. Her skin was ashy white, with just a hint of blue, and her long red hair was caught into a braid just past her shoulders.
She raised one pale hand, and waved at him, a tentative flutter of fingers. Russell waved back.