IGMS Issue 46

by IGMS

  I shrugged. "Probably."

  She put her hand on the doorknob. "So . . . tomorrow then?"

  "Yes. Tomorrow."

  Victoria reached out and squeezed my shoulder. "We'll find the letter. I'm sure of it."

  I offered a weak smile as she slipped into the dusk.

  I stayed in that night and went to bed early. But sleep evaded me and at ten minutes to midnight, I turned on the lights to the shop below and sat in the overstuffed reading chair we'd discovered earlier that day beneath a mountain of books.

  I opened the copy of Poe and glanced at the statue.

  The pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber-door. I read the words and smiled. Then I settled into the chair and read until the dull chime of midnight made me jump. I chuckled at myself.

  But I didn't jump at all when I heard tapping at the door. Between the book and the bust, I wasn't surprised. And it explained why I didn't feel as alone in the world as I should have.

  I stood up, put down the book, and went to let my brother in.

  He hopped into the room with many a flirt and flutter and I locked the door behind him. Papers ruffled as he flapped his wings and launched himself toward the ceiling, finally settling onto the statue.

  "Ta-da," quoth the raven.

  I shook my head and chuckled again. "Hello, Thomas."

  He cocked his head. "Pretty good, huh? I see you got my message."

  "Eventually," I told him, pointing to the book. "I should've guessed sooner."

  "Didn't Victoria tell you?"

  "She thought it was a letter." Of course, now I realized there'd never been a letter. There'd been a carefully placed book and a carefully marked poem. A buried bust. A hidden chair.

  "Ah," he said. "Semantics. It was more of a message. Dressed up like a conjuring."

  "Yes." I felt relief now and in it, I could feel the hidden tension in my body easing up. "And now I know why it didn't feel like you were gone."

  "Exactly," he said. His eyes sparkled like pools of ink. "I'd never leave without saying goodbye."

  I felt nothing at his funeral but those words -- leave and goodbye -- hit me like rocks. "But why leave at all?"

  Thomas picked at his wing with his beak. "We've been here a long time. I'm ready for something else."

  Now I was feeling even more of my emotions. Fear that tickled and anger that reared up without warning. I waved my hands at the room. "You've spent most of your time locked away here in this little town, this microcosm of reality here. How can you be ready?"

  He paused and looked away. "I just . . . am." Then his eyes met mine and were steady. "I supported your decision to leave and see the world. To stay young and steer clear of your roots here." He didn't say the rest but he didn't need to. He had supported all of my decisions because he was my brother and he respected my autonomy.

  I nodded. "You're right, of course."

  "And we know there was something before all of this. They found us on the mountain and time has proven that we're more than misplaced children or lost orphans. So I'm certain there's something after. Maybe a moving forward or maybe a coming home. I want to see that."

  I thought the words and wanted desperately not to say them. I failed. Because now I knew that the loss I'd not felt before was only delayed in its coming. "But what about me?"

  "I don't know about you. We came here together, I know that. But I don't think we need to leave together." He hopped from the statue to the counter. "Maybe you'll catch up to me when you're ready." He paused. "I only know about me, Michael. I'm ready to go see what's next. What about you?"

  I sighed. "I don't think I'm done yet." I looked at my hands and the fine dark hair of my forearms. "I'm not even ready to let my body age."

  Thomas's chuckle was more of a cackle. "That one took some getting used to. The weight and wear of time's passage on the body and the mind. Shuffling off the mortal coil at long last."

  I shuddered at the thought of it. And yet, here he was.

  "So the raven was your idea?"

  He hopped back to the statue and held his wings out. "It felt right."

  And it suited him. I still didn't understand exactly how he'd done it. Or why he was going. But his words rang true. It felt right. For him at least. And my next question was more for me than him. "What's next then?"

  "I thought we'd catch up a bit here and then take a trip." He chuckled and it was the caw of a hungry predator. "Obviously you'll have to drive."

  "No," I said. "I mean for me."

  "Ah." Thomas waited and watched me for a moment. "You'll know when you know. But I can tell you: I have no regrets about my life here in Bradley. None. I saw enough of the world. The best parts of it were the ones we met the first time we set foot upon it. My tribe here in Bradley." He cocked his head. "And you, of course. But I've known you for all my lives."

  More truth. I can't remember anything before the day that Reverend McKay found us naked and wandering in the snow. But I knew in my bones there were other mountainsides, other findings, and that someday it would be time for my brother and I to leave this place and be found all over again. Maybe in that life, I would stay in one place and he would wander. Or perhaps do some of each together. Until now, I'd never questioned our choices but the sorrow of his departure weighed on my chest heavy as a boulder.

  "I wish I'd spent more time with you in this one. I wish I'd know you were planning to go." Bargaining come early as grief finally reared its head.

  "I didn't want it to be a spectacle," Thomas answered. "I wanted a quick, simple goodbye the night before."

  I nodded. "After it was too late to talk you out of it."

  More laughter like fingernails on a slate. "Exactly."

  We drove in moonlight and starshine until the forest swallowed us. I turned off the headlights and let my senses guide us, window-down, onto the gravel spider-web of roads leading up into the foothills.

  My brother clutched the passenger seatbelt with his talons, beak pointed out the window. We were quiet as we went. We'd done all the catching up we needed to do.

  As we went, the forest came to life around us. Bears and elk and coyotes and bobcats formed their ranks on each side of the road. They knew us here for who we were, unlike the others, and we drank their adoration as we remembered briefly where we came from and how we mattered in the Slow Moving Wheel. The mountain that was our mother on this plane loomed above us and I felt her call upon my brother. It was a gravity flooded with joy and I knew I could expect the same when it was my time to follow.

  We parked and stepped out into the cold. The ground here was white and crunched beneath us. A light snow fell and I could hear each snowflake singing -- a billion-voiced choir in the night -- as they drifted down.

  I walked as my brother flew ahead through the trees until we found the clearing. I went to the tree right away. It had grown in the decades and decades since I'd last seen it but I found the markings and ran my hand over the initials we'd carved there so long ago.

  "So this is it," Thomas said. He hopped onto a fallen tree that rotted on the edge of the clearing. "I trust your judgment on the store but I hope you'll make sure Victoria is taken care of."

  "I offered it to her the other day. She said no."

  He chuckled. Then he was quiet and the silence settled over us. "I'm going to miss you," he finally said. "But hopefully I'll see you soon."

  "We're the Found brothers," I told him. "We'll find each other."

  "Over and over again," he replied.

  "Evermore," I told the raven. "Evermore."

  There was that raucous laugh again. This time, I joined him. "Good one."

  "Thanks, Thomas."

  "You're welcome, Michael. I sure do love you."

  "I sure do love you, too. See you soon, eh?"

  With that, my brother lifted off into the air and beat his wings against a sky that refused to hold him down. He flung himself upward at the moon and stars and the veil of cloud and the mountain that awaited. He
flung himself at all of that and flew free across the night's Plutonian shore.

  I watched until I knew that he was gone and then I sat in the car and let grief begin its work in me.

  I drove in the dark alone with my tears and paused at the cut-off to Bradley. I had an apartment -- nearly empty -- in Vancouver. And any number of ships to work. I could have my bag packed and be back on the road before Victoria arrived to open the shop. I could call the attorney -- Sandra Matthews -- and arrange for the store to be sold and for Victoria to be retained.

  Or like my brother, I could decide it was time for a change. I could pack up my few belongings, move south, and take on the store. Maybe even write a book or two of my own about my life here. And then, when the time was right, follow him up the mountain for whatever world waited beyond.

  "I don't need to know right now," I told the empty car.

  For now, I had a store to finish cleaning. Days to spend in the smell of dust and paper while I made up my mind.

  The bakery was open when I hit town. The coffee was hot and the donuts were fresh. I bought a dozen and realized as I climbed back into the car that the snow had followed me down from the mountain. I watched it settling upon the shoulders of the statue of Reverend McKay. I listened carefully and far, far away I thought that I could still hear it singing.

  I wondered if it meant my brother had been found again. If the cycle had started up again. I wondered where and how I would find him, and myself be found again.

  But I knew that I would learn this all soon enough.

  When it was my time to follow.

  The Monastery of the Parallels

  by Holly Heisey

  Artwork by Anna Repp

  * * *

  Johan Mercio emphatically did not think about the invitation in the inner pocket of his evening jacket, thick and heavy and anonymous. Instead, he adjusted the feathered plume on his hat and sauntered his way through the crowded ballroom of the palace of Venton, wine glass in hand.

  He spotted the Minister of National History in all his civil service-medaled glory. Maybe the invitation wasn't so anonymous. The minister might have finally agreed to listen to his theories on the impact of the Victorious War.

  Johan raised his glass, but the minister gave him a flat stare and turned to resume his own conversation. Of course the invitation wasn't from the minister.

  He noted, as he wove through various groups of nobles, three figures in bright reds and tangerines and golds, their veils draped to show only their eyes. Monks from the Monastery of the Parallels were not forbidden from any gathering, per the laws of the Accords of the Parallels, but they were given wide berth. Two made eye contact with him, and the invitation in his pocket began to feel heavier. He drained his glass of wine and prayed to all of the gods that the Monastery hadn't gotten hold of his theories and decided to meddle. He took his cue from everyone else and pointedly ignored the monks.

  While Johan was nursing the last of his third glass and trying to find a group he had not yet approached, the crowds began to push back. The ballroom hummed as people turned toward the south entrance.

  Johan watched over most of the heads as a man as tall and swarthy as himself, his face all planes and sharp edges, parted the crowds with the inevitability of a ship breaking water. Not the prince or one of the dukes, not anyone he recognized. The man's gaze locked on Johan and stayed there.

  The wine glass shook in Johan's hand. He glanced around, but yes, the man was looking at him. His ears began to rush and his hands and face numbed with a static that leaned toward pain. He felt with a gut-certainty that he knew this man, but he had never seen him before.

  "Are you Johan Mercio?"

  The man had a strange accent, slurred about the edges, and his voice was compressed as if he was used to bellowing.

  Johan surveyed the man's rigid posture, the left arm slightly bowed where he might normally prop a helmet. Fine scars etched his chin and brow. This man had to be a general.

  "Marcus Kato." Kato gave a stiff nod. "I have come to aid you in your work."

  And then the invitation in Johan's pocket made sense. He had asked the minister many times for the aid of a general. He'd known he'd never get it, but he asked anyway. Johan eyed where he'd last seen the minister, but only saw the smirking, tittering nobles.

  He took in a sharp breath of sweat and clashing perfumes.

  A scandal. The minister had invited him to a scandal, his own. It was a blatant attempt to discredit his name and cast doubt on his theories. Kato was no more a general than he was.

  Johan made a curt bow. "If you are to help me in my work, be in my office tomorrow morning by seven. We can discuss matters then."

  Kato's eyes narrowed.

  The numbness in Johan's hands increased, and though he told himself it was nerves, his gut tightened with a deeper dread. Kato was too familiar. He could have been one of Johan's brothers, or his father even, with the gray salting Kato's dark, bristly hair.

  Color rustled in the crowd, the orange robe and veil of one of the monks from the Monastery of the Parallels. His heart jumped to his throat. If the monks were here, and this Kato looked so much like himself . . .?

  He shoved that thought and everything that went with it away from him. His breathing slowed again.

  "I will be there," Kato said. "In the morning."

  Marcus Kato paced the edges of the Monastery viewing room, rousing dust from the silk-draped walls and flaring the sage-burning braziers.

  "That man is not me," he said.

  Li Sha sat on a cushion by her waist-high viewing crystal, which was dormant now, thank God. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she watched him with sapphire eyes through the orange folds of her veil. She was entirely too calm.

  "He looks nothing like me," Kato growled. "He is younger. He is --" He jerked his hand toward his head. Johan Mercio wore that ridiculous purple-feathered hat and had enough oil in his fussy curls to grease a carriage. "I asked you for help to stop my wars, and of all the kings and generals -- or, God forbid, philosophers -- you could have sent me to, you sent me to a historian! Damn you, monk, how is that supposed to help anything!" He stopped in front of Li Sha.

  Violet-uniformed guards at the viewing room doors shifted, their hands coming to rest on the hilts of their sabers.

  Li Sha motioned to her viewing crystal. "I have watched your armies devour whole nations. Surely you can handle one historian."

  But how could one historian find answers where he himself could not?

  "It is nearing the end of winter in my parallel," Kato said. "My commanders are already preparing my next campaign. My king will not take kindly to my absence. I need answers now."

  She glared up at him. She and the monks had sent him requests and summons and pleas to come to them, to change his ways, for the entire twelve years of his campaigns.

  "Ten days," Li Sha said. "You can spare ten days. Learn from Johan Mercio what he has to teach you. There is more to that man than you wish to see."

  Kato did not wish to see that man at all.

  "Trust me," Li Sha said. "And trust yourself."

  Kato grunted. He thought of his armies, spread now over too many former kingdoms and still swelling in numbers. There would be more campaigns, more bodies sprawled across bloody fields. And bodies laid out in the cities and the towns, not all of them soldiers.

  But he could not break his oaths to his king. He had come to the Monastery because it was his last hope, his last option to end the bloodshed.

  "Ten days," Kato said.

  Dawn blushed the sky over the scrolled spires of the ministry building when Johan turned the key in his office door and stepped inside. His head felt like it had been used for drum practice, courtesy of too much wine at the reception, but he had a bottle of seltzer in his desk for just such occasions. He closed the door and began the process of shrugging out of his tight-fitting jacket. Then he stopped.

  Marcus Kato sat behind Johan's desk.

  "Go
ds above. How did you get in here?"

  Kato stood and squeezed around the side of the desk. "Forgive me for startling you. The duty guard let me in."

  Johan brushed past Kato, the sense of a gong ringing in his head when their sleeves brushed. He shivered and barricaded himself behind the safety of his desk, straightening the stacks of files and books that Kato had mussed in passing.

  Kato handed across a small portfolio. The leather smelled fresh. "My credentials."

  Kato loomed over him, and Johan blinked hard to focus on the writing inside the portfolio. It was an official document, granting one Marcus Kato permission to reside in Venton and to work as a consultant in the Ministry of National History. Johan peered at the seal, with the High Minister's signature mix of gold and bronze flakes.

  "How can I be of use to you, sir?" Kato's words were clipped, his posture stiff.

  "I --" Johan fluttered his hands. The man was a legitimate general. A general-in-exile perhaps? What was the minister playing at?

  "You could best help me, sir, by offering a blind analysis." He gathered books and folders from his desk. "There is a study room across the hall and to the left, I am sure it will suit your needs. If you can read these and provide a summary of the reports, that would be a start."

  Kato glanced at the stack, then tucked it under his arm in military dispatch fashion. "If that is all?"

  Johan watched him leave. He hadn't quite believed Kato would take the stack.

  He yanked open his desk drawer and drained the bottle of seltzer.

  Marcus Kato shoved another heap of papers aside and rubbed at his eyes. He had scribes for this sort of work. There were books and ledgers and supply tallies and after-action reports. All of them made a picture of a fairly routine, if ultimately victorious, war of conquest. There was nothing here that could help him end his own wars.

  He'd sat in this closet of a room, with its chairs that cramped his back and flattened his ass, for four days now. He'd given Li Sha ten; six more would make no difference.

  Kato scraped back from the table. He stepped into the hall and paused. Johan's office door stood open and the voices within escalated to shouts.