“You wish a boon, then.”
“If we may.” I made my voice humble.
“For the…lady, I would suppose.” I didn’t care for the way the Blood Mother looked at Kara. Her distant reserve had given way to unwholesome interest.
“She…” I didn’t get to finish.
“Oh, I know what Kariel came for, Orman Orphesias. I could feel it when she first arrived in Remnar.”
She reached into a hidden pocket beside her throne chair, bringing out the tooth of some primordial creature. As long as a dagger, it came to a wicked point. She threw it to me, and I managed to catch it without being skewered.
“I have gotten the best side of this deal. Then again, I always do. Remember, breaking the spell will bring as much sadness as leaving it intact.”
“How is the spell broken?” I asked.
Her hard eyes bored into me. “By an act of will.”
Guards grabbed us and hauled us out a different way than we came in. By the time the door slammed behind us, I had no idea where we were or what direction we faced.
The cult had guessed, however. Outside on the street, a mob of twenty robed figures lurked, waiting to cut us to ribbons.
✧ ✧ ✧
I gathered Kara in my arms. Like every time, her embrace felt like the home I’d never known to look for.
“Hey, it’s not over. We’ll think of something,” she told me. I could hear the last dregs of hope fading as she spoke.
“I’m not giving up, Kara. Hold on tight.”
She did what I asked, burying her face in my shoulder. How could anyone want more than this? She was worth the pain, worth the scars of dying.
“Beyond the Gloomreach Mountains, in the valley where all night goes when burning chariot circles, I call to the living stuff of shadows. I have need of you, wings of Doldimmengard.”
The incantation’s power thrummed across us, encompassing our bodies with demi-real substance, like the breast of a giant raven. Wings three times as wide as my own height unfolded. Leaping, I took to the air, the wash of my passage forcing many of the cultists to the ground. We surmounted the walls of the Blood Mother’s sanctum and soared above the Screaming Hollows, where nightmares lingered.
“It’s wonderful,” she shouted against the wind.
“It’s temporary.”
The wings shed shadow, weakening with every beat. I circled above the edge of the great crevasse, looking for anywhere we could put down and have a defensible position. We couldn’t get away. No real escape remained. Only a place to defend, and maybe figure out how to free Kara from the rune.
I saw it. An ancient ossuary where a hundred generations of goblins moldered. It stood, the last vestige of an age when that race held sway over the city and the whole of the known world. We landed at the broken gates just as my wings dissipated.
“It’s not far enough. If we had managed to cross the chasm…” Kara’s face began to crumple as hope left.
I touched her chin. “Hey. You said it. It’s not over.”
Pulling free the tooth we’d been given, I pushed back my sleeves and cut my forearms. The artifact’s magic buzzed against my palms, the pain roaring in my veins. The tooth glimmered purple as it tasted my blood.
“Why?” she breathed.
“I’m a necro. This is what we do.”
I clenched my fists and the blood poured down my arms. I ran from one open crypt to the next, making handprints on the skulls of the ancient dead. To each, I only said a few words. The moment I released my hold, the skeletons clattered out of their funerary nooks and struggled to comply with my command. “Get up and kill.”
In the end, Kara had to throw me over her shoulder and carry me to a wide empty place beyond the crypts. How many did I raise? No one will ever know. More than anyone should. More than I thought myself capable of, even under the best conditions.
✧ ✧ ✧
I lay there, a hollow husk. Breathing hurt. Everything hurt. The sound of battle echoed from out in the crypts. Time ran short. I struggled to my knees, then to my feet. I swayed like a drunkard. Kara held the tooth in one clenched fist, her shirt discarded. Her jaw clenched, I saw the determination gleam in her eyes again. The glory of her presence caused me to stand straight, though every fiber of my being ached to simply stop, to quit the business of being conscious and even living.
“An act of will,” she said. Kara looked right in my eyes and drew the point of the tooth across the rune, cutting so deep I could see muscle in the opening wound.
She didn’t cry out. I tried to, but my protest drowned in the sound of a battle cry and the footfalls of our enemies rushing closer.
I turned away. I couldn’t watch her bleed to death. I couldn’t let the cultists touch her while I still lived. Bereft of magic, with nothing but bare hands, I staggered toward them. I could throw my body against their steel. I’d already died six times. What was once more? What did a guy like me have to fear from death, anyway?
The charging lunatics never reached me. Something titanic settled upon the ground behind me, wind blasting against my shoulders. The shadow of utter terror fell across the nearest faces, and then everything went away, burned to red, then to white in a torrent of flames that knocked me to my knees.
My clothes burned away, even my belt and boots turned to sudden ash. Heat beyond anything I had ever imagined bathed me. I made myself small within the maelstrom, eyes clamped shut, unable to breathe or think.
As suddenly as it came, the fire winked out. Blinking the blindness out of my eyes, I stood. Naked, scoured, and steaming, I saw that nothing but cracked bones remained of our enemies. Even the steel of their weapons twisted, the temper of the metal broken.
I turned. She filled my vision. “This is you. I should have known you’d be beautiful, no matter what the rune kept secret.” My voice sounded dry and raspy, like it came from inside a grave.
Kariel shook her long neck. Her talons gripped the rock, cutting half a foot into the pure granite. I’d never seen a dragon close up. Every scale began as dark as wrought iron, but glittered with a crescent moon like platinum at the edge. Her eyes still gleamed emerald, the rough of fur behind her horns crimson like her hair had been. More than weakness drove me to my knees. The realization of what I’d done, what I had touched, settled on my shoulders.
“Oh, Orman,” she sighed. The magnitude of her voice shook the bones inside my skin. A mighty claw reached out. She gently stroked my scarred back with the smooth edge of one talon. How could her touch, even like this, make my heart clench and burn?
“Did you always know what you were?”
“Not for a long time. Even when I finally guessed, I didn’t know it would feel like this. So bittersweet. For two hundred years, I was the woman you knew. It’s all I’ve ever known.”
Her claw encompassed me, lifting me up to her eye level. “They stole so many years from me, Orman. You gave me back my destiny.”
“And you have to live it.”
“I do.” That close, the intensity of her attention almost hurt. “And I don’t know where that will lead me.”
“Show them revenge like they’ve never imagined,” I told her. I couldn’t think of anything else that wouldn’t break me up inside.
“You know I will. Thoughts of you, though, will always be on my mind. A regular hero could never have done what you did. It had to be you.” She touched her snout to me, as near as she could get to a kiss goodbye.
“I would go with you. I’d leave everything behind.”
“I know…and I’d get you killed. I can’t face that.” She pushed her face against me one last time before she left.
Sitting on the edge of the crevasse, I watched until her shape disappeared into the distance, the thunder of her wingbeats fading away.
✧ ✧ ✧
I found the back door to my shop unlocked. Lex and Sebastian had been behind the counter and helped themselves to the old pastries and the darkbrew press.
“You loo
k like a wreck,” Lex said. “What the hell happened to you? And what are you wearing?”
I slumped down on the third chair at the table. Sebastian gave me a knowing and bemused look. “I caught one of your cases.”
Lex pushed the brim of his battered hat upward and sat forward. “How did that go?”
“About like you’d expect. I killed a lot of guys, did some magic, made love to a dragon.”
Lex’s eyes went wide. “You should tell me more about that part.”
“No. He shouldn’t,” Sebastian said. The look on the elf’s face showed that he knew. At least some of it.
I struggled to my feet. “I should go and get some rest. This place doesn’t open itself.”
Slipping out, I managed to keep it together, to act like things were fine. I walked, not knowing which way to go, not having any place to lay my head. Time went by. I found myself slumped in an ally, the stolen clothes too tight across my shoulders. Something went wrong with my eyes, because every witchlamp smeared like chalk in rain.
“She’ll be back. Blood always buys another turn around the ring.” I told myself that. The elf had been right the first time.
Somewhere down deep, I knew you never got that lucky twice.
The Frost Queen
Robert Buettner
To this day, of all days, my mother blames herself for what is now described in the Moon as “The Frost Queen Tragedy.” But Mom is one of the original ’59ers. So, she’s used to sucking it up, and taking onto herself responsibility for bad things that happen.
Me, no. I’m Jason Cho, Looney-born, Looney-raised, for all twelve of the years I had lived at that time. So, like all Looneys, Lithium Luna Limited coddled me from cradle to crematorium. Personal responsibility was optional. All I needed to know about the Big Blue Ball, that I saw up there in the sky when I went Topside, was: As long as the twelve billion people who lived on the Ball needed batteries, all of us who dug Lithium out of the Moon would have jobs.
Of course, because Triple-L controlled all the jobs, even the franchise concessions, you couldn’t job-hop. Other hopping was easy, because on the Moon we weighed one-sixth of Earth weight.
Carrying around five more of me throughout every wake cycle, and battling twelve billion competitors for a stupid McDonalds entry-level job were just two reasons I wanted no truck with the Big Ball on which Mom grew up.
That’s why Mom insisted on force-feeding me Earth culture since I was old enough to swipe. She said that Earth had been producing great art, great literature, and great music since cavemen first painted their walls. By comparison, Triple-L hadn’t introduced a permanent, nonrobotic community into the mining tunnels and galleries beneath the Moon’s surface until 2059.
So, Mom said, the Moon’s total creative output, since the year I was born, would fit in a flea’s navel.
I had to look up “flea.”
Me looking it up was what Mom was going for. Me looking stuff up for myself was what Mom was always going for. Other Looney slackers might punt personal responsibility. But in Cho-ville, personal responsibility was Job One. And Mom meant to keep it that way.
I had to consult Earth-generated sources to learn about fleas. That proved her point about Moon culture. Or lack thereof.
Fleas are insects. I didn’t know about insects because the Moon had none. And Triple-L meant to keep it that way.
Therefore Earth people flew down to the Moon for jobs, not vacations. That was because visitors’ first Moon experiences after disembarking the shuttle were normal gravity, which they found abnormal; Delousing, which they found degrading and disgusting; then Quarantine, in a windowless bus.
But I digress from my point, which involves fleas.
They’re smaller than Nanoborers. Because insects hatch from eggs, fleas lack navels. Navels are the leftover attachment points of the cords that connect placental mammal mothers to their children during gestation.
Just like fleas don’t need navels, human children don’t need to be jerked around by those invisible cords after their twelfth birthdays. I realized that sooner than Mom did.
Which is what started the trouble.
Mom said, “This month a Broadway show touring company’s coming down. I had to push my wake cycle an hour to queue. But I scored us front-row seats, with backstage passes, for a classic revival.”
The last Earth classic revival for which Mom had scored us front-row seats was The Comedy of Errors…which I thought was more error than comedy.
I said, “Do I have to go?”
She said, “If you’ve previously committed to, and taken responsibility for, something else, then no.”
“How long do I have to think up something else?”
Therefore, twelve wake cycles later, Mom and I sat in the center of Armstrong Auditorium’s first row. Mom sat alongside me, across the center aisle, as I watched actual human beings in the orchestra pit tune actual, wooden violas for opening night.
Mom fanned herself with her paper program as she leaned across the aisle and whispered, “Isn’t this exciting? Shakespeare, Stan Lee, Disney. The giants of the classics never grow older.”
She said it wrong on purpose. To test whether I had looked it up. I had, but I didn’t take her bait that time.
The classics might never grow older, but the giants were as dead as the guy whose name was on the auditorium.
Lee’s work was the most revered, and his death the best documented. Shakespeare plagiarized. So, who knew exactly when whoever wrote his plays died. But The Comedy of Errors was first performed in 1594. As for Disney, some sources insisted there had been a real person, but the body of work was produced over so long an interval that I doubted it. Plus, “Walt” sounded like a made-up name.
The overture started, so I watched the musicians try to saw their violas in half for three minutes before the curtain even rose.
The story concerned a princess who shot ice from her fingertips. The actress who played her was spectacular and was the only reason I stayed awake.
The reason that a Broadway show came down to us in the Moon was so that it could be performed in reduced gravity, holoed, then marketed in that more acrobatic version.
Based on opening night, I doubted it would sell enough clicks to fill a flea’s navel. The cast members could sing, but they flailed when they danced. Earth newbies always flailed in normal gravity, which they found abnormal.
But when she danced, she flew higher than any Looney—ever. With an angel’s grace. She sang like an angel, too. I cried when she cried. I laughed when she laughed.
After the final curtain, Mom stretched and yawned. “I don’t suppose you want to wait around for autographs.”
“Autographs?”
✧ ✧ ✧
Backstage passes, like the ones Mom and I wore on lanyards around our necks, must have been easy scores after all, because half the audience seemed to be wedged into the space between the dressing area’s door and the Airtight that exited into Centerline Passage.
Mom had stepped back from the crowd, into the lobby.
She’s claustrophobic. Claustrophobia and living in caves didn’t mix. Since the 2059 Breaches, Triple-L prescreened for, and rejected, claustrophobics’ applications.
But, like I said, Mom was a ’59er, and they were a tough bunch. To belabor the obvious, she was among the half that survived the first year. That’s part of why I never wanted to visit Earth. If the early years here were that bad, how much worse must conditions on Earth be, that people like Mom resorted to Triple-L?
While half the audience and I waited, with our programs opened to the cast member pages, two people also waited, apart from us because they wore zootier neck tags.
The first cast member who came out I didn’t recognize, but a girl squealed, and some grown-ups applauded.
The cast member held up both hands and waggled them, then grinned and shouted, “Hellooo, Moon!”
The crowd roared, and from the gesture and his voice, I realized that he had
played the snowman. Playing a snowman seemed like a stupid job.
He stepped up to the crowd and people pressed forward. They held out stuff for him to sign, ranging from programs to Topside helmets.
One of the zoot-pass people, a woman Mom’s age but way more flash, walked over to him and clung to his arm while he signed with his free hand.
If she was his girlfriend, maybe playing a snowman wasn’t stupid.
More actors emerged, the crowd split into clusters surrounding each of them, and the room grew quiet.
The door opened again, and a girl stepped out. She wore a tiger-striped skinsuit, just like any girl in my class might have worn after school.
The program said that the title role of the princess who became the Frost Queen was played by Isis Lavender and that she was fourteen. That was credible because her skinsuit had bumps in places where the girls in my class hardly had skin.
The other zoot-pass person, a man with a mustache, stepped over to her. Alongside himself he wheeled a scooter, tiger-striped, with a little stuffed tiger tied to the handlebar. Scooters were very big with girls then.
He said to her, “Honey, do you want to skip signing tonight? You have homework, and a matinee tomorrow.”
She looked around, saw me standing alone there, holding up my program like a dooz. She pushed the scooter aside, then produced a jeweled pen. That seemed magical because skinsuits lacked pockets.
She said, “Dad, I’m signing.”
She made it two steps toward me before the first person, other than me, recognized her.
A heartbeat later the stampede was on, like the story where the sea parted, except in reverse.
Then suddenly she stood in front of me. She brushed aside the hands and the things that the hands thrust toward her.
When she took my program, it was as though we were the only two people in the Moon.
With her pen poised over my program, she looked up. Without her makeup and costume, she looked more beautiful.
Since what Mom called my “growth spurt,” I was so tall—for a Looney—that I had outgrown my clothes. But when her eyes, bigger and lovelier blue than the Ball itself, stared into mine, she was almost as tall.
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