OPENING ACTS

Twenty-five First Chapters from Twenty-five Writers

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The Acknowledgments

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And, of course, all of the writers who graciously allowed us to feature them in the volume!

7th Sigma

(A Novel of the Territory)

by Steven Gould

It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is “Run and find out”; and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose.

— Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, Volume II, “Rikki Tiki Tavi”

In statistics, Sigma levels denote where a sample falls on the graph of Normal Distribution.

A Sigma level of one means an event will occur over 2/3 of the time.

A 6th Sigma is equivalent to 3.4 occurrences in one million (34 in ten million). 99.99966% odds against.

A 7th Sigma is equivalent to 1.9 occurrences in a hundred million (19 in a billion). 99.9999981% odds against.

Part I

He stopped; for there shuffled round the corner, from the roaring Motee Bazar, such a man as Kim, who thought he knew all castes, had never seen. He was nearly six feet high, dressed in fold upon fold of dingy stuff like horse-blanketing, and not one fold of it could Kim refer to any known trade or profession. At his belt hung a long open-work iron pencase and a wooden rosary such as holy men wear. On his head was a gigantic sort of tam-o'-shanter. His face was yellow and wrinkled, like that of Fook Shing, the Chinese bootmaker in the bazar. His eyes turned up at the corners and looked like little slits of onyx.

— Rudyard Kipling, Kim, Chapter 1

Chapter One

When the student is ready, a teacher will come.

High atop the Exodus Memorial in the plaza of Nuevo Santa Fe, Kimble paced back and forth, his hand raised to strike down the impudent. The Memorial has nothing to do with the early events of Judeo-Christian tradition, but there were several scriptural references on the ceramic tiles inset in the thick adobe wall, and young Orvel, whose father was the local LDS bishop, and young Martin, whose eldest brother was a deacon at the Church of Christ the Rock, argued from below that these affiliations entitled them to the place occupied by Kimble, an avowed apostate and frequent blasphemer. Alas, neither their spiritual superiority nor their physical efforts had dislodged the smaller boy from his perch.

“Let me up!” yelled Martin.

Kimble smiled kindly down at him. “Never while I breathe.”

Martin stepped back to the side where Orvel was trying to form an alliance with Cesar, an altar boy at Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe. Cesar was bigger than any of them and might have turned the tide against Kimble, but Cesar was having none of it. There was historical animosity. If Orvel and Martin had not previously sided against Cesar in the affair of Mr. Romero’s broken shop window (and borne false witness at that) Cesar might have been more receptive to their appeal to Christian solidarity.

Rebuffed, Martin and Orvel steeled themselves for another attempt on the monument, a two-front assault from opposite ends of the wall. Unfortunately for them, Kimble was monkey quick and a sudden flick of his hand toward Orvel's face sent that worthy sprawling in time for Kimble to turn and meet young Martin, pudgy and less fit, before he achieved the summit. A mild blow on Martin’s grasping fingers sent him down into the dust of the plaza.

Their injuries were slight but Cesar’s mocking laughter was like salt in a cut.

The Territorial Administrative Complex and the Territorial Rangers headquarters bordered the great square on two sides. The Commercial Galleria, a series of businesses clumped together around the main heliograph office, occupied the third side, and the fourth side held the sprawled booths of the city market, open every day but Sunday. Now, shortly after the end of siesta, people strolled the plaza and shopped.

As Kimble watched, a woman wearing goatskin boots, wide-bottomed gaucho pants, and a cotton smock walked out of the market and into the square. She was pulling a travois, a modern one, glass composite poles with a small wheel where they came together. A strap running between the two handles crossed her shoulders and helped support the modest, tarp-covered load. Though her short dark hair was peppered with gray her face seemed young, or at least unlined.

“Gentleman,” she said, apparently addressing all four of them. “Would one of you be so kind as to tell me where the Land Registrar is?”

Orvel, still on his bottom in the dust of the square, didn’t know and he was mortified, convinced the woman had seen his ignominious descent. Martin, following his church's creed, was unwilling to talk to a woman not of his family. Cesar didn’t know but he said politely, “I would be glad to ask inside, Ma’am.”

“No need,” said Kimble. “I know.” He dropped lightly off the monument and rolled to absorb the impact, rising smoothly to his feet. He tilted his head toward the fiberglass awnings of the Galleria. “If you’ll walk this way?”

She fell into step with him, the trailing wheel of her travois squeaking slightly as it turned. “I would’ve thought it would be over there,” she said, jerking her chin at the Administrative Complex.

Now that he was closer he could see that fine lines radiated from the corners of her eyes and her mouth. Not young, then, though not as old as the market manager, a veritable raisin of a man. “’twas. Both the Land Office and the Census Department needed more records space. Census stayed and Land Office moved into an annex early this year.”

“You know a lot about it. Does your mom work there? Or your dad?”

He shrugged. It was not his place, he felt, to inform against himself. The less said the better. He found that people filled in the gaps all by themselves with details that felt right to them. It wasn't his fault if they made assumptions. “I run errands. Sometimes it’s messages. Sometimes it’s guiding people to where they need to go.” He waited for her next question but it was nothing like he expected.

“Where did you learn to roll like that?”

He blinked and looked sideways at her from the corner of his eye. “Pardon?”

“When you jumped off the monument. The forward roll.”

Kimble opened his mouth to answer, but then shrugged again.

She sniffed. “As you like.”

They entered one of the arched passageways back into the Galleria, past Bolton & Cable, specialty printers (ceramic type, of course); past Duran, importer of ready-made clothing and the hard plastic needles that fetched high prices over in the market; past the law firm of McKensie, Duncan and Lattimore, specialists in Native American, territorial, and immigration law. “Up there,” said Kimble, pointing up a narrow stair to the second story and the sigil of the territorial government, the old Zia of New Mexico rising above the Star on the Horizon of the old Arizona Flag.

The woman eyed the two flights and the tight landing and looked at her travois.

“I can watch it,” Kimble offered.

She gave him a look which made him add, “Really. No harm will come to it and it will be right here.”

Again she considered him. “What payment would you want?”

He raised both hands palm up. “You decide.” He smiled ingenuously. “No doubt you’ll want to take into consideration how long I have to wait.”

The woman snorted. “Your name?”

“Kimble.”

“Is that your first name or last?”

He bowed as a player, one hand on his heart, “Yes.”

She raised her eyebrows and then nodded. “I’m Ruth Monroe. See you in a bit, Kimble.”

Her business took long enough to close the office—the great ceramic bell atop the Territorial Admin Complex had rung eight different quarters of the hour when, watching from below, Kimble saw one of the clerks escort Ruth to the landing outside the office. The clerk shook her hand and then took down the “Open” sign before vanishing back into the interior. As Ruth came down the stairs, perusing a piece of paper, Kimble heard the doors being barred from within.

“Well, Mister Kimble, I am hungry. Can you recommend a reasonable eatery? I’m going south, toward the Rio Puerco, but I’d like to eat before I leave town.”

Kimble’s stomach rumbled at the thought, audible, almost echoing in the passageway.

“A meal for both of us,” Ruth amended.

“There’s Griegos—it’s a taqueria by the south gate. The cabrito…this is a good time to go. Early enough—they run out.”

They ate the goat tacos (whole-wheat tortillas, black beans, red onions, and pico de gallo) in the alley beside the taqueria, where Ruth could watch her travois. They were not alone. The alley had several diners as well as a few hopeful dogs. Ruth and Kimble were among the first but as the alley filled, Ruth shifted the travois so that it leaned against the wall, handles down, wheel up, to clear more space. An older teen, not eating, took the opportunity to grab a spot by the wall on the other side of the travois from them.

A Jicarilla Apache couple sat against the opposite wall with their burritos. The woman was wearing a traditional deerskin dress with beaded trim. The man wore jeans converted for the territory—all metal removed. The rivets had been pulled and replaced with over-sewing and the zipper fly was now Velcro. His moccasins had thick rawhide soles and buckskin uppers.

The woman gestured at the travois. “I like your outfit,” she said. “The wheel is a good notion.”

“Thank you. It’s worked pretty well as long as I grease it regularly.”

“How far have you come with it?”

“I entered the territory at Needles.”

The man seemed impressed. “That’s almost five hundred miles. Walking the whole way?”

Ruth nodded. “Five weeks. Walk six days, rest one. I averaged fifteen miles a day.”

“Any trouble?”

“What do you mean?”

“Bugs. Grass fires. Weather. Ladrones.”

Ruth glanced sideways at Kimble and he translated, “Thieves, bandits.”

Ruth shrugged. “I’d been briefed on the bugs—I was careful. And it wasn’t too dry—saw one grass fire far to the south. Wind was bad for a few days but fortunately it was at my back. I did have some trouble with la-ladrones? West of Montezuma Well. Two men wanted to take my outfit and, from what they said, rape me.”

The woman’s eyes grew large. “What happened?”

Ruth tilted her head to one side. “They decided not to.” And then she surged to her feet and was standing over the teen who’d sat next to her travois. “They were clearly smarter than you.”

The teen, looked up at her, eyes wide. “What?”

Ruth pointed at the lashing on her tarp. “You cut it. I saw the cord jerk when the tension released.”

The boy gathered his feet underneath him. “I never touched your stupid rope.”

Kimble watched with interest. If the boy had cut the cord what had he used? Was it still in his ha—

The boy slashed upward with a chunk of obsidian as he rose. Perhaps he meant to scare Ruth, to make her recoil, so he could bolt, but it didn’t work out that way. Suddenly he was face down in the hard, baked dirt of the alley, his arm pinned to the ground by an absurdly small hand. The teen tried to move and yelped in considerable discomfort. Kimble saw Ruth’s free hand take the back of the teen’s hand and bend it, fingers toward the elbow. The teen’s fingers spasmed, releasing the obsidian flake. Ruth released the hand but kept all her weight on the elbow.

Kimble was impressed. “Nice ikkyo!”

Ruth, without taking her weight off the teen’s arm, looked at Kimble. “I knew you learned that roll in a dojo.” She took up the flake of obsidian. The teen began to struggle again and she held the flake against his ear. “Feel that?” she asked.

The teen froze.

“I could just cut off your ear.” She moved it down to his neck. “Or, since you attacked me with a lethal weapon, I’m sure the Rangers would understand a lethal response.”

His voice, previously deep, broke, now high pitched. “I just needed some food, for my mother and sisters!”

“Kimble, check his pockets.”

Kimble found a small roll of dollars and a handful of plastic territorial coins in the teen’s pants and showed them to Ruth.

“Try another,” she said to the facedown boy.

The teen didn’t respond.

Ruth looked up. “Where would we find a policeman? It’s not like we don’t have witnesses.”

The Jicarilla Apache had started to rise when the boy surged up, but now he was back against the wall since he saw Ruth had things well in hand. He said, “There were Rangers at the city gate when we came in.”

Kimble winced. The gate was only two hundred feet away. Conviction on charges of theft and assault could get the boy a trip outside where, at the very least, he’d be tagged, then jail time or community service. But it was the tag, a surgically implanted Lojack, that would keep him out of the territory. Not just because he could be tracked, but because the bugs would go for the EMF and metal like the chewy nougat center in a candy bar.

The teen spoke then. “No! All right, I did it! Take my money, just don’t call the Rangers, I’m already on probation!”

The Apache woman said, “Maybe break his arm, too. The taking arm—his right.” She said it seriously but Kimble thought she didn't really mean it. The corners of her eyes were crinkling.

Kimble offered the money to Ruth but she said, “Just the coins. To replace the rope. Put the dollars back.”

“What? He came at you with a blade!”

Ruth turned her gaze on Kimble.

“All right, all right.” Kimble shoved the roll back in the teen’s pocket. When he’d moved back, Ruth folded the teen’s arm across his back and then leaned on it as she stood, keeping him pinned until she was all the way to her feet. She took a sliding step back, releasing him. He got up slowly, rubbing his arm.

Ruth held up the obsidian flake and said, “I’m also keeping this.”

The teen turned suddenly and walked out of the alley, his steps quickening as he reached the open street. He took a sharp right, away from the city gate and was gone.

A growling tussle broke out at Ruth’s feet as two of the stray dogs fought over something.

“Crap,” said Ruth. “I dropped my taco.”

Kimble shook the coins together between his cupped hands.

“You can afford another.”

*** ***

“I’d like to talk to your parents,” Ruth said.

She’d replaced and eaten her taco, knotted the cut rope, and now they were standing near the south gate.

Kimble’s mouth went still. He could’ve told her one of the many fabrications he used on occasions like this but he was reluctant. My parents are working. They are out of town until next week. My father is on assignment with the Rangers. I’m only visiting today. We live near Grants.

Ruth seemed to sense this. “I’m not going to inform on you. Runaway?”

He held out his hand and rocked it side to side. “My mother died when I was little. My father had heart trouble, uneven heartbeats, last year. He had to have a pacemaker—so he can’t live in the territory.”

“He left you here?”

“They airlifted him out. I was supposed to take a caravan north and join him in Denver.”

“What happened?”

“I sold the travel voucher to someone who wanted to go.”

She sat still, regarding him without speaking.

Finally, Kimble gave in. “My dad...he’s not a nice man. Maybe when my mom was alive but not so much after. I hardly stayed at home when he was in the territory, not if I could help it. Not if he’d been working.”

“Working?”

“If he worked he could afford liquor. When he wasn’t drinking he was just grumpy. When he was—better not to be home.”

“Where do you live now? The same place?”

“No. We lived in Golondrinas, but the Rangers there knew me too well. I joined a sheep drive here—dishwasher and orphan lamb care. I’m a useful citizen here.”

“Yes,” she said. “A guide.”

“And messenger.”

“But where do you live?”

“It depends on the season.” He had a bedroll hidden in a roof garden near Eastgate. Everything else he owned was on his person. “In the winter there are shelters, but they preach at you something fierce.”

“I would still think the authorities are looking for you. I mean, your father must’ve noticed when you didn’t show up.”

“Well, they’re looking for Kim Creighton. I’m Kimble. The picture they have is three years old and I was so much pudgier then. I’ve been asked, you know, if I’ve seen myself around.”

Ruth smiled briefly “And had you?”

“Oh, yes. Traveling with a caravan headed into old Arizona. I was positive I’d seen the boy.”

She swung her arm, backhanded, toward his face. There was no warning and, he thought, no reason, but she didn’t connect. He moved his head back out of the way and took a back roll.

“Hey!” Kimble said, rising to his feet and eyeing her warily.

She smiled at him.

“Tell me about the dojo.”

“Ohhhhhhh,” he said, in a quiet voice. He squatted on his heels, still out of arms reach. “That was back in Golondrinas. The kids’ class was free if you did dojo chores. They taught karate and judo and aikido.”

“The same teacher?”

“Oh, no. It was a cooperative. There were four different styles of karate. There were two judo instructors, but just one old guy who taught aikido.”

“Old guy?” She stared at him. “Which classes did you take?”

“Aikido, of course.”

“Of course? Is that what all the kids took?”

Kimble shook his head. “Oh, no. If they were the wrestling type, they liked judo. Otherwise, they all wanted to take karate. Punch, kick, punch, kick and more kicking.”

“So...why aikido?”

“They were the kids who weren’t that interested in kicking and punching.” Kimble looked down at the dirt. “I got enough of that at home. Besides, once I got the hang of getting off the line, aikido worked pretty well against the kickers and punchers.”

Ruth was silent for a moment, then said. “I am building a dojo on the Rio Puerco.”

“Oh. Really? You teach aikido?”

“For over twenty years now.”

He tiled his head to the side. “So you already had a dojo. Why did you leave?”

She sighed. “Divorce. You know what that is?”

Kimble glared at her.

“Sorry, of course you do. My ex-husband and his new wife kept the dojo. I left. I left...everything. I’m starting over.”

Kimble tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. She looked back at him, very still, like a rock, like a predator, like a statue.

“You’ll need students,” Kimble finally said. “You can’t be a teacher without students. I mean, at least one.”

She nodded. “Get your things.”

“Yes, Ms. Monroe.”

“Sensei,” she said gently.

“Yes, Sensei.”

7th Sigma is now available at:

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

About the Author

Steven Gould is the author of Jumper, Wildside, Helm, Blind Waves, Reflex, Jumper: Griffin’s Story, 7th Sigma, and the upcoming Impulse as well as several short stories published in Analog, Asimov’s, and Amazing, and other magazines and anthologies. He is the recipient of the Hal Clement Young Adult Award for Science Fiction and has been on the Hugo ballot twice and the Nebula ballot once for his short fiction, but his favorite distinction was being on the American Library Associations Top 100 Banned Books list 1990-1999. “Jumper was right there at #94 between Steven King’s Christine and a non-fiction book on sex education. Then that Rowling woman came along and bumped us off the bottom of the list.” Jumper was made into the 2008 feature film of the same name with Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, and Hayden Christensen. Steve lives in New Mexico with his wife, writer Laura J. Mixon (M. J. Locke) and their two daughters.

Visit him online at:

Steve’s website

Steve's Books at Macmillan/Tor

Steve’s Books at Amazon

Steve’s Books at Barnes & Noble

Steve’s Books at iBooks

Bone Shop

by T.A. Pratt

Marla Mason spent the afternoon of her sixteenth birthday with a pyromaniac named Jenny Click. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder against the support pillar of an overpass, trying to stay out of the late spring rain, and discussed their options.

"The thing is, maybe I should follow my passion," Jenny said. She wore a transparent raincoat over an increasingly ratty sweater and a rapidly-disintegrating pair of jeans.

"Which passion?" Marla said. "Sex, drugs, or setting fires?" They hadn't known one another very long, but spending time together on the street helped you learn a lot about the essentials of a person.

"Well, any of them," Jenny said, scratching her long nose absently. She had thin blonde hair, big blue eyes, lots of little burn scars on her hands, and a general air of jittery craziness that made Marla feel calm and grounded by comparison. "But being a hooker means getting a pimp, or getting beat up, and even with a pimp you get beat up half the time anyway, I hear. Still, it's an option."

Marla made a noncommittal grunting sound. She'd run away from her home back in Indiana for a lot of reasons, but one of them was the way her mother's drunken boyfriends - or one-night-stand bar pickups - had leered and grabbed and groped at her. She wasn't going to submit to such things, and worse, now that she was on her own. Which did limit her options, admittedly.

"Or drugs, there aren't a lot of girl dealers, but maybe that's, like, a market I could exploit?" Jenny fished a cigarette from a cavernous pocket and lit it with her nicest possession, a Zippo she'd stolen from her dad, inscribed with the initials "JWC" - her dad's initials, and close enough, she said, to hers. She spun up the fire and stared at the flame for a long moment, eyes intense with concentration, until Marla snapped her fingers.

Jenny blinked, lit her cigarette, inhaled, snapped shut the lighter, and nodded. "Right. Sorry. But I mean maybe girls would be more comfortable buying whatever from another girl?"

"I don't know if any of the gangs would, uh, hire you. And even if you knew a dealer you could buy from, you'd need money to get started." Privately, Marla figured Jenny would consume any drugs she acquired before she could sell them - as far as Marla knew Jenny would try anything - and that would just end up getting her killed, or turned out, or something otherwise bad.

"Okay, so that leaves fire. My dad always said 'find what you love and do it for life,' but he sold fucking insurance, so who was he fooling? Maybe I could get a job as an arsonist. You know, burn places down for insurance money? I could join the… mob or whatever. I mean, I set fires anyway. Might as well get paid for it."

Marla liked hanging out with Jenny because she had a reputation as an utter lunatic - she'd once torched an unattended mail truck, the story went, because she wanted a fire to keep her warm - and people tended to give her, and anyone she was with, a wide berth. Marla could fight a little, her brother had taught her some dirty tricks, but it was smarter and easier to avoid conflict altogether, so that was the advantage of hanging out with Jenny.

The disadvantage was having to listen to the ridiculous crap that came out of her mouth.

"The problem, as I see it," Marla said carefully, "is that, if you set a fire for the insurance money, you'd probably want to stand there and watch it burn, maybe even until the cops got there."

Jenny waved her cigarette dismissively, and Marla leaned back to avoid being scorched. "I can work around it. Fires always attract a crowd. I can just… melt into the crowd. Nah, it'll work. It's good. Having a plan is good."

"Not sure how you get into a business like that," Marla said.

"There's a bar, on the other side of the river near the east bridge, I hear there's a guy there. Like a crime boss guy. Heard my dealer talking to his dealer about it, he's the guy they buy from, supposed to be a big deal. Maybe I'll go down there and, sort of, apply for a job?"

"Just go up to him and say, 'Hi, I like to start fires, you have any openings?'" Marla shook her head. "Best case, you get laughed at. Worst case, they call the cops."

Jenny tossed her cigarette aside, and was quiet for a long moment. "Your problem, Marla," she said at last, "is you just find excuses to tear stuff down instead of actually doing anything." Jenny rose and walked off into the rain.

"Is that my problem," Marla said, to the empty air. "I've been wondering."

Maybe it was a problem. Maybe she should do something about it.

*** ***

After spending several months in Felport, Marla didn't quite have a comfortable routine, but she had a series of strategies that covered her basic necessities. There were a few places she could sleep safely, though fewer than there had been in spring and summer - competition for relatively dry indoor places got fierce as the temperatures dropped along with the leaves from the trees.

Her days were spent mostly in the big public library downtown, reading whatever caught her eye - American history, Sun Tzu, mystery novels, popular science, first-person accounts of bear attacks, mythology, memoirs from formerly homeless and drug-addicted people, some of them even genuine.

For food she mostly dumpster-dived, having met some enterprising freegans her first month in town, who'd shown her the prime places to scavenge. She'd also learned a few hustles from her brother, who was the prince of the small-town con men, but most of them were no good to her - it was hard to find people to play cards with a teenage girl, and a lot of the better scams required confederates or access to bars, two things it was tricky for her to acquire. Jenny had been too unreliable for such work, and once she vanished to pursue her career as an arsonist, Marla made it a point not to get close to anyone else. She had to learn to live on her own. Still, she knew enough short cons to keep her in pocket money, and she could use her youth and female-ness to her advantage, since people didn't expect to get ripped off by someone like her.

Living outside or in squats made you stinky and disreputable, though, and that was a problem, and pretty quickly. Back home maybe she'd be able to steal clothes off the line in somebody's back yard, but things were different in the city. Shoplifting new clothes was no good, because she soon looked ratty enough that store security started following her as soon as she walked in the door.

But then, in early summer, she made a life-changing score.

Marla was hanging out in a little park in an upscale neighborhood north of the river, sitting on a picnic table watching some people do tai-chi and wondering if the slow deliberate movements could translate into actual ass-kicking. It must have been a genuinely martial martial art at some point, right?

A young, blonde mother pushing a stroller and talking on a cell phone parked her baby carriage at the table next to Marla's. Marla glanced over to see if she had anything worth stealing - distracted moms in parks sometimes wandered away from their possessions, though usually when chasing toddlers, and this kid was both younger than that and asleep. Nothing caught her eye, but the mother started digging through an overstuffed diaper bag that apparently doubled as a purse, trying to pull out a hardcover Danielle Steele novel while continuing her phone conversation - a stream of invective aimed at the baby's father and, by extension, all men everywhere.

She liberated the book, but knocked over the bag in the process, and a rain of lipstick tubes and tattered receipts and pacifiers and her wallet and its contents pattered onto the ground.

Just then the baby started screaming, and the mother simply froze, phone in one hand, book in the other, apparently overwhelmed by the sensory assault.

Ever one to turn another's distraction to her advantage, Marla said, "Let me help you with that," and began picking up the make-up and baby accoutrements from the ground.

"Oh, thank you," the mom said, still distracted, and bent to tend to the wailing baby, clucking and cooing and making nonsense soothing noises.

Marla was hoping to find a wad of cash - credit cards weren't much good to her, everyone wanted to see ID, because Marla was so grungy - but beyond a few loose coins, there was no money in the mess. A library card, a Triple-A card, a car insurance card, useless, useless - but when she saw the white-and-red YMCA card, she palmed it and slipped it in her pocket, just in case. "Here you go," Marla said, putting the last of the dropped items in the diaper bag, and the mother nodded and mumbled more thanks while picking up the baby. She didn't notice the theft, and had never even looked at Marla's face.

Marla sauntered off around a corner. She'd walked past the uptown Y a few times, and it wasn't too far. If the people at the desk were attentive she'd never get in, but maybe…

She walked half a dozen blocks, then went up the steps and through the automatic doors. The Y was pretty pleasant, clean and bustling even at midday, and the lobby smelled faintly of chlorine from the pool downstairs. The people at the desk looked promisingly bored. Marla pretended to read the big row of plaques on the wall honoring various donors while she watched people go in and out. The setup was better than she'd hoped.

Nobody bothered to look at your ID, you just held up the card to the little electric eye by the turnstile and pushed on through. Since you didn't have to use the card to get out, she'd be fine even if the card's rightful owner went in while Marla was there. Distracted-mommy could get a replacement card - it would be an inconvenience, sure, but this barely qualified as a crime by Marla's standards. As long as mommy kept her membership, Marla should be able to come as often as she liked. She owned a pair of shorts and a grimy t-shirt that would pass as gym clothes until she could acquire something better.

The Y became her second home, a paradise she visited daily, even though it was a few miles from her preferred squat. The place was worth the walk, though - once inside, she could shower, swim, use the exercise machines, sit in the sauna, use the hot tub, even take a bunch of classes for free, not that she did; the appeal of being yelled at by a woman in a leotard escaped her.

She was often tempted to break into lockers to see what she could find, but it would mean trouble if she were caught. She did snatch the occasional unattended deodorant, bottle of lotion, or other useful little things.

With regular access to a shower - and after stealing a perfectly nice sundress off a rack during one of the summer sidewalk sales, running like hell from a persistent saleswoman who pursued her for blocks, despite the disadvantage of her high heels - Marla was in business. She could get cleaned up and go to any store in the mall and take whatever she could fit in her bag and her pockets. She had a great sense for when the store detectives were taking a special interest in her - acquired during all those years of watchfulness at home - and she never got caught, though she had some close moments. Between the stuff she could pawn and the stuff she could wear, autumn was shaping up nicely, despite the drafty walls in the abandoned building where she was living.

Marla was in the process of stealing some new underwear from a swanky lingerie store when she next saw Jenny Click.

Jenny looked… good. Almost unrecognizably so. She was dressed in a decidedly non-ratty chocolate-brown sweater, tight white jeans, and a white denim jacket. Her hair was teased and hairsprayed, her make-up somehow simultaneously complex and discreet, and she was less thin and strung-out looking - though still a long way from fat. Moreover, the way she walked was totally different, without the tightly-wound watchfulness that took in every possible threat from every possible direction. She had the kind of pleased, faraway look that she usually only got from looking at fire.

Jenny had clearly passed into some other world, and Marla was instantly suspicious, and jealous, and resentful, and felt comparatively filthy and ill-fed; her instinct was to withdraw and slink away.

But she was also curious. That was, perhaps, her dominant trait. So she said, as nonchalantly as she could, "Hi, Jenny."

Jenny turned her head, saw Marla, and smiled widely. She glided over and embraced her and clasped Marla's hands in her own and made effusive noises. Marla noticed that Jenny's fingers weren't burn-scarred anymore; how had that happened? Could you get plastic surgery on your hands?

"Come, let me buy you something to eat," Jenny said, and Marla allowed herself to be led to the food court, the usual multi-ethnic array of fried rice and pizza and hamburgers and breaded chicken, all fundamentally tasting like cardboard. Marla bought as much as she could carry - she usually only got this food once it was cold and discarded - and sat down with a tottering pile of french fries and burgers and disgusting little hot apple pies that tasted like pastry filled with sweet glue; but they were filling.

Jenny had a salad. Which meant her concern was worrying about her weight instead of maximizing caloric intake. Which seemed, Marla realized, practically the mindset of an alien creature at this point. To have that kind of luxury, that kind of unconcern… However she got where she is, Marla thought, I'm going to get there too.

"Marla," Jenny said. "Are you still living… like we used to?"

"Living by my wits," Marla said, having encountered the phrase recently at the library and enjoying the opportunity to use it.

"I can help you. I think. If you want."

"Charity is always appreciated. Cash only, though, I can't take credit cards."

Jenny laughed and shook her head. "I could help you that way, but it's better if I help you help yourself. My - a friend of mine taught me that. How would you like a job?"

"Doing what?"

"Waitressing. Probably. To start. But there's room for advancement."

Marla snorted around a mouthful of french fries. After swallowing, she said, "I've never waited tables. Who's going to hire me? I don't even have a phone or a home address. I can't even fill out an application."

"Just go down to the Bau Bau Room," Jenny said, writing down an address - with an eyebrow pencil! - on a napkin. "Go to the bar and ask for Rollo. Tell him I sent you." She grinned - a very uncharacteristic look for Jenny. Though maybe not for this Jenny. "Just go easy on him. You know you can overwhelm people when you really turn on the charm."

"That's always been a problem for me." Marla picked up the napkin. "I guess I'll give it a try. Is the money good? I mean, is this what you do?"

"It's what I started out doing," Jenny said. "Now I do… other things."

Marla wrinkled her nose. "You're not hooking, are you? If this guy Rollo's your pimp, I'm not interested."

"It's not like that." She stood up, slinging her stylish purse over her arm. "Though, when you get there… well. Just remember. It's not hooking. I swear."

"Ohh-kay. Hey, before you go. What happened to your hands? They used to be all scarred up, now they're not." Marla had heard of tact, subtlety, and decorum, but had seldom seen the point in using them.

Jenny held out her hands, palms facing away from her, as if examining her manicure. "Like I said. I learned to help myself. Go see Rollo. Maybe you'll learn something too." She waved and strolled into the depths of the mall.

Marla pocketed the napkin with the address. Then she ate the rest of her food. Then she ate the remains of Jenny's salad.

Then she went and shoplifted some underwear, because regardless of what tomorrow might bring, she still needed to look after today.

*** ***

The Bau Bau room was in an unlovely part of downtown, near a lot of check-cashing places and liquor stores and greasy pizza joints and a few weird remnants of Felport's rusty industrial past: a machine shop, a small-engine repair company, and a place that sold chemicals.

Marla found the ugliness comforting and familiar. With a name like The Bau Bau Room she hadn't exactly expected something swanky, but she'd worried.

The club occupied one bottom corner of a squat three-story building with offices above, mostly for the kind of lawyer who advertises on late night TV, though there was also a private detective, which Marla found sort of interesting. She'd only read about such people, never met one, though she suspected reality would diverge from fiction pretty swiftly if she ever did.

It was only about noon, but the front door of the place was unlocked, so she pushed her way in.

The Bau Bau Room owed a lot to red velvet. Red velvet walls, red velvet booths, even ratty red velvet on the bar stools, worn through in places by years of prolonged ass-contact. There were a few booths against the walls and lots of small round tables crowded around the clear focal point of the room: a hexagonal stage with mirrors on the wall behind it and a vertical metal pole in the center. Marla had never been inside a strip club before, but she knew one when she saw it, even sans strippers.

She hesitated, almost walked away, then thought of Jenny, all clean and together and unscarred, and went toward the bar.

A middle-aged bald guy with a bushy mustache and a diamond earring leaned on the bar flipping through a newspaper. "We're not open yet," he said, then glanced up at her. "And you're too young to drink anyway. Beat it." He went back to his paper.

Marla sat on the stool in front of him. "Are you Rollo?"

He looked up from the paper again, this time more carefully. "You don't look like a process server, but to be on the safe side, who wants to know?"

"Jenny sent me."

"Who the fuck is Jenny?"

That was not encouraging. "Jenny Click. Blonde, kind of skinny, long nose" - was that unkind? - "she said she got a job here a while - "

"Right, firebug Jenny, sure." He looked at Marla more closely, then shook his head. "Shit. How old are you?"

"Eighteen," Marla said promptly. Only a lie by 18 months or so. And she knew she could pass for older if called upon.

Rollo wasn't buying it though. He shook his head. "You got ID?"

"Not with me."

"Not anywhere, more like it, or if you do it's a lousy fake. But if you're friends with Jenny, you probably can't afford a fake ID. That kind of stuff's for the rich north side kids, or the suburban ones. But, okay, maybe we can work something out. You want to work here?"

"If the money's right."

He snorted. "A waitress job, you get about half of minimum wage and whatever tips you can hustle. You can make more dancing, but we're full up right now."

Marla shook her head. "That's fine. I'm not much of a dancer."

"It's more, you know, undulating than actual dancing, but anyway. Okay, waitress it is, if you qualify. Let's see 'em."

Marla frowned. "See what?"

"Your tits, hon. You can learn how to carry a tray full of drinks and make change, but good tits can't be taught."

Marla nodded thoughtfully. "So the waitresses are topless, too."

"The dancers are more than topless, eventually, but, yes."

Rollo didn't seem particularly interested in leering at her. He seemed to mostly wish she would go away. "No touching, right?"

"What, from me, or the customers? From me, no. From the customers, no, not in theory. Sometimes somebody might get grabby, you just catch the bouncer's eye and we toss him out. Maybe you think you can make like a private arrangement with a customer, but the management frowns on that kind of freelancing. Now show 'em or go apply for a job at McDonald's, would you?"

There was a perverse pleasure in the thought of taking money from drunken assholes - she assumed that would describe the clientele, imagining a roomful of men like her mother's innumerable boyfriends - and knowing a bouncer would toss them out if they dared to touch her.

Marla lifted up her shirt.

Rollo squinted, nodded, and said, "All right, you'd get better tips if they were bigger, but you're, what, sixteen, seventeen? Nobody's exactly gonna complain. And you're not so skinny I can see your skeleton, which was the main thing I worried about. We made Jenny go eat cheeseburgers and milkshakes for a week and come back when we couldn't count her ribs anymore."

"So I'm hired?"

"Come into the back room for a minute, and you will be."

"I'm not fucking you," Marla said.

"That's for sure. I prefer sleeping with women old enough to know their way around a little. Come on." He came around the bar and led her to an unmarked door near the back wall, then led her into the backstage area, where there were chipped vanity mirrors, cardboard boxes full of high heels and feather boas and miscellaneous bits of underwear, and a row of gray lockers. Beyond that was another door, with a cardboard sign reading "Office" tacked into the center. The room beyond was surprisingly spacious, furnished with dented filing cabinets and a big desk covered in paper clutter.

Rollo opened a closet and took out a camera on a tripod, then tacked a dark blue cloth up on the wall.

"Oh," Marla said. "You're making me a fake ID."

"Gotta have ID on file for you, and since you don't have your own…" He shrugged. "The cops don't bother us much, but every once in a while somebody comes down and wants to see our records."

"I can't pay for this," Marla said.

"So no money up front, and we'll take it out of your earnings, all right? And you'll be able to buy your own booze afterward."

Marla didn't drink much. She could rarely afford to have her faculties blurred. "How much will it cost?"

Rollo shook his head. "You are one cautious kid. Tell you what, we'll call it half the tips you make tonight, okay?"

Marla nodded. She was having a hard time seeing how one went from serving drinks topless to being detoxed and scar-free and apparently happy like Jenny was, but this didn't seem the time to ask.

She stood for the camera, trying to "Look bored like you're at the DMV" as Rollo suggested. He took down her name and birthdate - "We'll just change the year" - and height and weight, and made her fill out some employment forms "Come back at 7, I'll get this laminated for you, and one of the other waitresses will show you the ropes. Not literally the ropes. It's not that kind of club. Don't fuck up tonight and you can come back tomorrow. Okay?"

"Sure," Marla said. Then, after a moment's thought: "Thanks."

"Thank Jenny," Rollo said. "You hadn't dropped her name, I'd have kicked you out the door on your ass."

*** ***

Having a job, and being expected to show up somewhere at a certain time, was a novelty, but the structure wasn't entirely unpleasant. The uniform - which consisted of rather tight shorts, a little apron, and nothing else - initially made her uncomfortable, but after a few hours the first night she hardly noticed her own nudity. She had little in common with the other waitresses, and didn't spend much time talking to them, but she shared their universal dislike for the dancers, who looked down on the waitresses as inferior beings.

Nobody ever mentioned Jenny, and Marla didn't bring her up, either.

The clientele was as boorish as she'd expected. At first she made an effort to smile at them, but soon realized that the few men (and occasional women) who paid attention to her at all didn't look much higher than her chest anyway, so she allowed herself to be impassive or scowl as much as necessary.

The tips were pretty good, though, at least on weekends. At the end of her first week, when it was clear she wasn't a drunk, a thief (at least in this context), or a drug addict, Rollo got her a room in a run-down apartment nearby, the kind of place with one shared bathroom per floor and a hotplate on a table for a kitchen. But it came with a bed and a dresser and it was hers.

Customers occasionally swatted her ass as she went by, and she learned, to her annoyance, that the bouncer was unwilling to throw them out for that, though he'd warn them to keep their hands to themselves. Marla consoled herself by wishing horrible deaths upon them, but resisted the urge to assault anyone.

Until one Saturday night, after about a month working at the bar, the best man at a bachelor party full of merry twentysomethings grabbed her as she was going by, knocking the tray from her hands as he pulled her into his lap. He reached around with both hands to grab her breasts, laughing raucously in her ear, and even though Marla saw the bouncer coming her way, she didn't wait.

Marla stomped his instep with her heel, threw her head back - he gasped, and she felt his nose crunch - and seized his hands, twisting his thumbs back as hard as she could as she stood up. "No touching," she said, and half the club applauded while the other half, including the rest of the bachelor party, gaped.

"You bitch," the best man said, clutching his bloody nose, "I'll beat the shit out of you - "

The bouncer put a big hand on the man's shoulder, and said, gently, "You want her to hurt you worse? Time to go, pal." He hustled the whole group out of the bar, and Marla smoothed down her hair and squatted to pick up her tray - she didn't feel like bending over and giving the room a nice look at her ass.

When she stood up, a fat guy with a comb-over and a cigar in his fingers beckoned to her. "Come here, would you?"

Marla had seen him before a few times, drinking Scotch and watching the dancers and not causing any fuss, but she'd never waited on him, and didn't have a good sense of whether he was an asshole or not. "Why, you want some of what that guy got?"

He was a red-faced guy, and his face got redder when he laughed. "Nah, just come here, sit down."

Marla shook her head. "My boss won't like - "

"Kid, I'm your boss. I'm Artie Mann. This is my joint."

"Oh," Marla said. "Am I fired? For hitting that guy?"

"Don't make it a habit, but no, you're not fired. You had some cause. Sit and talk to me." Marla joined him, secretly happy to be off her feet for a little while. Artie stared fixedly at her breasts while he spoke, which didn't do much to endear him to her. "How long you been working here?"

"A few weeks."

"What made you come into this place?"

She shrugged. "My friend Jenny said you were hiring."

"Jenny. Jenny Click?"

"Yeah. She used to work here?"

Artie nodded.

"But now she's… moved up in the organization?" Marla figured this had to be the crime boss, the guy Jenny wanted to meet.

"Sure," Artie said. "You're a friend of hers, huh?" He looked at her speculatively. "You seemed to know what you were doing, cracking that guy's nose, stomping his foot, like that. Somebody teach you?"

"There was a guy who used to hassle me, back home, so my brother showed me a few things, to take care of myself." That guy had hassled her one too many times, and things had gotten out of hand, and now he wouldn't ever hassle her or anyone else again - but that wasn't something she wanted to talk about, or even think about.

"Pretty tough, kid. What's your name?"

"Marla."

"I think Jenny mighta mentioned you. When's your next night off?"

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Listen. You want to come over to my house, maybe have some dinner, and see Jenny?"

Marla's resisted the urge to sigh. So that was the explanation. Jenny hadn't "moved up in the organization" - she'd just moved in with the boss, who had doubtless paid for her hair, her clothes, and to clean up her scarred hands. And, what, now he wanted Marla to join his harem or something? "I don't know…"

"Don't say no to the boss," he said, mock-sternly.

"I guess it'd be good to see Jenny again." If he tried anything on her, she could just walk away. And if he didn't want her to walk away, she could persuade him. Breaking two noses in two days would be a new record for her.

"It's a deal," he said. "Come over here around six, I'll have a car waiting. Now go earn some money."

*** ***

When the club closed, Marla nodded her farewells and went out into the street. It wasn't the best neighborhood, but her apartment was only a block and a half away, and Rollo had assured her that the local thugs knew better than to mess with any of the Bau Bau Room's girls - Artie Mann had juice around here, apparently. Though she saw the occasional shadowy figure lurking in a doorway, she'd never been bothered.

Until now. The best man who'd pulled her into his lap earlier stepped out of an alley just a few doors away from her place. He had cotton wadding sticking out of his nostrils - his friends must have taken him to the emergency room to get his broken nose patched up. He looked ridiculous, but he also looked pissed-off, and three of his friends were lurking behind him, shadowed by the old brick buildings that lined the street.

"Thought I'd let you get away with hitting me, bitch?" the best man said, voice thick and mushy from his blocked-up nose and, probably, booze. "Nobody fucks with me. How about we drag you back here and see how tough you are?"

Marla glanced around, knowing it was futile - this late the street was deserted, and her neighbors weren't the sort who'd come to the aid of a screaming woman. Which meant her options were limited. But that didn't mean she had no options.

She took her keys from her pocket and grasped the longest one firmly between her thumb and fingers. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it was better than fingernails. Maybe she should start carrying a knife. As calmly as she could, she said, "There are four of you, and one of me. That means I probably can't stop you."

"Damn right you can't - " the best man began, but Marla shook her head sharply.

"Shut up," she said, because it was worth a try. Amazingly, he did, though probably not for long, so she went on while she had the floor. "I can't stop you. But I can make it cost you. If I can gouge out your eyes, I will. If I can bite off an ear, or a nose, or something more tender, I will. I'll fight as hard and as long as I can, and whenever I can, I'll make sure to hurt you where it shows. You'll have some ugly marks on your faces to explain at that wedding you're all going to."

"Come on, man, maybe we should go," said one of the lurkers. None of them seemed particularly happy about this situation, judging by their body language. Marla began to see a glimmer of hope of getting out of this unhurt. If she could do something sufficiently nasty to the best man, fast enough, the others would probably just melt away.

"No way," the best man said. "She can't weigh more than a hundred, hundred and ten pounds. Couple of you grab her arms and she won't be able to do shit."

"You sound like you've done this before," Marla said. "You make a habit of jumping girls alone in the street? Probably the only way you get any action at all, right?" Maybe taunting him was a bad idea, but she was tired, and pissed off, and he was some idiot from the suburbs who thought he was a big man. She wanted to tell him how small he was, and make sure his friends heard it, too.

"That's it, you're fucked now," the best man said, and came toward her, two of his companions moving away from the wall to join him, while the one who'd acted as the voice of restraint just stood there shaking his head. Three against one wasn't much better odds than four against one, unfortunately. She'd promised to make this cost them, and she would…. but she didn't want to think about what it would cost her.

"No touching the girls without their permission," said Artie Mann strolling out of - where, exactly? The middle of the street? But she hadn't seen him there. He wore the same untucked Hawaiian shirt, and had perhaps the same fat cigar in his mouth. "That rule applies inside and outside the club."

"Get lost," the best man said, still staring at Marla. "This doesn't have shit to do with you."

"Okay," Artie said, and sucked on his cigar, making the end glow redly. Then he flicked the ashes toward the best man -

- and the ash somehow swelled into a fist-sized fireball that struck him in the chest, knocking him down. His friends jumped back, and the best man screamed, beating at his shirt, which was singed and smoking. The men all looked at Artie, who took another long pull on his cigar, and exhaled a cloud of smoke…. and kept exhaling, smoke thick as fog, great rolling gouts of it, and when the smoke touched them, the men dropped to their knees, gagging.

Artie walked over to Marla, put his hand on her shoulder, and said, "I'll walk you home, kid."

"What did you do?" Marla said as they walked wide into the street to skirt around the choking cloud and the men inside.

"Nothing permanent. Mostly just scared 'em."

"But how?"

"What'd it look like?"

"It looked like magic," Marla said. "But I want to know what it was."

"You got it in one. Magic."

Marla shook her head. "You have a magical cigar?"

"No. I have magic, and I also have a cigar."

"I don't believe in magic," Marla said, though the statement was slightly less true than it had been two minutes ago.

Artie sighed. "Come on, kid. Skepticism might take you farther than faith, but you won't have nearly as much fun getting there. We'll talk about it more when you come over tomorrow." They reached her building and went up the steps, and Marla, who still had her key clutched defensively in her hand, unlocked the door. She wasn't sure what was happening, but she was very interested in finding out.

She had one thing to say, though: "I didn't need your help. I can take care of myself."

Marla was afraid he'd laugh, or argue, but he just nodded seriously, cigar bobbing in his mouth. "I believe it. But you shouldn't have to do it all yourself. You work for me. That includes a certain protection. Besides, our situations were reversed, you'd do the same for me."

Marla shook her head. "I can't do… things like that."

"Don't worry about it," Artie said. "You're young yet." And he sauntered off into the night.

*** ***

BONE SHOP is now available at:

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble.com

About the Author

T.A. Pratt's series of urban fantasies about Marla Mason includes five other novels (Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, Spell Games, and Broken Mirrors) and a slew of short stories. Bone Shop is the story of Marla's transformation from a runaway living on the streets to the ass-kicking chief sorcerer of her own city. Pratt's fiction has won a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and World Fantasy Awards, among others. For more about Marla, visit www.marlamason.net; for more about the author, try www.timpratt.org. Or follow him on Twitter, where he tweets as timpratt.

Bones of Faerie

by Janni Lee Simner

I had a sister once. She was a beautiful baby, eyes silver as moonlight off the river at night. From the hour of her birth she was long-limbed and graceful, faerie-pale hair clear as glass from Before, so pale you could almost see through to the soft skin beneath.

My father was a sensible man. He set her out on the hillside that very night, though my mother wept and even old Jayce argued against it. "If the faerie folk want her, let them take her," Father said. "If not, the fault's theirs for not claiming one of their own." He left my sister, and he never looked back.

I did. I crept out before dawn to see whether the faeries had really come. They hadn't, but some wild creature had. One glance was all I could take. I turned and ran for home, telling no one where I'd been.

We were lucky that time, I knew. I'd heard tales of a woman who bore a child with a voice high and sweet as a bird's song-and with the sharp claws to match. No one questioned that baby's father when he set the child out to die, far from our town, far from where his wife lay dying, her insides torn and bleeding.

Magic was never meant for our world, Father said, and of course I'd agreed, though the War had ended and the faerie folk returned to their own places before I was born. If only they'd never stirred from those places-but it was no use thinking that way.

Besides, I'd heard often enough that our town did better than most. We knew the rules. Don't touch any stone that glows with faerie light, or that light will burn you fiercer than any fire. Don't venture out alone into the dark, or the darkness will swallow you whole. And cast out the magic born among you, before it can turn on its parents.

Towns had died for not understanding that much. My father was a sensible man.

But the memory of my sister's bones, cracked and bloody in the moonlight, haunts me still.

*** ***

Three weeks after my sister's birth I hurried through town, my breath puffing into the chilly air and an empty bucket banging against my hip. The sun was just above the horizon, turning layers of pink cloud to gold. Most of the other townsfolk were already in the fields, their morning chores done.

I walked quickly past the row of whitewashed houses I'd known all my life. Their windows were firmly shuttered or else tacked with old nylon against the cold. My gaze lingered a moment on the gap among those houses, but then I rushed on, thinking about how I'd overslept again that morning, not waking until Father had slammed the door as he left the house-deliberately loud, a warning to me. I'd already been sleeping badly since Father had cast my sister out, my dreams filled with restless shadows and a baby's cries. Then a week ago Mom left us. Since then I'd hardly slept at all, save in the early hours for just long enough to make it hard to wake again.

I passed the last of our town's tended houses; passed, too, the houses we didn't tend, which were little more than tangles of ragweed with splintered wood poking through. At the fork in the path I caught a whiff of metallic steam from Jayce's forge. I headed left. The path skirted the edge of the cornfields, then narrowed. Maples and sycamores grew along its edges, draped with wild grape. Green tendrils snaked out from the grapevines as I passed. I knew those vines sought skin to root in, so I kept to the path's center, where they couldn't reach. Plants used to be bound firmly to the places where they grew, but that was before the faerie folk came to our world.

No one knew why they came. No one even knew what they looked like. The War happened too fast, and the televisions people once had for speaking to one another all died the first day. Some said the faerie folk looked like trees, with gnarled arms and peeling brown skin. Others said they were dark winged shadows, with only their clear hair and silver eyes visible as they attacked us. Hair like that remained a sure sign a child was tainted with magic.

But whatever the faerie folk looked like, everyone agreed they were monsters. Because once they were here they turned their magic against us, ordering the trees to seek human flesh and the stones to burn with deadly light. Even after the War ended and the faerie folk left this world, the magic they'd set loose lingered, killing still.

The path ended at the river, though another path, narrower still, continued both ways along its near bank. I clambered down a short rocky slope and dipped my bucket into the water. Our well had silted up again, so the river was the only place to draw water for cooking and chores.

When the bucket was full I drew it out again, set it down, and cupped my hands for a drink. As I did a wind picked up, and I shivered. Mom would be cold, out alone on a morning like this. I knew better than to hope she yet lived, but still I whispered as I dipped my hands into the bucket, "Where are you? Where?"

Light flashed. A sickly sweet scent like tree sap filled the air. I jerked my hands back, but I couldn't turn away. The water in the bucket glowed like steel in the sun, holding my gaze. The wind died around me. From somewhere very far away, Mom called my name. I grabbed a stone and threw it into the bucket. There was a sound like shattering ice, and then the water within was merely water, clouded by ripples and mud from the rock, nothing more.

My mother was gone. Why couldn't I accept that? I must have imagined her voice, just as I'd imagined the way the water had seemed to glow.

Yet I'd seen light like that once before.

The night my sister was born-the night I'd fled from the hillside, where I never should have been-I'd seen flashes at the edges of my sight, like lightning, though the night was clear. I'd ignored them and kept running, calling the name my mother had chosen but only once been able to use. "Rebecca! Rebecca!" My throat and chest had tightened, but I couldn't seem to stop.

The night Mom left there'd been lightning, too, more ordinary flickers from an autumn storm. That light had illuminated her tear-streaked face as she slipped quietly into my room. I reached for her, but she drew away, clutching the necklace she always wore-a metal disk on a chain, laced with narrow veins. I drifted back to sleep, thinking I'd only dreamed it, but when I woke in the morning, Mom was gone.

"She knew the rules," Father had said when she failed to return by nightfall. I searched his face for some hint of the grief he must have felt and saw a tightness around his jaw and eyes, nothing more. He knew as well as I how unlikely Mom was to have survived a night alone in the dark, yet he didn't cry. He said there was no sense wasting tears on things you couldn't change.

I did my own crying alone in the dark, where no one could see. Why would Mom leave without telling where she'd gone? I would have gone with her. I'm good with a knife and a bow. I'd have kept watch for her or done whatever else she needed.

I gripped the bucket's handle with both hands and climbed back up the slope. As I reached the top I saw Matthew emerging from the path between river and town. His fair hair was pulled back in a ragged ponytail, but as usual it had escaped and fallen loose around his ears. He smiled when he saw me-an easy, comfortable smile-but I looked away. I didn't find being around Matthew comfortable at all.

"Hey, Liza. Your dad's looking for you." Matthew rubbed at the jagged white scar around his left wrist, and his smile faltered a little. "Wondering why you're not to work yet."

I glanced at the sky. The sun shone like tarnished silver through layers of gray. When had it risen so high? Sweat trickled down my neck and made my sweater itch against my clammy skin. How long had I stared into the water? Had magic held me transfixed while time flowed on all around me?

No. I was tired, that was all. I'd lost track of the time.

"Need any help?" Matthew asked.

"I'm fine." I walked past him, back toward the town.

I'd pay for being so late, but that was none of Matthew's concern. He came up beside me anyway, matching my pace with his own loping gait. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his deerskin jacket and said, "Your dad's in one of his moods."

Of course he was. I kept walking. The sun grew brighter, turning the maple and sycamore leaves deep green. Mom said before the War, leaves had changed color in autumn, first blazing fiery shades of yellow and red, then falling softly to earth, leaving behind bare branches that shivered beneath winter snows. It would take a fire now to make any tree release its grip so easily.

Matthew lifted his head and sniffed the air. The scent of leaf mold was heavy around us. "I can go with you," he offered. "Maybe if I'm with you, Ian won't …" Matthew let the words trail off.

"You can go away." Water sloshed over the edges of the bucket. Bad enough that Father would likely lash me for being late. I didn't need Matthew to follow and see. He stayed with me, though, right up until we reached the edge of the fields. There, he hesitated and glanced at me. I scowled. Matthew shrugged uneasily and turned away, heading off along a side path between fields of corn. The stalks' long leaves rustled as he went by. In the distance, corn ears moaned as townsfolk pulled them free. The corn had grown well this year, and the squash and beans, too. They'd all fought our harvesting, and we had the bruises to show for it, but come winter we would eat well.

I continued back into town. This time when I reached the gap among the houses, I couldn't help it. I stopped, thinking of how Matthew smiled as if no magic had ever touched his life. I knew better. We all did.

Matthew's little brother, Cam, had called blackberry brambles into their house nearly two years ago now, though we didn't know he'd called them at first. We just knew we woke to the sound of Cam's parents screaming.

All the townsfolk came running, and by the lanterns we brought with us we saw Cam's house swarming with thorny blackberry stems. Wood walls creaked and snapped as the screams fell to silence, yet even as the house collapsed we heard Cam laughing. We couldn't get him or his parents out. We could only burn the house down to keep the blackberry bushes from attacking the houses around it as well.

Everyone thought Matthew had died with his family, until a few hours later when he appeared at the edge of town. His clothes were gone, his skin was crossed with ragged scrapes, and his wrist still bled where the thorny stems had grabbed him. At first he was too dazed to speak. Later he told us what had happened, though he kept insisting Cam hadn't done it on purpose. His brother was just a little kid, Matthew said, throwing a little-kid tantrum. Cam didn't know a blackberry plant had taken root beneath his porch. No one knew, for all that we checked for new growth as often as we could.

Yet the plant had heard Cam's cries. It had broken through the porch and headed straight for him. Father said Matthew was a coward for running away instead of going for help. He said even a few extra minutes might have saved Cam and his family. I didn't know what to think, just as I didn't know quite what to say to Matthew after that. Mostly I didn't say anything at all. After two years, it had become a habit.

Later Brianna the midwife admitted she'd seen a few clear strands in Cam's hair earlier that year, meaning it'd likely been Cam's magic that had called the plant, and not simple bad luck that it had come. Until then we'd thought magic showed up either at birth or not at all, but now we were more careful. Cam and Matthew's grandmother Kate gathered the town's children together regularly to check our hair for magic, just as she checked for lice and fleas. As far as Kate could tell, though, Cam had been the only one.

I turned away from the empty space where Matthew's family had died and hurried on to my own house. As I started up the creaking steps, I saw a yellow dandelion growing beside them. I set my bucket down and tugged at the green stem. A thorn sliced my palm. I brought it to my mouth, cursing the spiteful plant, then took the knife from my belt and cut the dandelion free with a single stroke. "I'll be back for your roots," I promised as I hefted the bucket again and stepped inside.

A streak of amber fur leaped across the living room. I dropped the bucket as Tallow, my old yellow barn cat, landed in my arms. In spite of myself I smiled and scratched her behind the ears.

"Where were you?" I whispered. Tallow had lived in our town since I was small. When she was a kitten she'd sneak beneath the covers with me at night, until Father found out. "She's no use as a mouser if she spends her days lazing on feather mattresses," he'd said. Tallow kept sneaking in despite my best efforts, though. Until last night, when she'd gone missing and I went out calling for her, afraid she'd left this world at last. I called until my throat grew itchy and tight, but Tallow didn't come.

Yet now she purred as if she'd never been gone. I held her close a moment, then gently carried her outside and set her down on the stairs. Tallow looked up at me, green eyes large, as if hurt that I'd even consider setting her out. "You have to earn your keep," I told her. "Just like the rest of us."

Tallow yawned, telling me what she thought of that notion, and curled up on the top step to sleep. I went back inside and carried the water past our couch-its cushions torn and patched and torn again- past a fireplace filled with cold ash, and into the kitchen.

Plastic bins of corn and dried meat lined the kitchen walls. Their labels were faded beyond reading, but like old nylon, old plastic endured. It was one of the things that had best survived the War. I set the bucket down beside the sink.

Light flashed off the sink's metal surface, even though the kitchen windows were shuttered. The light turned bright and clear, reflecting back my own face. Ice-pale hair tumbled over my shoulders, flowing like water into my outstretched hands-

"No!" I wrenched my gaze away and tore at my hair. The strands that came free were as black as they'd ever been, dark as rich soil, dark as a moonless night. Yet there was a hint of something paler at their roots. I sank to my knees and pressed my face to the cool, crumbling kitchen tiles. Had some of Rebecca's magic lingered on the hillside? Had that magic found me, even as I ran? Was I the one faerie-cursed now?

My hands shook. Whether I spoke of this or not, sooner or later someone would find out and destroy me and the magic both. Or worse, I would destroy them, just as Matthew's little brother had done. Magic always did harm sooner or later. I drew a shuddering breath and stumbled to my feet.

When I turned, Father stood in the doorway, watching me.

*** ***

BONES OF FAERIE is now available at:

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About the Author

Janni Lee Simner lives in the Arizona desert, where even without magic the plants know how to bite and the dandelions really do have thorns. Bones of Faerie was an Indie Next independent bookseller pick and received the Judy Goddard / Libraries Ltd. Young Adult Author Award. Janni has published a sequel to Bones of Faerie, Faerie Winter), as well a contemporary YA fantasy, Thief Eyes based on the Icelandic sagas and dubbed "a captivating modern odyssey" by Publishers Weekly. She's also published four books for younger readers and more than 30 short stories, most recently one in the Welcome to Bordertown anthology. She's currently working on a third Faerie book.

Visit Janni at her website and blog, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

The Brahms Deception

by Louise Marley

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Henry David Thoreau

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

Albert Einstein

Her reflection in the ebony wood of the Gewandhaus piano disturbed her. She wished she were using a score so the pages of music would block the image. Her eyes were too large. Her chin was small and pointed, and her mouth an unexceptionable rosebud, but her eyes were those of a fawn, enormous, oddly shaped, gleaming darkly under the flickering gas lights. She looked terrified, and she was.

The long skirts of her blue silk dress spilled over the piano stool. She had to kick the hem free of the pedals. The fitted sleeves puffed above the elbow, making her wrists look like white sticks. A great, childish bow, blue to match her dress, adorned the back of her hair. It embarrassed her, but she had no power over the choice of it.

She had no power at all, in fact, not in the matter of the bow or in any of the other details of this performance. Her father had chosen the dress, had supervised the dressing of her hair, had dictated what she would eat for dinner and when. He had chosen the music for her programme,

had selected the Gewandhaus for her debut, had collected the ticket money with his own hands.

If she looked up, past the shining lid of the piano, she would see his clear, hard eyes watching her from the proscenium.

She kept her eyes lowered. She must concentrate. Her father's reputation as a teacher, and their future income, rested on her performance. He had reminded her of this many times. She had practiced until her fingers burned and her back ached. She knew the Variations perfectly, and would play them from memory. Some might call that vanity, but she preferred, even though she was nervous, to play without music.

She was ready. She just wished her father would go out into the house.

She curled her fingers over the keys, took a deep breath, and began.

The first notes disappointed her, seeming frail and somehow juvenile. The piano had sounded much stronger, much more full in her practice sessions. She was startled by the way the bodies of the audience absorbed the resonance.

She took another breath, concerned now only about the music and what she wanted it to say. She played the next phrases with more vigor, striking the keys with determined purpose. Goethe was to say, one day in the near future, that she played "with the strength of six boys". That would mean nothing to her, but the music did. The music made everything else tolerable. The muscles of her arms and hands began to thrum with energy. She knew how she wanted the notes to sound, how she could make the piano sing. She played on with unconscious authority, an assurance beyond her years.

It began to happen. She forgot her reflection, forgot her fatigue, forgot even her father. Brilliant notes poured from the piano, cascading over the stage, drowning the faint hiss of the footlights as they poured into the hall. She played from her soul. She never hesitated, never faltered. She drove on to the end of the Variations without once looking up from the keyboard.

She reached the cadence, and held it, letting the resonance of the chord die away on its own. She closed her eyes, relishing the moment of a piece well played, of music created, of the expression of an inner meaning no words could describe.

When she opened her eyes, she saw her father gazing fixedly at her from the wings. He was smiling, but it was that tight, pointed smile that meant there was something he wanted. She stiffened. What was it?

As the music left her, she became aware of another sound, a bigger, rougher sound. She turned her head, seeking the source, and realized there was a roar coming from the house.

It was for her. It was a rush of noise, gloved hands beating together, voices calling out. Brava, brava! She had forgotten for a moment where she was, how much this performance meant. She froze. What she was supposed to do now?

Curtsy. That was it. Bow. This was her debut, and this applause was for her.

Awkwardly, she swiveled on the stool. Her long dress caught on the pedals of the piano, and she had bend to untangle it with her hands before she could stand. She picked up her skirts and stepped away from the piano to the edge of the stage, careful of the heat of the footlights. She bobbed, twice, her cheeks as hot as the burning lamps at her feet.

Then, though the applause continued, she fled the stage. She turned away from her father. He would have to work his way around the back of the stage, dodge dusty stacks of equipment and piles of thick ropes to reach her. She flung herself into the tiny, dim dressing room, and collapsed into the chair before the tall pier glass.

Clara Wieck stared at her murky reflection, the big blue bow framing her small head, and marveled. She was nine years old. She had just become a professional.

*** ***

Roses spilled over the garden wall surrounding Casa Agosto, blooms of scarlet and pink and white blazing against the pale stone under impossibly bright Italian sunshine. Below the village of Castagno, forests and fields glittered faintly, as if washed in gold. Here and there, grapevines stretched and twisted in long, straight columns. In the valley beyond, a brown ribbon of road meandered along the blue line of a narrow stream. The Italian hills looked like bolts of dark green velvet, rolling gently from the ancient hilltop where twelve houses, each named for a month of the year, clustered along cramped streets. The houses were tall and narrow, trimmed with window boxes and surrounded by small gardens. Saints' niches pierced the outer walls, their tiny statues nestled amid offerings of tiny nosegays or bunches of herbs. In the garden of Casa Agosto, the branches of an ancient olive tree drooped to the grass, heavy with unripe fruit. A wooden bench, painted with a rustic scene of wooly lambs in a green field, nestled in its shade.

It was all real, Frederica reminded herself. Everything was real. Except for her.

She floated through the garden gate, smiling to think she could have gone right through the wall if she chose, could move anywhere and in any way she wished. It was like being in a dream journey. If she wanted to move to the left, she did. If she wanted to rise into the air, to look down on the garden and the olive tree, it happened without any effort beyond her thought.

She only had to remember not to go too far. They had told her she would know, that she would feel dizzy, perhaps a bit nauseous, if she got too close to the perimeter of the transfer zone. She would find herself instantly back in her own time.

But that wouldn't happen. She would take every care. Frederica had no intention of leaving Casa Agosto until she had to.

She settled to the ground, letting her virtual feet sink among the blades of grass. She drifted around the house, admiring the terra cotta walls, the embroidered curtains at the windows. She paused outside a set of French doors that led into a small, sun-filled room. Her memory served up the word for this room, salotto. A little salon, and in this case, a music room. The tall doors were half-open, fitted with long, gauzy curtains that belled in the light breeze. Inside, she saw the short keyboard and bulky body of a square fortepiano, old-fashioned even in 1861. Its ivory keys-real ivory, no plastic substitutes-glowed a muted white. Its bench was covered in green brocade. It stood on six legs carved with flowers and vines, and it dominated the room, though there was also a stuffed wing chair with a gas lamp beside it and a little writing table piled with books.

They had told her the transfer would be like watching television, that she would see the sights and hear the sounds, but enjoy no other sensations. Now that she was here, she found the television analogy imperfect. Her perceptions were more acute than those of a mere observer. It was possible, she supposed, that she was providing the intensity with her own eager imagination. She could almost, but not quite, smell the perfume of the tangled roses. It seemed if she tipped her head up, she could almost feel the sweetness of the May sunshine on her cheeks, or taste the clear air, as yet uncontaminated by the effluvia of industry or the exhaust of combustion engines. She breathed deeply, longing for the real experience. Her hands yearned to feel the cool surfaces of the fortepiano keys beneath her fingers.

If she was right-if that single, long-hidden letter spoke the truth-he had touched those keys. He might even place his hands on them this very day, the date of the letter buried for so long in a forgotten vault in Hamburg. The thought filled her with ecstatic anticipation.

Did her fingers twitch beneath the tangle of tubes on the cot in the transfer clinic? Did her nostrils flare, her eyelids flicker as she took in the marvel of it all?

No one really understood how much of her was present in 1861. Those who had gone before-to fourteenth-century France, to eighteenth-century Philadelphia, to the Middle Ages-were uncertain how strong the connection was between their virtual presence and their physical one. They had difficulty describing it, and Frederica could see why. They used different similes, suggested different metaphors. They agreed on only one point: that the experience was more vivid, more intense than they had expected. That it felt real.

It was why they walked here and there, and why they hid behind doors and curtains and furniture while they were observing. The researchers felt so present in their target periods that mere words could not describe the sensation.

A movement inside the house caught Frederica's eye. Someone was coming.

Instinctively, though it wasn't necessary, she stepped to the side, to hide herself behind the branches of the olive tree. She hovered behind its rough-barked trunk, and gazed into the music room with the fervency of one besotted.

Besotted was a good word for the way she felt. She had been in love with Brahms-dead a hundred years before she was born-since she had first taken up his famous Lullaby and tried to play it with her baby fingers. She knew everything about him that a historian could know. He had been lonely, as lonely perhaps as she was herself, pining for love denied him. He had been sickly and awkward as a youth. He had been a boy who never fit in. His family had loved him, but they had not understood him. For all these reasons, as much as for the sake of his music, she had devoted herself to the study of Brahms.

She knew where he had lived, whom he had known, where he traveled, what he read. She knew his portraits, and she knew his music. She was the equal, despite her youth, of any Brahms scholar in any university, but it was not enough. Her doctoral dissertation depended on her finding out one more detail, one new fact. When she had that, she would be the envy of every musicologist in the world. She would be the premiere Brahms scholar. She nourished a faint hope that the aching misery that was her life would not matter so much in comparison with this achievement.

Frederica knew she had come perilously close to losing this chance. She had studied the photograph of her competition, the young man from Boston. Kristian North. She gazed at his handsome face, his blond hair and ice-blue eyes, and she could see he had everything she lacked. It was not only his good looks, or the easy charm in his smile. He had a Juilliard concert fellowship. His master's thesis was impressive. Men like Kristian North always won through in the end, and he would survive the loss of this transfer opportunity. She needed it far more than he did!

She refused to feel guilty. That was an indulgence she couldn't afford. She had done what she had to do. This was her moment, and she would allow nothing to spoil it for her.

He was coming. Now, oh, God, he was coming now!

From the stairwell just off the music room-there was a foot, clad in a heavy black shoe. A leg followed, encased in some sort of brown fabric, and then a hand on the banister, a rather wide, with spatulate fingers-it was all coming too fast, she wasn't ready-

Her heart seemed to hesitate, to suspend its beat for an instant as she beheld his face for the first time. His real face. Not a painting, not a portrait, not a sepia photograph. His face.

It was beardless, the chin both strong and delicate, with a slight cleft. His fair hair was combed straight back, to fall past his collar. His eyes were a deep blue, the blue of violets. Even at this distance they shone with intelligence. His lower lip was fuller than the upper one, and this conformation of his mouth made something twist in Frederica's stomach, something hungry and wanting. He was tall and lean, and he walked with the sure step of one who knows his surroundings well.

Frederica held her breath. Her hand went to her throat, or it felt as if it did. Her lips parted, dry with excitement. Oh, to actually see him! It was beyond even what she had anticipated, to be so close, to see details no photograph could ever reveal. His skin was so clear, his lips so smooth. His hair shone jewel-bright in the sunlight. Oh, if only she could touch him, just once, know the feel of his skin, the warmth of his hand!

She abandoned the olive tree, and crept forward. He looked rested and happy, though she knew the year just past had been hard for him. It was no wonder he had slipped away from the bustle of Hamburg and the pressure of his concert schedule. He had learned as a youth how restorative country air could be. That was what the letter said, the letter so long hidden and only recently recovered. He had written it to a friend, a note never meant for the eyes of strangers, and now so precious to those who loved his music:

My dear Joachim,

I know I promised you a draft of the A major Quartet, but I was so distracted in Hamburg that I found it hard to work. I have gone away for a little time in hopes of some restful solitude, and I hope to bring back a completed manuscript. I enclose my temporary address herewith, but I pray you will not share it with anyone. This is a private holiday, and I prefer not to have it known, either by my friends or by the administration of the Philharmonic. I trust my delivery of the manuscript will not be too delayed, and that you will be understanding of this brief but much-needed absence.

Yours faithfully,

JB

Brahms scholars had rejoiced at this new tidbit of his life and times, and speculated endlessly about what it had all meant. Everyone believed him never to have been in Italy, despite having planned several trips. None of them, as far as posterity knew, had ever come to pass. But at the bottom of that letter, he had scrawled this address. Casa Agosto, Castagno di San Felice, Italy. And here he was, just as the letter said he would be, in this tiny village, secreted away from both public and private acquaintances.

Frederica gazed at him, enraptured. He had come so far from Hamburg, just for this bit of time alone. It was an amazing thing, this young man who was already so revered among musicians of his time, to have left the bustle of society and the clamor of his concerts, the demands of a career that would dominate the century. The pressures of such a life must be-

Her thoughts broke off. There was someone else in the house.

A woman descended the stairs behind Brahms and swept gracefully into the music room with a step so light it was as if she were no more substantial than Frederica. She sank onto the brocade bench of the fortepiano and reached up to arrange the foolscap sheets waiting on the music stand. She was lovely, slight of bosom, with a slender waist. Her dress was black, and very simple, what was called a morning dress. A lacy scarf was tucked in around the neckline. The waist was tied with a ribbon, and draped over a simple charcoal underskirt. Her hair, swept back in thick wings and held with tortoise shell combs, was as dark as it had always been, as dark as the portraits of her as a youg girl. Indeed, she looked nearly as youthful as Brahms, but Frederica Bannister knew well that this lady was fourteen years his senior.

Frederica gazed at her in open-mouthed astonishment. No one had known this. There had been nothing in the letter to Joachim, but there could be no mistake. She would know that face anywhere. Her photograph was in every Brahms biography. In fact, the name of Clara Wieck Schumann was sprinkled throughout every account of the life of Johannes Brahms.

Clara. Brahms's friend, the widow of his mentor. Clara, who had seven children, and her own schedule of concerts to maintain in order to support them. Clara, the brilliant pianist, the beauty who never remarried. She was a famous diarist, but she had concealed this event from posterity. She and Brahms had been the subject of speculation for a century and a half. He had loved her openly, hopelessly, but she had refused him. She had devoted herself to her children, to her career, and to the memory of her husband.

Yet she was here, in Castagno. She was here with Brahms.

She began to play the first movement of the A major Quartet. Brahms sat down beside her, his thigh pressed against hers. He reached past her shoulder to turn a page of the music. Clara played on, easily, smoothly, as if she often played with him sitting so close.

Frederica forgot to hide herself, forgot what she had come for, forgot everything. She gazed at Johannes Brahms sitting shoulder to shoulder with Clara Schumann as she played from a composition so recently written the ink was barely dry. Frederica stared at them, and was rocked by a wave of heart-stopping envy.

Carousel Tides

by Sharon Lee

ONE

Tuesday, April 18

High Tide 2:29 a.m.

Sunrise 5:54 a.m. EDT

I almost missed the left onto Route 5, which would've been embarrassing as hell. Luckily, I recognized the intersection before I was through it, snapping dry-mouthed out of a quarter-doze. Luckily, the Subaru answered quick to the wheel.

Luckily, there wasn't anybody else fool enough to be driving this particular stretch of Maine highway at this particular ungodly hour of the morning-or-night. If there had, I'd've been toast.

Route 5 twisted, snakelike, between parallel rows of dark storefronts and shuttered motels. I pushed myself up straighter in the seat, biting my lip when the pain knifed through my chest, and tried to stay focused on the matter at hand. Not long now. Not long.

Going home, after all this time.

No matter how many words they use to say it, people only ever leave home for two reasons. Money, that's one. Love-that's the other.

The reasons people come home again . . . it could be there are more than two. Me, I was worried about my grandmother. Worried enough to risk a homecoming. Trust me-that's some kind of worried.

Mind you, the crisis or calumny that Bonny Pepperidge-that would be Gran-couldn't settle with her off hand while cooking breakfast wasn't something that was likely to roll over and play dead for the likes of me. Still, there was the bothersome fact that the phone had rung empty the last six times I'd called-and it was just like Gran not to bother with an answering machine or to pick herself up a cell-and the downright terrifying reality of the foreclosure notice from Fun Country management.

Perfectly reasonable for Fun Country to contact me; my name's right there on the lease as co-owner. But I'm only an Archer-a half-Pepperidge, and not the best half, either. It's the Pepperidges who've owned and operated the merry-go-round at Archers Beach since right around the dawn of civilization, Maine time; and Gran who's had the care and keeping of the thing since well before I'd been born. The size and shape of the disaster she'd allow to threaten the carousel was-almost unimaginable.

Unfortunately, I've got a vivid imagination; and Gran's my last family, so far as I know. Given the combination of circumstances, I could no more have stayed away than flown to the moon.

Not to say that Gran didn't have a lot of friends in town-as old or older than she was, some of whom didn't look kindly on me. And of course, there was the family lawyer. But Henry'd been out of town when I called, according to the message on his answering machine, due back some days after Fun Country wanted their money.

Which is why I was here, driving uncertainly down Maine Route 5 at oh-my-God-o'clock in the morning, toward the home I'd forsaken, and trying not to think of what was likely to be waiting for me there.

The headlights picked out a deserted parking lot on the right. I pulled in next to the boarded up ice cream stand, "For Sale" sign hanging at a crazy angle from the storm shutters, slid the car into park, and fingered my cell phone free of its pocket on the outside of my backpack.

I hit speed dial and held the unit to my ear, listening to my grandmother's phone ringing, ringing, ringing on the other end.

Sighing, I thumbed "end" and sat holding the phone in my hand, staring out into the dark. No doubt about it, I was going to have to go in-back to Archers Beach, which I hadn't left on the best of terms. That would teach me to burn my bridges.

Or not.

I slid the phone back into its pocket, ratcheted the stick down to drive and pulled back onto 5. Soonest begun, soonest done, as the saying goes. And the devil take the hindermost.

Mist began to creep across the road as I went on. I kept my foot on the gas, and I won't say I wasn't holding my breath when the Subaru crossed the town line, which was a waste of perfectly good anxiety-nothing out of the ordinary happened, unless you count an increase of mist.

Breathing carefully, I turned off Route 5 and headed down into town.

The street lamps were out on Archer Avenue, and the Subaru's headlights illuminated swirls of sea mist pirouetting before boarded-up storefronts. At the bottom of the long hill was the Atlantic Ocean, hidden by a full-fledged fog.

I rolled the window down, shivering in the sudden cold breeze, and took a deep breath of salt air. My eyes watered-which was the salt, or maybe the breeze-and slammed on the brakes as a dark form loped across the street directly in front-but no. It was only the mist, playing games.

I took my foot off the brake and let the car drift.

At the bottom of the hill, where Archer Avenue crosses Grand, I tapped the brakes again. It was five-ten by the clock on the Subaru's dash; twenty minutes shy of Gran's usual rising time, though I told myself I no longer expected to find her at home. That last phone call, made just outside the town line, had been pretty definitive. Even Gran isn't stubborn enough to ignore her phone ringing at four-thirty in the morning.

I should, I thought, go straight on to the house, but habit decided me otherwise. Habit and the fact that I could hear Gran's voice just as plain as if she sat in the passenger's seat beside me-"Did you pay your respects to the sea?"

The fog played its game of hide and seek as I felt my way 'round Fountain Circle and pulled the Subaru head first into the center of the five municipal parking spots that face the ocean across a wide stretch of fine, pale sand. In Season there would be signs posted, warning drivers of a ten minute limit on parking, and a strictly enforced tow away policy.

In April, the signs were still in the Public Works garage, and you could park facing the ocean for weeks, and nobody'd notice. Or care, if they did.

I put the Subaru into park, turned off the engine, and sat, taking stock.

My head throbbed and my chest ached-nothing unusual, these days. Not to mention that I was standing on the chancy edge of being 'way too tired, which driving three days non-stop'll do for you, even if you're in the pink of health.

Damp breeze danced in the window, chilling my ungloved hands. Faintly, very faintly, I could hear the sound of the surf, slapping and sizzling against the sand.

"Walk light on the land," I whispered to myself, which was something I hadn't done since I was a kid, new-come to the Beach and afraid of it all. "Walk light on the land and everything'll be fine."

Or not. And it wasn't like I had a choice, anyway. Peril Number One, and counting.

I rolled up the window, popped the door, grabbed my cell, on the vanishingly small chance that I'd get a call; and went down to the water.

The tide was going out. I slogged through shifty dry sand to the firm wet stuff, the fog running cold fingers across my face; a blind thing trying to puzzle out my features. Turning up my collar, I pushed my hands deeper into my pockets, wishing I'd remembered how cold an early morning in April could be, here on the Maine seacoast.

Shivering and out of breath, I stopped at the water's edge, the toes of my sneakers on the tide line. I shook my hair back out of my eyes, squared my shoulders, and waited for what the sea might bring me.

Wavelets struck the shore and fizzed. The breeze swung 'round, freshened, trying to push the fog back out to sea.

A wave smacked against the sand, sudden as a shotgun blast, and water splashed over my sneakers.

Swearing, I jumped back, and looked down.

Wet sand was all I saw; that, and a little rag of foam.

I bit my lip. What had I expected? It was my good fortune that I'd gotten nothing worse than wet shoes.

I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket and took a look at its face: five-thirty-five. The sea had taken its own sweet time getting back to me. Turning my back on the water, I squinted uphill, barely making out a blue smear that was the Subaru, waiting patiently where I'd put her. To my right, the Archers Beach Municipal Pier hove out of the fog like a ship out of stormy seas; to my left Fun Country sat like a broken dream, sea mist toying with the shrouded rides. The carousel was invisible, gray steel storm gates absorbed by the gray fog.

I lifted my soggy right foot and shook it; did the same for my left-and stood for a moment, weighing the cramped agony in my chest against the long slog back up to the parking lot. Up above the fog, a gull screamed an insult, and somehow that decided it. I turned right and started walking, keeping to the damp sand, but well out of the splash zone. Under the Pier I went, making for the townie side of town, and one particular old house facing the water across the dunes.

" 'Mornin'." The voice was deep, soft as the fog itself.

Gasping, I spun, wet sneakers skidding on wet sand. The owner of the voice stepped out of the fog and raised his hands-one empty, one holding a Styrofoam coffee cup-and stopped where he was, letting me get a good look at him.

Tall-'way taller than I am-broad and powerful-looking. His face was high-cheeked and brown; his black hair cropped, except for a thin braid that snaked across his shoulder, falling almost to his waist. His jeans were as soft as salt and weather could make them, and he wore a brown leather jacket open over a green work sweater. He looked to be maybe thirty, thirty-five. I didn't recognize him-but, then, there wasn't any reason why I should.

" 'Morning," I answered, on the general principle that it's prudent to be polite to guys who're bigger than I am. "Pleasant day for a walk."

He laughed, deep in his chest, and lowered his hands. "Well, it's not. But I was up anyway, hoping it would clear in time to go out." He had a sip from his cup, and jerked his head at the fog-shrouded ocean. "No going out in this, and by the time she burns off, the tide'll have turned." He gave me nod. "I fish Mary Vois' boat for her, since the sea took Hum, couple years back." A pause for another sip from his cup. "Don't believe I've seen you around before. Visiting?"

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that my business was none of his-and then I thought better of it, recalling small town manners that were rusty with disuse. He'd given me info, and now he was asking for info in return. Fair enough.

"Visiting," I agreed, trying to reckon how much I needed to put on the table to balance my social debt. I was 'way too tired for that kind of subtle calculation, though, and in a couple seconds I gave it up and just told him what passed for the truth. "I grew up in town, and my grandmother's still here."

"Don't say." He sounded genuinely interested, which of course he would be. Parsing lineage is an ancient Maine pastime. "Who's your gran, then?"

Should've seen that coming. I sighed lightly, but forked over. It wasn't like it was a state secret, and if I spent more than two hours in town, he'd hear it from somebody else anyway. "Bonny Pepperidge. She runs the carousel."

"Sure she does!" He grinned. "You must be Kate."

"Yep, I'm Kate. And you are?"

"Borgan." He gave the name readily enough, and between it and the information that he fished Mary Vois' boat, I had enough to pin him down for any townie I met. Just in case I should need to, which I really hoped I wouldn't.

"I could use a cup of coffee," I said, which was nothing less than the truth. The fog had chilled me straight through while we'd played Twenty Questions, and I was shivering inside my denim jacket. "Anything open this early?"

Borgan held out the Styrofoam cup. "Bob's."

There wasn't any reason why I should've been startled, but I was. Exhaustion, maybe. "Bob's is still there?"

"Was ten minutes ago."

"Well, I'm going in the right direction, then." I cleared my throat and gave him a civil nod. "Morning."

"See you around," he answered easily, and raised his cup to his lips.

Social obligation discharged, I put my face into the wind and began to walk. Happily, Gran's house on Dube Street was only three blocks up from the Pier, and Bob's Diner was conveniently located at the bottom of the street. I'd check the house first, I thought, and glanced over my shoulder.

All I saw behind me was the shadow of the Pier, black inside the fog.

About the Author

Sharon Lee was born in Baltimore, Maryland sometime in the murky 50s - 1950s - and remained there, breathing smog, until she and her husband moved to Maine, in 1988. She realizes that this means she will always be a flatlander, but that has done nothing to diminish her affection for Maine, its locales, its color, its people. Its magic. So far, she has written two murder mysteries set in the fictional town of Wimsy, Maine - Barnburner and Gunshy - and Carousel Tides, a contemporary fantasy that takes place in Archers Beach, a coastal resort town that's seen better days, and other, far stranger, things.

In addition to embarrassing her adopted state by continually making a fuss over it at novel-length, Sharon has written with her husband and co-author, Steve Miller, eighteen science fiction and fantasy novels, most set in the Liaden Universe, a space opera geography of their own devising.

Sharon's - and Sharon and Steve's - work can be found wherever fine fantasy and science fiction sold, in paper, electronic, and audio formats.

Baen Webscriptions, sample chapters and ebooks

Pinbeam Books, Sharon and Steve's short fiction

Sharon's website

Fictionwise

The Cloud Roads

by Martha Wells

Moon had been thrown out of a lot of groundling settlements and camps, but he hadn't expected it from the Cordans.

The day started out normal enough. Moon had been hunting alone as usual, following the vargit, the big flightless birds common to this river valley. He had killed one for himself, then taken a nap on a sun-warmed rock and slept a little too long. By the time he found a second vargit for the camp, killed it, dressed it, and hauled it back, the sky was darkening. The gate in the rickety fence of woven sticks was closed, and he shook it, shifting the heavy dead bird on his shoulder. "Open up, it's me."

The gate and the entire fence were mostly a formality. The camp was built on a field leading down to the wide bed of the river, and the fence didn't even go all the way around. The jungle lay just outside it, climbing up the hills toward the steep cliffs and gorges to the east. The dense leaves of the tall trees, wreathed with vines and hung with heavy moss, formed a spreading canopy that kept the ground beneath in perpetual twilight. Anything could come out of there at the camp, and the weak fence wouldn't stop it. The Cordans knew that, but Moon still felt it gave a false sense of security that made everyone careless, especially the children. But the fence had sentimental value, reminding the Cordans of the walled towns in their old land in Kiaspur, before it had been taken by the Fell. Plans to take it down and use it for firewood always came to nothing.

After more shaking, something moved just inside the gate, and Hac's dull voice said, "Me who?" Then Hac laughed, a low noise that ended in a gurgling cough.

Moon looked away, letting out an exasperated breath. The fence wasn't made any more effective by letting the most mentally deficient member of the group guard it, but there weren't a lot of jobs Hac could do.

Sunset beyond the distant mountains cast the lush, forested hills with orange and yellow light. It also framed a sky-island, floating sedately high in the air over the far end of the valley. It had been drifting into the area for some days, traveling with the vagaries of the wind. Heavy vegetation overflowed the island's surface and hung down the sides. Moon could just make out the shapes of ruined towers and walls nearly covered by encroaching greenery. A flock of birds with long white bodies, each big enough to seize a grazing herdbeast in its talons, flew past it, and Moon felt a surge of pure envy. Tonight, he promised himself. It's been long enough.

But for now he had to get into the damn camp. He tried to make his voice flat and not betray his irritation. Showing Hac you were annoyed just made him worse. "The meat's spoiling, Hac."

Hac laughed again, coughed again, and finally unlatched the gate.

Moon hauled the bird inside. Hac crouched on the ground beside the fence, watching him with malicious glee. Hac looked like a typical Cordan: short and stocky, with pale gray-green skin and dull green hair. Most Cordans had patches of small glittering scales on their faces or arms, legacy of an alliance with a sea realm sometime in the history of their dead empire. On some of the others, especially the young, the effect was like glittering skin-jewelry. On Hac, it just looked slimy.

Hac, who held a similar opinion of Moon, said, "Hello, ugly."

A few other outsiders lived with the Cordans, but Moon tended to stand out. A good head taller than most of them, he was lean and rawboned where they were heavyset. He had dark bronze skin that never burned no matter how bright the sun, dark hair. The only thing green about him was his eyes.

"Keep up the good work, Hac," Moon said, and resisted the urge to kick Hac in the head as he carried the carcass past.

Tents were scattered across the compound, conical structures made of woven cable-rushes, dried and pressed and faintly sweet-smelling. They stretched down to the greenroot plantings at the edge of the broad river bed. At the moment, most of the inhabitants were gathered around the common area in the camp's center, portioning out the meat the hunters had brought back. People down at the river washed and filled big clay water jars. A few women worked at the cooking fires outside the tents. As Moon walked up the packed dirt path toward the central area, an excited band of children greeted him, hurrying along beside him and staring curiously at the vargit. Their enthusiastic welcome went a long way to make up for Hac.

The elders and other hunters all sat around on straw mats in front of the elders' tent, and some of the women and older kids were busy cutting and wrapping the kills brought back earlier. Moon dropped the vargit carcass on the muddy straw mat with the others, and set aside the bow and quiver of arrows he hadn't used. He had gotten very good at dressing his game in such a way that it was impossible to tell exactly how it had been killed. Dargan the headman leaned forward to look at it and nodded approval. "You had a good day after all, then. When you were late, we worried."

"I had to track them down the valley. It just took a little longer than I thought." Moon sat on his heels at the edge of the mat, stifling a yawn. He was still full from his first kill, which had been a much bigger vargit. Most of his time had gone to finding a more medium-sized one that he could carry back without help. But the novelty of coming home to people who worried that something might have happened to him had never paled.

Ildras, the chief hunter, gave him a friendly nod. "We never saw you, and thought perhaps you'd gone toward the west."

Moon made a mental note to make certain he crossed paths with Ildras' group tomorrow, and to make certain it happened more frequently from now on. He was comfortable here, and it was making him a little careless. He knew from long experience that elaborate lies were a bad idea, so he just said, "I didn't see anybody either."

Dargan waved for one of the boys to come over to cut up Moon's kill. Dargan and the other male elders kept track of all the provisions, portioning them out to the rest of the camp. It made sense, but the way they did it had always bothered Moon. He thought the others might resent it sometimes, but it was hard to tell since nobody talked about it.

Then Ildras nudged Dargan and said, "Tell him the news."

"Oh, the news." Dargan's expression turned briefly sardonic. He told Moon, "The Fell have come to the valley."

Moon stared. But Ildras's expression was wry, and the others looked, variously, amused, bored, and annoyed. Two of the boys skinning a herdbeast carcass collapsed into muffled giggling and were shushed by one of the women. Moon decided this was one of those times when he just didn't understand the Cordans' sense of humor. He discarded the first few responses that occurred to him and went with, "Why do you say that?"

Dargan nodded toward another elder. "Tacras saw it."

Tacras, whose eyes were too wide in a way that made him look a little crazy, nodded. "One of the harbingers, a big one."

Moon bit his lip to control his expression and tried to look thoughtful. Obviously the group had decided to humor Tacras. The creatures the Cordans knew as harbingers were actually called major kethel, the largest of all Fell. If one had been near the camp, Moon would have scented it. It would be in the air, in the river water. The things gave off an unbelievable stench. But he couldn't exactly tell the Cordans that. Also, if Tacras had been close enough to see a major kethel, it would have eaten him. "Where?"

Tacras pointed off to the west. "From the cliff on the edge of the forest, where it looks down into the gorge."

"Did it speak to you?" Vardin asked in wide-eyed mockery.

"Vardin," Dargan said in reproof, but it was a little too late.

Tacras glared. "You disrespect your elder!" He shoved to his feet. "Be fools then. I know what I saw."

He stamped away, off between the tents, and everybody sighed. Ildras reached over and gave Vardin a shove on the shoulder, apparently as punishment. Moon kept his mouth shut and did not wince in annoyance. They had all been making fun of the old man anyway. Vardin had just brought it out in the open. If Dargan hadn't wanted that to happen, he shouldn't have made his own derision so clear.

"He's crazy," Kavath said, sounding sour and worried as he watched Tacras walk away. He was another outsider, though he had been here much longer than Moon. He had shiny pale blue skin, a long narrow face, and a crest of gray feathers down the middle of his skull. "He's going to cause a panic."

The Cordans all just shrugged, looking unlikely to panic. Dargan added, "Everyone knows he's a little touched. They won't listen. But do not contradict him. It's disrespectful to his age." With the air of being done with the whole subject, he turned to Moon and said, "Now tell us if you saw any bando-hoppers down in that end of the valley. I think it must be the season for them soon."

*** ***

When Moon had first found the Cordans and been accepted into their group, Dargan had presented him with a tent, and with Selis and Ilane. Moon had been very much looking forward to the tent; in fact, it was the whole reason he had wanted to join the Cordans in the first place. He had been traveling alone a long time at that point, and the idea of sleeping warm and dry, without having to worry about something coming along and eating him, had been too attractive to pass up. The reality was every bit as good as he had hoped. Selis and Ilane, however, had taken some getting used to.

It was twilight by the time he reached his tent, shadows gathering. He met Selis coming out with the waterskin.

"You took long enough," she snapped, and snatched the packet of meat away.

"Tell that to Dargan," Moon snapped back. She knew damn well that he had to wait for the elders to divide up the kill, but he had given up trying to reason with her about three days after being accepted into the Cordan camp. He took the waterskin away from her and went to fill it at the troughs.

When the Cordans had fled their last town, many of their young men had been killed covering their escape. It had left them with a surplus of young women. The Cordans believed the women needed men to provide for them; Moon had no idea why. He knew that Selis in particular was perfectly capable of chasing down any number of grasseaters and beating them to death with a club, so he didn't see why she couldn't hunt for herself. But it was the way the Cordans lived, and he wasn't going to argue. And he liked Ilane.

By the time he got back, Selis had the meat laid out on a flat stone and was cutting it up into portions. Ilane sat on a mat beside the fire.

Ilane was beautiful, though the other Cordans didn't think so, and their lack of regard had made her quiet and timid. She was too tall, too slender, with a pearlescent quality to her pale green skin. Moon had tried to tell her that in most of the places he had lived, she would be considered lovely, that it was just a matter of perception. But he wasn't certain he had ever been able to make her understand. Selis looked more typically Cordan, stocky and strong, with iridescent patches on her cheeks and forehead. He wasn't sure why she had been stuck with him, but suspected her personality had a lot to do with it.

Moon stowed his weapons in the tent and dropped down onto the mat next to Ilane. She was peeling a greenroot, the big, melon-like staple that the Cordans ate with everything, fried, mashed, or raw. After the kill earlier in the day, Moon wasn't hungry and wouldn't be for the next day or so. But not eating in front of other people was one of the first mistakes he had ever made, and he didn't intend to make it again. It had gotten him chased out of the nice silk-weaving town of Var-tilth, and the memory still stung.

"Moon." Ilane's voice was always quiet, but this time it held a note of painful hesitancy. "Do you think the Fell are here?"

Tacras' story had, of course, spread all over camp. Moon knew he should say what Dargan had said, but looking at Ilane, her pale green skin ashy-gray with fear, he just couldn't. "No. I've been hunting in the open all up and down the valley and I haven't seen anything. Neither have the others."

As she wrapped the meat up in bandan leaves to put into the coals, Selis said, "So Tacras lies because he wants to frighten us to death for his amusement."

Moon pretended to consider it. "Probably not. Not everybody's like you."

She gave him a sour grimace. Forced into actually asking a question, she said, "Then what?"

Ilane was having trouble getting the knife through the tough greenroot skin. Moon took it and sawed the hard ends off. He squinted at Selis. "Do you know how many things there are that fly besides Fell?"

Selis' jaw set. She did know, but she didn't want to admit it. All the Cordans knew that further up in the hills, there were birds, flighted and not, that were nearly as large as the small Fell, and nearly as dangerous.

"So Tacras was wrong?" Ilane said, her perfect brow creased in a frown.

Moon finished stripping the greenroot's outer husk and started to slice it. "He saw it with the sun in his eyes, and made a mistake."

"We should all be so lucky," Selis said, but Moon knew enough Selis-speak to hear it as a grudging admission that he was probably right.

He hoped he was right. Investigating it gave him yet another reason to go out tonight.

"You're cutting the greenroot wrong," Selis snapped.

*** ***

Moon waited until late into the night, lying on his back and staring at the shadows on the tent's curved supports, listening to the camp go gradually quiet around him. The air was close and damp, and it seemed to take a long time for everyone to settle down. It would never go silent; there were too many people. But it had been a while since he had heard a voice nearby, or the low wail of a fretful baby.

Moon slid away from Ilane. She stirred, making a sleepy sound of inquiry. He whispered, "It's too warm. I'm going to take a walk, maybe sleep outside."

She hummed under her breath and rolled over. Moon eased to his feet, found his shirt, and made a wide circle around Selis' pallet as he slipped outside.

He and Ilane had been sleeping together since the second month Moon had been here. She had made the first overtures to him before that, apparently, but Moon hadn't understood what she wanted. Ilane hadn't understood what she had interpreted as his refusal, either, and had been very unhappy. Moon had had no idea what was going on and had seriously considered a strategic retreat- right out of the camp- until one night Selis had thrown her hands in the air in frustration and explained to him what Ilane wanted.

Ilane was sweet-tempered, but her lack of understanding was sometimes frustrating. Several days ago, she had said she wanted to have a baby, and Moon had had to tell her he didn't think it was possible. That had been a hard conversation. She had just stared tragically at him, her eyes huge, as if this was something he was deliberately withholding. "We're too different," he told her, feeling helpless. "I'm not a Cordan." He thought that if there had been any chance of it, it would have happened already.

Ilane blinked and her silver brows drew together. "You want Selis instead."

Selis, sitting across the fire and mending the ripped sleeve of a shirt, shook her head in weary resignation. "Just give up," she told Moon.

Moon threw her a grim look and persisted, telling Ilane, "No, no, I don't think . . .I can't give you a baby. It just won't happen." He added hopefully, "You could have babies with somebody else and bring them to live with us." Now that he thought about it, it wasn't a bad idea. He knew he could bring in enough food for a larger group, even with the elders taking their share.

Ilane had just continued to stare. Selis had muttered to Moon, "You are so stupid."

He stepped outside. The air was cool compared to the close interior of the tent, with just enough movement to lift the damp a little. The full moon was bright, almost bright enough to see the groundling woman that supposedly lived in it. The sky was crowded with stars; it was hard not to just leap into the air.

Moon stood beside the tent for a moment, pretending to stretch. Across the width of the camp, two sentries stood at the gate with torches, but the cooking fires were out or banked. He carried Ilane's scent on his skin, and the whole camp smelled of Cordan, so it was tricky to sense anyone nearby. But he wasn't going to get a better chance.

His bare feet were silent on the packed ground between the tents. He didn't see anyone else, but he could hear deep breathing, the occasional sleepy mutter as he passed. He stopped at the latrine ditches, pissed into one, then wandered off, tying the drawstring on his pants again.

He went toward the far end of the camp, where the fence ran down toward edge of the river channel. Made of bundles of saplings roped together, the fence wasn't very secure at the best of times but here, where it cut across the slope of the bank, there were gaps under the bottom. Moon dropped to the ground and wiggled under one.

Once through the fence, he loped across the field and reached the fringe of the jungle. There, in the deep shadow, he shifted.

Moon didn't know what he was, just that he could do this. His body got taller, his shoulders broader. He was stronger but much lighter, as if his bones weren't made of the same stuff anymore. His skin hardened, darkened, grew an armor of little scales, overlapping almost like solid feathers. In this shadow it made him nearly invisible; in bright sunlight the scales would be black with an under sheen of bronze. He grew retractable claws on his hands and feet and a long flexible tail, good for hanging upside down off tree branches. He also had a mane of flexible frills and spines around his head, running down to his lower back; in a fight they could be flared out into rigid spikes to protect his head and back.

Now he unfolded his wings and leapt into the air, hard flaps carrying him higher and higher until he caught the wind.

It was cooler up here, the wind hard and strong. He did a long sweep of the valley first, just in case Tacras was right, but didn't see or catch scent of anything unusual. Past the jungle, the broad grassy river plain was empty except for the giant lumpy forms of the big armored grasseaters that the Cordans called kras. He flew up into the hills, passing over narrow gorges and dozens of small waterfalls. The wind was rougher here, and he controlled his wing curvature with delicate movements, playing the air along his joints and scales.

There was no sign of Fell, no strange groundling tribes, nothing the Cordans needed to worry about.

Moon turned back toward the sky-island where it floated in isolation over the plain. He pushed himself higher until he was well above it.

He circled over the island. Its shape was irregular, with jagged edges. It had been hard to tell how large it was from the ground; from above he could see it was barely four hundred paces across, smaller than the Cordans' camp. It was covered with vegetation, trees with narrow trunks winding up into spirals, heavy falls of vines and white, night-blooming flowers. But he could still make out the round shape of a tower, and a building that was a series of stacked squares of vine-covered stone. There were broken sections of walls, choked pools and fountains.

He spotted a balcony jutting out of curtains of foliage and dropped down toward it. He landed lightly on the railing; his claws gripped the pocked stone. Folding his wings, he stepped down onto the cracked tiles, parting the vines to find the door. It was oblong and narrow, and he shifted back to groundling form to step through.

Fragments of moonlight fell through the cracks and the heavy shrouds of vegetation. The room smelled strongly of earth and must. Moon sneezed, then picked his way carefully forward.

He still wore his clothes; it was a little magic, to make the shift and take any loose fabric attached to his body with him, but it had taken practice to be able to do it. His mother had taught him, the way she had taught him to fly. He had never gotten the trick of shifting with boots on. His feet had a heavy layer of extra skin on the sole, thick as scar tissue, so he usually went barefoot.

When he was a boy, after being hounded out of yet another settlement, Moon had tried to make his groundling form look more like theirs, hoping it would make him fit in better. His mother had never mentioned that ability, but he thought it was worth a try. He might as well have tried to turn himself into a rock or a tree, and after a time he had concluded that the magic just didn't work that way. There was this him, and the scaly winged version, and that was it.

He made his way to the door, startling a little flock of flighted lizards, all brilliant greens and blues. They fluttered away, hissing harmlessly, and he stepped into the next room. The ceiling was several levels above him, and the room had tall doorways and windows that looked into an atrium shaped like a six-pointed star. Shafts of moonlight pierced the darkness, illuminating a mosaic tile floor strewn with debris and a shallow pool filled with bright blue flowers. Doorways led off into more shadowed spaces.

He made his way from one room to another, the tile gritty under his feet. He poked at broken fragments of pottery and glass, pushed vines away from faded wall murals. It was hard to tell in this bad light, but the people in the murals seemed to be tall and willowy, with long flowing hair and little bundles of tentacles where their mouths should be. There was something to do with a sea realm, but he couldn't tell if it was a battle, an alliance, or just a myth.

Moon had been very young when his mother and siblings had been killed, and she had never told him where they had come from. For a long time he had searched sky-islands looking for some trace of his own people. The islands flew; it stood to reason that the inhabitants might be shifters who could fly. But he had never found anything, and now he just explored because it gave him something to do.

When Moon had first joined the Cordans, he hadn't thought of staying this long. He had lived with other people he had liked - most recently the Jandin, who had lived in cliff caves above a waterfall, and the Hassi, with their wooden city high in the air atop a thick mat of link-trees - but something always happened. The Fell came or someone got suspicious of him and he had to move on. He had never lived with anyone long enough to truly trust them, to tell them what he was. But living alone, even with the freedom to shift whenever he felt like it or needed to, wore on him. It seemed pointless and, worst of all, it was lonely. Lost in thought, he said, "You're never satisfied," not realizing he had spoken aloud until the words broke the stillness.

In the next room, he found a filigreed metal cabinet built into the wall stuffed with books. Digging down through a layer of moldy, disintegrating lumps of paper and leather, he found some still intact. These were folded into neat packets and made of thin, stiff sheets of either very supple metal or thin reptile hide. Moon carried a pile back out to the atrium, sat on the gritty tile in a patch of moonlight near the flower-filled fountain, and tried to read.

The text was similar to Altanic, which was a common language in the Three Worlds, though this version was different enough that Moon couldn't get much sense out of it. But there were drawings with delicate colors, pictures of the people with the tentacle faces. They rode strange horned beasts like bando-hoppers and flew in carriages built on the backs of giant birds.

It was so absorbing, he didn't realize he was being watched until he happened to glance up.

He must have heard something, smelled something, or just sensed another living presence. He looked up the open shaft of the atrium, noticing broad balconies, easy pathways to other interior rooms if he shifted and used his claws to climb to them. Then he found a shadow on one of the balconies, a shadow in the wrong place.

At first he tried to see it as a statue, it was so still. Then moonlight caught the gleam of scales on sinuous limbs, claws gripping the stone railing, the curve of a wing ending in a pointed tip.

Moon's breath caught and his blood froze. He thought, You idiot. Then he flung himself through the nearest doorway.

He scrambled back through the debris, then crouched, listening. He heard the creature move, a rasp of scales as it uncoiled, clink of claws on stone. He thought it was too big to come further in, that it would go up, and out. Moon bolted back through the inner rooms.

He couldn't afford to be trapped in here; he had one chance to get past that thing and he had to take it now. He skidded around the corner, his bare feet slipping on mossy tile, and scrabbled up a pile of broken stone to a vine-draped window. He jumped through, already shifting.

He felt movement in the air before he saw the claws reaching for him. Moon jerked away with a sharp twist that wrenched his back. He swiped at the dark shape suddenly right on top of him. He swung wildly, catching it a glancing blow across the face, feeling his claws catch on tough scales. It pulled back, big wings knocking tiles and fragments of greenery off the sides of the ruin.

Moon tumbled in midair toward the cracked pavement below, caught himself on a ledge around a half-destroyed tower, and clung to the stone. He looked back just as the creature flapped upward in a spray of rock chips and dead leaves. Oh, it's big, Moon thought, his heart pounding. Not big enough to eat him in one bite, maybe. But it was three times his size if not more. Moon's wingspan was close to twenty paces, fully extended; this creature's span was more than forty. So two bites, maybe three. And it wasn't an animal. It had known it was looking at a shifter. It had expected him to fly out of an upper window, not walk or climb out.

As the creature flapped powerful wings, positioning itself to dive at him, Moon shoved off from the tower, sending himself out and down, over the edge of the sky-island. He angled his wings, diving in close past the jagged rock and the waterfalls of heavy greenery. He landed on a spur of rock and clung like a lizard. Digging his claws in, he climbed down and under, folding and tucking his wings and tail in, making himself as small as possible.

He kept his breath slow and shallow, hoping he didn't have to cling here too long. His claws were meant for fastening onto wooden branches, not rock, and this was already starting to hurt. He couldn't hear the creature, but he wasn't surprised when a great dark shape dove past. It circled below the island, one slow circuit to try to spot Moon. He hoped it was looking down toward the jungle.

It made another circuit, then headed upward to pass back over the top of the island.

Here goes, Moon thought. He aimed himself for the deep part of the river, flexed his claws, and let go.

Tilting his wings for the least wind resistance, he fell like a rock. The air rushed past him and he counted heartbeats, gauging how long it would take the creature to make a slow sweep over the sky-island. Then he rolled over to look up, just in time to see the dark shape appear at the western end of the island.

It saw him instantly. It didn't howl with rage, it just dove for him.

Uh oh. Moon twisted back around, arrowing straight down. The rapidly approaching ground was a green blur, broken by the dark expanse of the river.

At the last instant, he cupped his wings and slowed just enough before he slammed into the river. He plunged deep into the cold water, down until he scraped the bottom. Folding his wings in tightly, he kicked to stay below the surface, the rushing current carrying him along.

Moon wasn't as fast in the water as he was in the air, but he was faster in this form than as a groundling. Swimming close to the sandy bottom, Moon stayed under until his lungs were about to burst, then headed for the bank and the thick stands of reeds. The reeds were topped with large, wheel-shaped fronds that made a good screen from above. Moon let his face break the surface, just enough to get a breath. The fronds made a good screen from below, too, but after a few moments, Moon saw the creature make a lazy circle high above the river. He had been hoping it would slam into the bank and snap its neck, but no such luck. But he knew the water would keep it from following his scent. It probably knew that, too. He filled his lungs, sunk down again, and kicked off.

He surfaced twice more, and the second time, he couldn't spot the creature. Still careful, he stayed under, following the river all the way back to camp. Once there, he shifted back to groundling underwater, then swam toward the shore, until it was shallow enough that he could walk up the sloping bank.

He sat down on the sparse grass above the water, his clothes dripping, letting his breath out in a long sigh. His back and shoulder were sore, pain carried over from nearly twisting himself in half to avoid the creature's first grab. He still hadn't gotten a good look at it. This is going to be a problem. And he and all the Cordans owed Tacras an apology.

But that thing wasn't Fell - he knew that from its lack of scent. It might live on the island, drifting with it, and just hadn't needed to hunt yet. Or it might just be passing through, and had used the island as a place to shelter and sleep. He thought it must have been sleeping when he had reached the ruins, or he would have heard it moving around. Idiot, you could have been dinner. If it had snatched him in his groundling form, it could have snapped him in half before he had a chance to shift.

If it attacked the camp, what it was or why it had come here wouldn't matter much; it could still kill most of the Cordans before they had a chance to take cover in the jungle. Moon was going to have to warn them.

Except he couldn't exactly run into the center of the camp yelling an alarm. If he said he had seen it tonight, while sitting out by the river . . . No, he could hear that the camp wasn't as quiet as it had been when he left. It was a warm night, and there must be others sitting or sleeping outside, who would say they hadn't seen anything. He would look as unreliable as Tacras and no one would listen to him. He would have to wait until tomorrow.

When he went hunting, he would walk down the valley toward the sky-island. That would give him a chance to scout the island by air again, to see if the creature was still there, if it would come out in the daylight. Cautiously scout, he reminded himself. He didn't want to get eaten before he could warn the Cordans. But when he told them he had seen the same creature as Tacras at that end of the valley, they would have to take it seriously.

Moon pushed wearily to his feet and wrung out the front of his shirt. As he started back up the long slope of the bank, he considered the other problem: what the Cordans were going to do once they were warned.

Moon didn't have any answers for that one. The creature would either drive them out of the valley or it wouldn't. He knew he couldn't take it in an open fight. But if he could think of a way to trap it . . . He had killed a few of the smaller major kethel that way, but they weren't exactly the most clever fighters; he had the feeling this thing . . .was different.

Moon took the long way back through the camp, which let him pass the fewest number of tents. Still thinking about traps and tactics, he came in sight of his tent and halted abruptly. The banked fire had been stirred up, and the coals were glowing. In its light he could see a figure sitting in front of the doorway. A heartbeat later he recognized Ilane, and relaxed.

He walked up to the tent, dropping down to sit next to her on the straw mat. "Sorry I woke you. I went down to the river." That part was obvious; he was still dripping.

She shook her head. "I couldn't sleep." It was too dark to read her expression, but she sounded the same as she always did. She wore a light shift, and used a fold of her skirt to lift a small kettle off the fire. "I'm making a tisane. Do you want some?"

He didn't; the Cordans supposedly used herbs to make it but it just tasted like water reed to him. But it was habit to accept any food offered to him, just to look normal. And Ilane hardly ever cooked; he felt he owed it to Selis to encourage it when she did.

She poured the steaming water into a red-glazed ceramic pot that belonged to Selis and handed Moon a cup.

Selis poked her head out of the tent, her hair tumbled around her face. "What are you- " She saw Moon and swore, then added belatedly, "Oh, it's you."

"Do you want a cup of tisane?" Ilane asked, unperturbed.

"No, I want to sleep," Selis said pointedly, and vanished back into the tent.

The tisane tasted more reedy than usual, but Moon sat and drank it with Ilane. He listened to her detail the love affairs of nearly everybody else in camp while he nodded at the right moments and mostly thought about what he was going to say to Dargan tomorrow. Though he was a little surprised to hear that Kavath was sleeping with Selis' cousin Denira.

He didn't remember falling asleep.

*** ***

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About the Author

Martha Wells is the author of nine fantasy novels, including The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, The Gate of Gods, The Element of Fire, and the Nebula-nominated The Death of the Necromancer. Her newest novel, The Cloud Roads, was published in March 2011 by Night Shade Books, and the sequel, The Serpent Sea, will be out in 2012. She has had short stories in the magazines Black Gate, Realms of Fantasy, Lone Star Stories, and Stargate Magazine, and in the Tsunami Relief anthology Elemental and The Year's Best Fantasy 7. She has essays in the nonfiction anthologies Farscape Forever and Mapping the World of Harry Potter from BenBella Books. She has also written two media-tie-in novels, Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary and Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement. Her books have been published in seven languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Dutch.

You can visit Martha at her website, www.marthawells.com

Dangerous Waters

by Juliet E. McKenna

The Barony of Halferan, Western Caladhria

12th of Aft-Spring

In the 8th Year of Tadriol the Provident of Tormalin

She stood at a crossroads. The lodestone twisted on the pewter chain looped around her fingers. She frowned. Until now the metallic black crystal had led her unerringly in this direction. Now it wavered between two roads.

Jilseth disliked imprecision. Furthermore, she had refined this magic herself, blending an untried combination of spells. If there was some flaw in her understanding, she must find it. She had hoped to submit her discovery to the Council of Wizards on her return to Hadrumal. Not now she wouldn't, if there was some inherent ambiguity in the magic for other mages to seize on.

She could ignore those who'd merely seek to draw out her embarrassment. She wouldn't risk the possibility that someone might find a solution, claiming a decisive share in the credit for her work.

Jilseth focused on the lodestone, on the power flowing around it. Expanding her wizardly senses, she felt its connection to the damp earth beneath her feet, to the rock below the muddy track, to the elemental iron so far beneath that.

In some remote corner of her mind, she still marvelled that so few could see those lines of power. Even a pigeon could feel their tug. But no, for the mundane majority, the way in which pins were drawn to a shiny black rock was a trivial curiosity, perhaps of use to tailors but no more than that. To Jilseth's wizard sight, those unseen forces flowed through the stone unhindered. All was as it should be.

What of the magical use she had made of the crystal? Expanding its affinity to sense any magics manipulating earth and stone. This was an old sorcery, honed by generations of wizards and well practised by Jilseth herself. She found no error there.

The next step. To sense the elemental air, fire and water that combined with the essence of earth to make up the world around her. Magebirth only conveyed a single affinity in most cases; an innate understanding and the ability to influence one of the four elements. It took an apprentice wizard several years of dedicated study to master other magics in addition to those of their birthright and only then when they were guided by more experienced mages with a talent for explaining their own instinctive perceptions of the unseen constituents of the world around them.

Now Jilseth's awareness encompassed the breezes ruffling the new leaves on the ill-kempt hedges. She sensed the warmth of the sun lending vigour to those leaves. She felt the water drawn up through the roots spreading that vitality throughout the buckthorn.

Jilseth had been a diligent pupil. She had been equally quick to move beyond the magics of each individual element to the next step in her education; to the quadrate wizardry that blended all four into more complex magecraft. That had only been the start.

Along the way she had also learned caution and control. She kept tight hold of her wizardly instincts lest she be overwhelmed by the intoxicating sensations. Now her concern must be the second spell that had attuned this lodestone to search for magics beyond her own mageborn, intuitive grasp. This was a new magic not yet recorded in Hadrumal's libraries, never credited to some long dead mage.

Jilseth tempered her pride. She couldn't claim all the credit. Archmage Planir had summoned her along with three other wizards whose talents he'd noted. He had suggested that they share their understanding of their individual affinities to see what they could learn together of quintessential magic. Where quadrate magic stemmed from one wizard combining the four elements into a single spell, quintessential sorceries required four mages to work together, each drawing the element of their affinity into a union that offered wizardry with a scope far beyond anything that a mage working alone could hope to attain. Like the others, Jilseth had relished the challenge.

Standing on the muddy track, she was soon reassured. They had indeed succeeded in attuning this lodestone to find magic borne of any combination of the elements. Better yet, quintessential magic wasn't subject to the vagaries of wizardry still inextricably tied to the vacillating elements. Quintessential sorcery was as robust as the diamond that was its symbol.

Which only left her individual contribution to this artefact. Only Planir knew of that. Only the Archmage could sanction studies in the esoteric discipline she had chosen.

This was the most compelling of the reasons that kept Jilseth in Hadrumal when erstwhile friends and fellow apprentices had quit the wizard island's strictures. Peddling magecraft on the mainland was a far less demanding life.

Though some, it was murmured by pupil wizards in Hadrumal's wine shops, some went to Suthyfer now. Mageborn lived among those merchants and hired swords engaged in trade across the distant ocean for this past handful of years. The rewards for wizardly aid in defying the deadly storms and tides included liberty for mages to explore their talents however they saw fit. Ideally on some suitably remote reef among those scattered islands that were such vital stepping stones to the empty lands which the Tormalin Emperor's men had discovered on the far side of the ocean.

Jilseth couldn't deny such freedom was a tempting thought. But she was an earth mage and Planir the Black was not merely the Archmage. He was the Stone Master of Hadrumal and the finest mage of that affinity in ten generations. Even his critics on the Council of Wizards couldn't deny that. There was no one better to teach her.

Besides, she wasn't some mainland mageborn already uprooted from hearth and home when an adolescent elemental affinity had caused chaos and alarm. Some of her fellow apprentices had been shipped off so swiftly that they arrived on Hadrumal's dockside with only the clothes that they stood up in. Starting a new life a second time, on terms of their own choosing, that wasn't such an overwhelming prospect.

Jilseth was the latest daughter of a line of mageborn five generations long. Her roots in Hadrumal went deep. Perhaps that's why Planir had chosen her for this quest. The Hadrumal mageborn would feel most deeply wronged if Minelas's treachery ever came to light.

She had summoned up the elemental echo of blood spilled and bones broken by the foul renegade's magic at the foot of the cliff where his ship had docked. She had bound this lodestone to every resonance of the rare earths and minerals in those dead men's bodies. The unique reverberation of his spells would lead her to the wizard who had so betrayed his birth and his oaths to Hadrumal.

Focusing all her mage-sense on the conflicted stone, she understood. Her spell was working perfectly well. The lodestone indicated a choice of routes. Either way, she'd find a place where Minelas had worked magic.

The question remained. Which road to take? Jilseth looked around. No one worked in these empty fields. Not a cow nor a sheep cropped the first growth of weedy grass. Even though this sodden coastal region lay as flat as rush matting, no roof or chimney stack rose above the horizon.

Had the Caladhrians already abandoned these coastal regions for fear of corsairs' summer depredations? The raiders coming up from the south had been plaguing this coast and the sea lanes offshore for a handful of years now and the spring equinox usually marked the start of the sailing season.

She closed her eyes, the better to sense any infinitesimal variation in the magical resonance. Now that she knew what she was looking for, the difference soon became clear. Minelas had worked magic in two places. He had only killed in one and that had been his most recent magecraft. She must follow the road to the shore.

Jilseth began walking. Twenty or so paces on, the tug of the lodestone drew stronger. The shining grey crystal swung upwards to pull its chain out straight ahead, true as a mariner's compass needle. This was definitely the right path, even if she must measure every pace of it with her own feet.

Not for the first time on this quest, she cursed one limitation of magic. Not only of her magic. All wizards were similarly bound, whatever the tavern tales might say of their uncanny ability to step across hundreds of leagues in a blinding flash of light.

While almost every wizard worthy of the name could use magic to travel from place to place, they could only revisit somewhere they had already been. If not, like Jilseth on this journey, mages were subject like everyone else to the inconveniences of ill-sprung coaches, lame or recalcitrant horses, rutted and mud-choked roads.

Since the best the last village could offer had been a plodding ox cart, Jilseth had opted to walk. At least she could use a sling of woven air to relieve the burden of the battered leather sack she carried, its drawstring over her shoulder.

In the event that she encountered some peasants, or even trailblazing corsairs, she didn't anticipate trouble. Her modest gown was the soft shade of a pigeon's wing, the better to travel unnoticed. There was little else in her appearance to prompt unwelcome interest, even if this spring sunshine found some auburn glints in her long brown hair. Only her luminous hazel eyes might prompt a second glance.

In any event, she could wrap herself in elemental air and simply disappear, leaving the Caladhrian bog-trotters to entertain their mud-stained friends with a tavern tale of encountering a magewoman. Corsairs could flee trembling at the thought of their narrow escape from a wizard's wrath.

She followed the lodestone's continuing pull as the buckthorn hedged fields gave way to open pasture, still with no sign of livestock.

So Minelas had killed a second time. That was an unwelcome revelation, if not entirely unexpected. Jilseth scowled as she trudged along the muddy track. She'd been unpleasantly surprised by tavern tales on this journey, as she sat unremarked in some corner with a bowl of indifferent pottage. These mainlanders were far too eager to dwell on magecraft's potential for violence.

There'd been no such stories told in her childhood. Even islanders on Hadrumal with no elemental affinity knew the reality of wizardry. There was no need for wizards to kill. There were countless other ways in which Minelas could have evaded pursuit, when his arrival on Caladhria's shore had been threatened by mounted assailants. Villains they might have been, Jilseth allowed, but Minelas had killed them merely to show off his powers to the awestruck Caladhrians who hoped to hire him to defend them from the corsairs.

As her leather half-boots squelched, another gloss of magic kept them and her stocking feet within safe from insidious dampness. The ground underfoot was growing markedly wetter, the air dank with the scent of decay. Not the death she was seeking; merely the slow rot of sedge and rushes into the brackish water.

Before she had gone half a league further, glistening shallows stretched away to either hand. Only the track rose high enough above the salt marsh for a traveller to pass dry-shod. Two horses might ride abreast, if anyone wealthy enough to travel mounted had business in this backwater.

Jilseth studied the moist ground. A whole troop of horsemen had ridden this way. Hoof prints clustered thick in the mud, crossing and overlapping. She sank down to pass a hand over a waterlogged crescent. A handful of days ago.

She sighed. Then again, not so very long ago, she'd been ten whole days behind Minelas. She was closing in on him. Standing up, she continued, glancing back and forth from the hovering lodestone to the water-blurred path ahead.

It took no magic to mark her destination. Vegetation lay broken on either side of the track. Mud was churned up all around, darkened with lingering bloodstains. Jilseth shoved the lodestone into a pocket in the folds of her skirt and her touch quelled its sorcery. She didn't want any distractions.

Now she could use her chosen expertise. The magic which only those born with an earth affinity could even attempt to master. Nearly all chose to shun it, repelled by its very name without even attempting to understand its fascinations. Necromancy.

Where were the bodies? Jilseth frowned once again. Finding them should have been simplicity. She added a touch of fire to her mage-sense. The mainland custom was always to burn bodies on funeral pyres. That said, if anyone had tried building a pyre here, from sodden wood and green leaves, she wished them luck. They'd need a wizard to raise even a spark and Minelas would have no interest in reducing his victims to ash for a funeral urn.

There! Her wizard sight glimpsed a sunken body deep in the fen. The corpse itself was a horse but Jilseth's necromantic perception could see the dead man trapped beneath it.

Green magelight spread around her feet; the emerald hue of water magic. With her own affinity so focused, she had scant attention to spare for concealing her other workings. It hardly mattered. There was no one here to see but some frogs.

Once off the path, her wizardry ensured her firm footing a handspan above the muddy water. She walked over to the dead horse. Reed lizards had gnawed its ears and nose while some larger scavenger had ripped into its underbelly, releasing bloated entrails into the bog.

A sparkling sapphire veil of air defended Jilseth from the stench. She carefully balanced that spell with the contrary force of the water magic beneath her. By comparison, heaving the horse's dead weight aside demanded a trifle of her inborn affinity with the earth, an amber haze barely colouring the air.

As the dead horse sprawled with a noisome splash she saw the man's corpse. Jilseth locked her anger in that remote corner of her mind where she was accustomed to shove such distractions. Unbridled emotion threw wizardry into confusion, from highest to lowest, and she couldn't afford that here.

The dead man wore a woollen shirt beneath a scuffed leather tunic and buff breeches. A base metal brooch fastened the coarse cloak wrapped around his shoulders. He'd had greying hair but beyond that, no one would ever know him again. Worms and crabs had eaten their fill from his discoloured hands and face.

Jilseth wondered what twist of fortune had left this Caladhrian rotting faceless in the marshes. Well, she could soon find out and those mindless scavengers had made her task a little easier. A necromantic touch plucked a finger from his ravaged hand. She only needed the smallest of bones.

Walking back to solid ground, she unslung the leather sack from her shoulder. The black cloak she had stuffed in the top could protect her skirts from the damp ground now. She needed all her energies for her magecraft.

Folding the heavy cloth, she sat cross legged upon it. The dead man's finger hovered beside her as she took more things from the leather sack. A silver bowl. A small, securely stoppered bottle. She uncorked it to pour clear oil into the bowl. It trickled slow as honey. As she passed her hand over the bowl, amber radiance glowed.

Her gesture sent the dead man's finger into the bowl. The oil seethed, amber magic darkening. Jilseth swept her hands through the steam and thickening smoke, deftly shaping a latticed orb threaded with golden magelight.

A vision formed at its heart. The dead man's last moments. He'd been riding into battle with the troop whose horses had left these hoof prints. Jilseth could see the resolve in their faces.

The dead man turned in his saddle to rebut some comment behind him. 'He's no milksop. He couldn't handle that stallion if he was.'

His nod told Jilseth who he meant. Blue-cloaked, some way ahead, Minelas was riding beside that poor fool of a baron.

As soon as Jilseth learned his name, that noble lord would be answering to the Archmage and the Council of Hadrumal alongside the renegade mage. The edict was absolute. Wizards did not engage in warfare. No matter how grievously these coastal regions had suffered at the hands of the raiders, Minelas had no business taking Caladhrian gold in return for unsanctioned magic killing the corsairs.

So what exactly had happened? Jilseth concentrated on her spell. Once she knew the extent of his guilt, Minelas would learn the true meaning of the Archmage's wrath.

'This is salt marsh.' The dead man was pointing something out to the man riding beside him. The captain of the troop, judging by his finer linen and padded green tunic. 'See, samphire and spearweed.'

As the man nodded at the saw-edged plants, blue magelight flickered. Minelas's magelight. His affinity was with the air. Lightning flashed across Jilseth's spell. Another burst of radiance followed. Water and mud exploded all around.

The dead man yelped with pain as an arrow bit deep into the back of his shoulder. The Caladhrian troopers were shouting and drawing their swords. Their mounts plunged and snorted, obedience sorely tested by their terror.

More arrows struck men and beasts alike. A cry went up to dismount but the dead man was desperately clinging on as his horse reared up. It lashed out with iron shod hooves as black clad raiders emerged from the marshes.

Jilseth's contempt for Minelas deepened. He had led these men straight into an ambush. So much for his wizardry giving them an edge against the corsair raiders.

Worse, his lurid magecraft was doing far more harm than good. One Caladhrian's swinging sword cut through a floating ball of lightning. The magic killed him in an instant.

The wounded man's horse reared again and this time he lost his grip. He screamed as he hit the ground. Blood gushed from the ragged wound and he couldn't reach to staunch it.

Corsairs clubbed the surviving Caladhrians into submission on all sides. Jilseth leaned forward, brow furrowed, her careful hands never slowing. The black-clad raiders were carrying chains.

'What do they want?' a boy with a bloodied face quavered.

'We want slaves,' a swarthy rogue grinned.

'No!' The boy raised defiant fists.

The Caladhrian trooper beside him sent the youth sprawling into the mud. 'Don't be a fool.'

'Listen to him,' the raider advised as he chained the older man's unresisting wrists and claimed his weapons. 'You might live to see tomorrow.'

The necromantic spell flickered horribly. The wounded man wouldn't see another day.

Jilseth gasped, shocked. The Caladhrian baron lay face down in the mud, his captor's boot on his neck. A heavy-set corsair strode towards Minelas with his welcoming hand outstretched. The wizard brushed fragments of azure light from his gloves and nodded a greeting.

The spell-crafted vision was cut short as the dead man's head was wrenched backwards. The Caladhrian's last sight was the cloudless spring sky as a corsair cut his throat. Abrupt as a slamming door, the necromancy died.

Had she truly understood what she had seen? Jilseth licked dry lips as she reshaped the mingled magelight and smoke. The illusion of the dead man returned and the same events unfolded. Fighting a growing tremor in her hands, Jilseth strained her ears to pick every word from the confusion. She searched the fading edges of the vision for Minelas to see what he was doing.

She would have done so a third time but weariness defeated her. Her hands sank into her lap and the amber radiance in the oil faded. She closed her eyes for a moment. Only a moment.

A sweep of her hand sent the oil back to its bottle, leaving the silver bowl spotless. A flick of sapphire air magic tossed the dead man's finger into the reeds. As long as she kept weaving the spell, she could watch the men die time and again. Once she let the magic unravel, there was no recalling their fate, not from that bone anyway. Necromantic visions could only be summoned once from any mortal remains.

Though the faint scent of cooked meat lingered, that wasn't what made Jilseth nauseous. She took a brass mirror from her leather sack and kindled a stub of candle with a crimson spark springing from the snap of her fingers. Ruby reflections swirled around the polished metal.

'Jilseth?' A distant voice floated through the circling magic.

'It's worse than we thought.' She wasted no time on courtesies. 'Minelas took the Caladhrian baron's gold but then he betrayed him. He led the whole troop into a trap so the corsairs could take them as slaves. The raiders' captain hailed him as a friend.'

'A friend who will doubtless reward him.' The Archmage's anger rang across the countless leagues bridged by the spell. 'Minelas is out to make money from the Caladhrians' fight without redeeming his pledge to use magic.'

'His spells foiled all their attempts to fight back.' Jilseth was still appalled by Minelas's treachery. She'd long known he was greedy and lazy, but it had been a shock to realise that he had no hint of a conscience.

'That breaks the edict as surely as using his own magic to kill,' The Archmage said grimly. 'What of the noble baron?'

'He's dead.' Jilseth had seen him murdered by the raiders' leader as she revisited the vision.

'Then he's beyond our chastising.' Planir sighed. 'I see no reason to add to his widow's grief by accusing him, not when that could see this whole disgrace dragged into the daylight.'

Jilseth looked around the ravaged marsh. Her necromantic sight indicated more corpses. 'Should I do anything more here?'

'Find his body, you mean?' The Archmage's intuition wasn't hampered by the distance between them. 'No, regrettably. The less anyone knows of your presence there, the better. There'll soon be a search, when the baron and his troop don't return home. Follow Minelas. Our business is with him now.'

'Of course.' Jilseth was already wondering what penalties the renegade would face, accused before the Council of Wizards.

'Be careful.' The Archmage's warning ended the bespeaking spell.

Putting candle and mirror in the bag, Jilseth stood up to shake the wet mud from her cloak. A feeble crackle of grey magelight carried the dirt away. Hadrumal's Council wouldn't approve but such quadrate cantrips came in useful. Folding the pristine cloth, she stowed it away and pulled the drawstring tight.

As she took the ensorcelled lodestone out of her pocket, her innate affinity reawakened the spells within it. The darkly glistening gem led her onwards until scant moments later it dangled, limp and useless.

Jilseth didn't need to examine her magic. She had felt the snap of the spell in her bones, a thread broken beyond mending. Minelas's air-born wizardry had carried him away, directly in opposition to the earth magic underpinning her own sorcery.

Did he know that he was pursued? But Planir had only shared his suspicions with her. Minelas could have no reason to suspect he'd attracted the Archmage's attentions.

On the other hand, he'd know the Caladhrians would be out for his blood now that they knew his promises of magical aid were lies, and worse than lies if they ever learned the true depth of his betrayal. If they didn't have magic to find him, they had scent hounds and experienced huntsmen, well able to track him through this wilderness. No wonder he'd fled as far and as fast as his magic would carry him.

Jilseth glared at the spreading salt marsh. If she sought any other mage, it would be the work of moments to ensorcel some water with ink or oil and scry out the renegade's hidey-hole. But Minelas had studied all the ways to hide himself from scrying and devised new ones of his own. Such diligence in an otherwise indifferent student had been one of the first things to catch Planir's interest.

She would have to return to Hadrumal and wait for the Archmage's discreet allies ashore to send fresh word of the treacherous mage. Every one of Planir's enquiry agents would be seeking him now.

As soon as Jilseth could stand where he had once stood, the lodestone would find him again. Sooner or later she would catch up with Minelas. As long as herons and toads were the only witnesses to this depravity, Hadrumal's reputation would remain unsullied.

In the next breath, she was gone.

In the domain of Nahik Jagai

23rd of For-Summer

In the 8th Year of Tadriol the Provident of Tormalin

Corrain looked up. The whip master was striding along the walkway that cut the deck of the galley in two. The raised width of planking ran from the stern platform to the prow, a solid barrier between these rowers and those on their benches on the other half of the deck. Shouting in his southern barbarian tongue, to someone on the prow platform which the rowers couldn't see as they sat facing the rear of the ship, the whip master sounded like a cat choking on a hairball.

The brute took his orders from the galley master; Corrain had worked that much out. The galley master relaxed in a comfortable chair up there on the stern platform beside the steersman who wrestled the single vast oar that did duty instead of a tiller.

Two slaves scurried to do the whip master's bidding. Trusted slaves; not chained like the rest even if they remained marked out by their ragged heads and beards. Only the galley crew enjoyed the luxury of razors and shears, some going so far as to shave themselves bare as a newborn babe.

Corrain didn't blame them. He'd have done the same given half the chance. Lice were a constant torment for the rowers, especially for the mainland captives who had far more body hair than the darker skinned Archipelagans. With everyone stripped to the waist that was painfully apparent.

The piping flute which he'd come to loathe slowed and stopped with a trill. If Corrain couldn't understand the Aldabreshin language, he'd learned those signals soon enough. Along with the rest of the fettered rowers sitting at this oar, he raised its blade free of the water and drew it inboard to rest on the bulwark running along the side of the ship.

Corrain seized the respite to reckon up his count of everything that had happened since the corsairs had enslaved him. Sixteen days after that and he'd been sold like some fattened hog on an auction block, on a nameless beach in the Archipelago. That's when he'd lost sight of half of those to survive the wizard's treachery back in Caladhria.

Eight days after that and he'd arrived at the anchorage where more of his comrades had died. Were they the lucky ones, or those like himself, who'd been shared out among the galley captains to be chained to these oars?

The dead weren't going to be whipped into helping the very raiders who plagued Caladhria. It had taken Corrain some while to realise it, but the anchorage was home to yet more of those accursed corsairs.

A contingent of warriors had embarked on the galley for this voyage. They wore no chains, and if none was clean shaven like the mariners, they kept their hair and beards cropped short, offering no hand hold to a foe in a fight. These were free men, as far as Corrain could tell, eve if they lived in little more comfort than the rowers, bedding down on the decking at prow and stern.

They all looked to a man who could only be their captain. Corrain had spent his adult life as a trooper in his lord's service. He knew fighting men when he saw them. Raiders, every last one of the scum.

How long before they were forced to row north so these savages could pillage and rape? The sailing season was well advanced now, even if in the fifty one days since they'd arrived at the corsair anchorage, the galley had only rowed from island to island within the Archipelago. Fifty one days? Fifty two? Uncertainty gnawed at his gut as cruelly as hunger.

What was happening now? Every few days they were released from their oars to haul water from the sea and to wash down the decks but they'd done that just this morning.

Corrain watched the trusted slaves open one of the lockers beneath the walkway. One dragged out a basket while the other uncapped a battered leather flagon, tall as a top-boot and doubtless plundered from some mainland tavern.

The man chained beside him on the inboard side of their shared oar sat up straighter. So did most of the rest of the rowers as the whip master's trusted slaves began walking alongside the benches.

The one with the basket was dipping torn hunks of what passed for bread in these nightmare islands into the flagon. The rowers were passing the dripping sops along to those sat by the bulwark pierced with oar ports, the chains fettering their feet jingling.

It was some while before the slaves handing out the soaked bread reached their bench, twelfth of the twenty five on this side of the galley. Corrain was the middle of the five men forced to sit there, their feet shackled together and secured by a heavier chain running through the loop between each man's ankles, secured at both ends with formidable locks.

As the slaves with the basket and flagon reached them, Corrain held out his hand. His stomach growled with desperate anticipation. The man sat on his bulwark side laughed. Corrain paused before handing him the first sop, meeting his eyes with a warning stare.

He couldn't guess where this man had come from, paler of skin than the islanders though darker than the captured Caladhrians. Was that the touch of the sun or a natural burnish in his blood? Corrain had tried asking but if they shared some common tongue, the man was keeping that to himself. He didn't talk to anyone, not that Corrain had seen.

One of the trusted slaves said something and the man shrugged. He passed the sodden bread on to the youth sitting at the outermost end of their oar. Hosh stuffed it into his mouth, whimpering with gratitude.

Corrain breathed a little more easily. While he reckoned he was stronger than the silent man, he didn't relish the thought of fighting in the cramped space between the benches some dark night, in order to teach the silent man that Hosh was under his protection.

He passed the silent man the next sop and then ate his own. He nearly choked. The bread had been dipped in wine harsh enough to clean old pots and liberally mixed with white brandy.

But Corrain had always heard that the Aldabreshi scorned strong drink. That was what everyone said. They didn't have the head for it, so Caladhria's tavern warriors insisted with scornful amusement. So much for that homespun wisdom.

The two slaves on his inboard hand exchanged a few words as the whip master's lackeys moved on. Both were Archipelagans or of mixed blood, dark of hair and eye. Corrain couldn't understand a word they spoke and they knew nothing of his own Caladhrian dialect or of formal Tormalin, used right across the mainland by merchants and traders, legacy of that long vanished Empire's hegemony.

Regardless, Corrain treated the inboard rowers with wary respect. It was self-evident that the strongest men were set to hauling the innermost ends of the oars. When the heavy chain at their feet was unlocked, releasing them from the oar to sleep, they were the ones who enjoyed the comparative comfort of the bench padded with flock-stuffed sackcloth and crudely cured goat hide.

Corrain swallowed his pride and slept as best he could down on the planks with the others. That way he could keep an eye on Hosh. The stronger slaves would prey on the weakest, given half a chance.

'Corrain,' Hosh quavered. 'What's going on?'

'Shut up and eat your bread,' Corrain growled.

He looked to make sure that Hosh was eating his sop. The lad needed every scrap of food to sustain him, to maintain the pace which the whip master's flute player demanded. Corrain had earned his muscles through years of sword play whereas Hosh had only joined Lord Halferan's guard at the turn of the New Year gone. Corrain had served nineteen years and risen to a captaincy before his own folly saw him thrust back down the ladder to serve as a trooper and be grateful for that leniency.

Corrain's heart pounded painfully in his chest. Of all those enslaved when that foul mage betrayed Lord Halferan, only Hosh remained of the handful purchased by this galley master.

Greff's leg had been accidentally gashed when they had first been fettered. The wound had ulcerated in the moist heat, leaving Greff weak and feverish. As it festered, the whip master had sent one of his two underlings to unchain him. Were they going to tend him? Corrain hadn't shared Hosh's hope. He had been right. Greff was stabbed in the back of the neck and his corpse thrown to the sharks that constantly shadowed the ship.

Someone had strangled Orlon quietly one night, his body discovered the following morning. Hauled up onto the walkway, one by one his bench-mates were tied to the upthrust stern post. None would say what had happened, despite being brutally flogged by the overseers.

As for Kessle and Lamath? Corrain only knew that replies no longer came from the far benches, unseen beyond the walkway dividing the deck, when he risked shouting their names in the darkness.

'Corrain?' Hosh begged for reassurance.

The whip master's overseers had hauled a rower up from an oar some way ahead. His bound hands were tied to the stern post and the crack of the whip sent a shiver through the rowers from stern to prow. Somewhere behind, some corsair raider laughed callously.

'You've done nothing wrong. You've nothing to fear.' Corrain only hoped that was true. A flogging would most likely be the death of either of them.

Beaten senseless, violent or recalcitrant slaves might be briefly revived by the agony of having vinegar and salt rubbed into their wounds to keep the flies away. Then they were thrown down the stern hatch into the hold, into the narrow space between the galley master's cabin at the rear and the locked compartments for looted cargo.

By Corrain's count, fewer than one man in five emerged. The rest were hauled out lifeless, already gnawed by rats, and tossed overboard to delight the sharks. Corrain had taken his turn at that grisly task, as had Hosh. Corrain reckoned the whip master wanted the new slaves to see what fate awaited anyone contemplating disobedience.

How long could Hosh endure this torment? A sword pommel clubbing him into submission when they had been captured had left a visible dent beside the boy's broken nose. While his bruises had faded, he was now plagued with a constantly weeping eye and an oozing nostril.

'Remember your oath, boy. Our allegiance to Halferan holds.' Corrain had made the lad swear to return and see that treacherous wizard hanged. If Hosh died-

No, he wouldn't contemplate that possibility. They had come this far together. They would get back home. They would have their vengeance. The sour wine and liquor warmed his blood and limbs.

The overseer finished flogging the man. To Corrain's surprise, he was returned to his oar, still conscious albeit with blood coursing down his back. The other overseer shouted a warning, the tone unmistakeable even if the words were meaningless. The inboard rowers on their oar exchanged a cowed look.

Corrain hastily swallowed the last of the sodden bread as the whip master blew his silver whistle. The flute-player replied with a piercing note. Like everyone else, the five of them hastily readied their oar before either overseer cracked a lash over some laggard's head.

The whip master set the pace, swift and merciless. The flute-player took up the rhythm and the oars dug deep into the waves. The galley surged forward.

If he couldn't see where they were headed, Corrain strove to see what was going on aboard the galley. Raiders were hurrying back and forth from prow to stern and back again. Leather-wrapped bundles were being hauled up from the hold below. Armour and weapons, he soon realised. They didn't have to row all the way to the mainland to find themselves going into battle.

As his hauling arms slackened at the thought, the others were taken unawares. Their oar briefly faltered. An overseer's warning was backed up with a lick of his whip to raise a welt on their innermost rower's shoulder. The man beside Corrain growled a fierce rebuke.

'Sorry,' Corrain muttered. He concentrated on keeping a steady rhythm, using all the might in his shoulders, his back, his belly and legs, bare feet wedged against the board that jutted up from the deck.

He had seen enough. Those Archipelagan raiders, nearly as numerous as the rowers, were armouring themselves in stiff leather cuirasses. Some carried swords, others shouldered quivers with short bows in hand.

The whip master's whistle mercilessly increased the pace. The strongest rowers strained to keep up with the piper. A couple of armoured Aldabreshi ran along the top of the narrow bulwark on the outboard side of the ship. A single slip and they would fall to a brutal death among the scything oars.

The Aldabreshi didn't fall. Instead they hauled on ropes to spread out a great expanse of cloth. It was suspended somehow from the galley's single mast which Corrain had begun to think was only there for hanging signal flags.

Was the awning to shield the rowers from the punishing sun? As Corrain looked up, he saw the cloth twitch. Dark silhouettes of arrows lay snagged overhead. An excruciating itch burned between his shoulder blades. If some lucky shaft tore a hole, an arrow could bury itself in his back and he wouldn't even see it coming.

A taste of smoke drove that fear away with worse. Corrain snatched a desperate glance over his shoulder to see if something had set the awning alight. If the galley caught fire, chained as they were to their oars, they would sit there burning alive until the waves overwhelmed the sinking vessel to drown any who'd survived that long.

'Corrain? Are we dead men?'

As the silent man's mocking laugh drowned out Hosh's terrified plea, Corrain caught a glimpse of what was happening up on the crowded prow. He shouted what little reassurance he could.

'It's only charcoal, Hosh. They've lit a brazier.'

As he wondered why, as Hosh appealed for more answers, Corrain saw two Archipelagans hauling a barrel up from the hold and dragging it towards the prow. He risked twisting around a second time, ignoring the inboard man's furious snarl.

An Archipelagan reached into the barrel and took out something roughly the size and shape of a pomegranate. He reached for a wooden-handled copper spike thrust deep into the bright heart of the charcoal. Touching the glowing metal to a thick thread trailing from the pomegranate, he waited a moment to be sure it was alight. Then he hurled the thing high and hard, right over the galley's prow towards whatever lay ahead of them.

Sticky fire. Corrain had heard of that Archipelagan abomination, though he'd never seen it for himself.

Before he could speculate further, the overseers' screaming reached a new frenzy. The whip master blew rapid trills on his whistle. Before Corrain could guess what any of this meant, he was struck hard in the chest by their own oar.

The galley had come to a complete stop amid a horrendous cacophony of splintering wood and screaming voices. The armoured men waiting in the stern charged up the walkway. From the sounds of clashing swords and agonized yells, those who'd been in the prow had already joined battle.

Were he and Hosh unwilling partners in a corsair attack on some Caladhrian trading vessel? Even with the raiders prowling the sea lanes, trade between mainland and Archipelago was too lucrative and too widespread to be significantly interrupted.

Were they attacking some other Aldabreshin ship? Everyone said that southern barbarians fought each other like packs of wild dogs. If it was an Archipelagan ship, did it carry better swordsmen than their own?

If it did, Corrain could hope that their own galley master, the whip master and his overseers would find themselves captured and laded with chains, some token of natural justice. But if the rowers were sold on again like brute beasts brought to market, there was no knowing where he and Hosh might end up. Worse, they might be separated.

Corrain closed his eyes amid the incomprehensible shouting. He was still alive. Hosh was still alive. As long as they were alive, they could hold fast to their oath. They could cling to the hope of one day seeing Minelas punished for his treachery.

Wherever the wizard had gone, whatever he had done in the meantime, once he got back to the mainland, Corrain promised himself that he would hack the bastard's head from his shoulders and piss down the bleeding stump of his neck.

Aye, and he'd tell everyone from the eastern ocean to the western forests, from the southern shore to the northern mountains, why he'd done it. Those wizards of Hadrumal had been so virtuous and upright, swearing on the sanctity of their precious edict.

Corrain would see them all shamed for the perfidious liars that they were.

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Juliet E. McKenna's love of fantasy, myth and history led naturally to studying Greek and Roman history and literature at Oxford University. After a career change from personnel management to combine motherhood and book-selling, her debut novel, The Thief's Gamble, was published in 1999. This was the first of The Tales of Einarinn. That series was followed by The Aldabreshin Compass sequence, beginning with Southern Fire and The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution, starting with Irons in the Fire.

She writes diverse shorter fiction, including tie-in stories for Doctor Who, Torchwood and Warhammer 40K. She works from time to time as a creative writing tutor as well as reviewing books for print and online magazines. A contributing editor to Albedo One, she also works with other fantasy authors, promoting the breadth and depth of speculative fiction through The Write Fantastic.

Living in Oxfordshire with her teenage sons and husband, she fits in her writing around her family and vice versa. Her fourth fantasy series, The Hadrumal Crisis, will be published by Solaris in the UK and the US from 2011, beginning with Dangerous Waters.

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The Dread Hammer

by Trey Shiels

Visualize my brother, Smoke, as he stalks the forest road. He is a shadow, lost amid the mottled shadows of the trees. The woman he hunts does not see him. She is alone, hurrying south toward Nefion. A gauntlet of imagined fears lies before her-roots to bruise her toes, windfalls to block the way, wolves within the shadows-but none of these slow her pace. They are nothing against the fear that follows behind her-and my brother's presence she suspects not at all.

He is a murderer, my Smoke. Though he's just eighteen, at least 172 lives have ended against the edge of his sword. Maybe more. It's likely there are slayings I haven't discovered yet. Smoke doesn't keep count of the dead, but I do.

*** ***

The Hunt

Smoke crept to a vantage along a curve in the road. Peering past a veil of late summer leaves, he watched the woman approach. She carried a sack over one shoulder and held a staff in her hand. She walked south with great haste, until she was stopped at the curve by a puddle of rainwater and ox dung that stretched clear across the road. She hesitated, staring at the mire with a distressed gaze. The gush of her breath was the loudest sound in the forest. "Rot it," she whispered. "I am not getting my boots wet."

Using the staff to balance, she edged carefully around the puddle, brushing up against the leafy screen where Smoke was hidden.

He smiled.

By her ugly clothes he knew she was Binthy-a tribe of sheep herders and farmers who lived in the plains north of the Wild Wood. Binthy women were well known for their poor taste. They dressed like boys as often as not, in breeches and tunic with a shapeless wool poncho to keep warm, and so it was with this woman-though she was a pretty thing, despite it.

Smoke admired her youthful face, tanned brown from a summer in the sun, flushed now, and glistening with exertion. Her black hair was bobbed just past her shoulders. She showed little care for it, having tied it crudely with a braided string behind her neck. She had a sweet mouth and a graceful nose, but as he studied her it was her eyes that captivated him. They were a deep-dark black, framed by heavy lashes and full of heat.

As she arrived on the other side of the puddle she stopped and turned, using those exquisite eyes to search the forest shadows on both sides of the road. She stared directly at Smoke's hiding place, but still she didn't see him.

Next, she looked back the way she'd come. She held her breath, the better to listen. Smoke held his breath and listened too, but there was only the sound of a breeze rustling the tree tops. Her pursuers were drawing close, but they had not caught her yet.

She set out again, renewing her frantic pace, but she had not gone ten paces when Smoke stepped out onto the path behind her. He allowed the leaves to rustle, and she whirled around as if she'd heard the growling of a wolf.

Smoke grinned. She was a pretty thing. "Here you are alone," he observed.

Her mouth fell open. Her eyes went wide. But she was a shepherd girl accustomed to guarding the sheep from marauding wolves and in a moment she had her staff raised in a defensive pose.

He cocked an eyebrow. "Are you afraid of me?"

She lied to him from the first. "No!"

Her defiance excited him. "Then you are the only one. All the other women, they feared me at the start. There is no help for it. I have a fearsome aspect."

She actually had the temerity to look him up and down. What she saw was a tall, lean, youth, with handsome features and laughing eyes that glittered green as if with their own light. His honey-brown hair was tied in a tail on top of his head so that it cascaded in a plume down his back. His only flaw was a three-inch, sunken scar that ran from the left side of his throat down to his shoulder, spoiling the curve of his neck. He was dressed in tailored breeches and a green silk tunic, both badly worn, and over all, a long, brown, leather coat. On his back he carried a sword and a bow, and at his waist, two knives. Brown leather gloves protected his hands. His tall boots were mud stained, and scuffed with wear.

He took a step closer to her. "It's a wonder that you're here in the forest, all alone."

She lied to him a second time. "I am not alone."

"No longer," he conceded, "now that I'm here. Tell me your plan. Where is it you're going?"

She raised her chin in brave defiance. "I am going with my kin to Nefion. It's only that my brother annoyed me, so I ran ahead to escape his teasing. He'll be here soon, though, along with my father and-"

Smoke took another step toward her. This time her knuckles whitened around the staff and she stepped back two. "Come no closer!"

He shrugged. "So what have you brought to sell?"

"What?"

"Nefion is a merchant town. What have you brought to sell there?"

As she pondered an answer, Smoke took his turn to look her up and down. He imagined the pretty figure that was surely hidden beneath her dirty poncho and dowdy clothes, and for the first time he noticed that she had a sweet scent, a feral perfume that stirred his desire. By the time his gaze returned to her face his mouth felt oddly dry and his heart was beating faster than need required. Never before had he felt so drawn to any woman.

When he spoke again his voice had gone soft and husky. "I am taken suddenly with a fancy for you."

"Oh, no!" Her eyes narrowed and she raised her staff higher, ready to strike.

He scowled in indignant surprise. "But why not? I like the look of you. And besides"-(it had only just occurred to him)-"I am in need of a wife."

She should have been impressed with his willingness to do right by her, but it wasn't so.

Her mouth opened, and then closed again in confusion. A glint of desperation lit her eyes. "I-I don't think so!" she stammered, backing slowly away. "If you had me for a wife, it would be a very sad thing for you. You are a good man, I can see it. So I will tell you in all truth, I would make you a terrible wife. Terrible! I am like a boy in almost all things. Likely I would poison you with my cooking, and rats would run through my house. The chickens would not be put away, and the children would be dirty and ill-mannered and I would forget to keep an eye on them and they would fall in a well or be eaten by wolves. If you want a wife, you should make your way to Nefion. As you say, it is a merchant city and so there must be many young women there better suited than me."

By this time she had opened a considerable gap between them. Smoke felt her readiness. He knew that in another moment she would turn and flee. "You give too much credit to the women of Nefion. I've seen them. They're not like you. I've never seen anyone else like you. You're a wild thing, silly as a wolf cub, but very pretty, and you smell very nice. It's you I fancy. Come, say you'll be my wife."

"No! Stay away from me! I don't even know your name. You are some crazed forest spirit, I think."

He scowled, annoyed at her resistance. "Crazed? Me? What have I done that's crazed? You, on the other hand, have shown no hint of good judgment, fleeing to Nefion as if you will find sheep to tend there. I warn you there are no sheep, and if you go there you'll soon discover that all you have to sell is yourself."

She blinked in doubt, but then resolve came over her again. "No, I am going. I will not go home."

He rolled his eyes in exasperation.

She seized that moment. While his gaze was turned imploringly skyward toward the Dread Hammer, she fled, racing away south along the road.

Smoke laughed in delight at her daring. Then he slipped again into the trees and he pursued her in utter silence, with a speed she could not hope to match.

*** ***

A brook crossed the road a quarter mile farther on. Smoke came first to the ford. He waited until the woman drew near, then he stepped out from the mottled shadows to meet her. "Tell me your name."

A little screech of terror escaped her. She skidded to such a swift stop that she fell back on her rear. But she was up again in a moment. "How can you be here ahead of me? Are there two of you? Who are you?"

"I am one and I am alone, though I would have you alongside me. Please tell me your name."

"It is Ketty! My name is Ketty, and I cannot be your wife because I am already betrothed."

Smoke nodded. "I know. You don't care for him. He's near your father's age and has already used up two wives-so you ran away."

Ketty's lips parted in a round "O" of astonishment. "How do you know that?"

"Haven't you told me?"

"I've never seen you before! I only ever said such things when I spoke my prayers to the Dread Hammer."

"Just so. I heard your prayer. It's why I'm here." Smoke lifted his gaze to look past her. "He's coming along with your father, you know. They're riding horses and they're very near. You can't outrun them." He looked at her again. "But I'll kill them for you."

To his surprise, she greeted this proposal with horror. "No! My brothers and sisters will starve if my father is not there to care for them."

"Ah, I hadn't considered that." Smoke frowned, thinking hard. "I'll spare your father then, if I can, but I'll slay your betrothed."

"No," Ketty insisted, even more firmly. "I do not care for him, but he has small children too and no wife-" The sound of hoof beats interrupted her. They came with a cantering rhythm, faint at first but swiftly growing louder. Ketty made a frightened moan as she spun around to look.

"There's not much time," Smoke pointed out. "So what do you want me to-?"

Ketty gave him no answer, but instead turned and fled, east into the trees. She went with no grace at all, crashing through the ferns and sliding in the moss, leaving a trail a child could follow. Smoke looked after her in exasperation. Why did she have to make this so difficult? It would be a simple thing to cut open their throats . . . though of course she was right, there were children to consider.

So with a great sigh he set his soul to glide along the threads that lay beneath the world. In doing so his worldly reflection-that part of him that Ketty saw as a man-was dissolved by the speed of his passage. If Ketty had been watching she would have sworn he transformed into a long plume of scentless gray smoke that streamed away between the trees though there was no wind to carry it.

*** ***

Ferns grew lush between the trees. Ketty bounded through them, until Smoke caught up with her. In a swirl of gray vapor, he manifested not two steps ahead. She had no chance at all to stop. With a tiny cry she crashed into him, knocking him off balance, even as his arms closed around her.

He made sure they fell together. He went down on his side to avoid breaking his bow, and the ferns closed over them. They would have been nicely hidden if Ketty hadn't started to struggle. Smoke rolled her onto her back, pinning her against the ground as he hissed in her ear. "Be still or they'll know you're here! If they come hunting you, I'll have to kill them."

"What are you?" she whimpered. "I saw you. You were smoke-!"

He scowled at her, lying helpless beneath him in the green twilight under the ferns. "That's what my sisters named me, but you don't have to name me the same."

"Smoke?" she whispered, as the vibration of the cantering hooves rumbled up from the ground.

"It will be fixed if you say it again," he warned.

Her brow wrinkled in abject confusion. "Smoke?"

His lip curled. "It's done then."

"Are you a forest spirit? One of the Haunten?"

"Hush now. They're here."

A man's deep voice boomed over them. "Ketty! You clumsy sow. You left a trail for me to follow as plain as the forest road." Fern fronds crunched under the horses' hooves. "I brought my whip, Ketty, and your husband."

Ketty opened her mouth. Smoke clapped a hand over it before she could protest that the widower was not her husband yet. She stared up at him with wild eyes. Stay still. He mouthed the words. Do not move. Do not show yourself.

She nodded tentatively and he took his hand away. Then he reached out again to the threads that formed the weft of the world and, seeming to become a heavy pall of gray smoke, he sank away into the moist ground.

*** ***

The living soil was a reflection thrown off by a maze of fine threads in the world-beneath. Smoke let his awareness divide and slide across the threads' tangled paths as he hunted for a spirit of mist. There were many ancient forces within the weft and warp of the world-beneath. Most of them were too dangerous to disturb, but the mist was one Smoke did not fear. So when he found it, he woke it up.

It stirred, sleepily at first. He called to it again.

Such forces expected to be summoned only by the Haunten, the forest spirits. Smoke was not such. The mist was overcome with anger when it realized this. It boiled up out of the ground, determined to chill and deceive the insolent creature that had dared to waken it. It came so swiftly that its cold, billowing vapor startled the horses, making them snort and draw back.

Both men were nearly unseated. They cried out in consternation. Then the one who was betrothed shouted to Ketty's father. "This is a haunted place! It was not my wife we heard crashing away, but some enchanted creature."

Ketty's father was a braver man. "The print of her foot was on the road. It is her, and if you would have her for a wife, then stay and find her!"

But his horse danced beneath him, close to panic, snorting, stamping, turning in circles. Smoke heard the outraged pleas of the crushed ferns, Send them away! Send them away!

Since that was the result Smoke desired anyway, he consented to the task.

Following the threads back up from the ground, he manifested behind a tree, and at once he let go a great screech like the cry of a banshee.

The horses reared and whinnied. Ignoring the shouts of their riders, they plunged back to the road and fled, galloping north, returning to the safety of their home.

Smoke wiped the wet of the mist off his forehead. "It would have been easier to kill them," he groused.

Ketty made no answer, and when he went to look for her he discovered she was no longer among the ferns. "Ah, Ketty, you are a clever, wild wolf." Closing his eyes to listen, he heard faintly the rustle of her passage. She was fleeing east, away from the trail and deeper into the Wild Wood. If she had doubled back, crossing the trail to run west instead, he might have let her go. Running west would have been a bad sign. The Puzzle Lands lay to the west. He'd been born there, and had run away, and was determined never to go again. But Ketty had run east, straight toward the sanctuary of his secret holding in the Wild Wood as if she knew the way and was eager to reach it.

"Ketty, you can't deny we are meant for each other." With a pleased smile he let his reflection dissolve again and he set out after her, an errant shimmer of smoke breaking free of the mist's cold temper.

Published by Mythic Island Press LLC

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Trey Shiels is a pen name of award-winning science fiction author Linda Nagata.

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Flesh and Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

In the hills of southern Iaja, thunder had rolled through the night before, but no rain accompanied it, and the slaves were at work in the vineyards soon after sunrise. The sun had progressed to the third-quarter mark when a lean figure came to stand at the edge of the yard. A freshly picked clutch of fruit rested in his work-roughened hand, and he was studying the flesh of the fruit, letting the magic deep within it speak to him and murmur of potential and promise.

A soft cough sounded, overriding the gentle morning hum of insects in the grass and attracting his attention, as intended. "Master?"

Vineart Sionio didn't turn, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the slave, diffident but urgent, his hands fisting in the rough tunic that hung over his wiry body.

"Yes?" While he waited for a response, the Vineart placed a young green grape on his tongue and closed his mouth around it, crushing it and letting the juice coat his tongue. The taste was both delicate and sour, and it rose into his nasal passages. Not anywhere near ripe, still waiting for the heat of high summer and the cooler nights of Harvest, but showing distinct promise. His vineyards were still young, giving only limited yield. This Harvest might finally change that.

"Master," the slave said again, "there is a . . ." The slave looked down at his feet, falling silent.

Sionio was a young man, barely thirty and still building his reputation; although granted a Master's rank, he had not yet earned the right to name his House, his vines still known by the name of the nearest village. He was ambitious, though, and worked as hard as any slave when hands were needed in the yard. His slaves respected him and his magic to the point of caution, as was only proper, but he did not abuse them. There was no reason for them to fear speaking if there was something to be said.

"A what?" He turned then, and looked directly at the slave. "Speak. Stop wasting my time."

The slave flinched. He was bald, and had either lost or forgotten to wear his hat that morning. Sionio made note to speak to the overseer about that. He could not afford a single slave to fall ill, not now. "I do not know what it is, Master. But it is in the fields. And it is wrong."

Very few slaves could sense the magic that grew within spellgrapes' flesh. But they worked the vineyards every day of the year, season after season, and it spoke to them in its own fashion. They knew what should be there . . . and what should not.

Sionio did not hesitate. "Show me."

The soil was soft underfoot as they walked, the smell of the young fruit warm in the afternoon sun. If the weather held for another month, if no rot or infestation threatened, and Harvest went well. . .

Sionio halted his thoughts there. Weather was something even a Vineart could not always control, and so it could easily become obsession. Sionio was a more practical man; he worried over what he could affect, and left the rest to the silent gods and Nature's whim. Skill and craft were what made spellwine, and he did not doubt his strength in either.

They came to the vines the slave had been weeding and stopped. "Here, Master."

A quick mental calculation placed them in seventh square, second grouping. Sionio knew every square of the enclosure, its planting, history, and expectations. The vines here were only four years old, but they had a noble heritage, the rootstock coming from his own master's enclosures, and in another few years their fruit would contribute to a noble, powerful spellwine that would carry Sionio's name across the known lands.

"Where is this wrongness?"

"There, Master." The slave pointed, his sun-browned finger shaking slightly. Six other slaves stood by, looking up and down the yard nervously, three males, two females, and one so old its gender was uncertain. Sionio frowned at them. They should be weeding and pruning, not fiddling with their thumbs like useless citizens.

"In the soil." The slave who had brought him word pointed again, down at the base of a vine, but made no move to get closer.

Sionio looked at the other slaves again, more closely this time. Two of them had taken off their own straw-brimmed hats and were crunching them between restless fingers. They could not meet his gaze, not even the oldster who should have known better.

These slaves had been bought cheaply, all past puberty; the overlooked second string was all Sionio could afford at the time. Still, life here was better than on the slaver's caravan. They were not afraid of him, but of what they felt. Or, more accurately, they were more afraid of whatever was there than him.

Sionio pushed passed the slaves and knelt by the vine in question. A grape vine needed support to grow on, the woody stem not strong enough to support itself and the weight of its fruit. During the bare winter season, the slaves wove tendrils around waxed fibers strung between wooden posts, giving the vines something to cling to as they grew. Now, in the warmth of early summer, the small green leaves were clustered thickly around those ropes, protecting the grapes underneath from too much sun, rain, or animal predation.

Sionio's trousers, durable canvas styled after those worn by Iajan sailors, were quickly stained by the dirt as the Vineart dug his fingers into the soil. He reached toward the roots buried deep in the mineral-poor ground, until the soil reached the dark red mage-stain on the back of his hand. The senses that made him a Vineart, the ability that allowed him to craft the spellwines, rang an alarm. It was not magic that warned him, but some deep atavistic sense, an animal's warning of a predator, of something not right lurking nearby.

The civilized maiar, or princeling, in his city or fine country house might scoff, but Sionio knew better. Instinct did not lie.

The slave was right. Something was wrong. Something deep, something new. Something that should not be there.

"Go fetch a firestone, and a smudge pot," he told the nearest slave, the one who had fetched him originally. "And a vial of sweetwater."

The slave took off at a run, and the others backed up a few steps more, not willing to leave but not wanting to be close to anything that called for sweetwater, also known for good reason as grape-purge.

"Now, what ails you, little ones?" he asked, returning his attention to the grapevines in front of him. To the uneducated eye they seemed perfectly healthy, the leaves shiny and unfurled, each bunch thick and heavy, the grapes small and deep green.

Whatever rot lurked in the soil, it did not seem to have affected the crop yet. With luck, they had caught it soon enough, and Sionio would reward the slave who had alerted him.

Then a tremor under his knee made him look down in time to see tiny red bugs skittering under his hand, digging their way out of the soil. They scrambled over his fingers, trying to climb the rough cloth of his clothing.

Bud mites were normal pests. They usually came out only in the early morning, feeding on the occasional grape that burst in the night. They should not be swarming like this, not now, not in such numbers.

Sionio unhooked a palm-sized wineskin from his leather belt with his free hand, uncorked it easily with two fingers, and tilted it so that a few drops fell onto his tongue. Unlike the grapes he had tasted earlier, the spellwine was rich and fruity, sweetly pungent: the instantly familiar taste of vine-heal. It faded into his mouth, the vapor rising into his sinuses, and as he breathed, the spell was released, allowing him to feel the soil, feel the movements under his hands and knees.

"Sin Washer!" he swore, jerking back even as the ground under him rumbled, the dirt and bugs flying upward as the force of his query summoned something, a something that erupted from the soil like a volcano, and threw him onto his backside.

The wrinkled, blind head of a grub rose a full length into the air, the shape of it familiar to anyone who had ever worked a vineyard, if a thousand times larger than such a thing should be. The slaves, shrieking, scattered and ran as though the grub would devour them. In the distance, from the kennel by the sleep house, dogs barked a now-useless alarm.

Sionio got to his feet, his gaze never leaving the giant grub's form even as his mind identified the known facts. He might be young but he was not green. Faced with a threat to his vines, a Vineart did not react; a Vineart acted.

The leaves near where the grub reared its dark gray form had already faded to an ugly yellow, dying by sheer proximity to the thing, as though its very presence were a poison. Sionio suspected that, were he to lift the leaves, the young grapes would be withered and dying as well. This thing had to be stopped, now, before the blight spread.

He didn't need a vial of spellwine to deal with the threat: the grub might be huge but it was still a grub. Disgusting, and the size of the thing made it a creature of nightmares, yes, but any Vineart worthy of his vines knew how to deal with such a thing.

It would be easier with his tools, of course.

Even as the thought passed through his mind, there was a sound behind him. The grub turned as though it, too, had heard the sound, and a thin shriek rose into the air from its open maw. The slave had returned. Despite its obvious fear, the slave forced himself forward enough to push an object into his master's waiting hands.

A firestone, warm and ready. And a small clay pot marked with the sigil for sweetwater.

The smudge pot would have been useful as well, but these were the two things that he needed most of all.

Clutching the firestone in his right hand, he felt the crystalline globe react to his own body heat, doubling and trebling the fire trapped inside glass until the colors swirled and danced, impatient to be let out. The clay pot he crushed with his other hand, feeling the thick, oily liquid drip over his fingers and down his palm, tingling slightly.

To work magic, most needed properly prepared spellwines. But here, in the middle of his own vineyard, all a Vineart needed was already in place. Let princes and lords buy spellwines; a Vineart had a more subtle magic at his command.

Sionio spit into his left palm and then clasped his hands together, letting the juice from his mouth mix with the sweetwater and coat the firestone. The spit carried the magic within him, tangled with the lingering traces of mustus and fermentation. Mage-blood was not as potent as spellwine, but it was always present and ready.

"Scour, scour! Root and leaf, be clean! Go!"

A basic decantation, useful to prevent infestations of bugs and rot. The heated sweetwater mixture turned it into a flaming torch, exploding from his hands at the grub.

Magic that would have cleansed a midsized field of the most tenacious rot washed over the grub, making it scream like a horse in agony. The full body of the thing pulled out of the soil until it reached a man's height, almost as thick around and thrice as ugly as the most deformed freak.

And still it screamed, the ugly, bulbous head reaching through the flames to snap at the Vineart, the source of its agony. Blind, it still came dangerously close, aiming not for the Vineart's head but his hands, where the flames came from.

"Scour!" he cried again. "Root and leaf, be clean. Go!"

The decantation was a basic one, but he was no apprentice to miscast it or underestimate the power needed. It should have been a matter of moments before this was finished. Still, the grub attacked, despite the spell, and Sionio found himself pushed back one step and then another, until his back was up against the row of vines behind him, and he could retreat no farther.

What was this thing, he wondered, even as he grasped for another burst of magic, suddenly unable to concentrate through his fear. The thought occurred: grubs, even bastard monster grubs, did not appear alone. Was this nightmare beast an aberration? Or were there more, lurking below the fields, waiting to consume his entire crop? If he faltered now, might he lose it all?

The firestone flared again, driven by his own fear and protective anger. The vineyard was more than the source of his power; it was his livelihood, his life. It was everything he had worked for, from the beginning of his training until now. The idea that something as ugly, as horrible, and as ordinarily defeatable as a grub might put that at risk drove him forward again, his hands flaming bright enough to match the sun overhead. His normally calm features twisted with anger and determination as he reached out with those burning hands, reaching through his disgust and natural aversion to touch the grub.

The moment he made contact, he wanted to recoil, to let go, to wipe his hands clean of the taint. The skin of the grub was hot and slimy and wrong. This was no garden mutant, no horror of nature. This thing was magic, although how or why Sionio could not fathom. Such magic was not possible, could not be possible. . ..

Even as Sionio thought those things, he was chanting a new decantation. Not an apprentice's cantrip, but something far deeper, far stronger, and far more dangerous.

"Wither and die," he ordered the grub. "Lack of moisture, lack of rain. Overheat, wither, and die. Go."

It was less a spell than a curse, the sort that should never even be whispered in any vineyard, much less his own. Sionio poured everything he had into it, and poured that in turn into the body of the beast grub. The remaining rosewater on his hands slicked onto the grub's skin like pig oil; mixed with his spit, it had the same effect as setting a torch to dry grain.

A huge, high shriek nearly shattered the Vineart's eardrums at such close range, and the grub wavered, quivered under his grasp, and then collapsed, taking down an entire span of the vine-row with its fall.

Sionio fell back, the monster's death throes knocking him away, and he landed again on his back. He watched as the grub thrashed and writhed, and, finally, fell still.

An eerie silence fell over the vineyard. Birds did not sing overhead, slaves did not chatter, and even the wind seemed hushed. Distantly, as though through water, he could hear the faint sounds of something rustling, and recognized it, barely, as the sound of human bodies. His slaves, who had run . . . but not so far away. If he called to them, they would come back.

No. Not until he was sure the thing was dead. Slaves were not cheap, and good slaves, loyal slaves, were even more difficult to replace.

He got up and walked with steady grace to the monster's corpse. The sweetwater was gone, burned off his hands, and he could feel the depletion of the magic within his marrow. Sweetwater was dangerous to the user as well as the target. But this was still his vineyard, his lands, and so long as his feet walked the soil, there was strength here for him to take. Enough to ensure this thing was dead, and the immediate threat, gone.

The corpse was still and cooling. Dead. Even as he bent to check, the wrinkled gray form began to shimmer and shake. Before he could even jump back, sure it was some sort of trick, it imploded, leaving behind only a choking gray cloud of foul-tasting dust.

He had not caused that. Magic-born, and magic-sent, and magic-destroyed. Whoever had sent this monster against him wanted no trace left to be discovered. Who could do such a thing? Touching the grub, feeling its life-spark pulsing against his skin, enhanced by the sweetwater, had filled him with such dread, such disgust. . .magic should not cause him to shudder like that. Something lay beneath it, something dank and sour on the tongue.

He could ask no one. A Vineart would have no cause to attack him; they could not benefit from his vines, nor take over his lands. That was not their way; deviation from Sin Washer's Command to abjure power was unthinkable, unforgivable. And yet, it was a magical attack, so clearly another Vineart was involved. But who? Who could have created such an abomination of a spell? More to the point, who had bought it, used it against him?

Shaken, Sionio stood, and with a twitch of his hand summoned the slaves to him. Four came, four of the six who had worked this cluster originally. If the two who fled were not dead already, he would remedy that by nightfall. He rewarded betrayal as well as loyalty.

"Speak to no one of this," he warned the remaining four. "Speak of it, and die." No matter that he had defeated the beast, that his magic had been the greater force. The fact was that someone had attacked him- had sent this thing into his vineyard. Any whisper, any gossip that his grapes were tainted by the attack, and his reputation could be ruined forever.

The slaves dropped to the ground and, foreheads on the soil, swore their obedience. When he released them, they got to their feet and went back to work, joining the others farther away. They all nervously avoided the blasted cluster as though still expecting something else to emerge without warning.

Sionio walked to the end of the square and looked out over his lands. The ground around where the grub had fallen was seared, the vines dead where they had grown. But there was no further sense of wrongness: there had been only the one massive grub, burrowing in from below.

"Is it me?" he asked the now-still air. "Is someone spelling for me specifically? Or are others under attack as well?" If so, he had no way of knowing; the demands of the vines made Vinearts into solitary creatures, not prone to mingling with their peers, and their training made it difficult to trust others. There was not a soul he could turn to, not a soul he could ask for advice, now that his master was gone. That was the way things were.

Sionio stared out across the tops of the vines, a wave of green sloping down to a high stone wall. Odds were that this was a onetime event, a freak spell gone awry and out of control, the caster silent out of embarrassment or fear. Still, he needed to be certain.

A second wineskin was hooked to his belt, barely large enough to hold one swallow. It never left his person, too valuable to ever let out of his sight. Unlike most spellwines, this one did not fade as it aged, but grew stronger, and all he needed was that one sip.

Still, he hesitated. This was a spellwine of his own making, and difficult to craft. There would be no replacing it, not for years. But if he did not use it now, there might not be years left him if he were attacked again unawares.

Decided, he removed the skin and let the liquid within hit his tongue. It was thick and heavy, bitter and sweet like overripe berries left too long in the sun. But that sensation was overwhelmed almost immediately by the sweep of magic distilled into that potent liquid. This was different than any other spellwine: a simple command triggered its magic.

"Show me my enemy."

The spellwine complied and, in that instant of connection-and discovery-his enemy struck once more. Fatally.

HOUSE OF MALECH: HARVEST

The boy focused on what he was doing, but not so much that he failed to sense someone pause behind him, too close for comfort. He managed not to flinch as the older slave bent down to whisper. "Nice job you pulled, Fox-fur. Who'd you sweetmouth for it?"

The boy grunted, not wanting to talk, even to defend himself. Talk got you noticed. Notice was bad. Keep your face down, your hands busy, and your mouth shut, and survive. Those were the unspoken rules everyone knew.

After a minute the other slave shrugged and moved on with his own assignment. Left alone, the boy looked up into the sky, his eyes squinting as he searched the pale blue distance. He hadn't sweetmouthed anyone. Luck of the pick, was all. He wasn't going to question it. He didn't question anything; he just did as he was told.

The brightness of the open sky made his eyes water. There was a bird-a tarn, from the banding-flying overhead in search of a careless or greedy rabbit. Every year they cut back the brush to the ancient grove of trees that marked the end of the vineyard, trying to keep the rabbits and foxes from the vines. They had built stone fences and decanted spells to keep humans away, but animals were harder to convince.

This field, and the rest of it, was part of the Valle of Ivy. The valley was cut into a chessboard of fields, half green with crops, the others brown and fallow, interspersed with the occasional gnarled fruit tree, and dotted with low stone buildings. In the distance a river cut through the fields-the Ivy. The chessboard and the buildings belonged to the House of Malech, one of four Vinearts established within The Berengia, and the only one currently ranked Master. His master. The slave knew nothing of the other Vinearts or The Berengia, or what lay beyond her borders. To imagine anything beyond the vineyard and the sleep house was as impossible as flying with the tarn overhead.

At the far edge of the fields where the boy was stationed, a pair of trees-not quite so ancient, but still wider around than a man could reach-created a shelter for two low structures built of pale gray stone: the slaves' sleep house and vineyard's storehouse, where the plows and tools were kept. Those, and the open form of the vintnery behind him, made of the same stone as the enclosure's walls, were the boundaries of his world. The other buildings behind the vintnery, across a wide cobbled road, might as well have been on the other side of the Ivy, for all he knew of them.

The boy looked away from the sky and downward. Every slave in the House of Malech was working today. Summer had been warm and rainy, but those days had given way to cooler, drier mornings, and the grapes had ripened on schedule, green leaves turning a dark red at the edges, the grapes darker red yet, their skin tight over plump, juicy flesh. He could practically feel the ripeness in the air, waiting. He had learned the hard way not to mention that to anyone, the way the ripening grapes made a noise in his head, inside his bones. The one time he had asked another slave about it, he'd got beaten until his skull had bled, and the overseer had kept him out of the yards for the day.

The tarn had disappeared while he'd looked away. Now not even a cloud marred the expanse of blue, the sun already high overhead and surprisingly strong for the season. A faint breeze came down off the ridge, carrying a salty hint that cooled the sweat on his skin just enough to make it noticeable. The boy shifted, making himself as comfortable as he could, glad at least to be out of the direct sunlight, out of the fields. In the distance, past the vintner's shed, beyond the dark gray bulk of the sleep house, two score of slaves, stripped down to their loose-woven pants, worked their way up and down the groupings of waist-high vines, carefully stripping the ripe bunches from each plant one handful at a time, bending and rising in tune to some unheard rhythm.

He had done that, for three Harvests before this one, once he was old enough to be trusted. Your hands cramped after a while, and every finger cracked and bled, but not a single fruit was damaged if you could help it; each straw basket on their backs, once filled, was worth more than the slave carrying it. That was the first thing learned the very first day a slave was brought into the vineyard. You learned, and you survived, and, if your master was kind, you might even make it out of the yards, out of the sun and the rain, and away from walking stooped all your waking hours until you slept that way, too.

His master was not kind, but neither was he particularly cruel, and the boy had made it out of the yard. Barely.

Barely was enough. He could sit, and his back did not hurt, and his skin was not blistered by the sun. The Washer who traveled their road would say it was because he let the world move him rather than trying to move it. He didn't see how he could do otherwise. But there was much the Washers preached that he didn't understand.

A harvest-hire guard stood on the top of a slight rise at the edge of the field, watching the activity. A stiffened lash in his left hand tapped an irregular rhythm against his thigh as his gaze skimmed over the area being harvested. He was there more for tradition than need. It was death to steal a clutch of grapes. Death to taste one. Death to waste one. Nobles could afford spellwine, and free men might drink of vin ordinaire: slaves could not even dream of either.

The boy shifted, feeling warning prickles in his bare feet that told him he had been still too long. He looked away from the guard, letting his gaze rest on nothing in particular, waiting. That was best, to simply wait, and not draw attention.

When a basket was filled to near overflowing with fruit, the slave carrying it would place it to one side of the trellis-lane. A younger slave, not yet trusted with the picking, would come down to fetch it, leaving an empty basket in its place to be filled in turn. That slave would bring the full basket down, away from the vineyard itself to the crusher, a great wooden monster construct twice as high as a grown man and four times the length.

That was where the boy waited. His responsibility was to monitor the fill level of the wooden crusher, making sure that the right amount of fruit was added, no more and no less.

The other slave had been right; it was a good job. It was also an important job, a sign that the overseer was not displeased with him, and he felt the responsibility keenly. But the truth was that it was boring, and his legs kept falling asleep.

An old slave, his wizened limbs useless for anything else, watched from the other side, sitting in a raised wooden chair to make sure that every fruit was placed into the great wooden monster and that no slave sneaked even one fruit into his mouth. He was also there to ensure that no fingers or clothes were trapped in the process. Every year at least one slave was maimed or killed that way, the weights and beams catching the unwary or the careless. The boy had worked six Harvests since the Master bought him and seen the results: slaves missing fingers and, in one case, an entire arm, crushed to uselessness and cut off before it could turn black and stink.

Two baskets were emptied into the maw of the monster, then a third. The old slave nodded at the boy, licking his cracked, dry lips in a way that reminded the boy of the lizards that sunned themselves on the low stone walls between the vineyards. The boy looked away again, focusing all of his attention on the crusher, as though that would make the old man go away. Harvest stories weren't the only ones told in the sleep house. The younger slaves knew to stay away from that one's hands in the darkness, or when they used the shit pits at night.

The slavers had men like that, too. He had been younger then, too young, and not as careful. But the slavers were past, done with him now that he belonged to another.

The other slaves might fumble under blankets or up against shadowed walls, willingly or not. Here the boy learned how to say no without saying anything at all, to evade reaching hands without giving offense, and even as those his own age began to look around with an interested eye, he felt no desire at all, not even to use his own hand, as the others did. Fortunately, hard work and a sudden growth over the winter had finally turned his rounded limbs into harder muscle, so a slave grabbed at him at his own risk now, and the overseer had shown no interest in flesh, save that it did the work assigned to it.

That thought in mind, when the fourth basket was emptied into the belly of the crusher, he darted forward and looked inside. A dark line, the stain of years of pressings, marked the three-quarter point. The boy waved his hand in a circular motion, and one more basket was dumped in, then the heavy door was slid shut. The boy stepped back, out of harm's way, as the crusher was turned upside down with a creaking, moaning noise, like a giant moaning in his sleep. Pressure in the form of giant bladders was applied, another slave working the bellows to fill the bladders until given the command to stop, and then deflating it again. Once, he had been told, slaves did this work with their feet. Too many grapes were lost that way, the process too slow. He wondered about the feel of grapes under the soles of his feet and between his toes, tread upon like dirt, and could not imagine it.

"A good harvest, this year."

The boy tensed, his shoulders hunching up around his ears even more than usual. He had been so preoccupied with his boredom and his prickling legs, he hadn't noticed the overseer leaving his usual post and coming to stand behind him.

Stupid, stupid, he thought, trying to become invisible. The overseer had never hurt him, but you never knew what might catch his attention, and unlike the other slaves, you could not ignore him, or make him go away. The overseer was all-powerful. Even the season-hire guards were scared of the overseer.

"We shall see."

The other voice was deeper, dryer, unfamiliar but instantly recognizable by the power it carried. Even the wind stilled, and all activity halted for half a breath, then started again even more quickly than before, as though hoping to make up for that lapse. Even the insects creaking in the hedge called faster, louder.

The boy's heart squeezed dry in his chest, and his earlier fear was nothing compared to the shaking of his knees. The Master was there. "Idiot," he whispered fiercely to himself. Of course the Master was there. The Master was everywhere. Every inch of the vineyard was his, and he was in every span of soil, every clutch of fruit.

He owned everything, controlled everything. Decided everything.

It was safer in the fields, no matter that your knees and shoulders ached, to only face the overseer and his whip, and not the Vineart. Like a rabbit sensing the tarn overhead, he froze, and prayed to remain unseen.

The grapes, sun warmed and ripe near to bursting, didn't care who was watching them. Under the gentle pressure of the inflating bladders, the blood-red skins broke, and the crushed pulp and bits of skin dropped through the grate at the bottom, while the remnant of stem or leaf remained within the belly of the crusher. Another set of slaves carried the bottom pan to a large wooden vat off to the side, and carefully poured the contents into a great wooden barrel. The pulp would-like the other crushings of the day-be taken into the shade of the vintnery itself, where, the boy knew vaguely, it would be run through one of the two presses, even larger than the crusher, to create the liquid mustus and, from there, somehow, magically, spellwine.

Working the press was the most dangerous job of Harvest. Even to breathe too deeply of the smell was not allowed to a slave. And yet, the desire he felt, to draw it into your lungs, to maybe feel the touch of the magic, was almost irresistible.

You resisted. Or you died.

The boy stepped forward again; no matter how wobbly his legs or anxious his breathing, no matter how much he wanted to remain still, it was his responsibility now to ensure that all of the pulp had been emptied out, that no stems or leaves were left, and the presser was ready for another load of fruit.

The process would be repeated over and over again, until all the grapes had been stripped from the vines, or the first frost settled on the fruit, whichever occurred first. If the slaves valued their skins, they would win over the weather.

The aroma of crushed grape-flesh tickled his nose as he checked the inside of the crusher. Even as he coughed, he felt something was wrong. It was a pressure like a storm overhead, only stirring in his guts: as when something bad went into the stew and everyone had to use the pits all night.

"Nothing, nothing, you felt nothing" he whispered, barely audible even to his own ears, and stepped back into place. He could feel the presence of the overseer and the Master at his back, although he dared not look to see what they were doing. If the grapes were precious, the steps between harvesting and mustus were even more so. That was the second thing every slave learned at their very first Harvest. The mustus was where the value of the grapes were determined. A good Harvest meant the Master was pleased and the winter would be a good one, with enough rest, and food, and perhaps even a midwinter festive with music, if gleemen traveled through the area. A bad Harvest. . .

There hadn't been a bad Harvest in years. The boy would have made a sign to avert even the thought, except it might have attracted attention.

A downward push of his hand to the aged slave indicated that the barrel was clear, ready for another load, and the cycle started again.

"All the signs are positive," the overseer said, as the slaves went about their work. The two men took no more notice of them than one might of oxen drawing a plow, and the boy began to breathe a little easier. "The fruit has run clear in the first crushings, and there has been no sign of rot in any of the fruit."

The boy risked a glance sideways, to gauge how close to danger he stood. The overseer was a short, square-shouldered man, head shaved and arms tattooed; a former oarsman who had come to the estate by way of a broken and badly set leg and a debt he could not pay off. He was brutal and unflinching, and he was feared more than anything in the vineyard save the Master himself. And the boy was still far, far too close to both of them, and had no way to move without drawing unwanted notice.

The dryness in his chest moved up into his throat, and there wasn't enough spit in his entire body to keep his tongue from swelling from fear. His bowels were shivering, and his skin felt cold despite the sun's harvest warmth.

"Leave me to do the judging," the Master said, and although it was spoken mildly, the overseer bowed his shaved head to accept the rebuke. The Master was not cruel; in fact, he rarely entered the slaves' world at all, save when he walked the fields to inspect the crop, but he was the spell caster, the winemaker, the master of his fields, and not even a Berengian prince might challenge him without risk. He was the one who bought them from the slavers and they lived-and died-as his fortunes rose or fell. The overseer made sure they knew that-once bought, the price for slacking off was death, because the Master would not keep a lazy slave, and no Vineart wanted a slave trained by another.

"Wait," the Master said suddenly, holding up his hand, and every breathing soul froze. "Let me see a sampling from that crush."

"You, boy!" the overseer called, and the boy started before realizing the call was directed to another. The overseer never called them by name, although he knew them all by sight. "Bring the Master a sampling!"

The slave who had been waiting, crouched off to the side, for just such an order was a tiny thing barely a decade old, and without enough brains to be afraid. It bent a bare knee in obedience, and then ran to fetch the spoon off the wall of the vintnery. The spoon was crafted of purest silver, flat at the bottom with deep sides, and a long handle, and only the Vineart was allowed to touch it to his lips. The slave child wiped its pale hand on its smock, lifted the spoon off the hook with reverence, and then climbed up on a makeshift ladder of two planks set on bricks in order to be able to reach into the vat.

The boy held his breath, watching out of the corner of his eye. The vat, a great wooden barrel, was twice as high and four times as wide as the child, and dipping required perching on the rim and hanging on with one hand. The slave was tiny; there was no reason for the sight of it leaning against the side to fill the boy with a worse fear than even the Master's presence. And yet, a sense of dread filled him as he watched. Moving carefully, the slave child leaned forward and dipped the tasting spoon into the vat of flesh and juice, scooping out a bare mouthful into the silver depression. The dipper wobbled, and the slave child grabbed at the side.

"Sin Washer save us!" a voice cried out, quietly terrified.

The ground underneath was not even, or perhaps the slaves had not cleared the platform properly when the vat was wheeled into place for this harvest, or it might have been merest chance, or the silent gods' ill-wishing that caused the weight of the slave child to tip over the huge wooden cask; it teetered slowly before crashing down with a terrifying, sloshing noise.

"Right it! Right it, damn you!" The overseer strode forward, his short, thick crop slashing out at bodies he deemed not moving quickly enough. "You, and you! Move faster!" The slaves were throwing themselves under the side of the vat, using their bodies in vain to move it back into an upright position. Several others had grabbed containers and were trying to scoop the crushed pulp up off the ground before the valuable liquid soaked into the dry-packed dirt and disappeared.

In the chaos, only two forms stood still. One was the Vineart, his lean form aloof and above the fuss, even as the precious liquid was lost.

The other was the boy, feeling a light spray of moisture mist against his face and neck.

He licked his lips and spat instinctively, terrified that someone might have seen him possibly drink, however unintentionally. Yet he did not race to help save the spilled crush, even as a tingle of it sat on his lips, coated his tongue. He stood off to the side, his damp mouth open as though to speak, his body completely still, his dark gaze riveted on the scene, and did not move.

He couldn't move, not to save his own worthless life. His lungs could barely take in air, and the prickling in his legs was forgotten under the onslaught of sensations in his nose and throat. He should be panicking, but his thoughts were oddly calm, focusing on one single fact: there was something missing here, something that should be happening, and wasn't. It made no sense, and yet it was. He knew it, as well as he knew the feel of his own skin. Where others were panicking, he felt the desire to laugh.

The overseer noted him standing there like a wooden dolt, and jolted forward, his thickly muscled arm reaching out to grab him, shove him into useful work. The boy felt those fingers start to close on his upper arm, but the Master snapped his fingers and, as though yanked by a chain, the overseer backed off, glaring at the useless slave, but restrained.

The Vineart studied the boy, his eyes hooded and his expression thoughtful, then turned back to watch the attempted cleanup.

The boy barely noticed any of this, other than relief when the overseer backed off. He was too caught up in the attack on his senses, and the odd feel of something missing, to worry about his own safety.

Finally, the vat was righted, and the salvaged mustus returned to the container. It had been no more than a span of moments, but more than half of the liquid was lost forever, soaked into the dirt, the pulp and skins ruined beyond reclamation. The smell hung, tempting and damning, in the afternoon air.

Filled with a terrible rage that colored his face near-blue, the overseer grabbed the offending slave child by the ear and threw it down on its knees before the Master.

"Lord Malech, this worthless piece of shit awaits your judgment."

All of the slaves stopped once again, and watched.

The Vineart stared down at the slave, his long, tapered fingers stroking the fabric of his trousers thoughtfully. The boy, still frozen, staring at the now-righted vat, found his attention drawn away by that small movement. In style, the Master's clothing was not so much different from those of the slaves he owned; pants and a sleeveless tunic. Unlike their cheap, mud-colored garments, however, his were made of fine-woven cloth in a richly dyed crimson, the color of a sunrise, setting off his olive-toned skin. A heavy leather belt was wrapped twice around his hips, buckled with a metal clasp, with two leather bags and a smaller, short-handled version of the silver spoon hanging from it. He wore sturdy low-heeled leather boots on his feet, unlike even the overseer's bare and dirty toes.

"Kill it," the Master said.

No voice protested, not even the slave child; its fate had been sealed the moment the barrel was overturned. To waste, or cause waste. . .The crime was clear, and the punishment well established. The overseer nodded and drew back his whip, bringing it down on the back of the slave's neck with enough force to break it instantly.

The sound of the crack carried into the air, and-unlike the smell of the crushed grapes-dissipated there. The body collapsed, crumpled into something no longer human. Just meat.

Someone let out a long, shuddering sigh, and a sob was quickly muffled.

"Enough!" The overseer turned and glared at the remaining slaves "You, toss it into the pit, bury it with the rest of the refuse. The rest of you, back to work! The harvest will not happen on its own!"

There was a rustle of movement as all the slaves rushed to obey his orders, and then Vineart Malech raised a hand once again, a single ring glinting silver on his index finger. Every figure stopped cold, including the overseer. "That one."

All eyes turned to follow the Master's hand.

The boy's heart shriveled and dropped all the way down between his legs when he realized that finger was pointing at him.

"Bring it here," the Vineart continued.

The boy closed his eyes in resignation. He was dead. The Master was never wrong, and the Master never took note but to order death. He clasped his hands together and bent his upper body down, his gaze now on the ground as was appropriate for a slave in disgrace, but otherwise the boy showed no fear. How could one already dead, fear?

The overseer wrapped a hand around the boy's forearm, but he didn't need to drag the slave; he went calmly, almost willingly. There was no purpose to resisting. When he reached the Master's feet, he bent farther into the dirt, placing his forehead on the ground in full surrender.

In his abject pose, he could not see what happened around him. Vineart Malech looked down at him, then flicked his fingers at the overseer, indicating that the rest of the slaves were to be sent on their way. He could hear most of them scurry off, trying to become invisible so that whatever was about to happen would pass them by. A few tried to linger, but a crack of the overseer's stick made them rethink their curiosity.

"You."

"Master." The boy's voice had just broken a few weeks before, and he was embarrassed at the way it wavered on the first syllable, and then steadied in a firm tenor. "Yours is the hand and the will." The ritual words came to him, as the slavers had taught him the first night, reinforcing the lesson with beatings. Once his voice was back under control, the words were flat, neither terrified nor toadying, but merely expressing a response to a query. He had perfected that tone in the years since the slavers had sold him to the House of Malech, but until now he had used it only in response to the overseer, so he did not know if he had it right.

The Vineart apparently found nothing objectionable in the tone or the words, only his action-or lack thereof. "You did nothing to aid the spill."

"No, Master." He saw no reason to lie; the Master had seen him do nothing. He could hear the overseer lifting his stick again, prepared to beat him for his answer, but the Master stayed the blow.

"Why?"

The boy was silent, his body stiffening as though preparing for the inevitable blows to fall. Where a certain death had not shaken him, the question did. What could he answer? How did you speak excuses when you were dead?

"Why, boy?"

The boy bowed his head even lower, but had no answer.

The first blow that landed hit his backside, hard enough to shake his slender body, but still he did not speak.

The second blow moved up to the ribs, hitting under the thin top, and the stick came away bloody. He felt the blood dripping, but did not believe it. Could you still bleed when you were dead? The urge to laugh bubbled up again, and he wondered if he had gone mad.

"Boy?" The Vineart's voice had changed, from cool to curious, as though the slave's resistance had truly piqued his interest. "Why?"

"Master. I do not know why."

The third blow was directly between his shoulder blades and sent the slave sprawling flat on the ground. His body shook, but he did not move from the position, not even to lift his face out of the dirt.

They posed there, the three of them, in a motionless tableau, even as the slaves worked around them, casting frightened yet curious glances over their shoulders. He could practically hear their thoughts: The slave should have been dead by now, and yet wasn't. The Master was not one to hesitate to punish any infraction, any insolence or challenge. Why was the boy slave yet breathing?

Any change in routine was terrifying, even if it involved less violence rather than more. They wanted him dead, to make things right again. He understood. He felt the same.

"You do not know why," the Master said. It was a statement of fact, and so the boy did not respond.

"Do you have a name, boy?"

The question made no sense. Slaves did not have names, not ones the Master would know. Even the overseer was known only by his position, not the name he had arrived with. Nicknames, like Singer, Old Tree, or Fishtail, those were common. A name implied value. A name indicated worth.

It was a question, one asked of him directly. He had to answer it, somehow. The boy lifted his head from the dirt, expecting at any moment to feel another blow, this time on his neck, breaking it.

"Boy?" The Master's patience was clearly wearing thin.

The words seemed to come as though not from his own mouth but from a long distance away, lost and unexpectedly reclaimed. There had been a name once, back when he had a mother and father, and a home that did not smell of sea breeze and grapes, but horse and cold, snow and fire smoke.

"Jerzy, Master." He swallowed, having to force the name out after years of disuse and silence. "My name is Jerzy."

The Vineart nodded, as though this confirmed something he had expected. "What did you feel, Jerzy? When the crush spilled?"

What did he feel? The question again made no sense. "Nothing, Master."

"Nothing."

"Nothing, Master." He dropped back down to the ground, awaiting his punishment. What answer had the Master wanted?

"Ah. No tingle? No desire? No need to run your fingers through the liquid, to feel it touch your skin?" The words were like hooks, trying to pull something out of him.

"I. . .Master, I. . .there is something wrong with it, Master." The words spilled out of him before he even knew what he was going to say. Idiot, he thought again, and braced himself for the next blow, expecting it, at last, to be the deadly stroke.

The Vineart's expression didn't change, but he nodded once again, as though finally satisfied.

"Come with me. Now, Jerzy."

The Vineart turned and walked away, toward the taller stone building behind the vintnery that housed the Master's living quarters. The House of Malech. Forbidden territory to even approach, for a slave. The overseer aimed a kick at the slave in order to get him moving, but the boy rolled and was on his feet, nimbly avoiding the blow. The paralysis that had held him earlier was gone, and his entire body felt alive again. He was alive. He wanted, very much, to remain that way.

His face still averted, his shoulders hunched from years of habit, the slave followed his master away from the harvest and everything that had, until then, been his life.

The overseer's whipstick cracked in the air behind them, and his low growl sounded over it: the boy flinched, even though it was not aimed at him. "Back to work, you worthless bits of flesh! The sun's still up and there's fruit to be taken in! Stop wasting the Master's time!"

The boy, following blindly, almost mindlessly, felt the dry soil under his feet give way to sun-warmed paving stones, and then to the rougher cobble of the wide pathway separating vintnery from the Master's own building. He paused, risking one last glimpse over his shoulder. Already the vintnery seemed impossibly far away, the vineyard and sleep house farther yet. He felt no regret, no sense of loss to be leaving it behind. And yet, something made him stop.

Before the sleep house and the fields, there had been only the slavers' caravan. Weeks filled with endless hours of walking, of traveling from one market to another, praying to be chosen, to be overlooked, to die, to survive.

"Are you coming?" the Master asked, still in that same dry, incurious voice. "Or do you wish to stay in the fields?"

The vintnery was safe, in its own way. For the past however many years he could remember, it had been his home. But no, he didn't want to stay there.

Head bowed, the boy followed his master across the pathway, under the green arches of the entrance proper, and into the House of Malech.

*** ***

FLESH AND FIRE is now available at:

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About the Author

Laura Anne Gilman is the author of the Cosa Nostradamus novels, including the forthcoming Tricks of the Trade (November 2011) and the Nebula award-nominated Vineart War fantasy trilogy, which began with Flesh and Fire and Weight of Stone, and concludes in October with The Shattered Vine. Her story collection, Dragon Virus, was published as a limited edition hardcover from Fairwood Press, with recent stories in Fantasy Magazine (August 2011) and the anthology End of an Aeon.

A member of the on-line writers' consortium BookVew Cafe, she writes the "Practical Meerkat" advice column for writers on their blog every Friday. Learn more at www.lauraanegilman.net or follow her on Twitter: @LAGilman

Fright Court

by Mindy Klasky

As I watched Judge Robert DuBois drink a steaming glass of blood, I realized that my new job wasn't going to be the usual nine to five.

This couldn't be happening to me. I couldn't be sitting in the courtroom for the District of Columbia Night Court, watching an actual vampire devour a midnight snack. I couldn't be staring at suddenly-apparent fangs, at jet-black eyes in a whey-pale face, at a cruel and commanding supernatural jurist, where a mousy human judge had sat mere moments before.

It looked like my dream job, Court Clerk for the District of Columbia Night Court, was going to leave a little something to be desired.

"James," Judge DuBois snapped. "Do we have a problem with Ms. Anderson?"

My boss stood at attention beside me. In his impeccable dark suit, Mr. Morton looked every bit the Director of Security for the Night Court. "No, Your Honor. No problem at all."

But we did have a problem. A huge one - gaping in the center of the courtroom floor. The red-headed Amazon of a bailiff, Eleanor Owens, had pressed some hidden lever on the courtroom wall, and the sleek marble tiles started to slide back, folding away silently, one beneath another. An iron railing rose up from the emptiness below. Stairs gleamed as they marched into the darkness, and a metallic clang announced some door opening far below.

Eleanor's impressive display of violet eyeshadow glittered as she stepped away from the lever and intoned, "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Night Court of the Eastern Empire, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. May Sekhmet watch over all proceedings here and render justice unto all."

I barely had time to register the odd words before a woman walked up the shadowy stairs. Exquisitely dressed in a plum-colored suit, she was the living - or, I rapidly came to suspect - the undead image of a professional lady lawyer. She strode to the defense table and snapped open her briefcase.

A doddering old man followed behind her. Okay, he wasn't actually doddering, and he was probably only fifty-five, but he looked fat and soft and stupid next to the woman. He lugged a heavy litigation bag, one of those oversized briefcases that attorneys use to cart around endless sheaves of paper. He grunted as he hefted the satchel onto the prosecution's table.

Once both lawyers had settled into their places, Eleanor descended the stairs. My mind was reeling; I was twisting the coral ring on the middle finger of my right hand as if it could turn back time, could make everything normal again. I had only completed one year of law school, but my classes had certainly never prepared me for anything like this. Even my interview with Mr. Morton had seemed perfectly normal - he had glanced at my resume, asked me a bunch of questions about the three dozen jobs I'd held over the past few years, nodded when I explained that I was good at organizing information. He'd accepted my writing sample, told me that he was looking at a couple of other candidates, and said that he'd be back in touch.

And three days later, I was hired.

Now, sitting in the courtroom, Mr. Morton leaned forward, as two heads came into view on the secret staircase, Eleanor's and the defendant's. Clever me - I realized that the slight guy with the white-blond hair and ice-blue eyes had to be the defendant, because a gleaming silver chain was strung between his feet. That, and the fact that he wore a baggy white prison uniform, along with dirty flip-flops.

Eleanor followed behind the guy, towering over him without regard to the sneer he directed at her. She hefted a length of silver chain in her left hand; the links stood out against her heavy amethyst bracelet. In her right hand, she held a wooden stick, the length of her forearm and the width of her wrist. It tapered down to a knife-sharp point.

The Night Court bailiff held a stake.

This had to be a joke - some sort of hazing for the new girl. Mr. Morton had read my resume. He knew that I'd written my undergraduate thesis on Gothic literature in America - old horror stories, like Edgar Allan Poe. The courtroom staff must have decided to pull my leg.

Strike that. Judge DuBois didn't look like the type of guy who would put up with courtroom pranks.

This was insane. They couldn't be vampires. Vampires had no lungs. No beating hearts. I focused on Mr. Morton's starched white shirt. As soon as I saw him take a breath, I could laugh at myself. I could say that I had been taken in by a strange series of coincidences, that I'd been a gullible fool.

But he didn't breathe.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eleanor clump back to her place at the front of the bench. She proclaimed: "The matter of the Clans of the Eastern Empire versus Karl Schmidt, Judge Robert DuBois presiding."

Mr. Morton still didn't breathe.

The blond woman stood and announced, "Your Honor, we'd like to call our next witness, Ernst Brauer."

No breathing yet.

Eleanor heaved herself toward the impossible stairs in the center of the courtroom, stood at attention as another man climbed those steps. Judge DuBois ordered Brauer to take the witness stand.

No breathing at all.

My head swam. My vision clouded, and I realized that I had to get out of that room. "I can't- " I started to say, and I staggered toward the courtroom doors, doors that I had watched Mr. Morton lock behind us, a mere half hour before.

"James!" Judge DuBois snapped, and my boss's hand suddenly reached for my elbow.

"No!" I said, jerking my arm out of his reach.

"Sarah!" Mr. Morton shouted, and he blocked my way to the courtroom doors.

Before I could push past him, a snarl ripped the air - pure animal fury that shattered whatever formality remained in the courtroom. Judge DuBois slammed his gavel down, demanding order in his court. There was a clatter as the court reporter leaped to one side. Eleanor clutched her silver chain, and Mr. Morton grabbed at me again, closing his icy palm around my arm.

But none of it mattered. None of it made any difference.

Ernst Brauer crashed through the wooden gate that separated the active area of the courtroom from the spectators' seats. He pounced on me, grabbing my hair and snapping my head back like a doll's. I pounded at his chest, but I might as well have battled stone. His grip was stronger than I'd ever imagined an attacker's could be. I tried to turn sideways, to pull back toward Mr. Morton, toward safety. Brauer laughed, though, and he forced me hard against his chest, tugging at my hair with enough force to rattle my jaws.

Brauer growled deep in his throat, sounds that might have been lost syllables, twisted words. "Strangle her," I thought he said. I stared into his face. I could see his red-rimmed eyes, flaming like molten lava. I could see his cracked lips curl back in a snarl. I could see his incisors glinting like a Rottweiler's, descending even as I gaped.

I screamed as those teeth sank into my neck.

"Fire!" I shrieked. "Call 911!"

I'd taken a self-defense class in college. Some well-padded instructor had brainwashed me that onlookers were more likely to respond to warnings about fire than to everyday cries for help. The same burly guy had promised that twenty-five percent of attackers would be startled away by any loud shout.

Just my luck, Ernst Brauer wasn't in the twenty-five percent.

Panic flooded my body; my heart clenched with enough force that my entire chest hurt. Barely able to remember my training, I scrabbled for Brauer's fingers, bending them back until they broke like matchsticks.

In theory. There was no way that I was actually getting Brauer's hands to move. His fingers might as well have been made of iron.

He snarled against my throat. I actually felt his lips curve back. Hot air rushed against my skin as an inhuman sound rattled out of him. The tiny hairs on my arms rose in primitive reaction - the creature who held me was a predator, and I was prey.

My stomach lurched as I heard the pop of his teeth puncturing my flesh. For one heartbeat, I knew that I was injured, knew that I was going to bleed, and then I gasped at the actual sting of the wound, like a hundred razor nicks all at once. My blood pumped out of my body, suctioned into his mouth. His tongue drove against the pulse point in the hollow beneath my jaw, urging the flow to quicken.

Frantic, I struggled to remember other self-defense techniques. I couldn't balance in my idiotic new-job pumps; there was no way to get enough leverage to stomp on his insole, to bring my knee up into his groin. That left my hands. Not my own vulnerable fingers, my knuckles that had never delivered a real punch in my life. Instead, I bent my right hand back at my wrist, exposing the hard heel and driving toward my attacker's solar plexus. I tried to push through his body, to force every last gasp of air from his lungs so that he had no choice but to drop me while he caught his breath.

Great idea. If, you know, the guy actually needed to breathe.

If I had any doubt left about the creature that was attacking me, any suspicion that he was actually human, that I'd made some fanciful mistake by thinking he was a vampire, his reaction to my punch destroyed it. Any human man would have gulped in air after my blow. Any human man would have loosened his grip, if only for a second.

This creature only pulled me closer. He bent my neck at a steeper angle, slicing deeper with one razor fang to follow the rich lode of my jugular. I screamed as my blood began to flow faster.

Another cry matched mine. A bellow, actually. Suddenly, Eleanor was beside us, and Brauer's fangs ripped from my neck, tearing more of my flesh as he threw back his head to howl. Taking full advantage of my unexpected freedom, I staggered toward the oaken courtroom doors, toward safety.

I wanted to look away. I wanted not to see the creature before me, not to see his pointed teeth glinting with my blood. But I could not stop watching. I could not even blink as Eleanor wrestled Brauer to the ground, twisting her silver chain around his forehead, dropping it to his neck. She pulled the links tight, snapping them against each other with a vehemence that would have caused anyone - human or vampire - to wince.

The silver, though, made Brauer do more than wince. Once again, he screamed - this time in utter agony. I was almost bowled over by the stench of burning flesh. My attacker fell to his knees, slamming against the marble floor with enough force that my own legs ached. The motion knocked him silent, and I realized that he must have passed out. My suspicion was confirmed when he slumped to one side, collapsing in a heap at the toes of Eleanor's uniform boots.

In the sudden silence, the only sound that I could hear was my pounding heart. I raised a hand to my throat, catching my breath between my teeth as my torn flesh stung, as I realized just how much damage Brauer had done. I was terrified to move my fingers, too afraid to speak, to do anything that might make my wounds even worse.

My ears were ringing, and I realized that Judge DuBois had finally stopped pounding his gavel. I looked up at him, begging him to do something. And that was the first time I discovered that every single creature in the room was staring at me.

No, not at me. At my neck. At my fingers, covered with blood. At my blouse, soaked with the stuff.

Eleanor loomed over Brauer, the silver chain taut in her muscled hands. Her struggle with the witness had smeared her eyeshadow; a long purple streak disappeared into her hairline, making her look like a crazed clown. The court reporter, a skinny little guy, was peering out from behind his toppled stenography machine.

Judge DuBois was on his feet, his raptor eyes pinned to my fingers, as if he were taking an X-ray of my neck. Even the attorneys - the blond defense counsel and the disheveled prosecutor - were staring at me. My skin crawled as a high-pitched whine came from the defendant's throat. Karl Schmidt was studying me as if I were a Thanksgiving turkey, and he was a man who had been denied food for days. Weeks. A year, at least.

"James," Judge DuBois said. "Now."

Now? What?

I whirled back to the one person who wasn't in my line of sight. Mr. Morton stood directly behind me, close enough that I let out a bark of surprise. He reached toward me, but I lurched backward, even though the motion took me closer to Brauer, closer to all of the others. I couldn't let him touch me, couldn't let him put his frozen flesh on mine. My retreat made my heart pound even faster, and I started to panic when I felt more liquid seep between my fingers.

"Sarah," Mr. Morton snapped, and his left hand shot out, closing around my wrist before I could protest. He pulled me toward the oak doors, toward the hallway and supposed safety. He had to be crazy, though. I wasn't going anywhere with him. I wasn't going anywhere with any of these ravenous creatures, any of these monsters who were staring at me like I was some three-course gourmet meal, laid out on a spotless white tablecloth.

I jerked my hand away from Mr. Morton's.

Or, rather, I tried to jerk my hand away. He must have sensed the motion before I'd even thought to act; his fingers tightened around my wrist like a vise. "Let me go!" I shrieked.

"Sarah." He might have been instructing me on proper alphabetic order for filing, for all the emotion in his tone.

"Leave me alone!" I fought to free myself, and my right foot slipped on the marble floor.

Even as I struggled to regain my balance, Karl Schmidt lunged toward me, screaming, "Feeder bitch!"

The woman in the plum suit was faster than she looked. Stronger, too. She caught her client in a cross-body hold and refused to let him go. I didn't have a chance to feel grateful, though. She bared her own incisors, hissing at me like an angry cat.

"Sarah," Mr. Morton said again, implacably calm. "Come with me. Now."

What choice did I really have?

Better to follow Mr. Morton out of the room, away from the group of vampires. Better to deal with one, than with half a dozen. Even though every shred of logic said I shouldn't, I let Mr. Morton lead the way to the locked courtroom doors. I couldn't help but walk sideways, though, trying to keep an eye on both the ravenous creatures behind me and the man - strike that - the vampire who was my boss.

Apparently, my concern wasn't absurd. When we reached the double doors, Mr. Morton manhandled me to stand in front of him. He shielded me with his body, hiding me from the others. Someone back there whined, like a dog waiting for kibble. It took forever for Mr. Morton to work the deadbolt. I gasped in frustration, and I saw his head twitch; he was clearly drawn to the blood that leaked between my fingers when I moved. As soon as the lock was sprung, I leaned into the panic bar, letting the weight of my body move the door.

Mr. Morton shifted his grip to my forearm before I could escape down the empty hallway. "Don't even think about it," he said. "You need help."

"I'll call a doctor."

"And tell him what?"

I couldn't believe it. There was actually a hint of a smile on his lips, the barest turn at the hard corners of his mouth. He wasn't amused enough, though, to let me go. Instead, he used his free hand to reach into his trousers pocket, to extract a keyring and relock the courtroom door. Ever the professional. No one was going to stumble on the Night Court by mistake. Not on Mr. Morton's watch.

He took all of three steps, quick-marching me down the hall, before I lost my balance. I really was trying to move my feet, but my toes forgot to come along. I recovered from that first stumble, but my next step made my head swim. Apparently unaware of my confusion, Mr. Morton tugged at my arm, muttering under his breath as his fingers slipped down to my crimson-slicked hematite bracelet. His motion was enough to upset my balance completely. My knees buckled, and darkness swooped in like Poe's intractable raven.

"God damn it!" I heard Mr. Morton say, and a tiny part of my brain was surprised to hear him swear. He was too proper to swear. Too reserved.

But there was nothing proper about the way he lifted me off my feet. Nothing proper about the way he cursed at me when I started to protest. Nothing proper about the way he barged into his office, about the way he dropped me onto the black leather couch that hulked against the wall.

Leather. I shouldn't bleed all over leather.

Still dazed, I realized that my fingers had slipped off my neck, that my blood was flowing freely now. I fought to regain my grip, but my hand was tingling; I couldn't figure out where my skin ended and the electric air in the room began.

I closed my eyes, the better to concentrate on such a strange sensation. It wasn't just my fingers. My toes had dissolved as well. I wiggled them, trying to figure out where they'd gone. I used to have shoes, brand new shoes. But they were gone. Everything was gone now. I was just floating, a drifting swirl of thought….

"Sarah," someone said from very far away. I didn't want to listen. I just wanted to follow the irregular drumbeat that tickled the back of my brain, the thumping sound that was fading away, so soft now that I could barely make it out against my syncopated breathing.

"Sarah!" That voice was more insistent, more demanding. Still, there was no reason to respond. Not when I could just fall back into the darkness forever. Not …when …I …could…

I forgot my words and drifted away into the nothingness.

But then, there was something - a sharp smell, hot, like a penny roasting in the sun, sparking beneath my nose. I had a nose. And I had a mouth, as well. A mouth, with lips and tongue and teeth. My teeth were pressed against something, something soft and yielding. My tongue darted out, and I tasted …not copper. Not exactly. This was salty and hot, like chicken soup in the middle of a blizzard.

Strike that. Not soup.

This was velvety and pure, hot and delicious. I swallowed, once, twice, a third time. Heat spread through my body. I was drinking, but it felt as if I were inhaling some distilled essence of power. A vibrating energy filled my chest; it expanded inside me, doubling, and doubling again. It pumped through my arms to my hands, to the very tips of my fingers. It echoed inside my legs, past my knees, through my ankles and into my feet.

My flesh ignited with the sweetness of the drink, the sweetness and the saltiness and the pure, tawny wholeness of it. I could feel the rough ridges where my pantyhose had run as I stumbled through the hallway - when was it? A lifetime ago? I could feel a hangnail on my right thumb, sense it tingle before it closed itself up, before it disappeared.

And I could feel the mangled mess beneath my jaw. My torn vein was weaving itself together, knitting itself back to health. The flow of blood was restored beneath my skin, and the smooth stretch of my neck was new again.

With the healing came full awareness. Full comprehension. I knew that I was on a leather sofa. That I was cradled against a body. Arms were wrapped around me, holding me close, spoon fashion. My face was pressed against one of those arms, against a smooth, muscular wrist. My lips were suckling at the edges of a wound.

I was drinking Mr. Morton's blood.

I pulled back, horrified. My motion, though, only moved me closer to his chest, closer to the body that sheltered me, that protected me. Closer to the vampire who was my boss. "Let me go!" I demanded, but I was still too dazed to put actions to words, to actually push myself away from him.

"In a moment," he said, and his words reverberated along the length of my spine.

I should have been petrified. I should have fought for freedom, given my life to escape to the human world, to the sane world, to the normalcy that waited somewhere outside this office. But the energy inside me - the alien blood inside me - soothed me, calmed me as if it were a drug. I sank back, dazed by the sensation that all was right, that I was safe.

I licked my lips, and I realized that the blood carried information. I knew things that I'd only imagined an hour before. A lifetime before. I understood vampires - who they were, what they did, how they lived, year after year after year, forever, unless they were killed.

Vulnerable to silver: check, as I'd already witnessed back in the courtroom.

Destroyed by sunlight: check, if "destroyed" meant increasingly severe burns tied to the length of exposure, culminating in brutal, cindery death.

Killed by stake: check, but only with a direct blow to the heart, with a weapon made of oak.

Teleporting, mind-reading, turning into a mist: nope, nothing that cinematic.

Garlic, crosses, and other pathetic human folk remedies to protect against fangs: forget about it.

Vampires didn't need to sleep in coffins, and they didn't salvage earth from some distant homeland. They did require an explicit invitation before they could cross the threshold of a home. And somehow, creepiest of all, they had no reflection - not in a mirror.

All of that was crystal clear inside my head. All of that, and one more fact: vampire blood healed humans. Healed humans completely, from whatever physical harm we suffered, from whatever illnesses our weak, flawed bodies harbored.

Vampire blood had brought me back from the very brink of death.

*** ***

Read FRIGHT COURT in serialized form at www.mindyklasky.com

About the Author

Mindy Klasky learned to read when her parents shoved a book in her hands and told her that she could travel anywhere in the world through stories. She never forgot that advice.

As an author, Mindy's travels have taken her through various literary genres. In addition to her traditional fantasy novels written for Roc (including the award-winning, best-selling The Glasswrights' Apprentice), Mindy has written light paranormal novels for Mira (the As You Wish series) and Red Dress Ink (the Jane Madison series). Mindy has also written category romance novels for Harlequin Special Editions, along with several short stories and nonfiction essays.

In her spare time, Mindy quilts, knits, and tries to tame the endless to-be-read shelf in her home library. Her husband and cats do their best to fill the left-over minutes. You can keep in touch with Mindy through her website at www.mindyklasky.com.

The Heretic

(A Templar Chronicles Novel)

by Joseph Nassise

Niall O’Connor watched those around him intently. It was early evening, and the Vienna streets were still crowded, which could make spotting a tail difficult. He was a veteran of this kind of operation, however, and so he took his time, carefully examining his surroundings. When he was certain he hadn’t been followed from the museum, he stepped into the phone booth on the corner and shut the Plexiglas door behind him. Ignoring the mounted public telephone, he removed a satellite phone from his pocket and dialed an overseas number from memory.

The phone rang several times before it was picked up. O’Connor could sense someone’s presence at the other end, could hear the sound of breathing, but nothing was said, not even hello.

Into that silence, O’Connor said, “It’s done.”

“And?” The voice was deep and liquid, like water running over gravel.

“The Hofberg object is a fake.”

Another long moment of silence. Then, “And the other?”

O’Connor thought back to the long hours he’d spent in the Vatican Basilica; the endless lines, the quiet hope of the faithful, the majestic beauty of the cathedral itself. He’d walked beneath Michelangelo’s Dome and examined the pilasters, the four square columns that supported it, paying particular attention to the great statues of the saints - Andrew, Helena, Veronica, and Longinus - that rested in niches within them.

There was power in the cathedral, great power. He’d sensed its ebb and flow as it reacted to the faith of those inside; in some fashion almost every object within the building had glowed with traces of it. Even the statue of St. Peter, its right foot worn smooth after generations of caresses by the faithful, had glistened with the faintest of auras though it wasn’t known to be anything more than an ordinary sculpture.

The greatest concentration of power had clearly been beneath the Dome. Three of the four statues that he’d examined had blazed with it, a result of the True Relics each of them contained, relics that were easily discernible to a man of his particular talents.

But the statue of Saint Longinus, the one supposedly containing the remnant of the Holy Lance, had not. It was barren, bereft of the same spark of Divinity that so encased the other statutes and their contents.

“That’s a fake, too,” he said.

“You’re certain?”

“Yes. I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“Very well. Return to us, and we will begin the next phase of the operation.”

“As you wish.”

O’Connor closed his satellite phone, put it back in his pocket, and stepped out of the phone booth. Night had come, the Vienna air grown cold and still. He pulled the collar of his greatcoat closer about his neck, glancing around again as he did so. When he was satisfied that he was still alone, he walked to the end of the street, gazing in contempt at the closed iron gates of the Hofberg palace as he passed. Reaching the intersection, he paused for a moment to light a cigarette, waiting for the traffic signal to change. When it had, he stepped out into the street, confident in the performance of his mission and already dreaming of the ways in which he would spend his exorbitant fee.

The smile of expectation still on his face, he didn’t see the city bus surge through the intersection against the light, didn’t see the wide front grill bearing down on him until it was far too late.

O’Connor’s body bounced off the unyielding surface of the speeding vehicle, flipped high into the air and came crashing back down several yards away. From where he lay broken and twisted in the gutter, his dead eyes stared through the windshield of the vehicle at the empty driver’s seat.

Across the Atlantic, in a darkened room, a grey hand reached out in the half-light and finally replaced the phone, severing the connection.

*** ***

As the SUV turned in through the torn and twisted wrought-iron gates that had once guarded the entrance to the estate, Knight Sergeant Sean Duncan looked out the window at the destruction around him and knew the rumors were true.

The devil had indeed come to Connecticut.

The damaged gates were only the first indication.

The marble statue of the angel that had stood watch over the entrance to the commandery now rested on its back in the middle of the drive, one wing still stretched wide, the other crumbled into fragments a short distance away. Its stone eyes gazed unflinchingly at the sky above as if searching for repentance. In the grass just beyond, a group of knights were laying out the bodies of those who had fallen in defense of the gate, the long rows designed to make it easier for the mortuary team as they sought to identify each corpse. Duncan crossed himself and said a quick prayer for the dead men’s souls. Farther on, past the lawn, the still-smoking remains of a Mercedes sat in the cul-de-sac before the manor house, the once-fine leather seats cooked to a crisp and melted across the steel springs beneath.

He’d seen his share of combat; it came with the job, but he’d never heard of a Templar commandery being attacked directly. The Holy Order of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon, or the Knights Templar as they were once commonly known, existed in secret, away from men’s prying eyes. The days when the Order guarded the route to the Holy City had long since passed, the general public was no longer even aware of their existence. Finding the base should have been difficult, assaulting and overwhelming its defenses nearly impossible.

But someone had done both.

According to popular belief, the Templars had been destroyed in the 14th century when the Order was accused of witchcraft and the Pope had burned their Grand Master at the stake for the heresy. In truth, the Order had gone underground, hiding its wealth, disguising its power and managing to remain a viable independent entity right up through the end of the First World War. A treaty with Pius XI was followed by a reversal of their excommunication, and the Templars were reborn as a secret military arm of the Vatican. Their mission: to defend mankind from supernatural threats and enemies.

There were thousands of members worldwide, organized into local commanderies. These in turn were gathered into continental territories, each led by a Preceptor. The Preceptors reported to the Seneschal, who in turn answered to the Order’s Grand Master, the individual who governed the entire order from its Scottish base at Rosslynn Castle. While the Order was primarily allowed to run itself, it was still an arm of the Vatican. Over the years the Holy See had appointed three cardinals to interact with the Order’s senior leaders to help guide the group along a path that did not conflict with the Pope’s wishes.

The commandery in Westport, Connecticut, known as Ravensgate, was one of the largest on the East Coast. Only the Preceptor’s headquarters in Newport, Rhode Island, dwarfed it. The grounds consisted of thirty-eight acres of rolling green hills bounded on all sides by woodland, putting their nearest neighbors more than two miles away. The manor house was enormous; forty seven rooms, from the firing range in the basement to a chapel in the north wing.

And now it was in ruins.

The driver pulled to a halt next to the smoldering car, and Duncan stepped cautiously out, his hand on the butt of his weapon. The smell of scorched leather and gasoline washed over him, though the stench of burning flesh he’d expected was mercifully absent. As the rest of his protective detail took up position around the vehicle, Duncan continued to assess the scene. He glanced once more out over the lawn at the work crews and then he turned his attention to the manor house itself.

The damage here was no less extensive. The windows had all been blown out; the odd pieces of glass that remained in their frames reflected the rising sun with little flashes of brilliance here and there, but not a single pane remained intact. The front door was smashed, its splintered pieces still hanging haphazardly in the frame. Bullet holes pockmarked the entryway and surrounding facade. There was a three-foot-long crack in the marble steps leading up to the door. The sight of it made Duncan’s blood run cold. The amount of force it must have taken…

Despite the destruction, there didn’t appear to be any immediate threat, so Duncan passed the signal to the driver in the car behind him. A moment later the rear door opened, and Joshua Michaels, Preceptor for the North Atlantic Region, stepped out.

Duncan was the head of the Preceptor’s security detail and ultimately responsible for the man’s safety in much the same fashion that the Secret Service watched over and protected the president of the United States. He’d held the post for the last three years; the first for Michaels’ predecessor and the last two for Michaels himself. It was a highly respected position and one that gave Duncan significant insight into whatever current matters the Order was involved in.

Right now that meant finding out who, or what, had attacked them so viciously.

The Preceptor had chosen to be on-site for the investigation, and they’d quickly made the trip from Rhode Island. A temporary command center had been set up inside the manor house, and it was from there that Michaels intended to oversee the activity.

Duncan took his position at the Preceptor’s side, the rest of the team forming up around them. As one they mounted the steps and entered the manor house. Inside they were immediately met by a group of officers, who led them to a room down the hall. As they walked, one of the local commanders brought the Preceptor up to speed, his low voice the only sound other than the clump of the men’s booted feet.

A video-conferencing unit had been assembled in the corner of the command center and, upon arrival, Michaels headed directly to it. A technician activated the link, and a moment later, Cardinal Giovanni’s face filled the screen.

“What can you tell me, Joshua?” the older man asked.

“Not much yet, I’m afraid, Your Eminence. As you know, the commandery was attacked at some point during the night. Our best guess puts the event in the neighborhood of 3:00 A.M., though we’ll be able to narrow that down some once the mortuary team has had the chance to do its work.

“The intruders breached the gates, then struck directly at the manor house. We’ve been unable to determine if they were after anything else aside from the destruction of the commandery, but it’s still early yet. We should know more as the investigation continues. The site’s been secured, and the bodies are being tended to. At this point we’ve yet to find a single survivor. It’s starting to look like we’re not going to either. Whoever they were, they were thorough.”

The cardinal’s response was drowned out as the connection momentarily faltered. The Preceptor simply went on, wanting to get the worst of it out of the way and on the table quickly. “Based on what I’ve seen and learned so far, I’m going to hand the investigation over to Knight Commander Williams and his team.”

The cardinal visibly recoiled from the camera in surprise. “The Heretic? Are you certain that’s wise?”

“I am,” the Preceptor replied. “He’s absolutely ruthless. He can’t be bribed, he can’t be tempted, and he won’t stop until he’s discovered who or what is behind this attack. His men are all combat veterans, with the experience and firepower necessary to deal with anything they might uncover, human or otherwise. If the situation is as bad as I’m beginning to believe, I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have leading the investigation.”

Listening in, Duncan wasn’t so sure he agreed. While Williams was technically a member of the Order, having gone through the investment ceremony just like every other initiate who petitioned for membership, he and his Echo Team unit operated more like freelance operatives than true Knights of the Order. Where members of other units were selected and rotated regularly by the regional leaders, Cade handpicked all of his men, and they stayed with the unit until death or injury forced them out. Where other units answered up the chain of command to the Preceptors, Echo Team reported directly to the Knight Marshal, only two steps removed from the Grand Master himself. They had a reputation for bending the Rule, the laws by which the Order operated, and of occasionally following their own agenda. Rumors swirled around Commander Williams like the tide. He’d been accused of everything from practicing witchcraft to speaking with the dead. He was both feared and revered, depending upon to whom you were talking. His nickname, the Heretic, was a result of that fear and the belief among some that he was nothing but a wolf in sheep’s clothing, destined to corrupt the Order from within. Duncan tended to agree with them.

But this wasn’t his call to make.

The cardinal’s expression clearly showed the dissatisfaction he had with the idea, but like a good general he let his people on the ground make the decisions. Reluctantly, he nodded in agreement. “Very well. Keep me informed of your progress.”

“I will. Good night and God bless, Your Eminence.”

With a hand raised in blessing, the other man said good-bye and the television screen went dark.

Once the connection had been cut, Duncan didn’t hesitate. “With all due respect, sir, I think you are better off putting one of the other teams on this. Williams might be more trouble than he’s worth.”

The Preceptor turned to face him, shaking his head in disagreement. “I know he can be difficult to work with, Duncan, but it’s his very independence that can benefit us here. Whoever did this knew not only the location of the commandery, but also how to take it by surprise. Without, I remind you, a single word of warning escaping to the rest of us. That takes more than overwhelming force, it takes detailed knowledge of who and what they would be facing.”

“You believe they had inside knowledge,” Duncan said, giving voice to the suspicion that he’d been harboring ever since he’d heard of the attack. “You’re bringing in the Heretic because of his lack of political connections then.”

“Correct, though that’s not my primary reason for using him. I’m convinced that Echo Team is the right choice for the job. They’re veterans; they know what they’re doing. We’re going to need the many years of knowledge and skill that they’ll be bringing to the table.”

Based on what he’d seen outside, Duncan couldn’t argue with that.

“Last I’d heard the team was on a two-week leave. Track down Commander Williams and get him here ASAP.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Duncan moved to carry out his orders, he wondered just how bad things were going to get.

*** ***

Williams was at that moment in an alley in one of Connecticut’s rougher neighborhoods, watching the front of a two-story dwelling just up the street from his position. The smell of garbage from the Dumpster he was using for cover was heavy in the early-evening air, though Cade had gotten used to the stench.

“TOC to all units. You have compromise authority and permission to move to Green. I say again, Green.” The bone-mike was pressed securely against his lower jaw, the high-tech device carrying his words clearly to the rest of his team though they were spoken in no more than a whisper.

“Five. . .”

He pictured the assault group sitting in their specially modified Expeditions half a block away, the breaching rams in their laps. He knew they were concentrating on the sequence to come; who gets out first, who hits the door first, how to say “drop your gun” in Spanish.

“Four. . .”

His thoughts jumped to the sniper teams on the adjacent rooftops, his eyes and ears since this assault began. He knew their preparations intimately, from the way they slid that first bullet into the breach with their fingertips, needing the reassurance of feeling it seat properly, to the thousands and thousands of rounds they’d fired, learning the way the weapons reacted to heat and wind and weather.

“Three. . .”

He knew that his sharpshooters were aligning their bodies with the recoil path of their weapons, pressing their hips against the ground, and spreading their knees shoulder width apart for stability. He knew what it was like to stare through a Unertl ten-power scope at the target, watching, waiting for the moment. He’d been there himself, too many times to count.

“Two. . .”

Discipline was the name of the game, and in Cade’s unit, it was the only game being played. The stakes were too high, the consequences too horrible for it to be anything but deadly serious.

“One. . .”

His men took out the two guards standing near the front door from 250 yards away, the impact of their .308 caliber rounds knocking the targets backward into the tall grass on either side of the front stoop with barely a sound. As the bodies hit the ground the Expeditions slammed to a halt out front, the rest of Echo Team swarming the house. The front and back doors fell victim to the breaching rams, flash-bangs quickly following, then Cade’s men were inside. Brief, sporadic gunfire reached his ears, then silence.

Cade held his breath.

“Echo-1 to TOC. Structure is clear. Objective is secured.”

“Coming in,” Cade replied. He would have preferred his usual position on one of the entry teams. He was the type of commander who led by example, not from the sidelines, and staying behind as tactical operations command had been a test of his patience; but his concern over their target’s ability to detect his presence had won out over his need to be involved in the action. The need for stealth was over. Signaling Riley, his second-in-command, Cade emerged from cover and strode briskly forward.

He swept up the steps and entered the house, ignoring the snipers’ victims lying in the uncut grass on either side of the porch. As he moved swiftly through the lower floor he passed four other bodies, all young Hispanic males, each lying in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. He had no sympathy for their wasted lives; they were on the wrong side of this conflict, and the unflinching hand of righteousness had finally caught up with them. If anything, he was simply pleased that there were four fewer gangbangers on the city streets. It was the man that his team held captive in the kitchen that truly mattered to Cade. Everything and everyone else beyond that was just a means to an end.

Juan Alvarez was seated in the middle of the room in an old chair, his arms pulled back between the steel posts supporting the seat back and his hands secured together with a set of nylon flex cuffs. Wilson and Ortega stood a few feet to either side of the prisoner, their HK MP5s at the ready and aimed in his direction.

His pistol still in hand but pointed at the floor, Cade crossed the room to stand in front of the prisoner. Alvarez looked as if he had just been roused from sleep; his normally slicked-back hair was in disarray, and all he was wearing was a pair of hastily donned jeans. His usual air of smug superiority was still in place, however.

Cade fully intended to change that.

Alvarez had been under surveillance by Echo Team for the last three weeks. During that time it quickly became clear that the Bridgeport police were correct in their suspicions; Alvarez was indeed the primary conduit for the movement of heroin through Connecticut and into the rest of New England.

Cade didn’t care about the drugs.

He wanted Alvarez for a far more personal reason, and he wasted no time getting to the point.

“Where is he?” Cade asked.

The prisoner gave him a look of disdain, and a stream of rapid-fire Spanish poured forth from his mouth. Cade understood enough to know that it was more a commentary on his mother’s background than an answer to his question.

Shaking his head in resignation, Cade nodded to Riley.

The larger man stepped forward and gripped the back of the prisoner’s chair, holding it tightly.

Cade moved closer, placed the barrel of his pistol against the prisoner’s left kneecap, and, without another word, pulled the trigger.

Blood flew.

Alvarez screamed.

Riley held the chair firmly in place against the man’s struggles.

Cade waited patiently until the screaming stopped. Then, softly, he said, “I don’t have time for this. I asked you a question. I want an answer. Where is the Adversary?”

This time, the answer was in English.

“Drop dead, asshole. I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about.”

Expressionless, Cade shot him in the other leg, shattering the man’s right kneecap.

Alvarez writhed in agony, his muscles straining against the pain. Riley’s arms tensed, but that was the only outward sign of the increased effort he exerted to hold the prisoner securely in place.

Over the wounded man’s cries, Cade shouted, “Tell me where he is!”

The prisoner lapsed back into Spanish, cursing his interrogator vehemently; but he did not acknowledge Cade’s demand. His blood flowed down his legs and began to pool on the cracked linoleum beneath his feet.

Cade snorted in disgust and motioned Riley out of the way. The sergeant lost no time in following orders.

Cade raised the gun and pointed it at the prisoner’s face. “Last chance.”

With that, Alvarez went abruptly still. His eyes lost focus, as if listening to a voice no one else could hear, and his face went slack. Out of the corner of his eye Cade caught Riley looking at him quizzically, but he kept his eyes on the prisoner, watching him closely and didn’t respond.

Without a change in expression, Alvarez began to shake. His head twisted from side to side erratically as it shuddered atop his neck, darting this way and that like a hyperactive hummingbird. His mouth opened wide, stretching impossibly far. It seemed as if he was screaming, but no sound issued forth. Finally, with a loud pop, his lower jaw dislocated itself.

Cade calmly watched, his gun unwavering from the target.

The shaking intensified, the legs of the chair skipping and bumping against the tiles, leaving little skid marks in the blood pooling beneath Alvarez’s feet. A strange squealing sound came from his throat. Alvarez’s eyes bulged from their sockets, and blood ran freely from his ears.

Still, Cade stood and waited.

It was only when a widening crack appeared in the center of the prisoner’s forehead, a crack that dripped a substance far darker than blood, that Cade reacted.

With a twitch of his trigger finger, he put a bullet through Alvarez’s skull.

The prisoner and his chair went over backward to lie still on the blood-stained tiles.

In the silence that followed, no one moved for several long moments as they waited to be certain the thing that had once been Juan Alvarez was good and truly dead, then Cade gave the signal, and the team went instantly into motion. One of the men policed the brass from the floor while another checked to be certain no one had left anything behind that might betray their presence in the house. Thirty seconds later the team was filing out the front door and climbing back into the Expeditions, with Cade and Riley taking open seats in the lead vehicle.

Less than five minutes after entry the team was on its way, leaving behind seven bodies to lie cooling in the darkness.

*** ***

Later that night.

He stands alone in the center of the street, in a town that has no name. He has been here before, more than once, but each time the resolution is different, as if the events about to transpire are ordained by the random chance found in the motion of a giant spinning wheel, a cosmic wheel of fortune, and not by the actions he is about to take or has taken before.

He knows from previous experience that, just a few blocks beyond this one the town suddenly ends, becoming a great plain of nothingness, the landscape an artist’s canvas that stands untouched, unwanted.

This town has become the center of his universe.

Around him, the blackened buildings sag in crumbling heaps, testimony to his previous visits. He wonders what the town will look like a few weeks from now, when the confrontation about to take place has been enacted and re-enacted and reenacted again, until even these ragged shells stand no more. Will the road, like the buildings, be twisted and torn?

He does not know.

He turns his attention back to the present, for even after all this time, he might learn something new that could lead him to his opponent’s true identity.

The sky is growing dark, though night is still hours away. Dark grey storm clouds laced with green-and-silver lightning are rolling in from the horizon, like horses running hard to reach the town’s limits before the fated confrontation begins. The air is heavy with impending rain and the electrical tension of the coming storm. In the slowly fading afternoon light the shadows around him stretch and move. He learned early on that they can have a life of their own.

He avoids them now.

The sound of booted feet striking the pavement catches his attention, and he knows he has exhausted his time here. He turns to face the length of the street before him, just in time to see his foe emerge from the crumbled ruins at its end, just as he has emerged each and every time they have encountered one another in this place. It is as if his enemy is always there, silently waiting with infinite patience for him to make his appearance.

Pain shoots across his face and through his hands, phantoms of the true sensation that had once coursed through his flesh, from their first meeting in another time and place. Knowing it will not last, he waits the few seconds for the pain to fade. Idly, he wonders, not for the first time, if the pain is caused by his foe or by his own recollection of the suffering he once endured at the enemy’s hands.

He smiles grimly as the pain fades.

A chill wind suddenly rises, stirring the hairs on the back of his neck, and in that wind, he is certain he can hear the soft, sibilant whispers of a thousand lost souls, each and every one crying out to him to provide solace and sanctuary.

The voices act as a physical force, pushing him forward from behind, and before he knows it he is striding urgently down the street. His hands clench into fists as he is enveloped with the desire to tear his foe limb from limb with his bare hands. So great is his anger that it makes him forget the other weapons at his disposal in this strange half state of reality.

The Adversary, as he has come to call him in the years since their first, life-altering encounter, simply stands in the middle of the street, waiting. The Adversary’s features are hidden in the darkness of the hooded cloak that he wears over his form in this place, his mocking laughter echoes clearly off the deserted buildings and carries easily in the silence.

The insult only adds fuel to Cade’s rage.

Just as he draws closer, the scene shifts, wavers, the way a mirage will shimmy in the heat rising from the pavement. For a second it regains its form and in that moment Cade has the opportunity to glimpse the surprise in the other’s face, then everything dissolves around him in a dizzying spiral of shifting patterns and unidentified shapes.

When the scene solidifies once more, he finds himself standing in a cemetery. Large, carefully sculpted angels adorn the nearest of the gravestones, with only the word Godspeed carved beneath them. Older, more decayed stones decorate the other burial plots nearby, but he is not close enough to see the details etched there.

A sense of urgency grips him in its bony fist.

It forces him into motion, and he sets off across the lawn, winding in and out between the stones, letting that feeling guide his passage until he sees a small plot set off from the rest by a white picket fence. In the strange twilight, the rails of the fence gleam with the wetness of freshly revealed bone. The coppery tang of blood floats on the night air.

As he moves closer he can see that the earth on the other side of the fence has been freshly disturbed. A grave lies open, a gaping hole in the peaceful sea of green grass that surrounds it, filled with a darkness deeper than that of the night sky above. This intrusion of the landscape and of the sanctity of the place draws him closer still, pulling him in toward it the way a fly is coaxed into a spider’s web.

He stops just short of the small fence and gazes down into the darkness of the grave.

Unable to see clearly, he places one hand on the fence and leans forward, straining to get a better look.

Something moves down there, a furtive motion.

Beneath his hand the fence begins to twist and turn, tumbling him forward toward the darkness of that open grave, just as two eyes gleam hungrily from that inky murk&hellip.

Cade awoke in the darkness of his bedroom, his heart pounding and his body slick with cold sweat. He lay still for a moment, gathering his breath, and reached out for the phone in the second before its shrill ring pierced the silence of the bedroom.

“I’m on my way,” he said into the receiver, then hung up before the startled novice placing the call could explain the reason for the late-night summons.

He does not need that information.

The dream has already told him everything he needs to know.

THE HERETIC, book one of the Templar Chronicles series, is now available for just $3.99 at:

Amazon USA

Amazon UK

Barnes & Noble

Sony Reader store

About the Author

Joe is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the internationally bestselling Templar Chronicles trilogy, and several installments in the Rogue Angel action-adventure series from Harlequin/Gold Eagle.

He’s a former president of the Horror Writers Association, the world’s largest organization of professional horror writers, a two time Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award nominee, and a writing coach who enjoys working with other writers and helping them attain their publishing dreams.

Connect with him online at:

www.josephnassise.com

www.thetemplarchronicles.com

House of the Star

by Caitlin Brennan

Between the lake of fire and the river of ice, Elen faced the truth. She was lost. The road that had been so wide and straight when she began had dwindled into the faint line of a footpath. Now even that was gone. Her stolen map showed neither the world ahead nor the world behind. Whenever she tried to turn back, the baying of hounds sent her stumbling forward again.

As the road melted away to nothing in front of her, the hounds' cries faded away. She stood on the barren hillside, exhausted and footsore and weak with hunger and thirst. Long hours ago when there was still a road to follow, she had stumbled as she ran, and a bone-white hound had sprung upon her. Its snapping jaws had torn the pack of provisions from her back and the talisman from around her neck, the worn silver medallion that should have guided and protected her.

She pressed her hands to her eyes. The ice had frozen the tears, and the fire had burned them away. She kept seeing things on the edge of vision, skeletal horses and ghostly riders, watching, hovering, making no sound. Sometimes, if she slanted her glance just so, she saw the one who led them: a tall shape with a crown of spreading antlers. His eyes on her were dark and still.

Above her, winged things circled, waiting for her to fall. Those, she saw clearly. They looked as small as songbirds, but one had come down when she first stumbled onto the hill, and its wings had shadowed the whole of the summit.

It tilted its scaly head and fixed her with a cold yellow eye, and clashed its long hooked beak. She tensed to run, as if anything could escape that monstrous thing, but it turned and beat upward in a swirl of leathery wings.

Its stench nearly felled her- and it told her why the creature waited. It fed on dead things. She was alive.

It would wait, its eye had said.

She was not going to die. She clung to that. She was going to live.

In her head she held a picture of a barn, a pasture, a herd of horses. It was green and quiet, peaceful- safe. She only had to find it.

*** ***

"You will go," the queen had said to Elen a day or an eon ago, far away in Ymbria.

Her gown was the color of the night sky, scattered with gems like stars, and her crown was set with a white stone like the moon. She was tall and dark and terrible, and her will was as strong as cold iron.

Elen was dusty and muddy and covered with a spring mantle of horsehair; her thick black hair was snarled half out of its braid. The queen's summons had brought her up from the stables with no time to stop or bathe or make herself presentable.

She faced the royal majesty with great respect and perfectly equal stubbornness. "I can't."

"This is not a matter of can or will," said the queen. "This is must."

Elen shook her head. "No. I won't go."

The queen took off her crown and laid it on a table. Its weight had marked her forehead deeply, but when she rubbed it, Elen could see that the ache came from deeper inside. "Why, daughter? This has been your dream since you were old enough to clamber up on a pony. Now you can have it. You can travel to Earth, live in the House of the Star, spend your days with and care for and even, gods willing, ride the only creatures that can travel safely along the worldroads. Isn't that what you've always wanted?"

"I want to be a worldrider," Elen said. "I want it with all my heart. But if I do what you are trying to make me do, that's not what I'll get. You're trying to pretend it's about the horses, but it's not. It's about the same war that has torn us apart for thousands of years, and it will be just as useless as all the other attempts to make it stop. I'm to go to Earth, meet the king's son from Caledon, and let myself be forced to marry him. The worldrunners are just a bribe to get me there."

The queen sank down into the chair beside the table. The silk of her gown rustled; the jewels and the pearls rattled against the carved wood of the chair. "No one will force you to marry anyone," she said. "This invitation comes from Earth. You only need to go, join a group of young people in the House of the Star, ride and care for their horses, live on Earth for a season, and see what comes of it. That's all. How is that so difficult?"

Elen shook her head so hard her braid gave way altogether and sent her hair tumbling down over her back and shoulders. "Don't you understand? It can't be that simple. Friendship, Earth said. Mutual understanding. Liking, if possible, between royal offspring of the two most relentless enemies in all the worlds. Doesn't that sound lovely? Doesn't it sound too easy for words?"

"It doesn't sound easy at all," the queen said. "It sounds like a challenge worthy of the greatest of our heroes: to meet a Caledonian face to face, and learn to forget our whole long history of hatred, and make a friend. Horses are the key, says the Master of the Star. Earth is neutral ground, and the horses from whose stock the worldrunners come are creatures of such power and wonder in their own right that even he can't tell us what they may decide to do. But he is willing to trust them. And so, perforce, are we."

Horses of any kind, let alone worldrunners, were a great lure and attraction, and Elen wanted them desperately. But this was too cruel a lie for her to bear. She cried out against it. "But that's not true! There's got to be something else they're not saying. Some thing they want, that we'll find out if I get there. Some plan they're keeping secret. You know what it has to be. They want Ymbria and Caledon bound together- and how does that ever get done? By royal marriage. I'd rather not have the horses at all than have them for a few days and then see them taken away, either because I've been hauled off into Caledon, or because I refuse and have been sent back home, and the worldroads have been closed forever to anyone from Ymbria."

"Caledon, too," the queen said, "if it comes to that. Which I hope it will not. But, Elen, you must understand. This is the last chance. The other worlds along the roads have had enough of our fighting that spills over onto them and does them such terrible damage. Faerie itself has lost patience. The Horned King and his deadly Hunt would have closed us off well before this if Earth had not spoken for us. We need what the roads bring us: trade and knowledge and the arts and magic and medicines that heal our sick and nourish our land and make our crops grow richer and stronger to feed our people. Without those things, we wither and die."

"I know that!" Elen said. "I just can't do this. I can't. I'm not the kind of person you need. Why don't you send Margali? All she cares about is boys and dresses and more boys. She would be perfectly happy to attach herself to a royal Caledonian, as long as he has a pretty face and a large fortune."

"Elen!" the queen said. Her tone was like a slap. "Horses make your sister ill, and horses are a requirement. You love them more than anyone else in this family. I had thought you loved Ymbria, too."

Those were terrible words. Elen flinched.

"You leave in the morning," her mother said. "Be ready to ride."

Elen was dismissed. She opened her mouth to refuse, but what could she say that she had not already said?

People were clamoring at the door. The royal council was meeting- again. Messengers were lined up six deep, each with an urgent dispatch that the queen must answer immediately. Elen was keeping them all from getting their work done.

*** ***

"Lying, treacherous, murdering monsters," she muttered as she trudged back to the stables. "Never trust a Caledonian. Never give him your horse or your hound or, by all you hold holy, your daughter. No one knows that better than Mother. Why does she even try?"

Elen brought out her favorite mount, the spotted pony, whose name was Brychan. He was fresh and eager and delighted to see his saddle, though the day was getting on and the sky was spitting sleet. No one was there to stop her: the stablehands were all at dinner, having fed the horses and tucked them in for the night.

She meant to set her mind in order while she rode, and somehow bring herself to face what she had to do. Her mother would be terribly disappointed. That hurt. But the more she thought about doing this thing, even for Ymbria, even for her mother, the less she could stand it.

There were others who could go, who could tolerate both horses and, within limits, Caledon; who would not be devastated when the real plan came out and the promise of worldrunners proved to be a lie. Elen did not see how it could be true. Nothing that Caledon agreed to could ever be anything but treacherous.

"There's no good reason it has to be me, and every reason it shouldn't be," Elen said to the pony's ears.

They flicked in response; he tossed his shaggy mane and bucked lightly. She loosened rein and let him go.

The wind cut sharp and keen. The sleet stung her cheeks. The ground was solid underfoot- which was not always true in these days of endless war and renegade magics. The storm was perfectly mortal and ordinary, and because of that, it was wonderful.

The pony bucked and plunged across the field, then straightened into a steady canter. She aimed him toward the band of trees that edged the far pasture.

It was quiet out here. All the rush and bustle and uproar of the royal house was behind her, calming down a little with the approach of evening, but it would never be completely calm. The woods were dark already, silent but for the rattle of sleet and the soft hiss of wind in the icy branches.

Brychan halted so suddenly that Elen nearly pitched over his head. His ears nearly touched at the tips, quivering with alertness. He blew out a ferocious snort.

Out of the shadows of the wood, down a track that had never been straight before and might never be straight again, a great white horse came striding. All the light that was left in the world gathered in that long arched nose and that tall, solid body and those deep wise eyes. They looked into Elen's for a moment that stretched into forever, and for that moment she saw herself on the wide white back, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a long dark coat and tall black boots.

That was a worldrunner. It was a mare, Elen saw as she cantered past, as light on those big round feet as a much smaller horse. Her rider, who was dressed just as Elen had been in the dream or vision or heartfelt wish, took no notice of the girl on the pony. But the grey mare did. She noticed, and she remembered.

Tears streamed down Elen's face, freezing in the wind. In all the years she had seen worldrunners come and go, none of them had ever looked straight at her and recognized her, and said to the deepest part of her heart, You. I know you. I know everything about you, everything you are or ever wanted to be.

She wanted this more than anything. She wanted it so much, it made her heart pound and her throat lock and her eyes go dark. But now she realized what she wanted, and it was so much more, so much deeper and stronger than she had ever dreamed, that she could hardly breathe.

It was too much. Elen who was afraid of nothing, who could leave the boldest of her brothers crying in the dirt while she dared to climb the highest tree or ride the wildest horse, was terrified. If she was right and her mother was wrong, and Earth's offer was a lie and she would have her chance at worldrunners for a little while only to lose it all for Ymbria's sake, that would be grievous. But if she got it- if after all she could get and keep this enormous, amazing, wonderful, profoundly frightening thing, could she even begin to be good enough for it?

Elen the brave, Elen the obstinate, Elen the royal princess of Ymbria, turned her spotted pony on his haunches and fled from the thing she wanted most in any world.

*** ***

Elen rode Brychan back to the stables in a blur of wind and sleet and almost-panic. The part of her that was a horse girl knew enough not to run the pony off his feet, so that by the time he reached the barn and the sleet turned to snow, he had cooled down.

She was calmer now, the kind of calm that lies at the heart of a storm. All the fears and doubts and horrors still swirled around her, but she took care of Brychan as if none of them existed. She rubbed him as dry as she could, covered him with a blanket and fed him a hot mash and left him in peace.

Her own dinner was waiting. She was not hungry at all. She could not face her mother or the rest of her family or, worst of all, the worldrider. Not tonight.

She had a plan now. She knew what she had to do. It did not matter if what she did was reasonable or sensible or even sane. She had to do it. That was all.

She made a show of shutting herself in her room and calling for a tray from the kitchen. When it came, she ate everything on it, no matter how her stomach rebelled.

Her mind was made up. She would go- but not to Earth. Once she was out of the way, someone else could be chosen to do this great and terrible thing. Someone better; more willing. Someone who really was strong enough.

Elen would find sanctuary far down the worldroad, with horses and pasture and a stable where she could earn her keep. The worlds were full of such places. Every world had horses or some kind of animal like them, though only Earth had worldrunners. Worldrunners could be born nowhere else; no one who had tried to change that had ever succeeded.

As for how she would get away from Ymbria without a worldrunner, that was the difficult part; but Elen's head was full of stories. In some of them, especially the oldest ones, a person with a firm will and a clear image in her mind could make the worldroads lead her where she wanted to go. It helped if she had something to focus on, a jewel or a map or a talisman. But she could do it.

Elen had the will. She could find a map of the worldroads. She knew where there was a talisman, though it was old and worn and had no magic left in it. She even had a destination. It was a world called Hesperia, where the sweetest apples came from, and a cordial that could heal the heart's ills. She had met a girl from there once, a horse girl like her, who had been traveling with her father to trade apples for the sweet spices and the fine horses of Ymbria.

Irena might have forgotten Elen long ago, but Elen had always remembered the place Irena had described, to which the three geldings and the one bay mare were to go. It was a place of wide rolling meadows and little streams, and grass as rich as any in the worlds.

Surely they would need a stablehand there, or even a trainer. Or somewhere nearby would welcome such a person. Anywhere that had horses, really, except Earth itself, would do.

*** ***

Macsen the librarian was asleep in the palace library, face down in a book, snoring. An army could have invaded and he would barely have stirred.

There was no one else among the shelves and tables and chests of books so old that some of them had been written before worldrunners came to Ymbria. The book of maps that Elen needed was on a shelf up near the high ceiling; it needed a ladder and a far stretch that nearly sent her tumbling to the floor, but she recovered it and herself with no bones broken. With the book lying heavy and solid in the pocket of her coat, she trod softly toward the far end of the room.

Tall glass cases gleamed in the dimness. They were full of interesting oddments, lesser treasures and bits of history that were not so precious that they needed to be hidden away in the royal treasury. Among the tarnished trophies and the coins of ancient realms hung a medallion on a faded ribbon. It looked like a silver coin rubbed smooth with age. On one side was the image of a nine-spoked wheel. Elen had never seen the other: it was hidden against the back of the case.

Her breath came hard as if she had been running a race. The lock on the case was sealed with a spell, but the steel of Elen's lock-pick broke it with a pop and a spark. The pick, which had begun life as a hairpin, leaped out of Elen's fingers. She hissed in startlement and shook them hard: they throbbed and stung.

Gingerly she retrieved the hairpin. It was harmless again, and so was the lock.

Some skills that Elen's more interesting friends had taught her were more useful than others, though her mother might not agree about this one. She opened the case as quietly as she could, darting glances at Macsen, who had not moved a muscle in all that time.

The contents of the case had no such spell on them as had warded the lock. The medallion felt like ordinary silver, cool and smooth; its back was covered with writing too faded and worn to read. Legend said that such baubles had held enormous power once. If that was true, this one had lost the last of it long ago.

Still, along with the book of maps, it was the best chance Elen had to fulfill her plan, short of stealing a worldrunner- and she was not quite crazy enough to do that. She hung the talisman around her neck, tucking it into her shirt. It was cold against her skin, but it warmed slowly as she made her soft-footed way past Macsen and out of the library.

*** ***

The cooks were so busy with dinner that they barely noticed the bits of bread and meat and fruit and cheese that Elen plucked from passing bowls and platters. The hardest part was taking it all and packing it in a knapsack and walking away from the only home she had ever known.

She had to do it. She kept telling herself that.

She went on foot. Brychan would have carried her; he was brave and he loved her. But she could not do it to him. He was no worldrunner; he was not born and bred to travel the worldroads.

She went out alone into the storm. Her mind was set on the road she needed to find and the place where she wanted to go. The medallion proved useful after all: it helped to serve as a focus. She could see her starting point as the wheel's hub, and the track she needed as one of the spokes. She was careful not to let her vision waver, and not to get distracted.

She could have taken one of the roads that ran straight out from the palace itself, but that was too public, even at night and in a snowstorm. Instead she went back to the place where she had first seen the white mare.

The worldroad was still there, as if it waited for the mare to come back to it. If Elen had been paying close enough attention, she would have been suspicious, but it took most of her strength of will to keep her mind fixed on what she needed to do and where she needed to go.

Worldroads were things of Faerie, of wild and untamed magic, and like all wild magic, they were full of snares and deceptions. Elen was too busy keeping her wish in her mind to notice much else. She only had to stay on the straight track, she told herself, and take care to know, all the way down to the bone, where she wanted to go.

Worlds like pearls strung on a string, oases of order and safety and, mostly, peace, surrounded by the wildness that was Faerie. Far down the string from Ymbria, and far away from either Earth or Caledon, a world called Hesperia. Far, fair, and green. And horses. Above all, horses.

Instead, the road gave her ice and fire and a pack of harrying hounds, and cast her on a hillside in Faerie, in the most dangerous and treacherous of all realms that were.

She would die here. Her soul would wander the borderlands of Faerie forever, lost and forgotten. She would never see her mother or her people or her world again.

After a moment or an hour or an age, hooves clattered on stone. Elen lowered her hands from her eyes, blinking. The light of this place was dazzling bright and yet had no source: no sun or moon or star.

The shape that loomed over her was as white as the sky. It lowered its long head and warmed her with its sweet-scented breath. She was safe now, it said without words: a feeling so deep it sank all the way to the bottom of her. She wrapped her arms around the grey mare's neck and clung for her life's sake.

*** ***

The mare was alone. She wore no saddle or bridle and carried no rider. Still, there was no mistaking that tall and massive body or that strong arched profile with its dark, wise eye.

Elen looked into that eye and found the mare's name there. It came to Elen first as a feeling: a sense of snow and clouds and peaceful whiteness. The word that described that feeling was an Earth word, and it was a name: Blanca.

"Blanca," Elen said. Her voice was as raw as her throat. "Please. Take me- "

The rest would not come as words. She held the image of the horses and the pasture and the world called Hesperia inside her head, and hoped that Blanca could see it, too.

Blanca knelt. Mount, that meant.

Elen took a breath to steady her hammering heart. The confusion of doubt and fear that driven her away from the mare and from Ymbria was still there, but the terror of Faerie was stronger. She wound her fingers in mane and swung her leg over the broad white back. When she was secure, the mare surged upright.

Elen was in Blanca's power now. All she could do was hold on and hope.

When Blanca strode out, there was a road under her feet, straight and clear through the wilds of Faerie. Elen dared not loose her death grip on Blanca's mane to hunt in her pocket for the book of maps. Blanca was a worldrunner; she must know where to go.

*** ***

Elen held fast to her vision of Hesperia. Blanca moved from a walk into a long-strided, smooth but powerful canter. The hills of Faerie rolled past, soft and green at first, but growing sharper and more jagged as the road ran on. The light never changed; time passed, it must, but there was no way to judge how fast or how slow it was passing.

With a worldrunner under her, Elen had nothing to fear. No hounds stalked her. No skeletal Hunt haunted the road behind her.

Blanca's calm washed over Elen. The mare knew where she was going, and she fully expected to get there, safe and whole and with her rider still on her back.

Elen had always been able to feel what horses were feeling, and mostly she could guess what they were thinking. They did most of their talking with their bodies, with the slant of an ear or the turn of a head or the wrinkle of a nostril.

This was like that, but it was stronger than anything Elen had felt before. What had scared her in Ymbria, and what still made it hard to get enough air into her lungs, was how right it felt. This big white creature belonged here, striding along under her, taking her where she needed to go. One moment, Elen had been her sturdy and independent self, riding any horse she could get a leg over, loving a few and liking most of them. The next, she had found herself so much a part of Blanca that she could hardly tell where she left off and the mare began.

Blanca seemed perfectly comfortable with that. Elen had never been raised or taught to expect it. None of the stories talked of any such thing. Worldriders were riders and messengers, trained to navigate the worldroads on the backs of worldrunners. Worldrunners were a particular strain of horses from Earth, who had to be born there and could not be born or bred elsewhere. People had tried it over and over; the best they could hope for was that the mares never got in foal at all. If they did, the foals died, or were born so twisted and broken that they could not survive.

Elen squeezed her eyes shut. This was doing her no good at all. She had to stop panicking over the horse and remember where she was going. Hesperia. Pastures. Horses.

Blanca's canter slowed. The air around Elen was distinctly hotter. The light through her eyelids was piercingly bright. She smelled dust and heat and something sharp and pungent that had a distinct aura of green. She opened her eyes.

This was not Hesperia, unless Hesperia had gone to desert since Elen last heard of it. These pastures were not even slightly green. The trees that dotted them were low and gnarled. Mountains rose steep and jagged above them to an achingly blue sky.

HOUSE OF THE STAR is now available at:

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About the Author

Caitlin Brennan is the author of over three dozen acclaimed novels, including The Mountain's Call, The Serpent and the Rose (as Kathleen Bryan), and World Fantasy nominee Lord of the Two Lands (as Judith Tarr). She lives near Tucson, Arizona, where she raises and trains Lipizzan horses.

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Indigo Springs

by A.M. Dellamonica

"You're going to fall in love today." It is the first thing Astrid Lethewood says to me. A heartbeat later Patience joins us in the foyer and I nearly believe her.

I've seen Patience- on TV, on security feeds- but nothing has prepared me for meeting a demi-goddess. My brain seizes up, my hands get damp and my mouth dries. I smell popcorn, hear the distant music of a carousel. A tingle of arousal threatens to embarrass me but that, at least, I am ready for. My jacket, folded over one arm, hangs discreetly over my groin.

Today Patience is black and curly haired, with breasts- I can't help looking- as firm and curvaceous as if they had been sculpted by Rodin. Her lips are full, her teeth straight, and her brown eyes are luminous and warm. Her skin has the seal-fat sleekness of youth, but she does not look young.

Soon she will look utterly different, if just as devastating.

"Who are you?" she asks, voice full of music.

"My name is Will Forest. I'm- "

"Another of Roche's inquisitors? When'll he give up?"

"Don't be naive," I say.

She pops a candy into her mouth, crunching defiantly. "I got nothing to say to you."

"I pull in a breath. The carousel music tinkles on, and my spirits ride along, taking my inner child to the circus. "I'm here to talk to Astrid."

"Great- another shrink who thinks he can get through to her." She puts a protective hand out to Astrid, who is hiding in her shadow. Proximate invisibility, the doctors call it, as if naming the behavior gives them a measure of control. The everyday world of telecommunications and two-hour commutes is crumbling, so they crouch in the surveillance center, labeling Astrid's every twitch.

Even now she is shrinking against the wall. "Is this when the guards start shooting?"

I glance at the well-armed young women in the corridor. They frown back, probably annoyed that I'm blocking the threshold of the apartment entrance.

Astrid sobs into a clenched fist, and Patience strokes her hair, glaring at me. "Just leave us alone!"

"I'm not here to upset you, but I'm not going away either." To emphasize the point, I step inside and shut the white door. Steel bolts clunk into place behind it: a vault door sealing us inside. This prison is two hundred feet below ground and surrounded by bedrock. To get here, I have been X-rayed, frisked, fingerprinted, and DNA tested. My identity has been confirmed and reconfirmed so completely that I am almost beginning to doubt it.

"As I said, my name is Will Forest." I take care to speak to them both. "I'm here to interview Astrid about- "

"Please, Doc, go away." Patience locks her bewitching eyes on me. "She can't help you."

I want to give in, like the others before me, but I hold her gaze, fighting the spell with thoughts of my missing kids. "I'm not a doctor, Patience, and I'm not leaving."

Astrid stops crying with a hiccup. "Didn't I show him around the place?"

"Show him the door, sweetie."

"Why don't you let her decide?" Opening my suitcase, I bring out a battered, plastic-wrapped paintbrush.

Astrid's breath catches. She looks at me closely, searching my face. "I'm supposed to believe you'd let me have it back?"

"Cooperation is a two-way street. I don't expect something for nothing, Astrid."

She licks her lips. "I need paper. Cards. Playing cards."

"I've brought them."

"Astrid, you're not ready," Patience says.

"How long do you expect us to give her?"

"She's in shock."

"Astrid?" I say.

"It was okay, Patience." She slides to her knees, face raised, eyes locked on the paintbrush.

"Fine." Throwing up her hands, Patience wafts away.

Astrid begins to hyperventilate. "When are we?"

"You said something about showing me around."

"I said that?" Her tone is dubious. "Is that today?"

"Do you know how long you've been here?"

"We were locked up for about twelve weeks. . ." Her eyelids flutter; she seems to be counting. "Eight in jail, four here. That's twelve."

"That's right. You were moved here a month ago."

"The comfy prison." She shudders.

The apartment is part of an underground military base: a VIP housing unit that got converted to a jail cell when this crisis arose. It comes with false windows, frosted glass alight with phony full-spectrum sunshine.

"You razed your gardens," Astrid says. "Bird blood, right? If you put tulip bulbs in the front, daffodils. . ."

"I'm not much for the outdoors these days," I say.

"The woods aren't as deep as they seem." She breaks off, eyes wandering. "Have we . . . Sahara- "

"It's all right," I say, because I've watched six hundred hours of surveillance footage on this pair, and that is what Patience tells her.

Astrid curls away, then bangs her head against the drywall. "Roche sent you down here to screw me over."

"It's not like that." I grasp her shoulders. "You help me, I'll help you."

"Help. . ." She jerks her head again, but I'm holding her away from the wall.

"Let me help you, Astrid."

She flinches, then seems to calm down. "Want to see the rest of the place?"

"Sure."

She listlessly tours me through the apartment. Every counter, shelf and tabletop is cluttered with baubles and jewelry, offerings from Patience's admiring public. The air smells of paint, and the furniture is inexpensive particle-board, two decades out of date. One piece stands out: an oak cabinet which dominates the living room wall.

"My grandfather is gonna make that," Astrid explains.

"I thought he was an accountant."

"He took up woodworking after he retired. Terrible at it- made Ma a rocking chair that almost killed her. Tips too far, falls, hits her head."

"Ouch." Evelyn Lethewood has mentioned the incident too; it happened when she was a teenager.

Astrid leans a damp cheek against the varnished wood. "Colonel Roach takes this out of Ma's garage for me."

"I asked him to."

"You?"

"Yes." She's mentioned the cabinet in her ramblings, even searching for it in the spot it now occupies.

"You're a regular Santa Claus, aren't you?"

"I meant it as a show of good faith."

"It's all happening." Her hand drifts out, settling on my briefcase. "It's finally Will day, isn't it?"

"It's the sixth of September."

She starts to weep, tugging her hair. "Will day, Jackson day, fire, quake day, cutthroats, boomsday. Blood on the paintings, painted spatters across the walls. . ."

Patience peers through a doorway, arching her brows in challenge. "Making out okay, Santa?"

"I'm fine." I rap my knuckles on Astrid's cabinet, drawing her attention. "Only things my granddad ever made were model airplanes and bad wine."

She sniffles. "Think you can trade with me? I'll bare my soul for treats, like a dog?"

"I thought you'd like to have something familiar around, that's all."

"Thinking of my welfare." Her eyes narrow. "I know about you."

"Do you?"

"You're divorcing, I know that."

"Am I supposed to believe you're psychic? Patience could have gone through my office."

"Right, Patience. I'm small potatoes, right? The side issue. The material witness."

"The accomplice?"

Her mouth tightens. "You have two kids and a pit bull, which is funny because you don't like dogs."

The words bring up gooseflesh on my neck. "My son Carson wanted a puppy. I'm a soft touch."

She scoffs. "You're here to break me open."

"Astrid, all I want is to talk."

"Gull dropping mussels onto rocks, that's you. Cracking shells, getting the meat. Break everything open."

"Astrid, I know you've been through a traumatic- "

"I'm not insane."

"Then you've no excuse for not cooperating." I will coax the truth from this raving, damaged woman. I need to learn how Patience became a shape-changing beauty, how she defies locks and assassins by turning to mist and drifting through walls and bullets, rocks and people.

I'm here to find out how Astrid, a landscape gardener who never finished high school, came to possess a collection of objects we can only label as mystical, despite our science and rationality.

Most importantly, I'm supposed to learn how Astrid's childhood friend, Sahara Knax, took those mystical items and used them to create an eco-terrorist cult with half a million devoted followers. I need to discover Sahara's weaknesses, anything that will tell my panicked government how to fight as her numbers grow, as she unleashes monsters into the seas and forests, as she forces us to napalm U.S. territory to destroy the infestations. Her actions grow more dangerous daily, and our attempts to locate her have failed. Astrid may be our only hope.

"The grumbles are so loud," Astrid says, "I can't remember when things happen. So much compressed magic. . ."

"You want to make things right, don't you?"

She clutches my arm. "You had an accident last month. A contaminated bluejay attacked your car."

I rasp my tongue over my lips, remembering the eagle-sized bird pecking holes in my windshield.

"That's when you killed off your yard."

Caroline had vanished with our kids just days earlier. I'd shot the bird, then pulled up the garden and, in a rage, burned it. Instead of telling Astrid this, I say: "Lots of people are sterilizing their gardens."

With a defeated sigh, she leads me to the kitchen, where Patience is sorting teabags. "Santa Claus drinks coffee," Astrid says.

"We don't have coffee."

"It's okay, tea's fine."

Patience holds up a bag of Darjeeling. "You don't look military."

"Are you asking what I do for a living?"

"Yeah," Astrid says, "This is the part where you tell us."

"You don't already know?"

"Patience asked, not me."

"I'm no psychic," Patience says, crunching another candy as she dangles the teabag. The swing of her wrist is hypnotic; I nod to show Darjeeling is fine.

"I'm a crisis negotiator for the Portland city police," I say.

"Hostage haggler. Same as Roach." Astrid's voice is flat with dislike. I remember anew she has been charged with kidnapping and murder.

"Civilian rather than military, but essentially yes, the same as Colonel Roche. We've taken courses together."

Patience runs hot tapwater into a stoneware teapot to warm it. "So you're a cop and a shrink?"

"If you like."

Dreamily, Astrid says: "He was at the sewer outflow before they firebombed it. He got some of Sahara's converts to come out."

"Does that make you uncomfortable, Astrid?"

She eyes me like a stalking cat, ready to pounce. "You don't make me uncomfortable, Santa."

"I'd prefer it if you'd call me Will."

"Would I, won't I, will I?" Another predatory glance. "Okay . . . Will it is."

The kettle shrieks and Patience puts a tray together. Sugar, cream, three cups. "You sure about this, sweetie?"

"Yeah. It's Will day, Patience."

"If you say so. Want to set up by the couch?"

"I think that's what we do." Astrid pushes at her curls, flashing the mangled cartilage of her right ear. "It's hard . . . so much going on. Tuna and bullets and gates of brambles- "

"Let's try, all right?" With that, Patience leads us back the way we came. As she passes me, she whispers a threat: "Don't you mess her up worse than she already is."

The living room's lack of a TV gives it a Victorian aura. Photographs cover the walls- snapshots of Astrid's parents and missing step-brother. Four couches sit facing each other in a box.

Roche tried to keep the personal touches out of the suite, but Patience kept telling the media that she and Astrid were being kept in a barren subterranean hole. Her fans raised a hue and cry. Finally Roche allowed the bric-a-brac and Patience resumed her public campaign against Sahara. Without her broadcasts, the Alchemite cult would be even larger.

Astrid slumps on a grass-green chaise. I sit on a matching loveseat and pull out my digital recorder.

She scowls. "Apartment's bugged."

"It can go out of sight if you like."

"Doesn't matter. The cards?"

"Will these do?" I hand over a bulging manila envelope stuffed with greeting cards, playing cards, and a Tarot.

"Perfect. Are you really going to give me my chantment?"

"Of course." I pass her the paintbrush.

"Oh thank you, thank you," she murmurs, rolling it between her fingers. I imagine how Roche and the others upstairs in Security must be tensing up. But her gratitude and relief seem sincere.

"Astrid?"

She holds the brush to her cheek, eyes glistening. "You took a chance, bringing it here."

My gut clenches. Roche hadn't wanted to hand over the paintbrush. It's magical, he'd said. What if she uses it to change you into a frog, like the Clumber boy?

I'd brushed the objection aside, producing the transcripts of Astrid's ramblings. 'Can't think,'- she'd said hundreds of times. 'Need the brush, Jackson day, fortune cards. 'Will day,' too, appears repeatedly. Maybe it's arrogance, but I new she'd been saying my name.

Turn you to a frog, like the Clumber boy. It doesn't seem as funny now.

"Are you going to show me what it does?" I ask.

"Yes." Astrid pulls her hair up, knotting the curls atop her head. She pins them into place with the paintbrush handle. Her hands drop to the table . . . and as they do, they change. The fingers become longer and wider, while the nails take on the flat, fibrous texture of paintbrush bristles.

She says. "Relax. Nothing terrible happens today."

"Is that so?" I turn her hand palm-up, running my finger over the bristles of her thumbnail.

She draws back, aloof as a cat, and digs out a ten of hearts. "The cards help me keep track of things . . . things to come?"

"I'd like to talk about the past six months."

Ghosts of dimples dent her cheeks. "Past, future . . . it's all the same."

"Tell me about the magic- when and why things started to change."

"That's two different questions." Patience tosses a couple of high-calorie protein bars onto the tray. Then she serves the tea. "What exactly do you want to know?"

How to change it back. "Let's start with Sahara."

"That's two questions too." Astrid cups her palms above the surface of the ten of hearts. The red ink fades, leaving it blank. Then a bead of brown paint wells from the stiff paper, like a minuscule drop of blood coaxed from a pin-pricked finger. It streaks across the card, outlining a dilapidated car. Astrid watches it raptly. Me, I burn my mouth, slurping too-hot tea in a sip that becomes a gasp.

"Not what you expected?" Patience laughs.

"On the fifteenth of April, Mark Clumber told Sahara he'd been cheating on her," Astrid says, eyes locked on the card as if she's reading text. "He confessed, then took off for a few hours- to give her space. Sahara packed her bags the second he was gone. She took his car and cat, half their money, and drove west. She was eighty miles out of Boston before Mark slunk back, looking for forgiveness.

"She just left?"

"When someone hurts Sahara, she cuts them out of her heart forever. Ask Mark."

"Mark's beyond speech," Patience says sharply. The Clumber boy is in one of the compound's other apartments, suffering from severe alchemical contamination.

"Beyond speech," Astrid murmurs. "Sahara would be pleased."

I can believe it. Sahara routinely attacks Alchemites who leave her cult, not to mention police who oppose her and reporters who question her claim to be a goddess.

On the playing card, brown paint colors in the outline of the car. Tiny strokes of black sketch a cat on its rear dashboard. Brushstrokes from an invisible brush; the hairs on my arms stand up.

"So Sahara isn't particularly forgiving?"

Astrid doesn't contradict me. "She called from Billings and asked if she could stay at my house."

She means the home she inherited from her father, I know, on Mascer Lane in Indigo Springs, at the epicenter of the alchemical spill. "And you said yes?"

"I said she could stay forever if she wanted."

"What did she say?"

On the card, minuscule dots of green brighten the cat's eyes. "She said I'd have to make life pretty goddamned interesting if I was going to keep her around."

From Indigo Springs by A.M. Dellamonica. Copyright 2009 by the author and reprinted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC., a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

INDIGO SPRINGS is now available at:

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About the Author

A.M. Dellamonica's first novel, Indigo Springs, won the 2010 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Its much-awaited sequel, Blue Magic, will be released by Tor Books in 2012. Dellamonica lives in Vancouver, B.C., where she writes, blogs, takes pictures, sings alto in a local choir and tries to learn to speak Italian.

Visit her on the web at:

www.alyxdellamonica.com

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UCLA Extension Writers' Program

Jade Tiger

by Jenn Reese

Hunan Province, China

Sanctuary of the Jade Circle

Sixteen Years Ago

But Mother, why can't we fight?"

They hurried through the tunnel in a quiet line. Her mother first, Shan second, her father last, carrying their things. The torches tossed shadows against the uneven stone walls, and even the familiar dirt floor offered small comfort tonight. The rat-tat-tat of machine guns and the determined crack of pistols filled the distance above them and behind them. Wood and glass shattered. Men shouted guttural commands in Cantonese and Mandarin.

But even if this were the storm, her mother was at its eye, calm and focused. Lin-Yao stopped and crouched by Shan. Shan saw the dust in her mother's long black braid and thought, for the first time, that her mother had become wise like the ancients while Shan had been busy playing with her dolls and studying her numbers.

"Mother, we are strong. There are almost thirty of us now. We can defend ourselves from these intruders." Her voice rose in a whine, so close to tears, but held.

"They are too many, my little tigress," her mother said, smoothing the hair away from Shan's face. "The man who leads them hates us very much. He'll sacrifice anything to destroy what we have built."

"But Mother- "

"No, Shan." Her mother placed one thin finger on Shan's lips. "Did you know you have your father's eyes? Yes, green. The very same color as his. They will bring you great fortune in America."

Behind them, much too close, wood smashed into rock.

"They found the trap door," her father said. He shifted the bags to his left hand and pulled a gun from his waistband with his right. Her mother stood.

"No, let me take care of this, John. There's little enough time as it is."

They both looked down at Shan. Her father towered above them, his head almost touching the ceiling, a giant with skin the color of steamed rice and hair the color of sand. In every memory Shan had of him, he was sitting with a book, or teaching one of the women to speak English. The gun was not at home in his hand, and it hurt Shan to look at it.

But even with the gun, Shan knew her mother was the more dangerous of the two. It was her mother who practiced the old ways every day of her life. Her mother who called all five of the ancient animals to her when she fought.

Her parents switched places in the narrow hallway as Shan stood still, her feet like lead. Her mother's shoulder brushed against her father's chest, but they said nothing, made no move to prolong the contact. Then they were past.

"Do you have it?" her mother said.

"Yes." Her father hefted the bags. "It's safe." Her father, so often smiling, remained grim tonight. The straight line of his mouth brought tears to Shan's eyes for the first time since the sanctuary had been invaded.

Without a sound, in a blink of an eye, her mother crouched by Shan's side again.

"Teeth are strong and fall out," she said. "Gums are soft and remain."

Shan let her mother pull her into a hug. Shan closed her eyes and felt the embroidered silk of her mother's shirt rub against her arms. She inhaled the fullness of her mother's sweat, the scent of green tea still clinging to her mother's clothes.

A man shouted behind them. A gun cracked, and stone sparked near her mother's head.

"Now, go!" her mother said.

Her mother stood and turned around, her back to the family. Shan felt her father tugging at her arm. Her legs started to move in his direction, but slowly. Shan couldn't stop looking at her mother. The green silks, dusty and old, shimmered like scales in firelight. She pictured her mother's eyes, thin slits of black swimming in gold.

The eyes of a dragon.

The first man around the corner fell screaming, hands covering one of his eyes. Her mother's move had been too quick for Shan to see. The dragon strikes fast, without warning. Shan almost envied the man. His life would probably end quickly, without much suffering. But Shan's misery would continue…without her mother and on some distant, unforgiving shore, far away from her ancestors.

Her father pulled Shan along the passageway and, finally, her mother passed out of view. Shan watched the flickering shadows on the wall. A spinning braid became the whip of a huge tail. The curved hands struck, shimmering into a gaping maw around her next victim's head, then shrinking instantly back down to hands.

"Shan!" Her father's voice stung sharper than a slap. Shan turned from the shadows, from her mother's fate, and embarked on her own.

Risley University, Upstate New York

Now

"You've got to be kidding me."

Professor Ian Dashell rubbed his eyes and stared at the offending paper again, willing the words to be different the second time around. "The Vikings' primary weapon in battle was their famed horned helmets. Helmets which they wielded by bending over and charging their enemies."

Ian let the red felt-tip pen slip from his fingertips and onto the mountain of final exams covering his desk. His forehead followed shortly afterward with a satisfying thunk.

"Mmm. Comfy."

He closed his eyes. It was well past midnight but still long before dawn. All self-respecting archaeologists were snuggled deep in their beds, or their tents, or their hammocks at this hour. He would have settled for his own disastrously messy- but surprisingly warm- bed just off campus. On most nights, he elaborated on the fantasy with an attractive female colleague who just adored his doctoral thesis on the ritual significance of jade in Shang Dynasty China. But tonight he wanted the imaginary bed all to himself.

"Mmm," Ian groaned again, amazed at how comfortable a pillow a D-worthy exam paper could be. Would a C paper be better, or worse? How about an A or a B? Oh, the possibilities.

Ian rolled his head to the left, bringing his cheek in contact with the cool pages. Just a little nap. Drool dried invisibly. No one would ever have to know.

The painful sound of shattering glass echoed through the empty hallway.

Ian wrenched his head up.

The artifacts.

His chair screeched across the slick floor as he pushed back from the desk. He darted out the door and ran, the fog of sleep still thick in his head.

"If this is some stupid, frat boy prank…" Ian couldn't even finish the sentence in his thoughts. No one, but no one, touched those artifacts. Not without permission. And supervision. And a god-damned note from their mother.

The hallowed halls of Risley University projected sound like a three-story megaphone. Even Ian's scuffed shoes thudded appallingly on the faux marble floor. Another smash from the room ahead swallowed the sound of his running feet, but Ian's relief was fleeting. More priceless remnants from the past possibly destroyed.

Ian slowed at the door. The solid brown wood, plastered with department fliers, stood stalwart as ever…except for the ragged hole where the doorknob used to be. Someone was definitely inside. Touching. Moving. Breaking. Where the hell was that security guard? Sure, he was sixty or something, but at least the man had a billy club and some experience with this sort of thing. Maybe Ian should head downstairs and get him.

Ian took one step toward the stairwell at the end of the hall and stopped.

He saw a boot in the distance. Black and dull in the darkness, toes pointed toward the ceiling. The white rim of a sock, the listless folds of a pant leg. Whatever this macabre image was attached to lay just out of sight in the stairwell. Ian struggled to swallow. The security guard wouldn't be helping him anytime soon.

But decades of work cowered helplessly in the artifact room. Countless hours of research and back-breaking labor in the field. The promise of exhibits and careers and the overall idea that the past could be saved and cherished and…

Ian kicked open the door with his foot and yelled, "Stop!"

He'd been expecting a surprised curse, or maybe the snick of a bullet cutting into the wall by his head. He certainly hadn't anticipated getting hit in the face with what felt like a speeding train.

The man's fist took Ian squarely across the jaw, and his kick slammed into Ian's chest. Ian sprawled on his ass and slid across the floor into the heavy metal shelves against the left wall. Behind him, the door slammed shut.

"Stay down," the man said, his voice thick with a Mandarin accent. "I don't like to kill teachers."

Ian shook his head, trying to recover his vision and pushed himself onto his knees. He took two deep, rasping breaths, but neither brought enough oxygen to relieve the pain in his chest. He coughed, surprised at how cold and dirty the floor felt against his palms, and annoyed his mind chose such inopportune moments to notice such things.

He looked up. The man, clearly Asian, stood against the far wall and pulled another bin off the shelf. The man placed the bin on one of the desks in the center of the room and began pulling out the bagged and labeled artifacts. He ignored the labels and stared directly at the contents. Bag after bag dropped to the floor or exploded against the wall near Ian.

Ian's lungs finally filled with air, and he drank it in deep gulps. Bins were everywhere- overturned on desks, spilled onto the floor. His throat clenched. Venetian glass. Incan pottery. Cuneiform tablets. Artifacts that hadn't yet made it into museums, and now never would.

Ian huddled against the shelf behind him. He'd been thrown against the European wall, near the locked weapons bin. Slowly, he reached into his left pocket for his key ring. The man across the room seemed completely occupied with his search and destroy mission, but Ian couldn't count on it. The man had obviously anticipated Ian's flamboyant entrance into the room. There was no guessing at the extent of his awareness.

More baggies dropped to the floor. Red cinnabar. Ivory. Blown glass. The man's feet crushed them absently as he hefted another bin to the table.

Ian's hand remained surprisingly steady as he pulled the keys from his pocket and slipped them behind his back. His fingers searched for a small round key amidst a dozen others of various shapes and sizes.

The thief had another bin on the table. Ian's teeth ground together. That simple container represented his last five summers of work in China.

"Please," Ian said. "Stop." His voice pleased him. It divulged no sign of his faltering pulse. Ian found the small key on his key ring and started feeling the bin for the lock.

"I'm looking for something," the man said. "I'll stop when I find it." As if to make his point, the thief dropped a shard of pottery to the floor and ground it beneath his shiny black boot.

"I know," Ian said quickly. He had to get the man to stop. "I'll help you find what you're looking for. I know where everything is."

The man dropped the new bag in his hands back into the bin and started to crunch his way toward Ian. "Now I know why I like teachers," he said.

The man's dark crop of hair was cut flat like a lawn on top of his head. A pale scar radiated from the man's right eye in a painful sunburst. The eye itself seemed glazed over, as if a sheet of thin vellum had been glued to its surface. Judging from the man's excellent depth perception at the door, Ian doubted that he was blind. But he also doubted the man got laid very often, despite the expensive black leather outfit hugging the man's steroid-sized muscles. Just too creepy.

Twenty more steps, now fifteen.

Behind his back, Ian found the small indent of the lock and maneuvered the key into place.

Ten more steps and it'd be too late.

Ian twisted the key. He yanked the lock open and pried it off the box.

Five more steps, and the man smiled without showing his teeth.

Ian flipped open the lid to the bin and thrust his hand inside. His fingers wrapped around the worn leather. He used his right hand to push himself to his feet just as the thief came within range. Ian whipped his left hand out of the weapon bin and thrust the broken blade of a seventeenth century Italian rapier at the man's chest.

The blade, dull from centuries' neglect, snagged in the man's clothes above his heart and dragged a bloody gash across his torso as the man jumped away.

Before Ian could pull back and strike again, before he could even think about parrying, the blade flew out of his hands. He was dimly aware of it clattering in the distance as the man's foot connected with Ian's temple. This time Ian hit the floor hard.

His head throbbed. His vision spun. Those papers would never get graded. Maybe the kid with the horned Viking helmets deserved a C instead of a D. Maybe he should have pursued that relationship with Rachel Sexton after the Tenochtitlan dig in college. Maybe he should have gone yachting with his dad once in awhile.

"You surprised me, teacher," said the man. His voice seemed to echo between Ian's ears. "And I really don't like surprises." Another kick slammed into Ian's ribs. The force of the blow sent him upward and spinning onto his back. He landed hard again, and his skull threatened to explode.

"Well, then, you're gonna hate this," said a new voice. A woman's voice. A nice woman's voice. Did she have a yacht?

No. Ian groaned and rolled his head to the side. Strange new noises filled the air: the snap of clothing and the muffled thud of bone pounding flesh.

"No," Ian tried again. "Run." But he knew his words were too weak. Ian felt something thick and warm and metallic fill his mouth and dribble down his cheek. Drool? How fitting. No, wait. Blood.

His vision cleared enough to show him a new figure in the room, but none of the details. Her body blazed across the drab room like a flame. So bright! Her arms and legs moved in time with the thief's black-clad limbs, like two lovers in some evil, acrobatic bastard-stepchild of the tango. She stood taller than the thief. Her long black hair spun with her, but just a heartbeat behind. It swished into her face until the next dance step had her spinning again, or flying through the air.

It was clear to Ian, even in his current state, that this woman- this bright angel of vengeance- was going to give the thief quite a run for his money. It was also clear to Ian, even in his current state, that he was already falling in love with her.

Or at least in worship.

As usual, his timing was terrible. Ian tried to laugh, but ended up choking on his own blood instead.

*** ***

Shan ducked under an uppercut and snapped a backfist at the man's temple. He blocked and tried to grab her wrist at a pressure point. Twisting, Shan snaked her other hand around and reversed the hold.

Stalemate.

This man was good. Probably the best she'd fought in years. And there was something about his face that tugged a memory she couldn't place.

She spun. Kicked to the chest. Blocked. Jumped over a speeding foot. Raked his face. Twisted out of his grip again.

Shan leaped up and back, did a somersault in the air, and landed in a low snake stance on one of the desks in the middle of the room, her hands open and waiting.

The wounded man, probably a professor at the university, judging from the button-down and khakis, hadn't made a noise in far too long. How had he managed to score that bloody gash across her opponent's chest? Amazing for someone untrained in martial arts. Especially considering that she hadn't even scratched the bastard yet, let alone drawn blood. With any luck, the professor would live. Shan wanted to ask him about his fight, and find out what he knew about the crane.

No, she just needed the information about the crane. That's all she had time to worry about, wounded man or not.

Her one-eyed opponent, breathing hard, thrust his heel into the table leg of Shan's desk. The desk rocked forward, suddenly unstable. Shan used the momentum and angle to launch herself at the man. She flipped over him and landed with her back to his. Her right arm whipped back, and she hooked two of her fingers in the man's mouth. She yanked hard and crouched low, throwing the man over her shoulder.

One-eye yelped. He slammed into another desk covered in boxes. The whole thing collapsed in an implosion of wood and small plastic bags.

Behind her, the wounded man moaned and said something. Shan turned to look. Just the facts? What the hell did that mean?

A chunk of wood collided with Shan's face, and she stopped wondering. She fell onto her back and kept rolling until she was on her feet again, ready.

Her enemy swung the table leg at her again. She ducked low as it whooshed overhead, then focused her mind on the leopard. Its thick muscles. The power it drew from the earth. Years of meditation helped her find the leopard's strength in her own body and harness it. Shan spun and kicked backward, releasing a scream of focused energy. The man's weapon smashed in two, and he stumbled backward, surprised.

"You…" he said in Mandarin, his eyes wide. Up close, Shan pegged him as late thirties, early forties…and so familiar. There was something about that fiery scar around his eye that made her suddenly think of green tea.

No time for that. She needed to stay focused, keep her mind empty, and feed the leopard energy she had built. Shan curled her fingers into leopard's paws and struck.

One, two, three- solar plexus, throat, and nose. The man only blocked the first two. A spray of warm red caught Shan across the face.

She pressed her advantage.

They whirred and tumbled, kicked and sprang into the air. Shan slammed hard into one of the heavy metal shelves lining the wall, and another cry went up from the crumpled form at the other end of the room.

"Artifacts!"

Well, now that made a lot more sense than her first guess.

The man's fist found her stomach. Shan doubled over with a gasp. His booted foot followed, faster than she could even see, and connected with her skull. Shan was knocked sideways onto the floor and the multitude of smashed objects littering it. Something sharp slid into the skin of her thigh.

"Your mother was better," the man said. She smelled his arrogance more thickly than his sweat or her own blood. Shan's mushin, her empty mind, flooded with heat. This pig had fought her mother? Had he been there that night, the night Shan had fled her home? Or had he fought her years later, in a different place, or even recently?

"Is she- "

He dropped his heel onto her chest in a flash of motion. Pain detonated across her torso. Shan felt frozen in time, unable to move or even tell her body to keep breathing. The pain held her like a straightjacket, wrapped tight around every muscle. The man swung his foot off her chest and smiled.

"It is so much better if you die without knowing," the man said.

Finally, Shan's arms agreed to listen to her brain. She pushed herself backward, her wounded thigh leaving a slug-trail of blood across the floor. Above her, a three-foot-wide window was sandwiched between two towering shelves. And, unfortunately, barred from the outside. Shan backed into the space, keeping her eyes on the bastard in front of her. A lever. There was always a lever to release security bars. Her left hand slapped the wall behind her until she found a dented, hollow rectangle of metal wedged almost behind the left shelf. And in it, a solid rubber pedal.

Shan wailed from the pain as she shifted her position and snapped the pedal down. He bought the distraction. A faint click from outside the glass told her the bars had been released from their lock.

The man grinned wildly now. Most people stopped to gloat during a fight, given half a chance. It made them vulnerable. Shan preferred to wrap things up before stopping to chat. Far more practical.

"Where are your animals now?" the man said. "You Jade Circle bitches are nothing without your little statues."

He grabbed the front of Shan's crimson blouse and hauled her to her feet. Shan whimpered again, her body limp, her eyes wide with feigned fear. Blood continued to dribble down her leg. He wasn't tall enough to keep her off the ground, but she stayed light on her feet, letting him do most of the work to keep her upright.

"I think I'll take your eye first," the man said, "to replace the one your mother stole from me." His breath smelled of greasy fish. Her mother had taken his eye. Her mother would always be a better fighter.

This was not the time.

Shan let the thoughts flow away from her, like a river into the ocean, until her mind was empty- a vessel waiting to be filled. Only then did her mind and body act as one.

She planted her left foot on the floor and thrust at his knee with her right heel. He screamed. Shan grabbed his right bicep with one hand and the cloth covering his left shoulder with the other. Dropping her weight, she rolled onto her back and thrust upward with both arms and a leg, throwing him behind her.

The man soared through the window, smashing glass and wood, and slammed into the bars outside. They swung open with the deafening scrape of rusted metal on metal and crashed into the stone facade of the building. Shan protected her face from the shower of sharp rain. When she opened her eyes again, the man was gone.

Shan shook off the shards and splinters without using her hands. It was so easy to drop one's guard at the first respite from fighting, and so easy to get dangerously hurt because of it. She stood up slowly, keeping her weight off her wounded leg, and looked out the window.

Some mangled bushes two stories down stared back up at her. She scanned the quad, looking for limping martial arts bad-asses. No luck. Too bad she hadn't broken his kneecap. That would have slowed him down enough for her to finish the job.

But he'd definitely be back. Shan needed to find the statue and get herself, and the professor, out of the building before the thief did.

As if on cue, the professor groaned. Shan glared into the trees a few more seconds, then turned and shuffled over to the man. Her leg hurt, but it wasn't serious. The rest of the bruises she'd discover tomorrow or the day after.

The man was sitting up against a shelf, his face hidden in his hand. At first glance, nothing looked broken. His limbs looked straight, and he seemed to be breathing fine. Internal injuries weren't out of the question, though, given the professor's blood-stained chin.

Shan eased into a crouch in front of him, ignoring the complaint from her leg, and gently pried his arm from his face.

"Here, let me look."

The man was a lot younger than she'd expected. "Professor" always summoned images of pipe-smoking, white-bearded old men. Probably since she'd never gone to college and had a chance to debunk the stereotype. But no, her professor looked mid-thirties, with short, unkempt brown hair matted with blood in odd places. At first she thought he'd gotten a gash along his face, but it was just his almost painfully sharp cheekbones poking out from a layer of drying blood. Shan pressed two fingers to his brow, cheek, nose, and chin, feeling for fractures. He shivered, probably from shock, and let her search.

His whole face was covered in angles and ridges. She turned it from side to side slowly, trying to get a better look. It always remained hidden at least half in shadow. Shan blamed his nose. It rose long and thin and proud, demanding her attention from every angle. Especially with the blood, the man looked like some doomed fairytale prince, European-style.

"Can you see me?" Shan asked. "Try to focus on my eyes."

He looked up at her, the full moons of his pupils ringed ever so slightly in warm brown. Eye dilation and shivers, Shan thought. Definitely shock. Definitely not good.

A police siren wailed in the distance, and then another. No doubt they were headed this way. But Shan couldn't afford to chat with the cops. Not when some poor security guard with a broken neck lay waiting down the hall.

"You're doing well," Shan lied. "Just keep trying to focus. What color are my eyes?"

His pupils retracted slightly.

"Greeb," he said.

"Good- "

"Green," the man corrected. "With flecks of yellow."

The man smiled and, miraculously, almost every severe angle on his face dissolved into a boyish roundness. Only the nose stubbornly kept its shape.

"Ian," he said. "And yes, I think I can walk."

"Good. I'm Shan." She stood up and held out her arm. "We can't afford to wait for the police."

Ian grabbed her hand, and Shan pulled him to his feet. His fingers were long, his palms huge compared to hers. Standing, he stood at least half a foot higher. Ian grinned and looked down at their hands. Shan smiled back patiently, even as the heat rushed to her face. Good ol' half-Asian blood probably kept Ian from knowing that, though.

"Look, Ian," she began, "we need to go now. Fast. Before that man comes back. But I can't leave without the statue he was looking for. A small, jade crane. Do you know where it is?"

Ian's grin faded, replaced by a new wariness that creased his brow and turned down the edges of his mouth. "So you're a thief, too? I thought you were one of the good guys. My mistake." He took a step past Shan, but wobbled.

Shan snaked an arm under his to steady him. "I am one of the good guys. Get me that statue, and I'll explain everything."

"Everything?" He arched an eyebrow. "I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because you saved my life, but I'll definitely need answers."

"Fine," Shan said. "You'll get answers." She felt the weight of him on her shoulder. His warmth soaked into her neck and arm, down her ribs and across her belly.

"Good enough for me," Ian said. "Now let's get the hell out of here."

"The statue- "

"Isn't here," he said. "It never was."

Shan looked at him. The shadows were back, hiding his eyes and the whole far side of his face. Was he just protecting the statue, or was it really someplace else? Her mother, when she'd been near the Jade Circle, had been able to discern truth from lie, to see through any ruse. Now the Circle was broken, and Shan had only her own instincts to rely on. Instincts which had proved more adept at fighting than diplomacy.

And absolutely pitiful at reading attractive men.

But regardless of Ian's intent, she'd never be able to search the room before the police arrived. Maybe this was just the break she needed. After all these years of searching, she still had only the tiger statue that she'd started with. And now she knew that someone else was looking for the Jade Circle animals, too. If Ian knew about the crane, maybe he had other information as well.

"Lead on," she said finally. "It looks like I'm going to trust you, at least for now."

"Excellent," said Ian, "because I think I'm going to pass out."

JADE TIGER is now available at:

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About the Author

Jenn Reese is a writer, martial artist, and geek. She lives in Los Angeles where she writes science fiction and fantasy adventure stories for readers of all ages. She's currently at work on Above World, a middle grade series for Candlewick Press coming spring 2012. Jade Tiger is her first novel and combines her love of martial arts, kick-ass women, archaeology, ancient societies, and goofy romance.

Visit her online at www.jennreese.com

Kat, Incorrigible

by Stephanie Burgis

1803

I was twelve years of age when I chopped off my hair, dressed as a boy, and set off to save my family from impending ruin. I made it almost to the end of my front garden.

"Katherine Ann Stephenson!" My oldest sister Elissa's outraged voice pinned me like a dagger as she threw open her bedroom window. "What on earth do you think you're doing?" Curses. I froze, still holding my pack slung across my shoulder. I might be my family's best chance of salvation, but there was no expecting either of my older sisters to understand that. If they'd trusted me in the first place, I wouldn't have had to run away in the middle of the night, like a criminal.

The garden gate was only two feet ahead of me. If I hurried . . .

"I'm going to tell Papa!" Elissa hissed.

Behind her, I heard groggy, incoherent moans of outrage-my other sister, Angeline, waking up.

Elissa was the prissiest female ever to have been born. But Angeline was simply impossible. If they really did wake the whole household, and Papa came after me in the gig . . .

I'd planned to walk to the closest coaching inn, six miles away, and catch the dawn stagecoach to London. If Papa caught up with me first, the sad, disappointed looks I'd have to endure from him for weeks afterward would be unbearable. And the way Stepmama would gloat over my disgrace-the second of our mother's children to be a disappointment to the family . . .

I gritted my teeth together as I turned and trudged back toward the vicarage.

Angeline's voice floated lazily through the open window. "What were you shouting about?"

"I was not shouting!" Elissa snapped. "Ladies never shout."

"You could have fooled me," said Angeline. "I thought the house must have been burning down."

I pushed the side door open just in time to hear my brother, Charles, bellow, "Would everyone be quiet? Some of us are trying to sleep!"

"What? What?" My father's voice sounded from his bedroom at the head of the stairs. "What's going on out there?"

My stepmother's voice overrode his. "For heaven's sake, make them be quiet, George! It's past midnight. You can-not let them constantly behave like hoydens. Be firm, for once!"

I groaned and closed the door behind me.

Like it or not, I was home.

I squeezed through the narrow kitchen and tiptoed up the rickety staircase that led to the second floor. When I was a little girl and Mama's influence still lingered in the house, each of the stairs had whispered my name as I stepped onto them, and they never let me trip. Now, the only sound they made was the telltale creak of straining wood.

The door to Papa and Stepmama's room swung open as I reached the head of the first flight of stairs, and I stopped, resigned.

"Kat?" Papa blinked out at me, peering through the darkness. He held a candle in his hand. "What's amiss?"

"Nothing, Papa," I said. "I just went downstairs for some milk."

"Oh. Well." He coughed and ran a hand over his faded nightcap. "Er, your stepmother is quite right. You should all be in bed and quiet at this hour."

"Yes, Papa." I hoisted the heavy sack higher on my shoulder. "I'm just going back to bed now."

"Good, good. And the others?"

"I'll tell them to be quiet," I said. "Don't worry."

"Good girl." He reached out to pat my shoulder. A frown crept across his face. "Ah . . . is something wrong, my dear?"

"Papa?"

"I don't mean to be critical, er, but your clothing seems . . . it appears . . . well, it does look a trifle unorthodox."

I glanced down at the boy's breeches, shirt, and coat that I wore. "I was too cold for a nightgown," I said.

"But . . ." He frowned harder. "There's something about your hair, I don't quite know what-"

My stepmother's voice cut him off. "Would you please stop talking and come back to bed, George? I cannot be expected to sleep with all this noise!"

"Ah. Right. Yes, of course." Papa gave a quick nod and turned away. "Sleep well, Kat."

"And you, sir."

I tiptoed up the last five steps that led to the second-floor landing. The doors to Charles's room and my sisters' room were both closed. If I was very, very lucky . . .

I leaped toward the ladder that led up to the attic where I slept.

No such luck. The door to my sisters' room jerked open.

"Come in here now!" Elissa said. I couldn't make out her features in the darkness, but I could tell that she had her arms crossed.

Oh, Lord.

"'Ladies don't cross their arms like common fish-wives,'" I whispered, quoting one of Elissa's own favorite maxims as I stalked past her into their room.

Elissa slammed the door behind her.

"Give us light, Angeline," she said. "I want to see her face."

Angeline was already lighting a candle. When the tinder finally caught and the candle lit, the sound of my sisters' gasps filled the room.

I crossed my arms over my chest and glared right back at them.

"You-you-" Elissa couldn't even speak. She collapsed onto her side of the bed, gasping and pressing one slender hand to her heart.

Angeline shook her head, smirking. "Well, that's torn it."

"Don't use slang," Elissa said. Being able to give one of her most common reproofs seemed to revive her spirits a little; the color came flooding back into her face. With her fair hair and pale skin, I could always tell her mood from her face, and right now, she was as horrified as I'd ever seen her. She took a deep, deep breath. "Katherine," she said, in a voice that was nearly steady. "Would you care to explain yourself to us?"

"No," I said. "I wouldn't." I lifted my chin, fighting for height. I was shorter than either of my sisters, a curse in situations like this.

"What is there to explain?" Angeline said. "It's obvious. Kat's finally decided to run off to the circus, where she belongs."

"I do not!"

"No?" Angeline's full lips twisted as she looked at me. "With that haircut, I don't know where else you hoped to go. Perhaps if you hid behind all the other animals-"

"Shut up!" I lunged for her straight across the room.

Their bed was in the way. I hit my knees on it, then flung aside my sack and crawled across the bed to get to her. Angeline's taunting laughter made my vision blur with rage. I landed on her, punching blindly, and kept on fighting even after she'd shoved me down onto the bed and wrapped her arm around my neck, half strangling me.

"Stop it!" Elissa shrieked.

Something heavy hit the other side of the wall: Charles signifying his displeasure. Across the stairwell, a door opened. Footsteps approached. A firm knock sounded on the door.

We all froze. We knew that knock.

"You've done it now, haven't you?" Angeline whispered into my ear.

"Cow," I whispered back.

"What's happening in there?" our stepmother demanded, through the door.

Angeline shoved me off the bed and onto the floor. When I tried to stand up, she put one hand on my newly short hair and pushed me straight back down. "Stay where you are!" she hissed. "She mustn't see you like this." She looked across the bed at Elissa. "You try to fob her off."

Elissa was already moving for the door, her face suddenly angelic and serene. "I'm coming, Stepmama," she called. "Just a moment." She stopped just short of the door and whispered, "Put that light out! Quick!"

Angeline blew the candle out and threw herself back into bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.

I huddled on the cold floor in the darkness while Elissa opened the door.

"What do you think-"

"We are so sorry for the noise, Stepmama," Elissa murmured. "Angeline had a fright and fell out of bed."

"All that screaming . . ." Stepmama's voice drew nearer. I could imagine what was happening, even though I couldn't see it: She was poking her sharp nose into the room, peering around in hopes of mischief. It was her never-ending quest: to prove to Papa how incorrigible we all were. Just like our mother had been.

"Angeline had a terrible nightmare," Elissa said, and I was amazed by how well my saintly sister could lie when she was properly motivated.

"Perhaps I should come in and look things over," Stepmama said.

"Ohhh . . . ," Angeline moaned from the bed. Angeline, unlike Elissa, never found any difficulty in lying. "Oh, my poor stomach . . ."

Stepmama sighed and started forward. "If you're ill, I'd better-"

"I was ill," Angeline said. "All over the floor."

"Oh." Stepmama came to an abrupt halt. "Where-?"

"Do watch where you step," Elissa said sweetly. "I haven't had a chance to clean it up quite yet, so-"

Stepmama's feet shuffled back hastily. "Well," she said. "Well. I'm sure that you'll feel better after a good night's sleep, Angeline. But see that you girls take care of the mess first. And no more noise!"

The door closed, and her footsteps moved away. I stayed frozen until her bedroom door had opened and closed again on the other side of the stairwell. As I finally moved, my hand slipped on the wooden floor and slid across two familiar, oddly shaped books hidden just beneath the bed.

I knew those books. They weren't supposed to be here. They were supposed to be locked away with the rest of our mother's keepsakes, where Papa and Stepmama hoped we would all forget that they had ever existed. Just like Mama herself.

I started to pick them up, then stopped. Now wasn't the time to ask either of my sisters provocative questions.

"Whew." I stood up and stretched to relieve my cramped muscles as Angeline relit the candle. "Well, I'd better go up to bed and sleep now, as Stepmama said, so-"

"Don't even think about it," said Angeline. Her arm shot out and grabbed the back of my jacket, pinning me to the side of the bed. "Open up her pack, Elissa. Let's see what Kat was planning to take away with her."

"I'm not a thief," I muttered.

Angeline threw me a look of amused contempt. "I never thought you were, ninny. I just wondered what sort of practical provisioning you'd made to prepare for your journey."

"Journey?" Elissa said. Her voice came out in a gasp. "What journey?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Angeline. "What else did you think she was doing, dressed up as a boy and heading out in the middle of the night? She was running away, weren't you, Kat?"

I gritted my teeth and stood silent under her grasp.

"You couldn't-why-" Elissa collapsed onto the bed. "Whatever would make you do such a thing? How could you even think-?"

"I didn't have a choice!" The words burst out between my gritted teeth. "It was the only way I could stop you from being an idiot!"

"Me?" Elissa stared at me.

"If you're trying to fool us with one of your wild stories-," Angeline began.

I glowered at her. "And you. You were going to let her do it!"

"Do what?" said Elissa. "What is she talking about?"

"I heard Stepmama!" I said to Elissa. "She was positively gloating about it to Papa. All about how she'd managed to save the whole family by selling you off to some horrible old man. And you hadn't even told me! You two never tell me anything! I knew if I tried to argue, you wouldn't pay any attention, so-"

"Oh, Lord," Angeline said. "I knew if she found out-"

"At least I was going to do something about it." I swung on Angeline. "You were just going to let her sacrifice herself."

"And what exactly was your plan?" Angeline asked. "Once you'd fitted yourself out like a monkey-"

"I was going to London," I said. "I knew if I ran away, there would be such a scandal that Stepmama wouldn't be able to sell Elissa off. And once I was there . . ." I half closed my eyes, to see my dream past my sister's skeptical face. "There are thousands of jobs a boy can get in London. I could sign on to a merchant ship and make my fortune in the Indies, or I could be a typesetter at a newspaper and see every part of London. All I'd have to do is get work, real work, earning money, and then I could send part of it home to you two, so at least you could both have real dowries and then-"

"Oh, you little fool," Elissa said, and the words came out in a half sob. "Come here, Kat." Angeline let go of me, and I crawled over the bed to Elissa's warm embrace. She wrapped her arms around me, and I felt her tears land on my short hair. "Promise me you won't ever do anything so rash and unnecessary ever again."

"But-" My voice came out muffled against her nightgown.

Angeline spoke from behind me. "How long do you think you would have survived in London on your own, idiot? And who do you think would have hired you, coming from the countryside with no references, no one who knows you to give you a good word, no skills or experience-"

"I have skills!" I said.

"Not the sort that get young men hired," Angeline said implacably. "And when they found out you weren't really a boy . . ."

Elissa shuddered and tightened her arms around me. "It isn't to be thought of," she said. "The danger you would have been exposed to-"

"The danger she would have walked straight into, without even thinking twice," Angeline corrected her.

"I could have taken care of myself," I said. "Charles taught me how to box and fence last year when he was sent down from Oxford for bad behavior."

"Charles is a fool," said Angeline, "and I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't half as good at boxing or fencing as he claims to be."

The three of us sat for a moment in depressed silence, acknowledging the truth of that.

Elissa sighed. "But the point is, darling, it isn't necessary for you to save me."

"Who else is going to do it?" I struggled up out of her embrace. "I am not going to let you sell yourself off just so Stepmama can buy us all dozens of new gowns and seasons in London and-"

"And keep our brother from being sent to debtors' prison," Angeline said evenly.

I snorted. "You should know better than to listen to Stepmama's moans. She's just hysterical about-"

"It's true," said Elissa. "I saw the evidence myself. Papa borrowed everything he could to pay off Charles's dreadful gambling debts, but he couldn't cover all of them. If we can't come up with the money to pay the rest within two months, poor Charles will have to go to debtors' prison."

"'Poor Charles,' my foot," said Angeline. "Going to debtors' prison is exactly what Charles deserves."

I looked from Angeline to Elissa. "But surely-"

"If Charles goes to debtors' prison, we will all be ruined," Elissa said. "None of us would ever receive an eligible offer of marriage after that. You know our family is already considered . . . well . . ." She bit her lip.

"I know," I said. Stepmama was only too ready to remind us, anytime one of us forgot. There were plenty of people in Society who would always look at us askance just because of our mother, no matter how properly we behaved or what our dowries were. It was one reason why I had decided long ago not to bother behaving properly. "But that can't be enough to make you marry an old man! Whoever he is."

"Sir Neville Collingwood," Angeline said. "One of the wealthiest men in England. You can see why Stepmama chose him, can't you?"

"He's not so very old, Kat," Elissa said. She clasped her hands together and looked down at them. "I don't think he can be above forty, and-"

"Forty!"

"And Stepmama says he is supposed to be quite handsome."

"Supposed to be? She hasn't even met him herself?"

"We've been very fortunate even to gain this one opportunity." Elissa's voice sounded strained. "Stepmama has good relations, you know."

"Ha," I said.

"Well, she has connections, at any rate," Elissa said. "It was through them that she found out that Sir Neville is coming into Yorkshire-and that she arranged for us to meet him."

"Sir Neville will be part of a monthlong house party at Grantham Abbey, thirty miles from here," Angeline said briskly. "Stepmama has arranged for all of us to be guests there as well, because everyone knows that Sir Neville is looking for another wife."

"Another?" I repeated. "What happened to his first one?"

"That doesn't matter," Elissa said. She was knotting her fingers so tightly together now that her knuckles had turned white. "It's a wonderful opportunity for me. For all of us. Sir Neville is . . . he is . . ."

"He is so wealthy, he could pay off all Charles's debts for the rest of his life, without even noticing," Angeline said. "And since Papa and Stepmama can't keep Charles locked up in the house forever, it makes a great deal of sense for at least one of us to have a husband like that."

"I don't mind, Kat. Truly," Elissa said. "I always wanted to marry a man who could help my family. Sir Neville is a great man in Society."

I frowned at her. "Then why do you look so miserable?"

"Never mind that." Angeline put one hand on Elissa's knotted fingers, and for a moment I felt completely shut out as they looked at each other with sympathetic under-standing.

"What is it?" I said. "What aren't you telling me this time?"

"Nothing, darling," Elissa said. "Just go up to bed now. We're all too tired to talk properly. Come back in the morning before breakfast, and I'll fix your hair. And please, don't worry about me anymore. I am perfectly happy. Truly."

"But . . ." I stood up slowly, still frowning at my two sisters and trying to guess the secret I could feel hang-ing between them. "If you marry Sir Neville, do you think he'll give Angeline a dowry?"

"I hope so," said Elissa.

"It doesn't matter whether he does or not," Angeline said, and flashed me a dangerous smile. "I have my own plans for that."

Ha. At least that gave me one clue.

Perhaps Angeline and Elissa wanted to play at keeping more secrets from me, but I would wager anything that there was one secret Angeline hadn't dared to share with our sweet, proper oldest sister.

I'd recognized the books hidden underneath Angeline's side of the bed. They were Mama's old magic books.

Now all I had to do was figure out what Angeline was planning to do with them.

KAT, INCORRIGIBLE is now available at:

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About the Author

Stephanie Burgis grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, but fell in love with Regency England when she was eight years old and discovered Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. Now she lives in Wales with her husband, fellow writer Patrick Samphire, their toddler son, and their crazy-sweet border collie mix, Maya.

Visit her online at www.stephanieburgis.com

Medium Dead

by Chris Dolley

There's only one thing worse than being able to see the dead and that's having to listen to them. They're so whiney. Why me? I'm too young to die! Why didn't I go to the doctor earlier?

When Brenda saw her first ghost she thought she was going crazy. The final destination in a year-long descent into hell that had seen her marriage, her career, her home of six years - all disappear in the messiest of messy divorces.

Other wives got alimony, Brenda got dead people. And to make matters worse, her lying, cheating ex-husband hadn't been one of them.

Now, four years on, she did her best to ignore them, busying herself with whatever task she could find while waiting for them to leave. That was one good thing about the dead - they never stayed for long. They drifted in, complained, then faded.

Except this one. She'd been in Brenda's kitchen since before breakfast. Just standing there by the fridge door, a translucent mouse of a woman - mid-fifties, pinched features, short brown hair and wearing what looked like an ankle-length dressing gown. She'd watched in silence as Brenda ate her solitary breakfast and watched a recording of her favorite daytime soap - the so-bad-it-was-addictive, The Rich, The Spoiled, and the Surgically Enhanced.

And all through that the ghost hadn't said a word. Even when Celeste, who last week had become a lesbian, discovered that Geraldine, her new partner, was actually her father - who'd had to have a sex change ten years earlier when he'd been forced into the witness protection program following his wife's murder by the albino Mafia. Or was that the Albanian Mafia? It was difficult to tell in the excitement. Celeste was screaming so loud, and Brenda's coffee had gone down the wrong way.

But the ghost hadn't reacted at all. Not to Celeste, or the choking Brenda. She'd just hung there, impassive and staring.

And exuding an odor that Brenda euphemistically named, 'freshly dug.' That was another thing about ghosts - the slightly musty, slightly sweet smell they sometimes brought with them. Brenda had to keep a can of air freshener handy at all times.

"Well?" snapped Brenda, gathering up her cup and bowl from the table. "Are you going to say something, or are you just going to stand there all day?"

The ghost said nothing. She didn't even flicker. Her empty black eyes followed Brenda from the table to the sink.

Then, as Brenda was stacking the washing up, the woman spoke.

"He's coming for you next."

Brenda swung round in surprise. "Who…."

But the woman had gone. No wisp of fading ectoplasm, no shimmering patch of air. Nothing.

Until Brenda turned to face the sink again and almost jumped across the room.

The ghost was in her sink. Well, half in her sink. The woman was standing there as though the sink didn't exist - her feet presumably on the floor while her torso rose out of Brenda's washing up.

"He's going to kill you like he killed me." Gone were the ghost's empty eyes and impassive face. She spat the words out. "He's been watching you for weeks."

"Who?"

The ghost turned her head to one side. "I can hear him coming." The corners of her mouth curled up in a hint of a smile. A far from pleasant one. Her face swung back to challenge Brenda.

"Run! Get out while you can."

There was no warmth in the warning. Just hostility.

Brenda folded her arms. "I'm not going anywhere until you tell-"

"You're not listening!" The ghost stabbed an ethereal hand at the back door. "This is your last chance. Open that door and run!"

Brenda stayed where she was, arms folded and determined not to say another word. She'd experienced enough ghostly histrionics over the past four years. Some spirits were angry and confused. Others were just plain angry. And the more you responded, the crazier they became.

A look of contempt settled over the woman's face. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

And with that, she vanished.

Brenda let out a deep breath and rolled her eyes. What was it with ghosts? Had all the friendly, well-adjusted ones found the bright white light and passed over?

She looked down at her crockery in the sink. Was that ectoplasm on her breakfast bowl? Calcium deposits were bad enough, but ectoplasm…

That's when the front doorbell rang.

Brenda froze. She glanced towards the living room, then back at the sink. Coincidence? She wasn't expecting anyone. No one called on a Saturday. No one called most days.

The doorbell rang again.

Okay, thought Brenda, I'm thirty-one and far too old to be spooked by a spook. It'll probably be Jehovah's Witnesses.

She stepped into her living room, cast a quick glance around to make sure it was presentable and walked towards the door. Then hesitated.

"Who is it?" she asked, standing a good two yards back from the door.

"Brian Murphy. I'm sorry to disturb you, but my car's broken down outside your house."

Brian Murphy? The name didn't ring any bells, but he didn't sound threatening. He sounded middle-aged, educated - not the kind of person who'd pull a knife and come crashing through the door the moment she slipped the chain.

But that warning…

"Hello? Are you still there?" asked the man outside.

Brenda bit her lip. This was stupid. It was nine o'clock in the morning. Broad daylight in a crime-free suburban neighborhood. She wasn't in any danger. This was the Midwest, not New York or London. Her neighbors were probably out in their driveways washing their cars, or playing with their kids. No one would try anything in front of so many witnesses.

She stepped forward and opened the door a crack, letting the chain pull taut across the gap. A middle-aged man peered in, business suit, clean shaven, slightly built. And nervous. It wasn't hot outside, but three beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.

"My car's there," he said, standing back to point at a black BMW parked across the entrance to Brenda's drive. "Can I … would it be all right to use your phone?"

He smiled - a quick nervous smile - then looked away.

Brenda's internal threat status rose from guarded to elevated. He wants to get inside your home. Why doesn't he use his cell?

She swallowed, her mouth suddenly feeling dry. "I'll call the local garage for you. I've got them on speed dial."

"No!"

He couldn't disguise the panic in his voice. Though he tried.

"It's not a garage I need to call. It's uh my office. I'm late for an important meeting. My job depends on it."

Brenda looked at him hard. She wanted him to be telling the truth. She didn't want a fuss. She wanted a nice, simple, conflict-free life. And he might be telling the truth. Important meeting, career on the line, car breaks down on the way. Who wouldn't panic?

But…

"Don't you have a cell phone?"

He closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. "You must think I'm a total idiot. I'm usually so organized but … it's this meeting. It's really knocked me sideways. I forgot to charge the battery last night. The thing's dead. Along with my career and my marriage if I don't sort something out."

He looked at her pleadingly. Brenda wavered. He didn't look creepy. He looked frightened and nervous - which could be explained if this meeting was as important as he said it was.

But…

He could be spinning her a line. You heard about it all the time. Serial killers and their ploys. My car's broken down. I've lost my dog. My child's hurt. Please, can you help?

And once you slipped the chain or got in their car, that was it. No way back. They'd whack you from behind or drug you. And the next thing you knew you were face down on some cold floor being raped or murdered.

She was not slipping that chain.

"You can borrow my cell," said Brenda, keeping her voice bright and confident. "I'll fetch it."

She'd barely turned away from the door when she heard the click of a gun.

"One more step and I'll blow his head off."

A second man's voice. Young, threatening, and hitting all Brenda's alarm buttons. She swung round. The older man's face had been pushed down and squashed against the doorjamb. A gun pressed against his ear. The second man - tall, early twenties, black greasy hair - glared at her through wild eyes.

"Open the door, or I'll spread his brains all over your carpet."

Brenda couldn't move. Her gut told her to run. Let him inside and he'd do whatever he wanted. Her only chance was to run and duck and hope she could make it out the back before he smashed his way in. But his eyes told her he'd shoot her in the back before she made it to the kitchen.

Time stretched. The only sound the slow tick of the wall clock. Nothing from outside. No shouts, no voices, no children playing. Where were her neighbors when she needed them?

"I'm counting to three," he said. "One…."

Brenda still couldn't move, still listening for that one sound - a slowing car, a shout, a passing savior.

"Two."

She rushed to the door, hands trembling, fingers turning to thumbs as she struggled to slip the chain off the latch. The door swung open, knocking her backwards. Two men bundled through. The older man was shoved towards the center of the room, off balance and falling. He hit the floor and rolled, banging into the edge of the sofa.

The younger man closed the door and locked it. "Anyone else in the house?"

She wanted to say 'not yet.' She wanted to say her husband was on his way home. With his brothers. All Navy SEALS.

But he ran at her and the words vanished. There was so much anger in his face. She shrank back against the wall - trapped. His left hand thudded into her sternum, pinning her there.

"I said, is anyone else here!"

His breath stank. She could barely think. "No!" she gasped. "No one."

"You live alone?"

"Yes."

He pushed himself off her, smiling as he did so. Every part of her body was shaking. Why hadn't she listened to the dead woman? She'd been warned!

The gunman hurried to the windows and drew all the curtains. He switched on the room lights and ripped the phone out of the wall.

"Give me your cells. Now! Both of you!"

Brian fumbled in his pockets. The gunman stood over him, beckoning impatiently with his fingers, before snatching the cell from Brian's trembling hand.

"Mine's in the kitchen," said Brenda.

He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her from the wall. "Show me. And you," he turned and pointed the gun at Brian. "Don't move an inch. I only need one hostage."

Brian didn't say a word. Or move. He just sat there, on the floor, looking like a helpless animal caught in a spotlight.

Brenda was pushed towards the kitchen. She tried to walk calmly. She tried not to look at the rack of knives by the draining board. She tried to focus everything on collecting her phone and handing it over with the minimum of eye contact. But her brain was in a spin, screaming at her to do something, screaming at her - no! She had to wait. There's no time to wait! He'll tie you up in a minute and you'll be helpless. But fight back and he'll kill you! Do as he says and you'll get through this. Make him realize you're a person, do all those things that hostages are supposed to do. Wait him out!

She grabbed the cell with shaking fingers and handed it to him, keeping her eyes down and fixed on the phone. She didn't dare look at him. One misread look and anything could happen.

He reached forward to take the phone, his left hand enclosing both the phone and the tips of her fingers. And there it stayed. His hand in contact with hers. Gently squeezing.

"That's a good girl. We're going to get along fine. I can tell."

Brenda swallowed hard, her imagination on fire. She had to get out of this room. She was trapped in a corner. He was between her and both doors.

"Shouldn't you be locking the back door and closing the blinds?" she said.

"You like it in the dark, do you?"

Shit! Shit! Shit! She closed her eyes, squeezed them shut. She could feel him inching closer, his stinking breath warm against the top of her head. His other hand brushed against her shoulder, sliding down and across…

Crash! The sound came from the living room. Breaking glass. The gunman turned, already moving towards the sound. He yanked Brenda along behind him, his fingers digging into her arm.

"It wasn't me," said Brian, rising from the spot where they'd left him. "It just fell down. I haven't moved."

Brenda believed him. There was a dead woman standing by the far wall, a few yards from an empty space where a mirror had been. A different dead woman - not the one from earlier - and were those bruises on her face? And her clothes - they were ripped and … was that blood?

She looked so sad and tearful, rippling against the far wall - opaque, transparent, half here, half there. Had she managed to dislodge the mirror from the wall? All the ghosts Brenda had seen passed straight through matter.

The gunman let go of Brenda's arm and turned on Brian.

"I told you not to fucking move!" He pointed the gun straight at Brian's head. "Where do you want it? In the head? The chest? The leg?"

The gun zigzagged in his hands, pointing at Brian's head, his chest, his thighs.

"You can die quick or slow. It's up to you."

"He didn't do anything!" shouted Brenda. "The screw holding the mirror's been loose for ages. I meant to get someone in to repair it!"

He ignored her, the gun dancing in his hands. He was enjoying himself, smiling, tormenting, his eyes locked on Brian's terrified face.

"What would he be doing over there?" shouted Brenda. "If he wanted to escape he'd have gone for the door!"

A second passed. Then another. Brian just stood there, eyes tight closed and face screwed up in silent acceptance. The ghost by the wall started to cry.

"No!" she wailed.

The gunman relaxed. It was like a switch had been thrown. One second he was about to kill, the next he lowered his gun, turned to Brenda and smiled.

"Not your lucky day is it? First me, then the mirror."

His smile tightened, then vanished. He started to move towards her. "Do you know the difference between me and a mirror?"

She shook her head, backing away at the same time. One wrong word, one mistaken glance and she could set him off.

"You get seven years bad luck for a mirror. But with me … you get time off for good behavior. If you know what I mean."

Brenda nearly threw up. The way he said it, the way he smiled, so smug, so … eugh!

"Now move! Both of you! Over there where I can see you."

He herded them into the lounge area of the open plan living room, the section in the far corner by the television. "Sit down!"

Brenda took the near armchair so she could keep an eye on the dead woman who still hadn't moved from her place by the wall. Brian perched on the far edge of the L-shaped sofa. The gunman stood in front of the television. He turned it on and flicked through the channels until he found a local news station.

It was a live broadcast from nearby Hillsdale. A gaggle of reporters surrounded a police spokesman.

"Is it the Hillsdale rapist?" a journalist called out.

"It's too soon to say," said the spokesman. "But we do have a lead. A man was seen running away from the vicinity."

He held up a photofit of the man's face. The cameras zoomed in on the image. Brenda leaned forward, already knowing whose face she was going to see. It was the gunman. Not an exact likeness, but close enough. The Hillsdale rapist. Five women beaten, raped and murdered in a matter of months. And now here he was - in her home! - holding her hostage.

"Fuck!" said the gunman, starting to pace. "Fuck!"

He turned on Brian. "This is all your fault. How the fuck can you run out of gas?"

Brian melted into the back of the sofa. "I uh I … I…." He looked too terrified to speak.

"I-I-I what?" said the gunman. "I shit myself? I too fucking stupid to see the warning light?"

"You put a gun in my face! I couldn't think straight."

"You couldn't think straight? You only had enough gas to drive eight miles! You should have seen the warning light before I flagged you down."

The police spokesman flashed back on screen talking about how there'd been a chase, but the killer had given them the slip.

"He won't get away. We've set up roadblocks around Hillsdale and Richwood. There's no way he's getting out."

The gunman turned and swore at the television before starting pacing again, prowling the area in front of the TV.

Another picture flashed on screen. The victim - twenty-four year-old nurse, Gabriella Czerna - pictured from happier times when she could still smile. When her face wasn't bruised, her dress torn and blood-spattered, and her ghost wasn't a see-through wraith hovering above the broken shards of Brenda's mirror.

The wraith began to pulse against the wall, brightening and fading in time to … to what? A ghostly heart beat? Had anger, the sudden sight of her former self on the television, imbued her spectral form with some remnant of life?

The pulsing began to diminish and with it went the anger in her face. Replaced by tears. A low sobbing accompaniment to the news report of her death.

"Why don't you take my car?" said Brenda. "They can't be watching every road out of here."

"No. Best to stay here and wait," said the gunman. "Tomorrow this'll be old news."

Tomorrow? He was staying here - in her house - for twenty-four hours?

"Don't look so worried. Do what I say and you'll both get out of here alive. You never know - you might start to enjoy it."

He smiled - a serial-killing rapist's smile. Are you having a good time? I am.

A small sad voice sounded from the ghost by the wall. "He never leaves loose ends."

Brenda closed her eyes. He never leaves loose ends. She wasn't going to get out of this alive. He was going to hole up in her house until the roadblocks were lifted then make a run for it in her car. Either he'd take her with him as a hostage, or he'd kill her here. He wouldn't care. And when he wasn't killing her, he'd be raping her.

He never leaves loose ends.

"I'm sorry," said Brian. "It's all my fault. I should never have let him hijack my car. I should have fought back. I could have saved you from this."

"Shut up," said the gunman. He smiled at Brenda and rolled his eyes. "Of all the cars to hijack I had to hijack his. You'd be a better driving buddy, wouldn't you? I bet you wouldn't run out of gas. I bet you could go for hours."

He sauntered towards her, smiling his serial-killer rapist's smile. He probably thought himself irresistible. Brenda glanced towards the ghost by the wall. The ghost who'd found enough power earlier to dislodge the mirror. Wasn't it about time…

The ghost vanished. No goodbyes, no 'I'm going for help.' She just vanished.

"How much do you want?" asked Brian. "I'm a rich man. I can raise a ransom. Just let us go. You won't get a penny if we're dead."

He had the killer's interest. "How rich?"

"Very. Look, take my wallet. It's full of platinum cards. I can raise hundreds of thousands. Let me call my wife. She'll get it for you."

The gunman took the wallet and opened it. He pulled out a number of credit cards and pocketed them. Then stopped dead, his eyes narrowing.

"Where'd you get this?" he shouted at Brian, pulling a photograph from the wallet and thrusting it at him.

Brian pulled away, flattening himself against the back of the sofa. "It's Tina, my wife. It was taken-"

"Is this some kinda joke?" He stood over Brian, gun hand drawn back ready to strike. "This is Tina Murphy!"

Brian brought his arms up to protect his face. "I know. I'm Brian Murphy."

The gunman brought his arm back further, held it there, quivering. Then turned away. "Fuck!"

Brenda watched, confused. Who was Tina Murphy?

The gunman paced, shaking his head. The picture had unnerved him. He was already unpredictable. He could snap at any second.

He charged at Brian, grabbed a fistful of hair with his left hand and shook the man's head, his gun hand held high, threatening to come smashing down on the side of Brian's face.

Brian wailed, both hands coming up to claw at the killer's left hand. But with no strength or conviction.

Brenda's hands flew to her face. He was going to kill him. Beat him to death in front of her. And all for what? A picture of his wife?

The gun hand continued to hover. The fingers of the killer's left hand continued to bite. "Were you following me? Is that why you were there when I needed a car? Did you let me hi-jack it?"

"No! I don't understand."

"You don't understand. Tina Murphy is fucking dead. I killed her last month!"

"No! I talked to her this morning. I can phone her if you like. She's alive."

"Can I see her picture?" asked Brenda. The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. Curiosity, the cat killer, had struck again. She flinched in her seat, not sure if she'd just tipped him over the edge, not sure if he was going to come racing over, flailing and shooting.

He stopped shaking Brian. And stared at Brenda. Then back at Brian. "Are you in this together? Did you bring me here on purpose?"

"No! We've never met. I ran out of gas. You can check."

The gunman let go of Brian, let him slump back in the sofa and moved towards Brenda. "Why do you want to see the picture?"

He stood in front of her, daring her to say something he didn't like.

And what could she say? That she thought the face might belong to one of the many ghosts who floated through her home. Maybe the one who'd warned her earlier?

"Sorry. I thought I might recognize her from the TV. I was only trying to help."

She pitched her voice calm and businesslike. I'm not a threat. I'm not trying to provoke you. I'm trying to help.

He handed her the picture. "Well?"

It wasn't the woman from breakfast. Or anyone she recognized. Not that she'd been following the Hillsdale case closely. She tried to avoid that kind of news.

"She's not dead!" shouted Brian. "Let me call her. I can prove it! Give me my phone back!"

Brian was getting up. He'd leaned forward, planted both hands on the rim of the sofa ready to push off.

The gunman erupted. In two strides he was across the floor, gun arm pulled back and swinging towards the side of Brian's unprotected head.

And then Brenda's life changed forever.

MEDIUM DEAD is now available at:

Amazon USA

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iBooks/iTunes

About the Author

Chris Dolley is an author, a pioneer computer game designer and a teenage freedom fighter. That was in 1974 when Chris was tasked with publicising Plymouth Rag Week. Some people might have arranged an interview with the local newspaper. Chris created the Free Cornish Army, invaded the country next door, and persuaded the UK media that Cornwall had risen up and declared independence. As he told journalists at the time, ‘It was only a small country, and I did give it back.’

In 1981, he created Randomberry Games and wrote Necromancer, one of the first 3D first person perspective D&D computer games.

Now he lives in rural France with his wife and a frightening number of animals. They grow their own food and solve their own crimes. The latter out of necessity when Chris’s identity was stolen along with their life savings. Abandoned by the police forces of four countries who all insisted the crime originated in someone else's jurisdiction, he had to solve the crime himself. Which he did, and got a book out of it the UK bestseller, French Fried

Visit him online at www.chrisdolley.com

Midnight at Spanish Gardens

by Alma Alexander

Overture

Thursday, 20 December 2012

Olivia could not believe how little had changed on the street where she stood. Twenty years had slipped by since she had last seen this place; twenty years, crumbling away with each step, days falling like leaves from autumnal branches and swirling around her feet. In an era where everything hurtled forward at a breakneck pace, where entire neighborhoods were swept away at a whim to create new malls or parking lots or great gleaming edifices of steel and glass with forlorn 'For Lease: Office Space' signs growing old and faded in empty windows, this particular street seemed to have remained alarmingly faithful to Olivia's memory of it - back in the days when she was young, at the top of the world, invincible, immortal.

In fact, it was a little disconcerting to allow herself to realize that the single thing that had changed the most from the way things used to be twenty years ago was…herself.

Well, but that's as it should be, she thought, allowing herself a little philosophical shrug.

But it was also…wrong. Wrong that everything else should be so changeless and immutable while she alone was the flotsam on the river of life, being carried hither and yon as the currents willed it, being allowed to tarry nowhere, only to find herself apparently cast back on the same shores she thought she'd left a long time ago.

The short winter twilight had passed while she lingered in the oddly empty street, wasting time, peering at shop windows and trying to recall if they were in fact identical to those she remembered being there before, or if she was just painting a mental landscape with the things that she knew ought to be there. There ought to have been a notebook in her bag - there always was, she carried one by what was part instinct and part ritual, but when she rooted around for it this time, in the moment when she really needed it, the thing seemed to have disappeared.

No matter. Her mind's eye would do She would transcribe later; it might not be the same, it might not be as good as it came in the instant when she was standing here resting her eyes on the scenery, but enough would remain. In the meantime, she rolled up her mental sleeves and sat down in front of a blank screen in the back of her mind, her hands poised over a keyboard that wasn't there.

A cursor blinked momentarily as she did a slow, apprising circle, raking the street up and down with a writer's recording stare.

Evening You walk down a shuttered street; there are "Closed" signs in shop windows and on doors as you stroll past Illuminated displays of things. This is not Rodeo Drive; you're likely to see cheap, ordinary shoes. Maybe tools. Printed T-shirts. A bicycle shop.

Olivia's footsteps seemed loud on the empty pavement. Things looked wet - as though it had recently rained, but not rained hard; not nearly enough water for puddles, just barely wet enough to reflect back the glow of street lights in a strange and oddly magical manner - as though it was not so much reflection that she was seeing but that the asphalt had turned transparent, revealing glimpses of an upside-down world beneath her feet.

She reached a gap between buildings - a narrow alley which someone who did not know that it was there would have probably missed completely, or dismissed as an insignificant cul-de-sac - and paused, glancing up and down the street again, and then down the short alleyway. The mind-screen woke again; words appeared in the wake of the blinking cursor.

A narrow alley opens between two buildings. There are no signs, nothing to indicate that it leads anywhere at all. But you turn.

The alley was lit dimly at the street end by a fluorescent sign hanging from the shop front facing the street on the corner, and at the far end by an old-fashioned collared street light with a large yellow bulb, barely pooling enough light at its foot to show that the alley was paved with irregular cobbles. Ordinarily this was the kind of place that might have been regarded with wariness, even suspicion - a mugger's lair where a single female should never venture alone - but that sense of vague danger was window-dressing, camouflage, and the far end of the alley was barely a dozen steps away. At the other end it opened up…

Olivia closed her eyes briefly, conjuring up the lay of the land in the courtyard at the far end. The words on her mind's eye-screen helpfully spilled into the space she had left for them.

The passageway between a couple of blank brick walls widens abruptly into a courtyard. There is a doorway, dark now, with some sort of gilt writing on the glass. An accountant, maybe, or a dentist - I forget what it was, and maybe it even changed once or twice during my time here. And across the courtyard, dimly lit, a coy sign above the door, there it is, Spanish Gardens.

It does not look very Spanish. It certainly doesn't look anything like a garden.

And then she was there, under the far light, and she opened her eyes…and smiled to herself, a little grimly. She might have stepped back in time, so much alike was it to what she remembered.

She paused for the longest time, staring at that door, at that sign.

The outside of that side of the courtyard was utilitarian. So ordinary, in fact, so far from being special, that Olivia wondered just by what kind of alchemy it had lingered in her memory with the kind of etched precision that it did. The door itself was a perfectly mundane metal frame, spare to the point of being almost industrial, with somewhat dusty glass, inscribed with the hours of opening (late afternoon, night; to this kind of place daylight was never kind). Next to it, a large shop window, with one of those half-curtains like one would expect to see in cafes or neat suburban kitchens, leaving the top part of the window open. Through the glass, it was just possible to glimpse the top of the till - not precisely antique, but not computerized, either - still obstinately analog, old-fashioned.

The glass door opened to a view of a narrow room, one side almost entirely taken up with a glass-fronted display cabinet such as one would expect to find in an old-fashioned neighborhood deli or a pastry shop, and the other side, against the wall, crammed with a couple of small tables covered with red and white checked tablecloths and flanked by pairs of old-fashioned wooden chairs, no two of them alike.

Olivia stepped closer and was somehow not surprised to see that over at the far end of the glass display case, beside a crimson-curtained doorway above which hung signs pointing the way to the restrooms, sat a tall bar stool surrounded by a mike and an amplifier and a couple of speakers. It was currently unoccupied, but she remembered all too clearly the young, long-haired troubadours of twenty years ago perched on that very stool, or one just like it, strumming guitars and crooning songs like "Starry Starry Night" and songs by John Lennon.

At first glance through that door, the interior of the place was cramped to the point of claustrophobia, once you factored in a coat rack and a line of hooks on the wall waiting to receive coats and jackets. But next to the table furthest from the entrance, there was an arched opening to another room. It had a further cluster of red-check-tableclothed tables and mismatched wooden chairs. A large blackboard adorned most of the far wall, festooned with graffiti from previous patrons, an ever-changing display. One couldn't see it from the vantage point of the entrance, but Olivia knew that just above the archway, facing into the second room, hung the only other piece of art in the place - a framed print of a bullfight, with a charging black bull and a matador resplendent in gold with a red cape flourished jauntily. The only nod to Spain in the place, if one didn't count the presence of the occasional guitar.

She pushed the door open. It gave after a slight resistance The oil lanterns on the tables had been lit, and the flames behind glass globes, grayed by years of smoke, flickered sturdily, leaving soft edgeless shadows pooling on the tables and the walls. If that had been the only available light, the place would have been cave-dark, but there were other lights strategically fastened to available walls - muted, to be sure, covered in dusty shades that made the light a mellow reddish orange-gold. Perhaps it was that permanent half-light that changed the place, metamorphosing it from shabby to enchanted. One entire wall of it, facing into the courtyard, was no more than a couple of huge plate glass windows - but it was impossible to tell that from the inside, where the harshness of that enormous expanse of cold glass was softened by an almost theatrical floor-to-ceiling red-plush curtain. In a more garish light it might have looked cheap and contrived; in what light there was, it looked mysterious, warm, inviting, intriguing - as though one was on the stage, on the wrong side of the curtain, waiting with a sense of rising excitement for the curtain to go up and show you the audience beyond.

Olivia stepped inside and allowed her eyes to fall sideways at the glass deli cabinet. There were things on display here, pies and pastries. The laminated menus in metal holders on the individual tables also offered burgers and fries, pasta, toasted sandwiches, and soup. The food was always plain but substantial here - because this was a student place, had always been, knowledge of it passed like arcane secrets from senior to freshman through time-honored underground channels, advertised nowhere except by word of mouth. A scattering of the usual clientele occupied the main room, girls with pony tails and fresh faces, young men with long hair and intense eyes, leaning across the tables toward one another, fingers intertwined between them on the tabletop.

Oh, dear God.

Olivia closed her eyes briefly. The cursor on the screen in her mind's eyes blinked briefly, words falling after it in another burst of memory.

This was a place of celebrations - you would come here for your graduations, your anniversaries. Young women with long lanky hair and bold eyes were given wine-red roses at these utilitarian, almost dingy, tables, and their memory of it is glamoured in a romantic spell. You bring your girlfriend here to propose…

Four times. Four times she had been asked that question in this place. She could remember each occasion quite vividly - twice it had happened almost by accident, meant more as a joke than anything else; the third time, over at the table in the far corner right underneath the blackboard, the potential groom-to-be had been broken quite recently by a rejection of a similar proposal made to another girl, the love of his life, a friend of Olivia's. Initially he had brought Olivia there to pour out his misery to her. The proposal came out of nowhere, had been slipped into his tale of woe born out of sheer desperation. The evening had ended badly - because Olivia had come out with the young man as a friend, because she could listen and commiserate, and had been entirely blindsided by the sudden switch in his focus. Rejecting him was the only thing to do, but she remembered feeling like dirt, stammering, groping blindly for words that would not slice like flensing knives and yet would not come out resembling anything remotely like an intention to even seriously consider the question. They both knew the proposal for what it was - and yet there was a thread of seriousness there, and if she had uttered anything close to a yes he would have taken it as a promise. He had finally gone very white, very quiet, and they had left early, knowing that they would never see each other again - after that night, it would have been entirely too excruciating to endure one another's company.

The fourth time it had been Sam, and she had accepted, flushed and flustered; there had been a ring and the resident troubadour on the bar stool had smiled and had sung…something appropriate…

"Oh I can't have possibly forgotten," Olivia muttered to herself, aggrieved, astonished that she could remember every nuance of the scene except the soundtrack. But it was no use, the song was gone, vanished - and the only memory that remained was that she had broken the engagement less than a month later, and fled the city, and had not come back for years.

"Forgotten?" asked a cheerful, pleasant male voice to her left.

She turned her head slightly, eyebrow slightly raised, and met a pair of friendly smoke-gray eyes of a young man vigorously drying some glassware with a clean cloth behind the deli counter. Olivia's first thought was that she could have sworn there had been nobody there a moment ago. Her second was that he looked uncannily familiar. It's as though he and the counter, he and the whole place, were part of a seamless whole - as though he must have been standing there just like this when Olivia had walked out of the place in stiff silence with the young man whose rebound proposal she had just fumbled in turning down - or even when she had floated out on a cloud of short-lived euphoria when she had left with the one whose proposal she had accepted It was odd, how she almost…recognized him. And yet he was nondescript, almost calculated to be erased from memory - average height, average build, hair that was neither blond nor brown, his only outstanding features those astonishing eyes and possibly the long-fingered hands working the cloth in the glass.

Olivia shook her head, her lips twitching up into a slight smile.

"Ah," she said, with a self-deprecating little shrug "I forget a lot of things these days."

"That's what some people come here for," he said. "To forget stuff."

Olivia's eyebrows came together in a puzzled frown. "What do you mean?"

"Unless they come here to remember stuff," the young man said enigmatically.

"It looks just the same," Olivia said, almost reflexively, glancing around as she began to unbutton her coat.

"That's the point," he said, putting the glass down.

"The point of what…?"

"It looks the same. It looked the same twenty years ago, or ten, or two, or last month, or last week. The world ends tomorrow, according to some, and it still looks the same on the eve of that. There is nothing that will change this place. Ever."

Olivia stared at him. "I'm sorry, do I know you? You look awfully familiar…"

"I don't think so," he said cheerfully.

"So you changed?" Olivia asked. "This place never changes…but you're new?"

"Perhaps," he said cryptically. "I'm Ariel."

"Get out of here."

"Pardon?"

"Sorry," she said, looking embarrassed. "It isn't…a common name. Last time I saw it, I think I was reading Shakespeare."

Ariel had the grace to laugh. "It could be worse," he said cheerfully. "Can I be of assistance?"

"I'm meeting a bunch of people here tonight - I don't suppose any of them are here yet…?" Olivia said.

"Nobody who said they were meeting a bunch of people," Ariel said. "But the big table over in the corner - the one with the bench - you can go grab that, if you like. I'm sure your friends will be here soon."

"Thanks."

As she turned away, Spanish Gardens reached for her and swallowed her whole. Whether she was one of those who came to remember or to forget, she didn't know - but the place was redolent with memory anyway. The cursor in her mind's eye blinked at her, and more words spilled out on the waiting screen.

You come here in a rowdy crowd after the pomp and circumstance of the graduation ceremony, and you order Irish Coffees ("Keep 'em coming!") and you get beautifully, headily, cathartically tipsy while some crooner weaves his way through "House of the Rising Sun" on his high chair and you bellow the lyrics with him when you can actually remember them. You came here to laugh, and to cry, and to share, and to grow, and to guzzle cream pies and to linger over coffee after some sad movie show, and to be able to tell some newcomer, somewhere, sometime, "Ah, yes I know the Spanish Gardens".

Irish Coffees. That, she remembered. The cheap and plentiful food was not the real reason that this place was a legend with generations of students It was the Irish Coffees - this place made the best Irish Coffees on the planet, bar none.

Olivia's mouth curved into a wider smile.

"You guys still do Irish Coffees?" she flung at Ariel over her shoulder, reaching to hang up her coat on a free hook on the wall.

"Sure do," he said.

"Send one over to the big table with the bench," Olivia said.

"Make that two."

The new voice made Olivia turn so fast that she nearly dropped the coat in a heap on the floor Just inside the narrow entrance, a man stood looking at her, one eyebrow lifted in inquiry.

"John…?" Olivia said carefully.

"I've changed that much?" John asked, sounding a little plaintive.

"Hardly at all, actually, if you disregard the gray on the temples and a little, um, broader than you used to be," Olivia said. "There was a time you could practically disappear if you turned sideways…" She bit off the rest of the sentence, flushing. This was the kind of banter that she used to be able to have with John; it suddenly seemed presumptuous to assume that she could just pick it up where she left off, with both of them twenty years older.

"Yeah, well," John said with a grin, apparently unconcerned by Olivia's misgivings. "Aside from the fact that your hair was never that color and that you have the tiniest touch of laugh lines where there weren't any before…I'd have known you anywhere."

"Old friends?" Ariel asked, with a knowing smile. "Two Irish Coffees, coming right up."

Olivia dropped her gaze, suddenly awkward; her hands tightened around her coat. She suddenly wanted to hide it, to bundle it out of sight - the bright red coat with its fetching cowl that could be raised as a hood, the coat she had loved, the coat that she had walked out of her home in when she had walked out on her marriage carrying only an overnight duffel bag, a laptop case, and a battered teddy bear under one arm. The coat that had matched the Olivia whom John remembered - the girl with hair the color of French-roasted coffee or of bitter chocolate, not the dark auburn that she wore now and that suddenly and hopelessly clashed with the bright red of the coat, something Olivia had not noticed until now, had not cared.

The coat that had her initials - her initials then - monogrammed onto its lapel in elegant cursive: OHB, Olivia Halloran Boyes. Irrationally, helplessly, she would have given the world right now for that B to be erased, for John never to have to see it, for her never to have to answer questions about it, or to defend it, or to explain.

But John showed no indication that he had noticed. He had shrugged out of his own jacket, generic yellow-and-black Goretex, and draped it untidily over the nearest coat hook. When he did reach for Olivia's coat, it was just a gentlemanly gesture.

"Let me help you with that," he said. "Let's go sit. The rest of them should be along shortly."

"Why did I ever think that coming back here would be a good idea?" Olivia muttered under her breath as she turned away from the coat racks and led the way to the big table in the corner where she had been told to go.

She slipped onto the bench, on the edge of it, leaving John the choice of coming around the far side to slide down the length of the table, if he wanted to sit beside her, or to take one of the chairs on the opposite side. He did the latter, smiling a small crooked smile; Olivia kept her eyes down on the shadows dancing on the tablecloth. One of her hands, flat against the side of the bench, rubbed experimentally against the material upholstering the seat.

"Can you call this Naugahide?" she said, apparently apropos of nothing. "I've often wondered what a Nauga looked like, or if they were killed humanely in order for their hides to be sat upon…"

John rolled his eyes a little. "And this, before you've had your first Irish Coffee…Simon phoned me earlier, he said he and Ellen are going to be running just a little late - he said to go ahead and order something to nibble before they get here if we're starving."

"Ellen's late, eh," Olivia said, looking up with a smile. "Oh, God, this brings back memories. Ellen was always late. She never wore a watch, and she behaved as though time itself was the Devil's construct made just to annoy her. I remember her falling into lectures ten minutes after they started, tripping over people's bags, causing complete havoc and bringing everything to a standstill until she was settled, the center of attention, waving to everyone like a queen…"

"I always thought that was the point, rather," John said.

"What?"

"The being late. The being the center of attention. Hey, don't knock it, it worked. I did think that having kids might have beaten it out of her, though. Children have regimented lives - the first time she tried being 'late' to a 2 AM feed she would have been disabused of the notion of using the lateness quirk to hog the spotlight. The screaming kid gets the spotlight. Every time."

"Speaking from experience?" Olivia asked, lifting an eyebrow.

John shook his head "No No kids. Never married. I heard you did, though -"

Olivia made a small sharp gesture with her hand. "Lasted only long enough to cure me."

"Cure you? Of what?"

"Being a romantic. Remember what Simon said to me, twenty years ago, in this very room…?"

"Should I?" John asked, sounding startled.

"He was passing down his oracular pronouncements on everyone's future, that time we came here after graduation, remember? He told you that you were the person who would damn well prove that hard work and dedication really could be enough because you'd get whatever you went after…"

"That didn't turn out too well," John said. "Sometimes life is just a crap shoot. But what was it that he told you?"

"He said…" Olivia began.

"He said, 'You? You are just misguided'," a new voice said, from the archway separating the two rooms.

Olivia turned, and John pushed back his chair, getting to his feet, his face cracking into a broad grin.

"Quincey! Q! You look great! It's so good to see you!"

"All right, all right, down," said Quincey, making warding-off gestures - but her face was wreathed in a matching grin as she ran one hand through close-cropped blonde hair. "Let me get rid of this coat…"

"Two Irish Coffees," a girl wearing a small black apron over tight pants and a short-sleeved white peasant top said, setting two tall glasses on the table between Olivia and John.

"Hey," Quincey said, "you can bring another of those, next time you swing by."

"Sure," the girl said, spinning on her heel in an almost balletic motion and skipping back behind a curtain that separated the cafe from the kitchen area.

"I was never that young," Olivia groaned, watching her go.

"Yeah, you were. But you left it all in a heap right here in this room and they feed on it. It's the picture of Dorian Grey, all over again. We age, and they never do, the people who work in this place. They never get a day older than eighteen," said Quincey. "Budge up. You're taking up the whole bench."

"Well, that's depressing," Olivia said, shifting up a space so that Quincey could slip sideways onto the edge-of-the-bench seat she had claimed earlier.

"Is Simon here yet, or are we just talking about him behind his back?" Quincey asked, settling back against the wall.

"Late," John said.

"Figures, if Ellen's in the picture. Even the end of the world doesn't make the gears grind faster," Quincey said, glancing at her watch. "I meant to have something to eat before I got here but time got away from me. Can we order a basket of garlic bread, at least? I've waited on Ellen often enough to know that I'll be ready to eat her by the time she gets here."

Olivia glanced sideways at Quincey's long, lanky body, lean and tight, not an ounce of extra weight anywhere on her. When she had first spoken, she had been leaning against the archway - a woman in her forties who might have been poured into her jeans, her long-fingered, slender hands bare of ornamentation except for one silver and turquoise ring, a close-fitting long-sleeved t-shirt outlining her small breasts, a loose man's shirt that she wore over the top of it, flat-bellied, long-legged, slim.

"How do you do it?" Olivia asked, smiling, but serious. "How do you stay looking like that? Someone with an appetite big enough to devour Ellen shouldn't have your hips, damn it all. All I have to do is think about a box of chocolates and the pounds appear on my backside just like magic."

"Stress," Quincey said.

"If you could sell that as a diet you would make a mint," Olivia said.

"Your coffee," said the girl with the pony tail, setting another glass before Quincey.

John leaned his elbow on the table beside his own coffee, pillowing his face in his hand, staring at Olivia with frank curiosity.

"What?" she said, a touch defensively.

"You really did drop out of the world," John said. "After we all sailed off in different directions, we all…somehow kept in touch with each other's lives All except you You know nothing about any of us, and I have no real idea what you've done with yourself since you walked off the stage with your diploma."

"She's got something deep dark and terrible to hide," Quincey said, grinning.

"So do we all," John said.

"I know all about everyone's lives I knew it before everyone else knew it, sometimes. I knew about Simon's book long before it was a book," Olivia said, suddenly feeling as though she was supposed to defend her life and her attitudes. "I read it when it was an embryo of a draft. I know more about the origins of it than you all…" She broke off, took a deep breath. "I read Ellen's books when they came out. Ellen and Simon got married. Quincey got married, divorced and married."

"Only because you were invited to the weddings. But you didn't come."

"I kept track. I know who's had kids."

"Only because we're here today because Ellen and Simon's Abby turned 21 yesterday. And that's odd too - you don't come for their wedding, but it's okay to come to a reunion of the old crowd, in this place, on the flimsy excuse that Simon and Ellen's daughter is turning 21 and you weren't even going to the party?"

"I got her a present," Olivia said.

John raised an eyebrow but said nothing, sipping his coffee. Olivia suddenly shivered, looking around at the dimly lit room.

"I can't believe this place is still here," she said in a low voice, as though she was trying to prevent the cafe from overhearing. "I was fully expecting it to be gone by now, probably gone for a good few years - the whole shebang, the red curtains, the checked tablecloths, the secret recipe for Irish Coffee, the guitars, even that wretched picture of the bullfight, everything. I thought it was a memory, only living on in my head. And yet my feet brought me here by themselves, apparently without any conscious effort on my part, and it's all still here, exactly like I remember it. I could almost swear that the same guy was behind the counter when we first came here. And you don't think that's weird?"

The door to the cafe opened and closed again. Quincey swiveled around in her seat, Irish Coffee precariously tilted, to peer through the arch and back into the entrance hallway And then swiveled back, placing her glass on the table with slow deliberation.

"It's Ellen," she said. "No sign of Simon."

"He may be parking the car," John said. "I had to park a couple of blocks away - circled this one twenty times before I gave up on finding anything closer."

But that wasn't what Quincey had meant.

"Livy," she said quickly, turning to Olivia, "you really haven't seen Ellen since college?"

"I've seen the author photograph," Olivia said. "I know she's turned rather gray, that she doesn't dye it, and that she's cut her hair. I also know that she's not…."

"I wasn't asking if you would recognize Ellen in the street. Have you actually spoken to her at all since…?"

Olivia shook her head mutely, and Quincey was out of her seat in one fluid motion, apparently wrapping herself at right-angles around the corner to head off Ellen at the pass.

"Ellen! You made it! We've a basket of garlic bread on order, but for once you arrived before the emergency provisions…"

Quincey's voice was bright and chatty, but Olivia's face was white and pinched, and John, his eyes snapping from Quincey's back as she retreated around the corner to Olivia's expression, frowned slightly.

"I have a feeling I am missing something," he said.

Olivia managed a wan smile. "I daresay you won't be, by the time this night is over. You may want to watch for sudden ice in your coffee…depending on how Ellen plays this…"

The voices from beyond the archway had dropped into near-silence, but now they lifted again, into a more normal range. Quincey stepped back out into the main room wearing an odd, slightly fixed smile.

"Is it safe?" she mouthed at Olivia.

Olivia's reply, a slight toss of her head, was ambiguous in the extreme - but they were out of time, and Quincey was followed into the room by another woman, shorter than Quincey by a head even in reasonably high heels, her silver-gray hair falling about her face in carefully styled waves. She wore a shade of lipstick that was perhaps a little too garish for the circumstances, leaning rather too far into scarlet to sit comfortably on any face other than something from a publicity poster for a Hollywood starlet of an era where they still showed lovers smoking in bed after the fade-to-black scene - it was as though she had tried to cast about for a way to recapture a lost youth, and missed. But her eyes were the same eyes that Olivia remembered - an unusual shade, a warm golden brown, what Olivia had once called cat-amber. The scarlet mouth was curved into a slight smile, but it had not yet reached those eyes - the eyes were a little wide, wary, sweeping swiftly around the room and then homing in on Olivia's own gaze, which they met and held.

Some part of Olivia was aware of her surroundings - aware of the way that Quincey's breath was suddenly held for a little too long, of the way that John's expression deepened in puzzlement - but mostly she saw only Ellen's face, curiously superimposed on the face from her own memory of an Ellen two decades younger, and trying to recapture something of what the two of them had shared back then.

The smile she had painted on her face for John widened a small, painful notch.

So did Ellen's.

"It's been a while," Olivia said at last, because somebody had to say something.

Quincey let her breath out slowly.

"Yes," Ellen said faintly. "Hasn't it."

"Scootch up, Livy," Quincey said with sudden determination. "I'll squish in next to you and Ellen can perch on the end."

Olivia obeyed meekly, shifting even further along the Naugahide bench, reaching out to pull her Irish Coffee after her along the countertop. Quincey, who seemed to think that it was a good idea to keep a warm body between Olivia and Ellen, at least for the first part of the evening, slid in after her and Ellen obediently sat down on the same outside corner which Olivia herself had started out at, trying to get John to choose the chair rather than the bench.

There was a slightly awkward silence, and then Ellen smiled.

"I'd forgotten about the Irish Coffees," she said. "Are they still as good?"

"Better," John said. "I've had twenty years to wait for one. The anticipation kind of adds to the spice."

Ellen caught the eye of one of the passing waitresses, and then pointed to Quincey's glass "Another," she said.

Olivia drained hers, and put the empty glass with its foam-smeared side back on the table rather too hard. "Make that two."

"My God," Ellen said, placing her hands on the table before her and lacing her fingers tightly together before finally giving the room a closer appraisal, "it's like a time machine…"

Quincey coughed slightly over a mouthful of coffee, and Olivia looked away, into her empty glass.

"Hasn't changed," she said. "We have."

Ellen appeared to gather together whatever shreds she could of dignity and civility and grown-up politeness - but also a veneer of cautious coolness in her face - and turned to Olivia across the barrier of Quincey's rangy body.

"We may as well get it over with," she said. "You didn't stick around long enough, before. But for what it's worth, I'm sorry. For the circumstances, possibly not for the event itself, given the outcome - which was, after all, Abby, who is now improbably enough 21 years old and is the reason we're all here in the first place. Possibly it was rash and misguided - but we were both so young…"

"Simon wasn't," Olivia said.

"Simon was misguided," Ellen snapped.

And then, somehow, they both managed a real grin, in unison. This was going to be one of those nights. Simon's words had come full circle - he had called Olivia the same thing once, in this very place, and now Ellen was turning the tables.

Ellen leaned over and stuck out a hand across Quincey.

"Truce?" she asked. "Please? If you want to we can have a catfight outside later. But for now - when Simon comes back in after finding a parking spot hopefully within the same zip code as this place - truce?"

"Truce," Olivia said, reaching back to slip her hand into Ellen's briefly - very briefly, without squeezing, it was truce after all and not a peace accord.

"Oh, thank God," Ellen said, sitting back. "I was actually dreading tonight. Just a little. At some point, I can probably explain - but until then, let's not talk about it."

"About what?" John muttered under his breath.

Olivia favored him with one stern glance that made him subside in his chair, looking rebellious and suddenly very much younger, as though he really did belong with the young bodies which had begun to cluster around the tables surrounding theirs.

When Olivia turned back to Ellen, it was to a deeply understanding smile which, this time, reached into cat-amber eyes. Ellen had noticed the exchange.

"So, tell me," Olivia said. "How are the books doing?"

"Mine or his?" Ellen asked.

"The family oeuvre," Quincey said, happy to nudge the conversation into less fraught channels.

"His…critically acclaimed, and up for two major prizes this year. Mine…selling like hot cakes, thankfully, but being rather sniffily reviewed, if they are reviewed at all. The latest one I let get under my skin spoke of the wife of the acclaimed novelist who has published a few - what did they call them - 'slight' volumes of children's stories on her own behalf. As though I've ridden Simon's coat-tails all the way into this. As though it is possible to ride those coat-tails and get to the place that I am at - which is on a different planet from him, really. We are so not writing the same…"

"Whoa," John said, laughing, flinging up both hands in a defensive gesture. "Feels like someone kicked over a wasp nest."

Ellen shut her mouth with a snap, flushing a little. "Sorry," she said. "Sometimes it just bugs me. And it isn't often I get a chance to let it out when Simon isn't over there in the corner, listening in. It feels rather too much like sour grapes when he's listening. And it's not - it's not. It's just that it's all so different and all anyone ever sees is…" She stopped again, closed her eyes for a moment as though she were centering herself, and then turned to Olivia again.

"Seems everything's unsteady ground," she said, with a lopsided grin. "Well, there's mine, in all its boggy grandeur. Your turn?"

"Nothing much," Olivia said. "This and that. Never quite got around to using the actual degree. Floated on the surface of the stream, waited to see where I'd wash up."

Ellen glanced at Olivia's hands. The ring finger was bare, but she wore rings on other fingers and the bareness suddenly seemed to stand out in stark relief; Olivia surreptitiously folded her left hand under her right, hiding the evidence.

"I thought I read in the society pages that you did get married," Ellen murmured, and then bit her lip.

"Oh-ho?" John said. "The society pages?"

"She married a Vanderbilt," Quincey said, with just a touch of acid, but the look she turned on Olivia was sympathetic - You might as well get it over with, it said.

"A Vanderbilt?" John said, sitting up. "I thought they were extinct."

"They're a family, not a clutch of Velociraptors," Quincey said, a little sharply. "Of course they aren't extinct. But even so, it was meant as a metaphor."

"Boyes," Olivia said faintly. Her voice was very soft, but every one of the others turned toward her instantly, as though she had shouted the name out loud "His name was Brandon Boyes, all right? And yes, he's a 'Vanderbilt', if you want to use that as a qualifier - his family's got money, and we moved into an apartment in New York, Upper West Side, and all that jazz."

John blinked. "And?"

"And what?"

"Well, you're here. And there's no point in sitting on your hands, we all noticed there's no ring. You don't have to tell us anything, Olivia, but we used to be friends."

Olivia flushed darkly, staring down into her lap. And then, looking up, met the eyes of everyone at the table for a moment.

"Fine," she said, and she felt as though she was trying to talk through a mouthful of molasses. "If you have to know. The whole thing was a cliche, really. I met Brand because he collided with me in a coffee shop and poured scalding coffee down my arm - luckily I was wearing a padded jacket and it didn't actually burn me but the thing was dripping wet with hot coffee and it did drip down onto my hand and it was still hot, and I dropped the book I was holding and then just stood there and looked shell-shocked while he fussed around and apologized fourteen times in the space of the next five minutes…and after that I found myself having dinner in posh places which were so exclusive there were no signs outside the building that indicated there was a restaurant there at all…"

"Kind of like this place," John murmured.

Quincey cut him down with a look, and he subsided.

"The courtship lasted four months, and then he asked me to marry him and I said yes because he turned my head," Olivia said. "It took the next six months to mollify his mother, and I suppose that should have been the clue I needed - I kind of went home in tears several times, but Brand said not to take it personally, that she was a bitch to everybody - well, he didn't say that, he would never say a bad word about momma, but that was the gist of all the paraphrasing that he did - and that all I needed to was to learn to ignore her. Just like he did. Or so he said."

"What happened?" Quincey asked gently.

Olivia shrugged. "We got married, eventually. That was the society pages, Ellen. I wore a designer gown, and the flowers I was carrying cost more than a dinner for four in the Village. There were pictures. Everyone said I looked very happy. Everyone said that mother-in-law tried to look happy. I learned very quickly, after, that she really was the power behind the throne. There was no decision in our household that didn't need to be vetted by Mother, and if Mother said no then that was that. And she said no rather a lot, especially if she thought that the idea she was vetting had originated from me. Particularly then. And when I was married for less than half a year she began planting the seeds - that I was still not pregnant, that the only reason her precious boy had married me was because he wanted a kid, and when was I going to, um, so to speak, deliver? And the thing is, it didn't really matter to us - not then, not in the beginning, if the children came they would come. But then Brand started getting obsessed with the idea, and the more he did the less I wanted it - because it had started to feel a lot like I had been bought and paid for, and only to be used for the purpose or creating the next generation to inherit it…."

Quincey said nothing, only reached out and covered Olivia's hand with her own.

"Well," Olivia said, taking a deep breath. "To cut a long story short. It came to a head. Hurtful things were said…and meant. Brand didn't exactly raise his hand to me, not right then, but the look in his eyes told me that it could come to that…if his precious Mama told him to do it. And if I did have a child in this toxic atmosphere it would be taken from me at birth and indoctrinated with the proper attitude, until I was no more important than the wallpaper in the nursery. That was the end of it. I felt like I'd just woken up from a nice pleasant dream - but that nothing in that dream was mine. I walked out of the apartment while he slept, at two in the morning, and I took what would fit into an overnight bag, and my computer, and the bear my mother gave me when I was two years old because the poor thing might have been stuffed and inanimate but I couldn't even think about leaving him behind in that apartment. He was mine, I took him there, and it was up to me to take him out. That, as they say, is that. From there…to now."

"So what have you been doing since you walked out?"

"This and that. Made do. I've had what people like to refer to as an interesting life. It did seem to consist of jumping from ice floe to ice floe on a dark river while the ice was breaking up under my feet and trying to keep my balance. My father had a Mencken quote stuck above his desk for years - I don't remember it precisely, but what it boiled down to was that truth and error are not opposite, that the opposite of an error may simply be another error, sometimes worse than the first…"

"I kind of remember it," John said. "Something along the lines of, 'The world makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth, that truth and error are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort.' And that when the world is cured of one error it usually turns to another, probably worse than the first…"

"So you think you made a mistake, leaving?"

Olivia shook her head., "Some romantic remnant in me sometimes thinks so. But that particular ice floe disintegrated long ago. All right, we've done me. Can we change the subject now? Or, rather, you guys do. Excuse me for a sec I think I need to go visit the restroom and give myself a bit of a pep talk in the mirror."

She had begun sidling out of the bench before she finished talking, and slipped free as she finished, grabbing her handbag by its long handles as though she were strangling it by the neck and making her escape through the archway before any of the others could react at all.

"Wow," Ellen said, after a beat. "I had no idea I'd break that dam. Serves me right, trying to deflect fire from my own petty concerns."

"Is she going to be all right?" John said anxiously, trying to peer after Olivia through the archway.

"I think she'd rather a moment of being alone right now," Quincey murmured.

But Olivia, who had paused by the coat racks to lean unsteadily on the wall with one hand and try and catch her breath, was not allowed any such luxury. In her hurry to leave, with no real destination in mind other than to be momentarily free of others' eyes, she had forgotten they were expecting another companion, and had turned her back to the door.

When the voice came from behind her, familiar and barely changed by the twenty years that had passed, she froze for a moment, like a hunted hare.

"Olivia…?"

She turned on her heel, sharply, her arms not so much crossed as grasping one another, her fingers and knuckles white with pressure where they gripped the complementary elbow.

Simon's hair had also turned gray, but he had kept all of it, and almost kept the old style he used to wear it in - slightly longer than a respected novelist and a University professor ought by rights to wear it and be considered respectable, waving back from his forehead just like it had used to do when he was still her brother's best friend, and her own heart's desire.

Her mouth curved in what might, in other circumstances, have been described as a smile but there was something in her eyes that made Simon actually take a step back as if he had been struck. It might have been a smile, once. Right now, it was a slash of pain.

"For God's sake, what did I do?" Simon demanded, his eyebrows coming together in a bewildered frown.

"You remind me," Olivia said savagely, skipping small talk entirely.

"Of what?"

"Of all the things you were. Of all the things that David could have been."

"David…?" Simon sounded thrown. That was a name from the past, and not, for better or worse, one he had come here armed to deal with. He made a valiant effort to regroup. "David made his own choices. I was hardly his conscience."

"You were his friend."

Simon shut his mouth with a snap. "Not his keeper," he said finally, tightly leashed, his control of the words that left his mouth almost visible. "But I don't think David is really the matter."

"He was the origin."

"Of what?"

"Of my own life. Of the things that I went on to do Once David chose what he chose - and then you weighed in - everything went bad, after that."

"Let's see If I remember correctly, David enlisted and went to the Gulf. Your family shredded into political streamers and your mother is still not talking to your father who is not really speaking to you - well, that was the situation, and I think it's still pretty much current, knowing what I do about your father. And you, once upon a time, talked to me about it…"

"I told you all the things that David told me. I showed you the letters. You were his friend."

"Yes…and then I wrote a book about it," Simon said "That's one of the flashpoints, isn't it?"

"You used him," Olivia whispered.

"Used him? Liv, I wrote about the horrors of it I wrote what you thought. Not what David wrote about. He was proud of what he was; I don't think you will find much of that in the book that I wrote. I was against the damned war. Same as you."

"You were against it for all the wrong reasons." Olivia said.

"Which are? Does it really matter?"

"It mattered then," Olivia said "It mattered enough, back then, to make for a nice bonfire, anyway. One I burned a lot of things on."

Simon crossed his own arms, leaning back a little. "You built it," he said. "The bonfire."

"You betrayed my confidence, and your friend," Olivia said. "And then, when I called you on it, when you showed me the first draft of the book…"

"I remember it well," Simon said. "I've never seen you that furious, or that inarticulate. You shrieked."

"I never shriek."

"You did then My neighbors came around after you stormed out to ask who won World War Three. You don't even remember it."

Olivia tilted her head a little. "It's a little…hazy."

"Incandescent rage will do that," Simon said dryly.

"And then you slept with my best friend," Olivia said, her voice suddenly flat and level, icy. The best friend in question was currently only the thickness of a brick wall away - Simon's wife, now, mother of his children. "Was that payback?"

"I thought you had just broken up with me," Simon said.

"But…Ellen," Olivia said helplessly, unable to articulate the burden of all the hurt and betrayal that she had carried with her through the years, and yet managing to stuff it all into a single word, that name. It had all the impossible weight of a black hole and, like one, was sucking in the light and air that was between the two of them in that hallway.

"She was there," Simon said, after a short, painful pause. "And she said yes."

"But you asked."

"It takes two to make that decision. Olivia, what do you want from me?"

Olivia turned away, bowing her head, letting her hair fall over her face like a concealing curtain. "I have no idea," she said dully. "I just wish…if all of us had made different choices, I might have had a different life." After a moment she glanced up again, her lips twisting into another small bitter smile. "You were a lousy teacher."

"That's not true," Simon said, stung.

"Oh, but it is. You were of the 'it's never going to be good enough' school, and you passed that on, more than you knew." She paused. "You called me misguided once, right here in this place, the night after graduation, remember?"

"Yes," Simon said warily. "I said that."

"I took it at face value, back then I never asked. I'm asking now. Why?"

"Because you had just walked away with a degree that would never make you happy," Simon said. "The diploma was still hot off the presses, and you were making plans about where to go from here, and already the regrets hung about you like a shroud."

"I was happy," Olivia said. "If you were right…I ought to have been miserable. So how come nobody else noticed but you?"

"Because I knew you," Simon said gently. "Your passions were always words, not numbers. If you were to have anything to do with science, it was going to be writing poetry about the gas nebulae or visions about what it meant to be human as they unraveled the human genome."

"You think I wasn't capable of doing the actual science behind those things?"

"Who said you weren't capable?" Simon asked. "Don't put words in my mouth. But the capability itself wasn't going to make you happy. You could have probably designed a star drive - but what you really wanted to do was be on that rocket ship when it left this planet and send back poetry about the strange new worlds it would land on. A scientist, Olivia, cares about the how of things - you always cared more about the why, or the who. Dissecting a flower or a frog or a human being might have made you enlightened, but it would never have made you happy."

"Damn you," she said, after a pause.

"What does that mean? Do you forgive me?" Simon asked, and then tossed his head in a frustrated movement, spreading his hands. "Will you tell me what it is that you forgive me for?"

Olivia made a small sound that was halfway between a sob and a giggle. "If you don't get it, Simon, there's little point in it. Excuse me, I need to pop into the restroom and stick something cold on my eyes before the others start asking questions back at the table."

She turned away without another word and the door of one of the two bathrooms swung closed behind her. Simon stood speechless, staring after her.

"If you want to use the other one, that's okay," Ariel said.

He had slipped from behind the counter somehow without Simon noticing, and now stood beside Simon, his expression pleasant but somehow alert as if he was expecting Simon to offer some sort of secret password which he knew he had to be on the look-out for.

Simon stared at him. "It says 'Out of Order' on the door," he said.

"Oh, that. It's only there to keep out the uninvited."

"You have to be invited into the restroom?" Simon asked, furrowing his brow. "That's a new one. Come to think of it, you've always had a bathroom out of commission. Ever since I can remember, and I've been coming here for years. For decades."

Ariel said nothing, merely smiled, and held out a folded piece of paper. Simon instinctively reached out and took it.

"What is this?" Simon said.

"Instructions," said Ariel. "Should you choose to follow them."

Simon unfolded the paper and glanced at it. There were only a few lines, in copperplate handwriting looking rather as though the entire thing had been penned by an old-fashioned nib pen, the kind you had to dip into an inkwell - the language, oddly old-fashioned and portentous, had the same feel of a weight of age on it. And yet the paper looked rather like it had been torn from a mass-produced notebook available in any stationery store for a few bucks, and the ink looked barely dry.

His eyebrows rose as he read.

Your life is filled with crossroads and you are free to choose one road or another at any time. Stepping through this door narrows your choices to only two - the choice to live a different life, or the choice to return to this one.

You make your first choice when you pass through the portal. Once you do, you will not remember the life you have left behind…until one single moment, when all memory will return. In that moment you must choose if you wish to return to your previous existence…or renounce it forever.

Remember this before you decide. Here, you change the world around you; there, you have to change to fit the world. Both are harder than you think. Choose wisely.

"Choose wisely," Simon said dryly as he finished scanning the paper. "Take a step into a bathroom and flush a life down a toilet. Some choice…?"

But when he looked up again, Ariel had gone. The counter was deserted, too, but the cafe had started to fill up, like it always did as the evening wore on, and there was an ever-louder buzz of conversation as voices rose to be heard above the background noise. It was not the weekend, but it was technically the Eve of the End of the World, which was a sort of special occasion - and there was even a young man clutching a guitar by the throat, fussing with the connections of mike and amp by the high stool of the musician. He gave Simon a half smile as their eyes met and held briefly.

Even as he looked away again, the writer part of Simon's brain was turning the idea over and over, dissecting it from different angles. You could choose? You could - in a manner of speaking - unchoose? Life was there to be sifted through and you could pick the bits you wanted, erase the things you would rather had never existed? That couldn't be right - it wasn't fair - you couldn't unwrite something that had been written, simply unremember something that you wished to forget. But still - it glittered before him like a jewel, the temptation, the chance to start again, to be young again and to have the world unfolding in front of him before he narrowed it down by the things that he thought, that he believed, that he had allowed to happen to him and to twist him…

Simon pursed his lips, folding the paper and pushing it into his pocket.

"What the hell," he muttered. "The world ends tomorrow morning anyway."

He hesitated briefly at the door to the second bathroom, with the tattered 'Out of Order' sign that hung on the doorknob, but nobody called out to tell him that he was an idiot and couldn't he read the sign. His hand landed on the knob, at first very lightly, and then it tightened and he turned it with rather too much pressure, as though he was expecting it to be locked and unyielding - but the door swung open at a mere touch and hung ajar, showing only darkness beyond.

Simon shook his head.

"That's it," he said to himself firmly. "I've finally, officially lost it."

And then he pushed the door open all the way, and stepped through.

The door closed behind him. The sign swung lightly on its doorknob once or twice, and was still.

"Midnight at Spanish Gardens" now AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER, direct from the publisher

The ebook will be available for the Kindle from Amazon and for most other formats from Smashwords on 1 August 2011.

Details of trade PB edition to be announced later this year.

About the Author

Novelist Alma Alexander once drank Irish Coffees in the real-life version of Spanish Gardens, the semi-mythical setting of her new novel Midnight at Spanish Gardens - in her other life as a graduate student of Molecular Biology - and she can vouch that real magic truly existed in that place. After leaving science behind in order to follow her true vocation as writer, Alma has published eleven books in fourteen languages in the past fifteen years, not to mention numerous short stories in magazines and anthologies and a mound of non-fiction (reviews, bloggage, etcetera). You can find out more about Alma at her website at AlmaAlexander.com or the website devoted to her YA series, Worldweavers, at WorldWeaversWeb.com - or you can join her more informally at her LiveJournal blog or her Facebook page. She is also on Twitter (@AlmaAlexander)

About the Book

Spanish Gardens is - or at least was, it's been gone many years - a real place and the worst-kept secret ever. Its existence was passed along, one generation to the next, at the University of Cape town; it was impossible to find, otherwise, or even stumble upon accidentally, because there were no obvious signs pointing down the nondescript alleyway down which it lay, and it tended to be open at night, keeping hours during which it was improbable that "passing custom" would drop by. You went there because you knew about it, you knew it existed, and really, you couldn't get a better Irish Coffee anywhere in the world. Thirty years later people who went to the place independently of one another and sometimes YEARS apart, and who have never met each other in person, will describe it to you in eerily identical words, with the same vivid details springing to life, as though the place existed outside time and place, never changing. I was neither the only one nor the first one to describe it as a "dimension portal". It was inevitable that such a place would eventually find its way into my stories, into my fictional world. I have given it a contemporary edge, bringing my characters together there on the eve of the Mayan "end of the world", giving their choices and decisions a certain sharp urgency (whether or not they believe the world is about to end in a puff of smoke). But the charm of this story lies in the fact that most people will put it down and remember their OWN version of Spanish Gardens - and yes, everyone has one! - and might well begin looking on the next day of their own lives as the beginning of a brand new world, no matter on what calendar date they happen to have read this particular novel.

Play Dead

by John Levitt

The rain was vicious, drenching the streets, bouncing off the pavement and running down the gutters. The wind had picked up, driving the rain sideways at times, and the bobbing red and yellow and black umbrellas danced erratically as the wind swept through.

A nasty gust caught one woman's black umbrella and flipped it inside out, instantly transforming it from a useful tool into a formless mass of wire and fabric. The woman clutched at it hopelessly and in faint surprise, as if she'd suddenly and unaccountably found herself holding a drowned bat.

Lou was one thoroughly wet dog, and he didn't like it a bit. He crowded next to my feet, trying to keep under the umbrella as well, but he's barely a foot tall and by the time the rain reached him the umbrella was essentially useless. He stopped every minute or so to give a vigorous shake, coupled with a sour glare in my direction. It was not fit outside for man nor beast, as they say. But the weather was entirely appropriate for my mission. I was on my way to see a black practitioner.

Black practitioners have a bad rep among the rest of us who aren't and it's not entirely undeserved, but not all of them are terrible people. I'd dealt with a few of them in the last few years, with mixed results. But I'd dealt with a couple of "normal" practitioners as well, with outcomes that were no better, and sometimes worse.

Still, normally I wouldn't waltz off to the home of a black practitioner I didn't know. They're unpredictable, and a practitioner's home is where he or she is most effective. There's enough danger in the magical world as is, without inviting more.

So when I got a call out of the blue inviting me for a talk, my first instinct was to politely decline. But the person on the other end of the line was courteous and persuasive, and by "persuasive," I mean he mentioned a rather large sum of money. He wasn't the actual practitioner, though. When you reach a certain level of fame, or maybe notoriety would be a better word, you never just call up someone yourself. You have people for that sort of thing. And the name he threw out was impressive-I try not to get involved with practitioner politics, but even I had heard of her.

The representative understood I wouldn't be comfortable coming to a black practitioner's home, so he suggested a meeting at the downtown offices.

"Offices?" I'd said. That was a new one for me.

"Five hundred Sutter Street, suite 1092. Blue Bay Promotions."

So there I was, walking through the rain, headed for 500 Sutter Street. Which turned out to be a handsome older building, erected sometime in the 1920s, or maybe even earlier. It sports an elegant granite facade with scrollwork peeking out below the windows on every floor. The lobby is faced in marble and the elevator doors are constructed of engraved metal, so that when they're closed they seem like elegant bas-reliefs, hardly looking like elevators at all. It was the kind of building Sam Spade might have visited, back when San Francisco was a far different city, and probably a better one.

The elevator doors were ancient, but the elevator itself was modern and high speed. I shared the ride with a young woman. There's a particular type of awkwardness associated with elevator rides-you're stuck in close proximity with a stranger, and often people avoid even making eye contact. Small talk is rare. An unspoken agreement to stay encased in one's own bubble seems to be the norm.

Lou changes all that, though. He won't put up with staring blankly at the opposite wall, and he usually gazes up winningly at random passengers until they finally break down and comment on his cuteness factor. I'd just replaced his usual collar with a sleek black harness because he kept getting the collar hung up on random branches. It was quite stylish and increased the cuteness factor, which helped him in cadging treats from strangers. Some people don't care for dogs, of course. I guess it takes all kinds. This woman, however, had a corgi with her, so we shared a few dog pleasantries.

At the tenth floor, I walked down the corridor checking numbers until I came to Blue Bay Promotions. The outer office reminded me of a dentist's office, with bland prints on the walls and beige everywhere. The man behind the front desk looked up as I came in, noting my general scruffy condition and my wet dog, and raised his eyebrows ever so slightly in polite inquiry.

"I'm here to see Jessica," I said. He looked at me in some surprise.

"You're Mason?"

"The same." He picked up the phone on the desk, pressed a button, and spoke into it.

"Jessie? There's a Mason here to see you?" He listened a moment, then nodded and waved a hand toward the door at the far end of the room. "Go right in."

I knocked politely at the door before pushing it open. The inside office was as opulent as the outside was austere. Thick carpet, the obligatory expanse of mahogany desk, and, on each wall, hanging rugs that even my untrained eye could see were old and expensive.

"Come in," said the woman on the other side of the desk. "I'm Jessica, Jessica Alexander. Jessie to my friends, and everyone else, for that matter." She smiled disarmingly. "Yes, I use my full name, just like an ordinary businesswoman. Gauche of me, I know." She came out from behind the desk and offered her hand, glancing down at Lou. "And this is Louie, of course."

"You've done you're homework, I see," I said, taking her hand. It was cool and her grip was strong.

"Wouldn't you? I assume you at least asked Victor about me."

Victor was my sometimes boss, the unofficial head of magical enforcement in San Francisco. Actually, I hadn't, so I just shrugged noncommittally. Jessica wasn't at all what I'd expected. First, she was way too young, and way too pleasant-looking. I'd expected more of an iron maiden, suitable for a black practitioner with an impressive reputation. Steely eyes, short hair or perhaps a tight bun, impeccably dressed in the latest of fashion. But this woman was none of those things.

At first I thought she couldn't be more than twenty-five, but the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes and the slight beginnings of a double chin when she held her head at a certain angle made me revise that upward. Long hair, loose and light brown. A long straight nose. Nondescript slacks and a soft, plain cashmere-type top, expensive but not obviously so. She looked more like the daughter of the CEO than the CEO herself.

Which made her doubly dangerous. One of the things I've learned from hanging around with Victor is the danger of unexamined assumptions. This woman looked harmless and friendly, and cultural conditioning would inevitably lead people to not consider her much of a threat. On an intellectual level they might realize her potential for danger, but emotionally it would be hard not to let their guard down, at least a little. Which, given her position, would be a mistake. Luckily, I wasn't there as a rival.

She sat back down behind the desk, pushing aside a large brown leather purse that was dangling over the back of the desk chair.

"Okay," I said. "So you checked me out. And there was the mention of some money. Quite a bit, actually, but I have no idea why. Blue Bay Promotions? What exactly is it do you do here?"

She examined me thoughtfully, as if she hadn't yet decided whether she liked what she saw.

"You've worked for Victor for quite some time now, haven't you? And handled some difficult problems, some complicated situations?"

"I have my moments."

"I believe you. Victor has his moments, too, but he's old-school, to say the least. He likes the old ways, and tradition, and isn't fond of change. Am I right?" She was, but I wasn't about to be discussing Victor's psyche with her.

"He gets results," I said.

"I know he does. I'm not dissing him; he's an impressive man, and quite the character as well. But times are changing-he'd prefer to live in the nineteenth century if he could, where I'm ready to move into the twenty-first, redefining what it means to be a practitioner. So I've set up a corporation and opened an office-part public relations, part R and D. The old days of random knowledge and private fiefdoms are coming to an end."

I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that, and it also didn't answer what she wanted from me. She immediately saw that in my body language, and turned on her smile again.

"But that's neither here nor there. I gather you're not that interested in practitioner politics." That was putting it mildly. "That's not necessarily a bad thing," she continued. "For example, I've also heard that unlike many of your fellows, you don't hold any particular prejudice toward black practitioners."

"Maybe not, but I haven't had the best of experiences in dealing with them, either," I said.

"And have you had nothing but good experiences with those who aren't?"

"Not always," I admitted. She smiled.

"So if I were to offer you a job, you wouldn't automatically turn it down, then? You'd at least listen?" I thought about the dollar figure that had been mentioned.

"Well, I'm here," I said. "And it never hurts just to listen." Which of course is the age-old lie, but it's something we all tell ourselves.

Lou had meanwhile been quietly checking out the office, wandering around unobtrusively. He kept glancing over behind the desk where Jessie sat and then glancing back at me. I looked in that direction and thought I saw a slight movement. Jessie saw my attention straying.

"How rude of me," she said. "I haven't introduced my Ifrit. Naja, say hello to our guests."

I wasn't prepared for what came out from behind the desk. There are many types of Ifrits, which is what we call our magical companions. They almost always take the form of small animals, no more than fifteen pounds tops, and most are much smaller. Mostly they're cats, ferrets, sometimes small dogs like Lou, and occasionally even large birds. No one really knows what they really are or where they come from, although my mentor Eli and I have come up with some pretty good guesses in the last couple of years. They can't do magic or talk, but they're smart, way smarter than a dog or a cat, and most of them can understand a great deal of what you say. And they do have some special abilities.

Not all practitioners acquire them, either-more don't have them than do. Lou of course is special, clever even for an Ifrit, and he's saved my hide on more than one occasion. But there was one form I'd never seen an Ifrit manifested in, and that was what came out from behind the desk. Slithered out, actually. I was looking at a large snake.

And not just any snake. It was five, maybe six feet long, heavy and speckled, and there was a thickening around its neck that would turn into a hooded cowl if it reared up and spread it out. A cobra.

Lou stood immobile, imitating a statue. Ifrits generally get along well with one another, even if their practitioners are in conflict. They'll fight to the death to protect their practitioners, and that's a two-way street. But there seems to be no personal animosity between them, no matter how deadly an argument between practitioners may become. They're almost like mercenaries on different sides of a battle-they may have to kill one another, but there's no hatred and even a certain respect and camaraderie that comes from being part of the same club, a club outsiders can't comprehend.

But like me, Lou had never run across an Ifrit that was a reptile, much less a snake, and a deadly poisonous one at that. I hadn't known there were such things. He didn't seem inclined to test the limits of the normal Ifrit bonds.

"I know, it's too perfect," Jessie said, laughing at Lou's reaction. "Black practitioner with a poisonous snake for an Ifrit. But she's harmless-quite friendly, actually." Sure she was.

Lou eased slowly behind me, putting a couple of strong, thick legs between Naja's fangs and his own precious skin. He may be willing to fight to the death for me, but he's also got a very strong sense of self-preservation.

"Interesting," I said.

"Yes, isn't it? I sometimes wonder why I'm the only practitioner with a snake for an Ifrit. It must say something about me."

It probably did, though I couldn't imagine what. I'm not one of those people who think that snakes are evil or creepy; I rather like them, in fact. They're no more evil than is a cat or a dog, just different. But it couldn't hurt to have an Ifrit that could scare the hell out of people, not to mention that whole poisonous fang thing.

Naja slid back around the desk and disappeared again. Now I did feel a little nervous. It's one thing to have a large snake staring at you across the room; it's quite another to have it lurking somewhere, unseen. Maybe Jessie had learned that trick in a management seminar. Gentlemen, ladies-if you want to gain the upper hand in a negotiation, there are many techniques designed to throw your opponent off his game. But may I suggest a six-foot cobra coiled up somewhere underneath your desk?

"So, what is it you want with me?" I said, trying desperately to regain some measure of equanimity. Jessie didn't answer right away, making me wait. Another technique designed to make one unsure. But I'd seen Victor pull the same sort of thing for years, and all it did was amuse me. She saw that, and changed tactics abruptly.

"Okay," she said. "Bottom line, I need your help, and I'm willing to pay for it. I want you to find someone for me."

"Money's always welcome," I said. "But you seem to have quite a little organization going here. You should easily be able to locate someone. Why would you need me?"

"Most of my 'organization,' as you put it, aren't practitioners. They're accountants and PR people and the like. And we were still in Seattle when this person left, but recently I've had word that's she's been seen here in Frisco."

"San Francisco," I corrected automatically.

"Whatever. But she's here, and from what I've heard, you have a particular talent for finding people."

"You need better sources of information." I gestured down toward my feet. "It's not me who's good at finding people; it's Lou."

"Same difference."

"Not really. And he can't just trot out and find someone, anyway-he has to know the person, or at least have met them, and they have to be relatively near-if someone's in San Jose, they might as well be on the moon as far as his ability to find them goes."

"Oh." Jessie looked momentarily disappointed. "Well, that's too bad, but you still could be a great help. I'm relatively new here; you're a fixture in the community, dialed in on all sorts of ways. Plus, you're a musician."

"I'm not sure what that has to do with anything."

"The woman I'm looking for is a musician as well-a jazz musician. She may change her name, and even her appearance, but she won't be able to give up the music. That much I know about her-it was an important part of her life, and she was good. So chances are you might run across her."

"What's her name?" I asked.

"Jacquiline. Jackie for short."

"And why are you looking for her?" A more incisive question might have been why this woman was hiding from Jessie, but as a prospective employee, I was trying to be tactful.

"That's not important. I just need to locate her."

"Well," I said, "it is kind of important, at least to me. If you're planning on draining the blood from her body for a ritual, for example, I doubt I'd want to track her down for you." Jessie laughed, not offended in the least.

"If I tell you why I want to find her, will you help then?"

"It depends. Obviously."

"It's simple, really. She stole something from me, something important, and I want it back."

"And what was that?"

"That's not important, either." I let that one pass.

"What happens to her if you find her?"

Jessie's face hardened for a moment, and I got a glimpse of how she could be running a large operation.

"She's a thief," she said. "Worse, I trusted her. If she weren't a practitioner, she'd go to prison. I won't try to con you; she'll be punished, and severely. Victor would do the same, would he not?"

"Probably."

"But no, I won't be draining her of blood or stringing her up from the ceiling fan."

"Maybe a little play toy for Naja, though?" This time, Jessie wasn't amused.

"Naja's not like that," she said, clearly angry. "She would never hurt another practitioner unless I was being attacked. She's an Ifrit, for God's sake, just like your Louie. She's not some mindless instrument of revenge."

"Sorry," I said, and I was. That had been uncalled for. Jessie nodded, a bit wearily.

"I get a lot of that, just because she's a snake. It gets old." We sat for a moment in an uncomfortable silence.

"If I did look for this woman, there's no guarantee I could find her," I said, pretending the exchange had never happened.

"Of course," she said. "I could put you on retainer, though. I know your reputation, and I know you'd give it your best shot." She named a figure three times what I usually make working a job for Victor. "And of course a bonus if you do locate her." She named another figure, significantly larger. She reached into the purse hanging from the chair, pulled out a photo, and pushed it across the desk toward me.

When she reached into her purse, I saw a small soft case inside, partly open. I just got a flash of it, but it seemed to contain a hypodermic syringe and some vials of liquid. What was that about? A diabetic, perhaps, but the syringe looked wrong, too long, and so did the vials. It's also not a disease that practitioners normally develop. Drugs? Was she a secret Demerol junkie? I pushed it aside to consider later.

"This the woman?" I asked, picking up the picture. She nodded.

The photo was an eight-by-ten black-and-white, almost like an old studio glamour head shot. It showed a young woman, a light-skinned African American. Large gold hoops dangled from her ears. Her hair was thick and hanging free, massed like a puff of smoke.

"Quite an attractive woman," I said.

"Yes," Jessie said, with no inflection. "Isn't she?"

I was tempted. Money's not usually the overriding thing with me, but my rent had been raised, my van needed a major overhaul, and although gigs had been coming my way, clubs weren't paying a whole lot these days.

But Jessie was a black practitioner. As I said, some of them aren't so bad, but some of them are, and I didn't know enough about her or the situation to judge which type she might be. I'd been joking about the draining-blood thing, but not entirely. I pushed the picture back across the desk, regretfully.

"Sorry," I said. "It's really not my sort of thing."

Jessie looked at me from her seat on the other side of the desk and didn't say anything. A slight flickering in her eyes told me she was running through a set of responses in her mind, trying to decide which one would work best.

"Think about it at least," she finally said. "You don't have to give me an answer right now."

It didn't add up. I got the feeling there was more to all this than she was letting on, and when you get that feeling it's best to pay attention.

Why had she called on me, of all people, in the first place? She'd given a bunch of reasons, but they didn't hold up when you looked at them closely. Finding people is not a particularly noted skill of mine, even with Lou to help, and since she'd done research on me, she must know that. I'm a musician, and the woman she was looking for was, too, but that was a tenuous connection at best. And although I don't have a huge prejudice against dark practitioners, they're not my favorite people, either. I should have just thanked her for her interest and walked away, but maybe it would be smart to keep my options open until I found out why she'd focused on me. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but it never hurts to be careful. And there was that money, after all.

"Well, okay, I'll think about it," I heard myself say. "I'll let you know."

She nodded, satisfied for the moment. When I got to my feet Lou immediately headed for the door, twisting his head back over his shoulder to keep an eye on the desk. Naja had made him very nervous. He didn't relax until we were out of the building and back out on the street, and then he had the rain to deal with again. All in all, not a great day for him.

Or me, either. I had a splitting headache, and that's rare for me. I hoped I wasn't coming down with something. Maybe I was allergic to black practitioners.

PLAY DEAD is now available at:

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About the Author

I grew up in New York City, spent some time at the University of Chicago, more time in the mountains of Alta, Utah, and finally ended up in San Francisco where I belong.

I started out writing police procedural/thrillers, drawing on my background of seven years working for the Salt Lake City PD. I moved over to urban fantasy with the Dog Days series, set in San Francisco -- I'm not sure what type of background prepared me for that, but I've certainly had fun with it. Currently taking a detour into middle grade, also great fun.

I've been a musician for years, mostly playing jazz. Right now I'm playing guitar in San Francisco with my pop/rock band, The Procrastinitas. We'll be releasing our second CD sometime in 2012.

I have a long time girlfriend who's smarter than I am, which is the way it should be. We have four dogs, all of whom are also smarter than I am -- which is not the way it should be at all.

Come visit me on the web at John Levitt.

Shade

by Jeri Smith-Ready

"You can hear me, can't you?"

I punched the green print button on the copier to drown out the disembodied voice. Sometimes if I ignored them long enough, they went away-confused, discouraged, and lonelier than ever. Sometimes.

Okay, almost never. Usually they got louder.

No time to deal with it that day. Only one more set of legal briefs to unstaple, copy, and restaple, then I could go home, trade this straitjacket and stockings for a T-shirt and jeans, and make it to Logan's before practice. To tell him I'm sorry, that I've changed my mind, and this time I mean it. Really.

"I know you can hear me." The old woman's voice strengthened as it came closer. "You're one of them."

I didn't flinch as I grabbed the top brief from the stack on the conference room table. I couldn't see her under the office's bright fluorescent lights, which made it about one percent easier to pretend she wasn't there.

Someday, if I had my way, none of them would be there.

"What an intolerably rude child," she said.

I yanked the staple out of the last brief and let it zing off in an unknown direction, trying to hurry without looking like I was hurrying. If the ghost knew I was getting ready to leave, she'd spit out her story, no invitation. I carefully laid the pages in the sheet feeder and hit print again.

"You can't be more than sixteen." The lady's voice was close, almost at my elbow. "So you were born hearing us."

I didn't need her to remind me how ghosts' ramblings had drowned out my mother's New Agey lullabies. (According to Aunt Gina, Mom thought the old-fashioned ones were too disturbing-"down will come baby, cradle and all." But when dead people are bitching and moaning around your crib at all hours, the thought of falling out of a tree is so not a source of angst.)

Worst part was, those lullabies were all I remembered of her.

"Come on," I nagged the copier under my breath, resisting the urge to kick it.

The piece of crap picked that moment to jam.

"Shit." I clenched my fist, driving the staple remover tooth into the pad of my thumb. "Ow! Damn it." I sucked the pinpoint of blood.

"Language." The ghost sniffed. "When I was your age, young ladies wouldn't have heard such words, much less murdered the mother tongue with…" Blah blah…kids these days…blah blah…parents' fault…blah.

I jerked open the front of the copier and searched for the stuck paper, humming a Keeley Brothers' song to cover the ghost's yakking.

"They cut me," she said quietly.

I stopped humming, then blew out a sigh that fluttered my dark bangs. Sometimes there's no ignoring these people.

I stood, slamming the copier door. "One condition. I get to see you."

"Absolutely not," she huffed.

"Wrong answer." I rounded the table and headed for the switches by the conference room door.

"Please, you don't want to do that. The way they left me-"

I flipped off the light and turned on the BlackBox.

"No!" The ghost streaked toward me in a blaze of violet. She stopped two inches from my face and let out a shriek that scraped against all the little bones in my ears.

Cringing? Not an option. I crossed my arms, then calmly and slowly extended my middle finger.

"This is your last warning." Her voice crackled around the edges as she tried to frighten me. "Turn on the light."

"You wanted to talk. I don't talk to ghosts I can't see." I touched the BlackBox switch. "Sucks to be trapped, huh? That's how I feel listening to you people all day."

"How dare you?" The woman slapped my face, her fingers curled into claws. Her hand passed through my head without so much as a breeze. "After all I've been through. Look at me."

I tried to check her out, but she was trembling so hard with anger, her violet lines kept shifting into one another. It was like trying to watch TV without my contacts.

"Those shoes are beyond last year," I said, "but other than that, you look fine."

The ghost glanced down at herself and froze in astonishment. Her pale hair-gray in life, I assumed-was tied in a bun, and she wore what looked like a ruffle-lapelled suit and low-heeled pumps. Your basic country-club queen. Probably found her own death positively scandalous.

"I haven't seen myself in the dark." She spoke with awe. "I assumed I would be…" Her hand passed over her stomach.

"What, fat?"

"Disemboweled."

I felt my eyes soften. "You were murdered?" With old people it was usually a heart attack or stroke. But it explained her rage.

She scowled at me. "Well, it certainly wasn't suicide."

"I know." My voice turned gentle as I remembered to be patient. Sometimes these poor souls didn't know what to expect, despite all the public awareness campaigns since the Shift. The least I could do was clarify. "If you'd killed yourself, you wouldn't be a ghost, because you would've been prepared to die. And you're not all carved up because you get frozen in the happiest moment of your life."

She examined her clothes with something close to a smile, maybe remembering the day she wore them, then looked up at me with a sudden ferocity. "But why?"

I ditched the patience. "How the hell should I know?" I flapped my arms. "I don't know why we see you at all. No one knows, okay?"

"Listen to me, young lady." She pointed her violet finger in my face. "When I was your age-"

"When you were my age the Shift hadn't happened yet. Everything's different now. You should be grateful someone can hear you."

"I shouldn't be-this way-at all." She clearly couldn't say the word dead. "I need someone to make it right."

"So you want to sue." One of my aunt Gina's specialties: wrongful death litigation. Gina believes in "peace through justice." She thinks it helps people move past ghosthood to whatever's beyond. Heaven, I guess, or at least someplace better than Baltimore.

Weird thing is, it usually works, though no one knows exactly why. But unfortunately, Gina-my aunt, guardian, and godmother-can't hear or see ghosts. Neither can anyone else born before the Shift, which happened sixteen and three-quarters years ago. So when Gina's firm gets one of these cases, guess who gets to translate? All for a file clerk's paycheck.

"My name is Hazel Cavendish," the lady said. "I was one of this firm's most loyal clients."

Ah, that explained how she got here. Ghosts can only appear in the places they went during their lives. No one knows why that is, either, but it makes things a lot easier on people like me.

She continued without prompting. "I was slaughtered this morning outside my home in-"

"Can you come back Monday?" I checked my watch in ex-Hazel's violet glow. "I have to be somewhere."

"But it's only Thursday. I need to speak to someone now." Her fingers flitted over the string of pearls around her neck. "Aura, please."

I stepped back. "How do you know my name?"

"Your aunt talked about you all the time, showed me your picture. Your name is hard to forget." She moved toward me, her footsteps silent. "So beautiful."

My head started to swim. Uh-oh.

Vertigo in a post-Shifter like me usually means a ghost is turning shade. They go down that one-way path when they let bitterness warp their souls. It has its advantages-shades are dark, powerful spirits who can hide in the shadows and go anywhere they want.

Anywhere, that is, but out of this world. Unlike ghosts, shades can't pass on or find peace, as far as we know. And since they can single-handedly debilitate any nearby post-Shifters, "detainment" is the only option.

"I really have to go," I whispered, like I'd hurt ex-Hazel less if I lowered the volume. "A few days won't matter."

"Time always matters."

"Not for you." I kept my voice firm but kind. "Not anymore."

She moved so close, I could see every wrinkle on her violet face.

"Your eyes are old," she hissed. "You think you've seen everything, but you don't know what it's like." She touched my heart with a hand I couldn't feel. "One day you'll lose something important, and then you'll know."

*** ***

I ran for the car, my work shoes clunking against the sidewalk and rubbing blisters on my ankles. No time to stop home to change before going to Logan's. Should've brought my clothes with me, but how could I have known there'd be a new case?

I'd wussed out, of course, and let the old woman tell my aunt her nasty death story. The ghost was angry enough that I worried about what she'd do without immediate attention. "Shading" was still pretty rare, especially for a new ghost like ex-Hazel, but it wasn't worth the risk.

The leafy trees lining the street made it dark enough to see ghosts even an hour before sunset. Half a dozen were loitering outside the day care center in the mansion across the street. Like most of the buildings in the Roland Park area, Little Creatures Kiddie Care was completely BlackBoxed-its walls lined with the same thin layer of charged obsidian that kept ghosts out of sensitive areas. Bathrooms, military base buildings, that sort of thing. I wish Gina and I could afford to live there-Roland Park, I mean, not a military base.

I stopped for a giant Coke Slurpee and guzzled it on my way toward I-83, wincing at the brain freeze. I usually prefer to use the spoon end of the straw, but after ex-Hazel's intake session, I desperately needed the massive caffeine-sugar infusion that only pure, bottom-of-the-cup Slurpee syrup could provide.

The long shadows of trees cut across the road, and I kept my eyes forward so I wouldn't see the ghosts on the sidewalks.

Lot of good it did. At the last stoplight before the expressway, a little violet kid waved from the backseat of the car in front of me. His lips were moving, forming words I couldn't decipher. An older girl next to him clapped her hands over her ears, her blond pigtails wagging back and forth as she shook her head. The parents in the front seats kept talking, oblivious or maybe just unable to deal. They should trade in that car, I thought, while that poor girl still has her sanity.

The on-ramp sloped uphill into the sunshine, and I let out a groan of relief, gnawing the end of my straw.

After almost seventeen years of hearing about grisly murders and gruesome accidents, you'd think I'd be tough, jaded. You'd think that ghosts' tendency to over-share would eventually annoy instead of sadden me.

And you'd be right. Mostly. By the time I was five, I'd stopped crying. I'd stopped having nightmares. I'd stopped sleeping with the lights on so I wouldn't see their faces. And I'd stopped talking about it, because by that point the world believed us. Five hundred million toddlers can't be wrong.

But I never forgot. Their stories are shelved in my mind, neat as a filing system. Probably because I've recited many of them on the witness stand.

Courts don't just take my word for it, or any one person's. Testimony only counts if two of us post-Shifters agree on a ghost's statement. Since ghosts apparently can't lie, they make great witnesses. Last year, me and this terrified freshman translated for the victims of a psycho serial killer. (Remember "Tomcat"? The one who liked to "play with his food"?)

Welcome to my life. It gets better.

I pulled into Logan's driveway at 6:40. I loved going to the Keeleys' house-it sat in a Hunt Valley development that had been farmland only a few years before. Newer neighborhoods had way fewer ghosts, and I'd never seen one at the Keeleys'. At the time, anyway.

I checked my hair in the rearview mirror. Hopelessly well-groomed. I pawed through my bag to find a few funky little silver skull-and-crossbones barrettes, then pinned them into my straight dark brown hair to make it stick out in random places.

"Yeah, you look totally punk in your beige suit and sensible flats." I made a face at myself in the mirror, then leaned closer.

Were my eyes really that old, like ex-Hazel said? Maybe it was the dark circles underneath. I licked my finger and wiped under my brown eyes to see if the mascara had smeared.

Nope. The gray shadows on my skin came from too little sleep and too much worrying. Too much rehearsing what I would say to Logan.

As I walked up the brick front path, I heard music blasting through the open basement window.

Late. I wanted to hurl my bag across the Keeleys' lawn in frustration. Once Logan got lost in his guitar, he forgot I existed. And we really needed to talk.

I went in the front door without knocking, the way I had since we were six and the Keeleys lived around the block in a row home like ours. I hurried past the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the family room.

"Hey Aura," called Logan's fifteen-year-old brother Dylan from his usual position, sprawled barefoot and bowlegged on the floor in front of the flat-screen TV. He glanced up from his video game, then did a double-take at the sight of my Slurpee cup. "Bad one?"

"Old lady, stabbed in a mugging. Semi-shady."

"Sucks." He focused on his game, nodding in time to the metal soundtrack. "Protein drinks work better."

"You bounce back your way, I'll bounce my way."

"Whatever." His voice rose suddenly. "Noooo! Eat it! Eat it!" Dylan slammed his back against the ottoman and jerked the joystick almost hard enough to break it. As his avatar got torched by a flamethrower, he shrieked a stream of curses that told me his parents weren't home. Mr. and Mrs. Keeley had apparently already left for their second honeymoon.

I opened the basement door, releasing a blast of guitar chords, then slipped off my shoes so I could walk downstairs without noise.

Halfway to the bottom, I peered over the banister into the left side of the unfinished basement. Logan was facing away from me, strumming his new Fender Stratocaster and watching his brother Mickey work out a solo. The motion of his shoulder blades rippled his neon green T-shirt, the one I'd bought him on our last trip to Ocean City.

When he angled his chin to check his fingers on the fret board, I could see his profile. Even with his face set in concentration, his sky blue eyes sparked with joy. Logan could play guitar in a sewer and still have fun.

The Keeley boys were like yin and yang, inside and out. Logan's spiky hair was bleached blond with black streaks, while Mickey's was black with blond streaks. Logan played a black guitar right-handed and his brother a white one left-handed. They had the same lanky build, and lots of people thought they were twins, but Mickey was eighteen and Logan only seventeen (minus one day).

Their sister Siobhan-Mickey's actual twin-was sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of them, her fiddle resting against her left knee as she shared a cigarette with the bassist, her boyfriend Connor.

My best friend Megan sat next to them, knees pulled to her chest. She wove a lock of her long, dark red hair through her fingers as she stared at Mickey.

The only one facing me was Brian, the drummer. He spotted me and promptly missed a beat. I cringed-he was sometimes brilliant, but he could be distracted by a stray dustball.

Mickey and Logan stopped playing and turned to Brian, who adjusted the backward white baseball cap on his head in embarrassment.

"Jesus," Mickey said, "is it too much to ask for a fucking backbeat?"

"Sorry." Brian twirled his stick in his thick hand, then pointed it at me. "She's here."

Logan spun around, and I expected a glare for interrupting-not to mention leftover hostility from last night's fight. Instead his face lit up.

"Aura!" He swept the strap over his head, handed his guitar to Mickey, and leaped to meet me at the bottom of the stairs. "Oh my God, you won't believe this!" He grabbed me around the waist and hoisted me up. "You will not believe this."

"I will, I swear." I wrapped my arms around his neck, grinning so hard it hurt. Clearly he wasn't mad at me. "What's up?"

"Hang on." Logan lowered me to the floor, then spread my arms to examine my suit. "They make you wear this to work?"

"I didn't have time to change." I gave him a light punch in the chest for torturing me. "So what won't I believe?"

"Siobhan, get her some clothes," he barked.

"Choice," she said. "Say please or kiss my ass."

"Please!" Logan held up his hands. "Anything to keep your ass in the safe zone."

Siobhan gave Connor her cigarette and got to her feet. As she passed me, she squeezed my elbow and said, "Boy thinks he's a rock god just because some label people are coming to the show tomorrow."

My mind spun as it absorbed my biggest hope and fear. "Is she kidding?" I asked Logan.

"No," he growled. "Thanks for blowing the surprise, horseface!" he yelled as she slouched up the stairs, snickering.

I tugged on his shirt. "Who's coming?"

"Get this." He gripped my shoulders. "A and R dudes from two different companies. One's an independent-Lianhan Records-"

"That's the one we want," Mickey interjected.

"-and the other is Warrant."

I gasped. "I've heard of Warrant."

"Because they're part of a major major major humongous label." Logan's eyes rolled up in ecstasy, like God himself was handing out record contracts.

"We'll use Warrant to make Lianhan jealous," Mickey added. "But we're not selling out."

Logan pulled me to the back side of the stairs, where the others couldn't see us. "This could be it," he whispered. "Can you believe it? It'd be the most amazing birthday present ever."

I steadied my breath so I could get the words out. "Hopefully not the best present."

"You mean the Strat from my folks?"

"Not that either." I reached up under the back of his T-shirt and let my fingers graze his warm skin.

"Is it something you-wait." His eyes widened, making the silver hoop in his brow glint in the overhead light. "Are you saying-"

"Yep." I stood on tiptoe and kissed him, quick but hard. "I'm ready."

His gold-tipped lashes flickered, but he angled his chin to look at me sideways. "You said that before."

"I said a lot of things before. Some of them were stupid."

"Yeah, they were." His eyes crinkled, softening his words. "You know I'd never leave you over this, either way. How could you even think that?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry."

"Me too." He traced my jaw with his thumb, which always made me shiver. "I love you."

He kissed me then, drowning my doubts in one warm, soft moment. Doubts about him, about me, about him and me.

"Here you go!" Siobhan called from the stairs, a moment before a clump of denim and cotton fell on our heads. "Oops," she said with fake surprise.

I peeled the jeans off Logan's shoulder and held them up in salute. "Thanks, Siobhan."

"Back to work!" rang Mickey's voice from the other side of the basement.

Logan ignored his siblings and gazed into my eyes. "So…maybe tomorrow night, at my party?" He hurried to add, "Only if you're sure. We could wait, if you-"

"No." I could barely manage a whisper. "No more waiting."

His lips curved into a smile, which promptly faded. "I better clean my room. There's like a one-foot path through all the old Guitar Worlds and dirty laundry."

"I can walk on a one-foot path."

"Screw that. I want it to be perfect."

"Hey!" Mickey yelled again, louder. "What part of 'back to work' is not in English?"

Logan grimaced. "We're switching out some of our set list-less covers, more original stuff. Probably be up all night." He gave me a kiss that was quick but full of promise. "Stay as long as you want."

He disappeared around the stairs, and immediately Megan replaced him at my side.

"Did you make up? You did, didn't you?"

"We made up." I sat on the couch to remove my stockings, checking over my shoulder to make sure the guys were out of sight on the other side of the stairs. "I told him I'm ready."

Megan slumped next to me and rested her elbow on the back of the sofa. "You don't think you have to say that to keep him, do you?"

"It's something I want too. Anyway, who cares, as long as it works?"

"Aura…"

"You know what it's like, going to their gigs." My whisper turned to a hiss. "Seeing all those girls who'd probably pay to get naked with Mickey or Logan. Or even with Brian or Connor."

"But the guys aren't like that-well, maybe Brian is, but he doesn't have a girlfriend. Mickey loves me. Logan loves you."

"So?" I slipped on the jeans. "Plenty of rock stars have wives and girlfriends, and they still screw their groupies. It comes with the territory."

"I find your lack of faith disturbing," she said in her best Darth Vader impression, forcing a smile out of me.

I unbuttoned my white silk blouse. "What should I wear?"

"Same stuff as always, on the outside. That's the way he likes you." Megan snapped the strap of my plain beige bra. "But definitely do better than this underneath."

"Duh," was my only response as I slipped Siobhan's black and yellow Distillers T-shirt over my head. I'd made a covert trip to Victoria's Secret weeks before-the one way up in Owings Mills, where no one would recognize me. The matching black lace bra and underwear were still in the original bag, with their tags on, in the back of my bottom dresser drawer.

"The first time doesn't have to suck," she said, "not if you go slow."

"Okay," I said quickly, in a deep state of not wanting to talk about it.

Luckily, at that moment Brian tapped his sticks to mark time, and the band launched into one of their original tunes, "The Day I Sailed Away."

The Keeley Brothers wanted to be the premier Irish-flavored rock band in Baltimore. Maybe one day go national, become the next Pogues, or at least the next Flogging Molly, with a heavy dose of American skate-punk 'tude.

As Logan began to sing, Megan's face reflected my bliss and awe. With that voice leading the way, the Keeley Brothers didn't have to be the next anyone.

Two record labels. I closed my eyes, ignoring the way my stomach turned to lead, and savored the sound that Megan and I would soon have to share with the world.

I knew then that everything would change the next night. It was like time had folded in on itself, and I could remember the future.

A future I already hated.

SHADE is now available at:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Constellation Books (autographed copies on request)

About the Author

Jeri Smith-Ready has been writing fiction since the night she had her first double espresso. Her 9 published works include the adult urban fantasy WVMP RADIO series and the ASPECT of CROW fantasy trilogy, both of which have won multiple awards in the fantasy and romance genres. Jeri had her teen fiction debut 2010 with SHADE, the first in a trilogy about a world of ghosts only the young can see. Like many of her characters, Jeri enjoys music, movies, and staying up very, very late.

Visit her online at www.jerismithready.com, Facebook or Twitter, where she spends way too much time.

The Snow Queen's Shadow

by Jim C. Hines

The plan had been so simple. An hour or so before sunrise, Snow White and Talia would sneak into the Sailor's Bone inn. Talia would "persuade" the innkeeper to tell them which room held the two fugitive witchhunters who had recently snuck into Lorindar. Snow would cast a spell of sleep upon their quarry, who could then be brought to Whiteshore Palace to face trial.

The universe rarely cooperated with Snow's plans. She should have been halfway back to the palace by now, not staring down the pointy end of a silver-tipped arrow, wielded by a man known to have murdered at least sixteen witches, while fire spread through the inn's upper story.

It went without saying that this was entirely Talia's fault.

Snow's would-be prisoner went by the name of Hansel. He was middle-aged and built like a bear, with shaggy blond locks that hung just past his shoulders. He wore heavy furs over a thick leather vest, studded in brass. Knotted braids of hair dangled from his belt: trophies of his kills.

Hansel jabbed his longbow at Snow. "Call your witch friend. Tell her to bring my sister back."

"Talia's not a witch." Snow searched the empty tavern for anything she might use as a weapon. The occupants had fled into the cold right around the time Snow sent Hansel tumbling down the stairs. His sister had escaped onto the roof, with Talia close behind. "Besides, she never listens to me. If you'd like to put down that bow, we could head to the palace to wait for them."

"No thank you," he said, his expression half sneer, half smile. "I've better things to do than be executed by your witch-loving king and queen."

He stepped around a broken table, wincing as he put weight on his right leg. Blood darkened the area around the sharpened steel snowflake stuck in his thigh. Hansel had some sort of protection against her spell, but nonmagical weapons worked just fine. Had her aim been better, she might have ended things at the top of the staircase. On the other hand, then Talia never would have let her forget how brute force had triumphed where magic failed.

At least if Hansel killed her, she wouldn't have to worry about Talia's teasing. Snow knew the only reason he hadn't fired was because he might need to bargain with Talia to get his sister back, but she had no idea how long he would wait. He didn't strike her as the patient sort.

"Take off that necklace of yours," Hansel said. "Slowly."

Snow touched the back of her choker. Gold wire unraveled, and the choker fell into her hand, its small oval mirrors clinking together. She glanced at the largest, searching for Talia, but it was dark outside, and Talia was moving too quickly to make out any details. Snow concentrated, maintaining the thread between her choker and the mirrored bracelet Talia wore. If nothing else, Talia should hear their conversation and know what had happened.

"Toss it to the floor."

Snow obeyed, throwing the choker so it landed at his feet. She moved sideways, putting another table between herself and Hansel. He stood so he could see both Snow and the door, and he was rumored to be good enough with that bow to put an arrow through her knee should she try for the stairs.

She heard shouts outside as neighbors worked to organize against the fire and keep it from spreading. The flames had reached the top of the staircase, and smoke darkened the ceiling. "That was an interesting charm you used to protect yourselves from my spell," she said brightly. "The one that burst into flame when Talia ripped it from your neck? So you kill witches, but you'll use witchcraft when it suits your purposes?"

He scowled. "You're Allesandrian, aren't you?"

"I am."

"So you're old enough to remember the Purge."

Snow's smile vanished.

"I see that you are. You've seen the damage such power can do. How many people did Queen Curtana murder?"

"Officially? Forty-seven." Unofficially, the tally was far higher. Forty-seven men, women, and children were known to have been executed for treason during the week-long purge, convicted only by the secrets Snow's mother had plucked from her magic mirror. Snow forced the cheerfulness back into her voice. "Two years ago, a man from southern Lorindar murdered twelve people with an axe. Should we kill all the woodsmen? And what of you? You shoved a witch into an oven when you were younger. Obviously we should hunt down and destroy all bakers!"

As she finished speaking, she waved a hand at her choker. Sunlight flashed from the mirrors. Snow crouched low and upended the table between herself and Hansel. She heard the snap of Hansel's bow, and an arrow punched through the wood a handspan from her face.

She pulled a long knife from her belt and thumbed a hidden catch on the hilt. A circular plate with an engraved snowflake swiveled open at the center of the crossguard, revealing a small mirror. Through the mirror, she saw Hansel stumbling toward the door, one hand shielding his eyes.

Snow jabbed her knife at the door and spoke a quick spell. The door slammed shut.

Hansel merely lowered his shoulder and smashed his way through. Cold air rushed into the tavern.

Snow swore and hurried to retrieve her choker. Her head throbbed from the magic she had used tonight, an old injury warning of worse to come if she continued to push herself.

She shoved the pain aside as she followed Hansel onto the street. Sixteen witches dead, in Lorindar and elsewhere. Like Snow's mother, Hansel killed indiscriminately and without remorse.

Snow had been too young to stop the Purge, but she'd be damned before she let Hansel murder another witch.

She squeezed through the gathering crowd, diverting a part of her attention to her choker and her connection to Talia's mirror. "Where are you?"

"On my way back to the inn." The choker relayed Talia's voice as clearly as if they were running side-by-side. Talia didn't even sound winded. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine!" Her boots splashed through slush and snow as she ran. The sky to the east was just beginning to brighten, but the streets were still dim. Her mirrors enhanced her vision, helping her spy Hansel limping up Mill Street. Snow cut through an alley, hoping to intercept him. The snowdrifts were higher here where the three-story buildings protected the streets from the sun. "He's making his way toward Holy Crossroads."

"Probably heading for the gates."

Snow bit back a yelp as her feet skidded on the cobblestones. A rain barrel had frozen and split, and ice covered much of the alley. She slowed, chafing at the delay, but she would never catch Hansel if she slipped and snapped an ankle.

The crowds had already begun to fill the streets at Holy Crossroads, eager to hear the preachers and their daily performance. The preachers' garb had grown more flamboyant over the years, as had their rhetoric, as each shouted and condemned his neighbor to eternal damnation.

Even if Snow had been able to spot Hansel, the crowd shielded him from both magical and mundane attacks. She slipped into the crowd, elbowing her way past the gawkers. "Danielle, are you listening to this?"

Princess Danielle had remained behind at Whiteshore Palace. "I'm here. Did you really set the Sailor's Bone on fire?"

"That was Talia's fault! And if they get that bucket line organized, I'm sure they can save part of the building."

A priest of the Fairy Church stepped into the middle of the street, blocking her way. He raised a hand to her. "No mundane errand is more important than your immortal soul," he shouted. "Enter the house of the fairy saviors. Confess your sins and receive their blessings!"

Snow smiled. "I like my sins."

The priest looked to weigh twice as much as Snow. Had he stood his ground, she would have been hard pressed to move him. But Snow had spent years working with Talia, and had picked up a number of tricks. She lowered her shoulders and ran, showing no sign of slowing. The priest stepped back. That move cost him his balance, and moments later he was tumbling into the slush on the side of the road, earning shouts from his followers and cheers from the other churches.

"What was that?" Danielle asked.

"Nothing. Can you get word to the guards at the southern gate?"

"It will take time, but I'll see what I can do."

A splash of red drew her attention to a snowbank on the left. She plucked her steel flake from the snow where Hansel had discarded it. Droplets of blood marked his path toward the gate. Snow ran around a mule-drawn wagon, then stopped to search the intersection in front of the gate. The main avenue was broad enough for three carriages to pass side by side. Two other roads branched away from the gate, parallel to the wall. There were too many people and too much space.

The stone wall wasn't as impressive as the one surrounding the palace, but Snow doubted Hansel could have scaled it with his wounded leg. The barred iron gate was wide open, though. Danielle's message must not have gotten through. Snow approached the closer of the two guards on duty. "Have you seen a witchhunter pass through here? Shaggy and bleeding, carrying an enchanted bow?"

He stared. "Are you all right, miss?"

"I've had better days." Snow sighed and turned away, just as Talia came running up the far street.

"Don't tell me you lost him."

Despite her annoyance, Snow grinned at the sight of poor Talia, bundled tight against the winter cold. Talia had grown up in the deserts of Arathea, and viewed snow as a punishment delivered personally by vengeful gods. She wore a thick wool cloak, and a knitted scarf covered her mouth and nose. Only her hands were bare, so she could better grip the various weapons hidden about her person. At the moment, she had one hand tucked beneath her arm for warmth while the other held her hood low to protect her face from the cold.

"I haven't lost anyone." Snow crouched to scoop a handful of slush, crushing it into a ball. She tilted her steel snowflake, allowing a single drop of blood to fall onto the slush. Tucking the weapon away, she whispered a spell to harden the ball to ice. "I just thought it was more sporting to give him a head start."

Her head pounded as she cast another spell. She blinked back tears, turning it into a wink when she caught Talia watching her. She switched the ice to her other hand and hurled it into the air. At its peak, the ice jerked to the east as if caught by the wind, though the air was still. It plummeted back to earth, the blood magically guiding its flight more than a block past the gate. The crowd at the gate hid Hansel from view, but Snow heard the impact, followed by loud swearing.

More shouts followed. By the time Snow and Talia made their way past the crowd into an alley between a butcher's shop and a tavern, Hansel was ready. He aimed his bow at Snow, the string drawn back. "Where is my sister?"

"I don't know," Snow said. "Let's go ask the nice guards at the gate if they've seen her."

The bow didn't waver. Snow glanced at Talia.

"She fell off a roof and broke her leg." Talia stepped sideways, away from Snow. "I tied her up at the hitching post a few blocks over. Danielle said she'd send men to collect her."

"Wait, you just left her there?" Snow asked.

"I had to make sure you didn't get yourself killed," Talia shot back.

Snow jabbed a finger at Hansel. "I found him all by myself, thank you."

"And now he's got a bow aimed at you!"

Snow shrugged. "We can't all throw people off of rooftops."

"I didn't throw her!"

A brown shape swooped from the wall. A small hawk flew through Hansel's drawn bow, its claws neatly plucking the arrow from the string. He jumped back, releasing the string so it snapped against his arm.

Snow smiled. Her choker flared to life.

Hansel turned to run, but his feet slipped on the magically-slick ice. He rolled over and pulled a knife from his boot.

Snow gestured, and an icicle snapped from the eaves overhead. It shot down as if launched by a crossbow, piercing his arm. He screamed, and the knife dropped to the road.

Talia had her own knives out now. She kept one raised as she approached, as if daring Hansel to try something.

Snow leaned against the wall, closing her eyes against the pain throbbing beneath her skull. The worst should pass soon, but it would be at least a day before she fully recovered. She wiped her face. "I assume the hawk was your doing?"

"Oh good." The cheerfulness in Danielle's voice carried quite well through Snow's choker. "I was afraid he wouldn't reach you in time."

Talia sheathed one of her knives and tossed the bow to Snow. Hansel grabbed her wrist, but Talia took his fingers in her hand and twisted, flipping him onto his stomach and eliciting another shout of pain. By the time the guards arrived, she had taken an array of blades from Hansel's person.

Snow plucked one of the mirrors from her choker and tossed it to the closest guard. "Talk to your princess. She'll explain."

She waited long enough to make sure the guards had everything under control, then grabbed Talia's hand and tugged her away. "Come on. The bakery should be open soon. I want cookies."

"What about your mirror?" Talia asked.

"It will find its way home eventually."

Talia shook her head, smiling despite herself. "You enjoyed this."

"Didn't you?" Snow asked, giving her a sidelong glance. Talia had tugged her scarf down beneath her chin. Wisps of black hair framed a stern face, but amusement crinkled the corners of her eyes. Snow grinned. "It reminds me of the time Queen Bea sent us out to find that frog who was impersonating a prince to harass young maidens."

"I still say you should have let me cook him," said Talia. "Fresh frog legs, soaked in butter and sprinkled with nadif spice- "

"I'll take the cookies, thanks." Snow made a face. "You keep your frog."

"Snow? Talia?" The urgency in Danielle's tone caused Snow's stomach to tighten.

"What's wrong?" Snow yanked the largest mirror from her choker, rubbing the glass clean with her sleeve. It was hard to make out much detail in the tiny glass, but Danielle looked like she was fighting tears.

"It's Beatrice."

*** ***

Snow had foreseen this day a year and a half before, when a mermaid stabbed Queen Beatrice in the chest with a cursed blade. Snow had done everything she could, magically stitching the wound and using every potion and poultice she could think of to help the queen heal. Her efforts had given the queen an extra eighteen months of life, but even magic had limits, and death could only be denied for so long.

"We're here," Snow whispered as they reached the palace, counting on her mirrors to send her voice to Danielle. "Is Bea- "

"She's still alive," Danielle said.

Snow allowed herself one moment of relief before turning to Talia. "There's something I need to take care of."

Talia whirled, her eyes wide. Snow had seen Talia angry before, but rarely had that anger been directed at her. Not like this. "Whatever it is, it can wait."

"No, it can't." Snow stepped away.

"Beatrice is dying." Talia's rage slowly shifted to disbelief. "What could possibly be more important?"

Snow shook her head. "Tell Beatrice . . ." Bea would have understood, but not Talia. No words could make this right with her, and the longer Snow stood here, the less time she would have.

Talia grabbed Snow's arm. "Beatrice took you in. She gave you a home after you fled Allesandria. She cared for you like her own daughter."

"You think I don't know that?" And now it's my turn to care for her. Snow twisted away. Anger she could take, but the pain and disappointment in Talia's eyes were too much. Talia would understand soon. "I'm sorry."

Talia's lips moved, as though she were searching for words. Instead, she turned her back and hurried down the hallway, the soles of her boots echoing on the tile floor.

"Talia- " Snow started after her, but forced herself to stop. Years of spellcasting had given her practice at pushing her own emotions and turmoil aside when she needed. Growing up with a mother who punished her for the slightest transgression, whether real or perceived, had only strengthened her self-control.

Most of the time, she simply chose not to use it.

Word of Bea's condition had obviously spread through the palace. Voices were muffled, the cheerful gossip of the servants replaced by somber whispers. Snow heard more than one woman weeping quietly behind closed doors.

She made her way through the palace toward the royal bedchamber. Given Beatrice's state, the room should be abandoned. Bea had been moved to a room on the ground floor after she became too weak to climb the steps, and King Theodore would be with his wife.

Once Snow reached the bedroom, she shut the door behind her and checked to make sure she was alone. She stepped past the bed to the fireplace, where a few coals glowed within the ashes. Taking an iron poker, she jabbed a brick in the back of the fireplace, opening a hidden panel in the wall. She squeezed inside and yanked the panel shut behind her until it clicked into place.

Sunlight shone from her choker as she made her way down a narrow stairway to the secret rooms hidden beneath the palace. Her light gleamed from weapons of every shape and size as she hurried through the armory toward her personal library and, most importantly, her magic mirror.

Tall as Snow herself, made of flawless glass and framed in platinum, the mirror dominated the wall where it stood. As she strode into the room, the glass responded to her will, showing her Queen Beatrice.

The library was a mess, with books strewn about the floor and falls of hardened wax dripping over the closest shelves where her candles had burned themselves out. Snow grabbed a discarded cloak of white fox skin from the floor. These rooms were refreshingly cool in the summertime, but come winter they grew cold enough she could see her breath.

A mummified cat was tucked away in one corner. A bundle of roses hung from one of the shelves, their petals dried and wrinkled. She had rolled the carpet up against the wall, and the stone floor was covered in chalk scribblings. For months now, every time Danielle came down, Snow had watched her fight the urge to scrub the library clean from top to bottom.

Pulling the cloak over her shoulders, Snow eased into the wooden chair in front of an old, heavily stained table. In the mirror, King Theodore sat beside the queen, holding her hand. His eyes were shadowed and shone with tears, but he had forced a smile for his wife. Danielle and Prince Armand sat on the opposite side of the bed, while Talia stood in the corner. It appeared as though Tymalous, the royal healer, had already retired from the room.

Snow wasn't certain Beatrice could even see them anymore. Heavy blankets buried her from the neck down, almost hiding the faint rise and fall of her chest. Her skin was like wrinkled parchment. Her hair had thinned, and her body was little more than a shadow of the woman who had rescued Snow from Allesandria seven years ago.

In all of Snow's planning over these past months, her one fear had been that she wouldn't make it in time. That Bea would die suddenly, before Snow could reach her mirror.

Snow turned sideways, keeping the mirror in the edge of her vision. Her table held a single fat beeswax candle, dirty yellow and brittle from the cold. To one side sat a bronze mug, half-full of fairy wine. She took the candle in both hands, checking the silver wick that curled from the wax.

A quick spell ignited the candle. She wrinkled her nose as the initial puff of smoke carried the smell of burning hair through the library. She had spun Beatrice's hair into the wick more than a month before.

A puff of breath guided the smoke toward the mirror. "Mirror, mirror, proud and tall. Mirror, mirror, seeing all. Help me reach the dying queen. Help Beatrice to hear my call."

Talia would have teased her. Snow had never been much of a poet, but the clumsy rhymes helped her focus her magic. She blew again, and again the black smoke dissipated against the glass. Snow closed her eyes, pushing back against the pounding in her head. The third time she tried, the smoke passed through the mirror into the queen's room.

Snow carefully returned the candle to the table. She watched the mirror closely. The smell of burnt hair had mostly faded, and neither the king nor the queen appeared to notice the thin trail of smoke drifting over their heads.

She reached over to pick up the mug of wine, finishing the contents in three swallows. Everything was prepared. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

The candle had lost a quarter of its height when Beatrice's breathing changed, becoming strained. Theodore's fingers tightened around the queen's hand. He kissed her knuckles and knelt beside her, whispering so softly Snow could barely hear. On the other side of the bed, Danielle, Armand, and Talia crowded close. Armand's cheeks were wet as he put his free hand on his father's shoulder. Danielle called for Father Isaac, who stepped into the room, praying softly.

Snow swiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. Between one breath and the next, Beatrice's body appeared to relax. For the first time in months, the tension left her face.

The candle flame flickered higher, becoming a deep red. Snow pressed her fingers to the mirror. The pain in her skull flared as her spells responded to the queen's death. "Follow the trail, Bea."

The smoke, nearly invisible in the shadowed room, should have shone like a beacon to Queen Bea's spirit. Snow had tested the spell dozens of times over the past months, calling the souls of mice, rats, birds, even an old hound she had discovered half-frozen in the streets . . . but never a human.

The flame began to shiver. Bea had discovered the trail. "It's me," Snow whispered. "Stay with us."

The mirror would hold Beatrice for now, though it wasn't an ideal solution. It was one thing to trap and hold a soul; the true challenge had been teaching herself how to create a body. She glanced at the discarded books, tomes that described everything from the making of fairy changelings to a spell that could form a new body from flowers, of all things. Snow had combined the different magics into her own-

The flame stilled.

"Bea?" Snow stood, toppling the chair. "Don't turn away."

Bea would be disoriented, like most souls newly freed from their bodies, but the touch of Snow's magic should have been familiar. She brought the candle closer to the glass, thickening the thread of smoke passing into Beatrice's room. "I know you can hear me."

King Theodore straightened, sniffing the air, but Snow ignored him. Her heart pounded her ribs as though fighting to escape. This was taking too long. In every test, the soul had moved into her mirror as the body exhaled its last breath. Either Beatrice was unable to find her way . . . or else she was choosing not to follow. "Think about your grandson. This is your chance to stay, to be a part of his life and watch him grow up."

Nothing. Snow passed her fingers over the candleflame, which doubled in size. Every spirit for miles around should have been able to see it. "Beatrice, please. We need you. Don't- "

The flame quivered and died.

"No!" A thought was enough to renew the flame, but it was too late. The trail had been broken.

Beatrice Whiteshore - the woman who had saved Snow's life, who had given her a home and purpose and a family - was gone.

Snow pulled her hand from the mirror. Her fingers were numb, and cold enough to leave frost outlines on the glass.

She stumbled back. Her hip bumped the table. Her vision blurred, and she closed her eyes against the stabbing pain in the back of her head, the price she paid for overexerting herself. It was nothing compared to the pain of her failure.

It should have worked. It had worked, in every test she had performed. So many spirits roamed this world after death, refusing to heed the call of whatever followed. Snow had encountered them again and again: jars enchanted to hold the souls of the dead, ghosts who moved from one body to the next . . . she had once seen an entire army of the dead rise to serve their master.

Danielle's mother had remained with her, surviving in the hazel tree Danielle planted in their garden. She had gifted Danielle with a silver gown and glass slippers, allowing her to attend the ball where she met Armand. She continued to defy death to this day, living on in the enchanted glass blade of Danielle's sword, all for the love of her daughter.

What of Snow's own mother, Queen Rose Curtana? Rose's ghost had lingered for years, searching for a way to regain her power. She had plotted with Danielle's stepsisters, hoping to possess the body of Danielle's child.

But Beatrice had turned away.

"Why didn't you stay?" Bea had been more of a mother to Snow than Rose Curtana ever was. If Bea had died naturally, taken by the ailments of age, that would have been one thing. But she could have lived for many more years. She should have lived. Would have, if Snow had been skilled enough to save her. If she had been strong enough.

Snow stared into the mirror. The glass showed only her own face. Black hair dusted with white. Red-veined eyes, swollen and shadowed. Faint wrinkles around the eyes, and laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. With every year, she looked more like her mother.

She picked up the candle. Clear wax burnt her fingers as it spilled onto the floor. She should leave. Find Danielle and Talia.

The thought made her wince. Danielle would forgive her for not being there with Bea, but Talia was another story. Talia was angry and hurting. She had known Beatrice a long time. Almost as long as Snow.

"You're safe now," Beatrice had said on that first journey to Lorindar. Snow had woken from a nightmare in the middle of the night, screaming loudly enough to wake half the crew. The smell of burning flesh had been so real. She had thought she was back in Allesandria, reliving her duel with her mother. Beatrice had held her, running her hands through Snow's hair and whispering softly, "I'll look after you."

Snow flung the candle away. It broke into pieces, splattering hot wax over the stone wall.

She stared at the broken chunks of wax for a long time. There were other spells. Spells her mother had known, magic Snow had never tried. Slowly, she reached down to take the largest piece of wax from the floor.

She pressed the wax directly to the mirror, drawing a simple circle. She adjusted her hold, using a corner to sketch the more detailed symbols of binding. A modified summoning circle soon took shape on the glass. She finished the final characters, working Beatrice's name into the runes, and tossed the wax aside.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Let Queen Beatrice hear my call. Seek her out where e'er she be. Mirror, find my queen for me." The words spilled forth without thought. The mirror changed, once again showing Queen Beatrice's lifeless body. Armand and Danielle knelt together at her side. Tears spilled freely down Danielle's cheeks.

Snow scowled and pushed beyond the image. That was but the body. Where was Beatrice's soul?

Light filled the mirror, bright as the sun. Snow squinted but refused to turn away. The light spread into the library. She felt as though she were falling into the glass.

She grabbed the mirror's frame with both hands. Wisps of fog curled from the glass. She peered into the light, trying to see what lay beyond, trying to follow Beatrice's soul wherever it had gone.

Never had the mirror responded so easily to her will. She felt as though she flew through the sky. In Snow's hands, the mirror could pierce Heaven itself if that was what it took to find Beatrice.

Sweat made her grip slippery. She tightened her fingers until they cramped. The wax runes began to flake away from the glass.

They didn't matter. The reflection of the runes remained in the mirror, their power pouring forth in pursuit of the queen.

She blinked to clear the tears from her vision. Her blood battered her head from within as though straining to crack the skull. Her body felt numb, and she clung to the mirror to keep from falling. Through the pain, a part of her marveled at what the mirror had done, reaching out so far in pursuit of the dead. If only she could see beyond the light.

"Come back to us, Bea." Silence swallowed her words. Snow wasn't even certain she had spoken aloud. She could no longer make out the library around her. Nothing existed save the light and the place that lay on the other side. The place Beatrice's spirit had gone.

The first crack made no sound. With her hands clenched around the frame, she felt the glass shift ever so slightly. Pain exploded behind her eyes as she tried to focus not on the light, but on the mirror's surface, where a white line now curved across the center of the glass.

Beatrice was there. She was so close. Snow could feel the pressure from beyond the mirror, as though Bea was pushing to escape back into this world.

Another crack grew from the center of the mirror, curving up and to the right to create a triangular shard that might have fallen if Snow hadn't moved her hand to hold it in place.

Lines spread in a starburst from her hand. Fragments of glass no larger than pebbles fell to the floor. Blood dripped down the frame, though Snow hadn't felt the cuts.

The magic surged like a living thing. She imagined she could hear Talia's voice, chastising her. How many times had Talia warned her against bending the laws of the universe too far? Push hard enough, and things were going to snap. Even her mother's mirror had limits. Snow tried to end her spell, but it was far too late.

This was a hell of a time for Talia to be right.

The light faded as the cracks spread through the rest of the mirror. For a moment, Snow saw herself in the reflection, her features distorted by the broken glass. Herself, and something more.

"Oh, mother. What did you do?"

THE SNOW QUEEN'S SHADOW is now available at:

Amazon.com

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iBooks

About the Author

Actor and author Wil Wheaton described Jim C. Hines' first published fantasy novel GOBLIN QUEST as "too f***ing cool for words!" which is pretty much the Best Blurb Ever. After completing the goblin trilogy, Jim went on to write the princess series, four books often described as a blend of Grimm's Fairy Tales with Charlie's Angels. He was a first place winner in the Writers of the Future contest, and has published more than 40 short stories in various magazines and anthologies. He also writes a popular blog, which covers everything from book reviews to living with diabetes to the occasional web comic. He's currently hard at work on LIBRIOMANCER, the first book in a new modern-day fantasy series.

Jim lives in Michigan with his wife and two children, along with half an ark worth of pets. He spends far too much time online at places like Facebook, Twitter,and LiveJournal. You can find free short fiction and samples of Jim's books at his web site, www.jimchines.com.

Spellcast

by Barbara Ashford

SOME ENCHANTED EVENING

On a scale of one to ten, the day had registered 9.5 on the Suck Scale even before I climbed into the bathtub with my bottle of Talisker. First, the "I'm sorry, but the recent merger means that we'll have to let some people go" speech at work. Then, the horrifically exuberant letter from some college classmate that exclaimed, "Hurry, Maggie! Only a few days left to register for our tenth reunion!"

Now, it appeared to be snowing. Inside my bathroom.

I gazed heavenward and frowned. A few moments ago, the crack in the ceiling had merely struck me as a depressing metaphor for my life. Now, it had blossomed into a giant spider web.

Mesmerized by whisky and the sheer improbability of yet another disaster, I watched the web expand. Like a character in a movie who stands on the frozen lake while you're shouting at the screen, "The ice is breaking up, you moron!"

When the first chunk of plaster struck my knee, I grabbed the Talisker and scrambled to safety. Seconds later, a chunk the size of my microwave plummeted into the tub, sending a small tidal wave lapping across my feet.

I stared at the icebergs of plaster floating in the tub, at the gaping hole in my ceiling, at the water racing down the hallway. Then I did what any strong, self-reliant New Yorker would do after surviving the loss of her job and the reminder of ten years of lackluster achievement on both personal and professional fronts. I cried.

After which I blew my nose, drained the tub, mopped up the mess, dried myself off, and called the super. By the time he rang the doorbell, I was already packing.

*** ***

I reviewed my options to the accompaniment of Jorge's sorrowful ruminations in Spanish.

No way was I staying in my apartment. It was just too damn depressing.

I could scurry down to Delaware, but I knew I'd run afoul of my mother's bullshit detector. Realizing that some major life crisis had prompted my spur-of-the-moment visit, she'd interrogate me ruthlessly until I came clean. And then I'd have her desperation to deal with on top of mine.

A colleague's apartment? Half my coworkers had lost their jobs in today's bloodbath. The rest felt guilty about hanging on to them. Either way, they didn't need me showing up on their doorsteps, and I didn't need to relive the whole saga with them.

Friends from college? The few I kept in touch with were scattered around the country.

Friends in the city? None.

Still clutching the pair of socks I'd been rolling up, I sank onto my futon. Two years in the city, zero friends. There were the other residents of my brownstone, most of whom I knew by sight rather than name, my colleagues at HelpLink, a few blind dates that my colleagues had arranged, but no real friends. The nice West Indian greengrocer who occasionally tossed an extra mango in my bag didn't really count.

I hauled out the stash of travel books I'd been collecting since I got the job at HelpLink. I'd never gone anywhere, but I had two weeks severance and two years of meager savings, and if ever I needed to escape Brooklyn, it was now.

I weighed the relative merits of Southern hospitality, Rocky Mountain vistas, and Pacific coastlines before deciding I couldn't afford to splurge on airfare. Then I picked up a guide to New England's bed and breakfasts.

And bing! I had the answer.

What could be more New Englandy than Vermont? The perfect place to retreat, relax, regroup. Patchwork quilts on the bed. Rocking chairs on the porch. Groves of maples. Babbling brooks. Cows.

Normally, I would have spent hours researching amenities and prices. But if I was going to spend the next God knows how many months winging it, I figured I might as well start now.

The next morning, I threw an overnight bag into my ancient Honda Civic and headed north. My spirit of adventure faded somewhere on I-91. Everyone in Connecticut and Massachusetts seemed to be fleeing their respective states. It was like gold had been discovered in the Green Mountains or I'd inadvertently entered an alternate universe where lemmings could drive. After six endless hours, I bailed onto a two-lane road and set off in search of a quaint country hideaway.

The road wound through dense stands of trees that still wore that new-leaf green that had adorned New York a month earlier. Eventually, the forest gave way to rolling countryside that looked like it had posed for a Vermont Life calendar. Stone walls surrounded fields where black and white Holsteins grazed. Purple wildflowers ran riot in a meadow, while daffodils hugged the foundations of a dilapidated shed.

I passed farmhouses and barns, a Buddhist meditation center and a blacksmith's forge, but the closest thing to a town was a collection of rundown mobile homes that had definitely not posed for a Vermont Life calendar. I was beginning to regret the whole winging it thing when the road came to an abrupt end.

A sign informed me that I had reached the township of Hillandale, evidently Vermont's version of the Twin Cities since Hill lay a mile to the north and Dale three miles to the south. Logic and my sore butt called for a right turn towards Hill, but the same instinct that had made me bail told me to turn left.

As I rumbled over a wooden trestle bridge, I glimpsed a man crouched on a slab of rock on the stream bank below. A little girl clung to his hand, staring intently at the opposite bank.

"Who knows what might be under those tree roots, Maggie! Pirate treasure. Or a family of gnomes. Or a gateway to another world."

I pulled over, astonished and angry to find tears burning my eyes. A couple of deep breaths banished the unwanted memory, but my first glimpse of Dale was a little blurry.

Once it came into focus, it proved to be the quintessential New England town, minus the fall foliage. White church steeples. Open fields. Virgin forest. A stream gleaming like polished brass in the last rays of sunlight still peeking over the mountains.

A green-and-white sign welcomed me to Dale, founded in seventeen-something-or-other. I felt like I'd reached the Promised Land.

I passed a deserted lunch stand and a well-manicured cemetery. Then I spied a large white barn in a meadow. My foot came off the gas pedal as if it had a mind of its own.

It wasn't your typical Vermont barn. Narrow windows along one side formed five Gothic arches. A tall cupola with the same slatted windows sprouted from the roof. Atop it, a spire pointed heavenward, furthering the barn's odd resemblance to a cathedral. Or a Wiccan house of worship. For under the steep central gable, there was an enormous five-pointed star.

I hit the brake. Architectural anomalies aside, I had the weird feeling that I'd seen the barn before. But that was impossible. I'd never been in Dale in my life.

"Need help, miss?"

The words jolted me out of my reverie. A pickup truck had pulled up next to me. An old guy in a John Deere cap regarded me from the passenger side, patiently awaiting my response. It was such a far cry from the typical New York reaction that I just stared at him. Then I stammered, "No. Thanks. I was just…"

Gawking at a barn like a stupid tourist.

"If you're looking for the crossroads-"

"Coffee. I could really use some coffee."

"Chatterbox cafe. Next to the hotel."

A hotel sounded promising. Maybe I'd skip the bed and breakfast and crash there.

As I continued down the road, the rearview mirror reflected the shrinking image of the barn. It seemed forlorn somehow. But that was as much a product of my overactive imagination as that earlier moment of deja vu.

The town looked anything but forlorn. White clapboard houses lined the street, most with porches and many with rocking chairs. No B&B signs on the front lawns, just an elderly couple sitting in a pair of Adirondack chairs and a little boy throwing a Frisbee to an enthusiastic golden retriever.

There were a surprising number of cars on the road, most heading in the opposite direction. Traffic slowed to a crawl at the village green. I circled the roundabout, fighting the absurd desire to take another look at the barn. After my second circuit, I became absorbed in the town.

The tree-lined street, neat shops, and small white Congregational church created a setting so perfectly Norman Rockwell that I began to suspect it was secretly Ira Levin. But the women looked normal enough in jeans and sweaters. Nary a Stepford Wife in sight.

As I escaped the traffic circle, the Norman Rockwell aura imploded. A screaming pink neon sign advertised "Hallee's." Judging from the lingerie in the window, Hallee's was a shopping mecca for New England hookers. Two doors down, a gingerbready building with dragons flanking the front door turned out to be the Mandarin Chalet. Bea's Hive of Beauty and a pub named Duck Inn revealed a strange local penchant for puns.

The Golden Bough Hotel turned out to be a colonnaded edifice that looked like it had been transplanted from a Tennessee Williams play. Next to it, as promised by my Good Samaritan, was the Chatterbox cafe.

Placards in the front window announced "Free WiFi" and "Bikers Welcome," neither of which I'd expected in a country town like Dale. I slowed to a crawl as two ladies exited the cafe and got into their car. Their flowered dresses and elaborate hats suggested they were off to a revival meeting. I waited for them to back out, then whipped into the vacated parking space.

My arrival seemed to be the cue for a general exodus from the Chatterbox. In addition to bikers, Dale's tourist trade included Goths, Renaissance Fair refugees, and a small Asian street gang.

Time warped as I stepped inside. Patrons and decor seemed to have escaped from the set of Happy Days or Bye, Bye Birdie. In one of the booths lining the left wall, an AARP couple hunkered down over their early bird specials. A noisy group of tweens crowded around the table in the front window, gobbling ice cream sundaes. The linoleum counter with its soda fountain stools reminded me of the Eckerd's drug store Nana used to take me to when I was little. Same red vinyl seats on the stools. Same glass domes covering the cakes and pies. Same pleasantly stout waitresses in powder blue uniforms.

One of them ambled over as I slumped onto a stool.

"Long day, huh?" Frannie or Francie - there was a dark smear in the middle of her nametag - clucked sympathetically.

"Very."

"Coffee?" she asked, already reaching for the pot.

"Please." I must have sounded desperate, because she shot me a quizzical look over her shoulder. "Cream, no sugar."

Wondering if I looked as frazzled as I'd sounded, I stole a glance at the long mirror behind the counter. The black flecks in the ancient glass made my auburn hair look polka-dotted, while my face seemed to be showing early signs of bubonic plague. My gaze drifted over a framed photograph next to the mirror, then snapped back as I recognized the barn.

Frannie/Francie jerked her head towards it. "Yep. That's the Crossroads Theatre."

"If you're looking for the crossroads…"

Maybe that was why the barn had looked so familiar. I'd spent my first season in summer stock at the Southford Playhouse, a converted barn that seated about one hundred people uncomfortably. Bats made occasional appearances, drawing gasps from the audience and stealing focus from the performers. We made a hundred bucks a week, which included living quarters in a dilapidated rooming house nicknamed "Anatevka" after the village in Fiddler on the Roof. And performed in front of a mottled black-and-gray backdrop that we dubbed "The Shroud."

Hands down, the best ten weeks of my life.

The mirror reflected back my smile. Quickly descending to earth again, I asked, "Is there a bed and breakfast in the area?"

Frannie/Francie sniffed. "There's one over to Hill calls itself that. Charge you an arm and a leg and give you toast in the morning. But the theatre folk all stay at the Bough."

As she plunked a plastic travel mug on the counter, I quickly said, "Cardboard is fine."

"This is better," she assured me as she poured. "Ten cents off each refill. Think of the savings." I was still doing the math when she added, "Be ready in a jiff. I know you don't want to be late."

"Late?"

"To see the cast lists."

"Cast lists?"

Frannie/Francie froze in the act of snapping the lid on my travel mug. "You mean you haven't auditioned yet?"

I shook my head. "I'm just up for a few-"

"Well, you better head right on over. Auditions close in ten minutes."

I may have inherited my father's love for acting, but that was more than offset by my mother's practicality. I'd given theatre a try, but when I turned thirty, I wrapped my acting dreams in mothballs and got a real job.

As I reached for my coffee, Frannie/Francie snatched up the travel mug and placed it under the counter. "I'll just keep this for you."

"You're holding my coffee hostage?"

"It'll taste even better after you audition."

"Oh, come on…"

When I ignored her shooing motions, she flung back the counter's bridge and marched towards me. I headed for the door, still complaining that I really wanted my coffee and I really, really didn't want to audition.

"Sure you do. It'll be fun."

No, it would only remind me that I'd failed as an actress. Just as I'd failed as a college admissions counselor, a telemarketer, and a HelpLink representative.

"You'll do fine. Don't worry about your hair."

She followed me out of the cafe and stood at the curb while I got into my car. As I eased into traffic, I heard her shout, "Break a leg, hon!"

"Break yours," I muttered.

A quick check of the rearview mirror at the roundabout proved she was still standing guard, ruining any chance of sneaking back to the Golden Bough. Resigned to searching for the overpriced B&B she had disdained, I headed north.

As soon as the barn came into view, my heart started racing. And - right on cue - my foot came off the gas pedal. Clearly, my body wanted me to stop, even if my mind was firmly against the idea.

What the hell. It couldn't hurt to look at the place.

I eased my car down the narrow lane, trying to avoid deep ruts that looked like they had been carved by the Conestoga wagons of Dale's original settlers. A white farmhouse sprawled atop a hill, overlooking the meadow and barn much the way the house in Psycho looms over the Bates Motel. As I drifted closer, I glimpsed a couple of outbuildings and what might be a small pond. Beyond that stretched the forest primeval.

There were close to two dozen cars in the gravel lot, sporting license plates from all over the Northeast; I even spotted a few from the South.

Even more astonishing were the hopefuls milling around the picnic tables. In addition to the motley crew I'd glimpsed leaving the Chatterbox, I saw a Rocky clone in a muscle shirt, Luca Brasi's twin brother, two Legally Blonde sorority chicks, a black Rasta dude, a white Rasta wannabe, and an elderly man in a walker serenading a mousy looking woman with a quavering rendition of 'Some Enchanted Evening.' A few clutched sheet music, but most were empty-handed and looked as bewildered as I felt.

Up close, the theatre was as unimpressive as its prospective actors. The timbers of the barn were more of a sun-bleached gray than white. Ivy crept over its stone foundations to snake up the wood slats. Atop the cupola, a black weathervane in the shape of something vaguely mammalian creaked in the gusting breeze. Shivering, I slipped through the open front door.

Warmth enveloped me. Not merely the physical sensation of walking into a heated building, but something more - like the embrace of an old friend. I shook my head impatiently; no use getting sentimental about the good old days of summer stock.

The small lobby was empty save for an elderly woman sitting in the box office. She looked up from her magazine and examined me over her reading glasses. Her patrician New England face - bone structure to die for - only added to the impression that she was looking down her nose at me. Then she smiled and morphed into the elegant but warm-hearted fairy godmother the Disney animators should have given Cinderella.

"Reinhard will be out in a moment."

I nodded politely and made a mental note to flee before then. There was still time to look around, though; beyond the two sets of double doors that led to the house, the current victim had just launched into a quavering a cappella version of 'Born to be Wild.'

A flyer impaled to the wall with a thumbtack advertised next weekend's Memorial Day parade. Another - bright pink - the "Spring into Summer" sale at Hallee's. All corsets 25% off.

A poster between the house doors revealed that Janet Mackenzie was the theatre's producer, while Rowan Mackenzie was its director. Doubtless some chirpy husband and wife team with pretensions of artistic brilliance. They clearly loved musicals because that was all they were doing: Brigadoon, Carousel - hoary chestnuts both - and an original show called The Sea-Wife. Book and lyrics by Rowan Mackenzie. He'd probably bombed in real theatre, but had enough money to start his own to soothe his wounded ego.

God only knew what The Sea-Wife was about; if there were mermaids involved, I was doomed. I'd be perfect for the comic lead in Brigadoon, but I'd always despised Carousel. Maybe because the story hit a little too close to home. Abusive ne'er-do-well woos small town girl, who continues to adore him no matter what kind of crap he pulls. Returns to earth years after his death to square things with his wife and daughter. Misty-eyed finale with everyone singing some plodding anthem of hope and love.

To be fair, Daddy never hit us. And it was only during that last year that he began vanishing for weeks at a time. Then Mom kicked him out and he vanished for good.

A weight descended on my chest. I shrugged it off. I had no intention of wallowing in the past. Or spending the summer singing about bonnie Jean and real nice clambakes. Or auditioning for the Crossroads Theatre.

Belatedly, I realized that 'Born to be Wild' had concluded. Before I could beat a hasty retreat, one of the house doors opened. A middle-aged man clutching a clipboard strode towards me.

"Name?" he demanded, pen poised.

"No. Sorry. I'm not-"

"Name."

"No. See, I'm not here for the auditions."

"Name!"

The Teutonic bullying brought out my Scotch-Irish temper. "Dorothy Gale. From Kansas."

His deepening frown chiseled new lines into his forehead. "And I am Glinda, the Good Witch of the North."

"As if," a voice proclaimed behind me. "That's my role."

I turned to discover a plumpish young man posed dramatically in the entranceway. His pink shirt was roughly the color of Glinda's gown, but he wore ordinary blue jeans rather than a chiffon skirt and, in lieu of wand, trailed a plum-colored sweater across the floor.

"Reinhard bullies everyone," he said as he breezed towards us. "But he's really a pussycat. I'm Hal. Welcome to the Crossroads."

"Maggie."

"Ha!" With a triumphant grin, Reinhard scribbled down my name.

"Hal as in Hallee's?" I ventured.

"Aren't you the little Miss Marple? Actually, I'm only half of Hallee's. My other half-"

"Better half," Reinhard muttered.

Hal stuck out his tongue. "Lee's closing up shop for me. I have to be here when the cast lists go up. So exciting."

His radiant smile dimmed as he studied me. In my black tunic and sweatpants, I resembled a lumpish ninja. Doubtless, Hal wished he'd brought along one of those 25% off corsets.

The smile returned with so little effort that it had to be genuine. "You'll be wonderful. I have a sixth sense about these things. Next week, after you're settled, you come into the shop. I have a green sarong that'll look fabulous with that hair."

Reinhard sighed heavily. "Last name."

"Graham. I bet you own the Mandarin Chalet."

"His wife does," Hal volunteered. "Reinhard is a pediatrician."

With that wonderful bedside manner, he probably terrified the local children into good health.

"Mei-Yin also does our choreography. I, of course, do costumes. And set design. Lee-"

"She will find all of this out later," Reinhard interrupted. "Now, she auditions."

I cast a despairing look at each of my fairy godmothers, but Hal just beamed and the lady in the box office waggled her fingers.

I knew I should turn around and walk out. But something - curiosity? instinct? my father's musical theatre genes? - impelled me to follow Reinhard into the house.

The doors whispered shut behind us, cutting off the light from the lobby. We stood motionless in the aisle, allowing our eyes to adjust to the dimness.

I'm a sucker for darkened theatres. There's an air of hushed anticipation, more patient and mysterious than the hush that descends before the curtain rises. As if the theatre holds secrets that it will reveal only to those who will surrender to its magic and allow it to carry them away to another place, another time, another world.

Beneath the odors of dust and old upholstery, I smelled paint and fresh-cut wood, as if the theatre had been erected that morning instead of decades ago. And something more elusive that made me think of warm summer earth and a thick mulch of pine needles.

A shiver crawled up my back. I rubbed my arms, firmly quelling my imagination and the emerging crop of goose bumps.

Mr. 'Born to be Wild' must have left via another door for the stage was empty. Thick clouds of dust motes lent a Brigadoony mistiness to the pool of light center stage. The music director's head peeped over the rim of the orchestra pit, hair gleaming like a newly minted penny. In the center section of the house, I spotted the dark silhouette of the director.

My stomach went into freefall.

"Break a leg, sweetie."

I started at Hal's whisper, unaware that he'd slipped in behind us. As Reinhard edged past me, I whispered that I didn't have any material, that I hadn't brought a resume or headshot. He ignored my running monologue and marched down the aisle. And once again, I trotted after him like an obedient puppy.

I mounted the five steps to the stage with the alacrity of Marie Antoinette en route to the guillotine. Then I remembered that I was a New Yorker, for God's sake. And once upon a time, people had paid to see me perform. I straightened my slumping shoulders and strode onto the stage as if I owned it.

A shock of static electricity stopped me in my tracks. And with it, that weird sense of coming home that I had felt when I stepped inside the barn.

Get a grip, Graham.

I took a deep breath, let it out, and walked into the pool of light.

"Good afternoon. And welcome."

Although I knew the invisible director was just adopting the same soothing tone I used on HelpLink calls, my heartbeat slowed from rabbit speed to human.

"I'd like you to read a scene first. Something from Brigadoon."

I couldn't place his faint accent, but it was also strangely soothing.

"If you please, Reinhard."

Reinhard thrust a piece of paper at me. Meg and Jeff. Funny, secondary lead stuff. No sweat. Hearing Jeff's lines delivered in a German accent reminded me how absurd this whole thing was.

"Very nice," Rowan Mackenzie said when I finished. He probably said that to everyone, but a warm glow blossomed in my stomach.

"What will you be singing for us today?"

Exit warm glow, stage left.

I shot a panicked glance at the music director, who just stared up expectantly from his piano in the pit. I couldn't think of anything. Neither the uptempo number nor the ballad I'd always used for auditions. I tried to remember the plodding anthem from Carousel, but all I came up with was 'A Real Nice Clambake.'

Then a title popped into my head. Before I could stop myself, I blurted it out.

I had to hand it to the music director; the guy didn't miss a beat. Never mind that it was a man's song. And a major cheese-fest. With a rippling arpeggio, he launched into the intro of 'Some Enchanted Evening.'

In spite of my horror, I noted that Penny Hair had chosen a good key for me. Silently blessing him, I dove in. The first verse was shaky, but by the second, I'd begun to enjoy mocking the sappy lyrics and over-ripe music.

But at the end of the bridge, something strange happened. I found myself remembering how I'd felt when I met Michael freshman year. And how Eric burst out laughing when I bumped into him at the Cineplex and drenched him with Diet Coke. That giddy, unexpected, "Oh, my God" magic that warms you like single malt whisky and leaves you cold and shivering at the same time.

And just like that, I was singing my heart out. My voice soared during that final verse, only to drop to a choked whisper at the end. The last note was still hanging in the air when Hal shouted "Brava!" and began clapping. The silhouetted head turned, and the applause stopped.

Just as abruptly, my chick flick sentimentality evaporated. Moisture prickled my armpits and forehead, that awful cold dampness that actors call "flop sweat." I hung my head, desperately searching for a trap in the floor so I could plummet quietly to my death.

"Now as to your availability…"

"She came in late." Reinhard's disapproving voice boomed out of the darkness. "She did not fill out the form."

"Thank you, Reinhard. Rehearsals begin after Memorial Day. The season ends in mid-August. We hope our actors will be able to join us for the entire summer, but that's not always possible. I need to accommodate everyone's schedule when I make casting decisions, so if you could tell me your availability…"

"Oh, I'm available. Free as the wind. No job. No husband at home. Not even any home to speak of since the bathroom ceiling caved in."

Realizing that I sounded more pathetic than amusing, I shut my mouth. The ensuing silence brought on another wave of flop sweat.

He'd given me the perfect cue and I'd blown it. I should have politely but firmly told him that I wasn't looking for a job. Not here, anyway. I had to get back to Brooklyn. File for unemployment. Check out jobsites.

As I opened my mouth to explain, he said, "Thank you. Would you please wait outside? The stage door is to your right."

I slunk into the wings where a work light guided me to the door. As I stepped into the real world, the little old man with the walker advanced carefully over the grass.

"Such a lovely song. Not so often you hear a girl sing it."

The familiar cadences of New York restored my spirits.

"We danced to it at our wedding, Rachel and me." As I glanced around, he added, "No, no. She passed away a few months ago."

"I'm so sorry."

"Fifty-two years we were married."

"Wow. That's terrific. Sometimes it feels like I've gone that long without a date."

"A nice young thing like you? You've got plenty of time to find Mr. Right. Who knows? Maybe here. Look at my granddaughter." He jerked his head over his shoulder. "The one with the blue hair who's eating up whatever Jack Kerouac's dishing out."

I smothered a laugh; the kid did look like a young Jack Kerouac.

"The two of you drove all the way up from the city?" I asked.

"You're a New Yorker, too?" he exclaimed. Because of course, to New Yorkers, there is only one city.

"Transplanted," I admitted.

"Born and bred." He thumped his chest proudly and listed a little to starboard, but steadied himself before I had to leap to the rescue. "Prospect Park."

"Crown Heights."

"We're practically neighbors! Well. Would have been. I live with my daughter now. Over in Manchester."

"If you don't mind my asking…"

"Ask."

"Are you an actor?"

"Dentist. Retired. Bernie Cohen."

"Maggie Graham. But you auditioned?"

"Me and Sarah both."

"How did you even find this place?"

"Well, it's funny…" His gaze moved past me, and he whispered, "I'll tell you later. Here comes Hermann Goering with the cast lists."

It seemed impossible that Rowan Mackenzie had made his decisions so quickly; I'd known directors who spent days mulling over their choices. But Hal was tacking sheets of paper to the side of the barn.

The buzz of conversation died, replaced by a silence so profound I could hear the creak of the weathervane and the soft whistle of Dr. Cohen's breathing.

Reinhard surveyed us, frowning. "The casts lists are up. Three copies. So do not crowd."

We darted nervous glances at each other, uncertain if this was our cue to inspect the lists and reluctant to move without Reinhard's permission. He nodded, clearly pleased by our obedience, then said, "Now. You look."

In the general stampede that ensued, I stuck close to Dr. Cohen so he wouldn't be trampled. There were excited exclamations as people found their names. A few retreated in obvious elation. Most just looked confused. But clearly, everyone had gotten a role, because there were no tears or brave "It's an honor to be nominated" smiles.

After the first wave subsided, I edged forward with Dr. Cohen and his granddaughter. Once again, my heart was pounding like a demented bongo, but I tried to appear nonchalant as I scanned the list.

Brigadoon - Chorus. Chorus? I nailed that scene. And he put me in the chorus?

The Sea-Wife - Chorus. Again.

Carousel - Nettie. Who the hell was Nettie? The tough-talking carousel owner?

The ear-shattering squeal of a pig being slaughtered turned out to be Dr. Cohen's granddaughter. "Grandpa, I got Louise!"

"That's wonderful, sweetheart!" He angled away from her to mouth, "Who's Louise?"

"I think that's the daughter in Carousel," I whispered. "With the big ballet number."

"Ballet?" He glanced at Sarah who was jumping up and down, plump bosoms, belly, and thighs quivering like Jell-O. "Oy. So who's this Mr. Lundie? If he's got a ballet number, I don't want to know."

"You're safe. He's the village elder who explains the miracle of Brigadoon."

"What miracle?" Luca Brasi demanded, shouldering a geeky accountant type aside.

"Of why the town vanishes into the mists and returns for one day every hundred years."

"Cool." One of the Legally Blondes nodded solemnly.

"What about this Heavenly Friend in Carousel?" the shorter church lady asked.

"I think he…she's a sort of angel."

As the church lady preened, the straw hat of her taller companion loomed behind her shoulder. "And Mrs. Mullin?"

I suddenly remembered who Nettie was: not the tough-talking carousel owner but the salt-of-the-earth woman who sings the plodding anthem whose name had eluded me earlier: 'You'll Never Walk Alone.' As well as 'June is Bustin' Out All Over.' And the fucking clambake song.

It wasn't the age thing I minded. Much. I was rarely cast as the ingenue, even when I was the right age to play one. I'd played Mrs. Kendal in The Elephant Man, the Witch in Into the Woods. But those were sexy, witty, glamorous roles. Starring roles. Not well-meaning, anthem-singing, clambake-loving frumps.

"Does anybody know who Mrs. Mullin is?" the second church lady pleaded.

"I think she's the owner of the carousel," I replied.

"And Carrie?"

"Hey! I'm Harry."

"Not Harry. Carrie."

"What about this guy Charlie?"

In moments, I was surrounded, spitting out plot synopses and character snapshots. It was clear most of them knew nothing about these shows. What the hell were they doing here? More importantly, what the hell was I doing here? Chorus in some dreadful original musical. An anonymous villager in Brigadoon. And Our Lady of the Clambake.

Rowan Mackenzie must be blind. Or on crack. Why would he cast me as Nettie when he had his pick of not one, but two church ladies? Or cast the geeky accountant as sinister Jigger when he was clearly made to play the insufferable Mr. Snow? And what bonnie Jean in her right mind would go home with Luca Brasi?

What made it more confusing was that some of the casting was spot on. Dr. Cohen was perfect for wise old Mr. Lundie. And Jack Kerouac would be great as the brooding guy who nearly destroys Brigadoon. So how come some of Rowan Mackenzie's picks were so right and others so woefully wrong?

There was an onslaught of shushing as Reinhard waved his clipboard.

"Rehearsals start after Memorial Day. You will be paid $100 a week. You will live at the Golden Bough. No charge. You will have breakfast at the Chatterbox. No charge. All this is spelled out in the contract. But you do not sign now. Tonight, we celebrate. Dinner at the Mandarin Chalet. No charge. Rooms at the Golden Bough. No charge. Tomorrow, ten o'clock, company meeting. Here. You meet the director. You meet the staff. You make up your minds. Any questions?"

Only about a thousand. But they could wait. I'd take the free food and the free night's lodging. Hell, I'd even stick around for the company meeting to get a look at the demented Rowan Mackenzie. After that, I would hit the road.

SPELLCAST is now available at:

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

About the Author

Barbara Ashford abandoned a career in educational administration to pursue a life in the theatre, working as an actress in summer stock and dinner theatre and later, as a lyricist and librettist. Her musicals have been performed throughout the world, including such venues as the New York Musical Theatre Festival and the Edinburgh International Festival.

Barbara's first trilogy was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Society's Fantasy Award for Literature. In writing Spellcast, she exchanged epic fantasy in the Bronze Age for paranormal romance in Vermont, and cannibalized much of her life to create her protagonist's.

Her short stories appear in the anthologies After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar and The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (2012).

Barbara lives near New York City with her husband whom she met while performing in the play Bedroom Farce. (You can't make this stuff up, folks.)

Visit her at www.barbaraashford.com

The Spirit Lens

by Carol Berg

Philosophers claimed the Blood Wars had irredeemably corrupted magic. Historians insisted that Sabria's growing sophistication in physics, astronomy, and alchemistry-the almost daily discoveries that exposed another spell as nonsensical and another magical practitioner as a charlatan-was but a grand human evolution, on the order of our discovery of fire, the wheel, or sail. Whoever had the right of the discussion, a sensible man could not but admit that the practice of magic had lost its glamour-and I was an unendingly sensible man.

Of course it was not good sense, but rather my own incapacity that had caused me to relinquish my aspiration to life as a mage of the Camarilla Magica. Sixteen years' residence at the sole remaining school of magic in Sabria and I could not charm a flea to a dog's back.

With encouragement from my mentor, I had faced disappointment squarely, weathered the storm that followed, and accepted what solace was offered me. Yet somewhere, nurtured by the lost dreams of youth and exposed in the ruthless self-examination required to recover from despair, lay a small, intractable conviction. A seed that would not let me spit it out. A stone that would not be shaken from my shoe. I ought to be more than I was. Even if I lacked the blood-born talents of a mage, somewhere, in some capacity, my service would make a difference in this world. Perhaps that's why the summons intrigued me so, though it made no good sense at all.

The odd missive had arrived in the late afternoon. Spring sunlight streamed through the casements of the collegia library, stretching all the way across the scuffed floor to the book cupboard labeled FORMULARY: POTIONS AND HERBALS. Only incidentally did the beams illuminate the fold of fine paper in my hand.

I peered again at the outside of the page. No insignia had manifested itself in the broken wax seal in the past few moments. The handwriting that spelled out my name remained unrecognizable.

Portier de Duplais, Curator of Archives

Collegia Magica de Seravain

Bold and angular-a man's hand, I judged. Seven years of intensive study in this library and nine more as its keeper, with little companionship but five thousand mouldering manuscripts and a transitory stream of increasingly vapid students, had left me unskilled in the discipline most important to me, but knowledgeable in many arcane branches of learning.

I flipped back to the enigmatic message.

*** ***

Portier de Savin-Duplais:

Present yourself at Villa Margeroux on the Ventinna Road no later than 17 Trine on a matter of urgent family business. A mount awaits you at the hostelry in Tigano. We require utmost discretion.

Your kinsman

*** ***

No personal signature. No politenesses. I had no acquaintance with Villa Margeroux or with any person who lived in the vicinity of Ventinna.

The note could be a prank, perpetrated by some student I had reprimanded for marking in books or dripping lamp oil onto irreplaceable pages. Mage Rutan's much-praised validator, the small pewter charm I had wheedled out of the old sturgeon only with extraordinary groveling, wavered maddeningly between dullness and brilliance, refusing to designate the message as truth or falsehood.

Yet the request was stated with a certain directness uncharacteristic of students. Uncharacteristic, too, was the distance involved; Ventinna lay a good four days' ride westward. And a particular detail tickled my imagination, one that might escape a reader unburdened by the excessive expectations of names and bloodlines-or the private convictions of some greater destiny too embarrassing to mention, even to his longtime mentor. The outer address used my common appellation, Duplais being my father's unprepossessing demesne. But the inner included Savin, the family name I had long discarded, which could not but lead my thoughts to one particular kinsman and couch the imperious tone of the message in an entirely different light. Present yourself . . . We require . . .

A prickle of excitement minimized all sober considerations, such as how to request leave from my duties while maintaining utmost discretion, and how ridiculous it was to imagine that my fifteenth cousin, the King of Sabria, had summoned me to a clandestine meeting. I had never even met the man.

My finger traced the Savin family device scribed on the back of my left hand at birth, then moved inevitably to the ragged, nine-year-old scar that bisected it, scoring my wrist and vanishing up my sleeve. If not now, Portier, when?

In an instant's resolve, I stuffed the missive inside my threadbare doublet, snatched up my compass, journal, and pen case, and locked my desk without so much as returning my books to the shelves. A hastily scribbled note directed students to see Adept Nidallo for access to the archives or the vault. At the modest age of two-and-thirty, I'd spent precisely half my life inside these walls. My bones had near fossilized. Did my royal cousin bid me suckle his children, I'd do it.

*** ***

"Cousin Portier. We've not met before, I believe." The tall, broad-shouldered man in maroon and silver stood by a grand window that opened onto the sprawling country estate called Margeroux. His clear voice resonated with confidence. His extended hand bore a ruby signet, crested with Sabria's golden tree.

"Indeed, sire, I've not had that privilege." I dropped to one knee and kissed his proffered ring. "How may I serve you?"

I felt immensely relieved and a bit foolish. Four long days in the saddle give a man occasion to recall every synonym for idiot. Philippe de Savin-Journia was a sovereign in his prime. His wealth and open-mindedness had artists, explorers, scholars, and academicians of every science flocking to his court. What possible need had he of a librarian, schooled in a fading art? I had decided that, at best, the kinsman awaiting me would turn out to be some moronic relation as bereft of fortune and prospects as I. Worse cases abounded.

But the King of Sabria enveloped my left hand with his own-a broad, hard, warm hand, scribed with the myriad honorable scars of a warrior's life, as well as the same Savin family device that marked mine-and hauled me to my feet. Eyes the deep blue of Sabria's skies took my measure.

"I've a mystery needs solving, cousin. The matter is delicate, and certain aspects require me to seek counsel beyond my usual circles. Where better than with a member of my own family?"

"I'm honored you would think of me, sire." Mystified, to be precise. Curious.

His well-proportioned face relaxed into a welcoming smile. "Good. I've heard decent reports of you over the years and was sure you were the man I needed. I've delayed this unconscionably, hoping- Ah, you'll hear all the sordid complications soon enough. Come along."

He led me on a brisk walk through a series of pleasant, sunny rooms to a deserted kitchen in the back of the house. Pausing only to light a lamp from the banked kitchen fire, which seemed odd in the bright midafternoon, he headed outdoors.

"Tell me, Portier," he said, striding across a shady courtyard. "The methods of sorcerous practice have not changed in these years of my estrangement with the Camarilla, have they? No revelation of opticum or mechanica, no new-writ treatise on anatomy or mathematics or the composition of minerals has altered the teaching of spellwork?"

"Not at all, sire. Indeed some progressive mages believe that instruments such as the opticum will support our understanding of the physical melding of the five divine elements." Not many. Most magical practitioners stubbornly maintained their posture that the mundane sciences offered nothing to sorcerers.

"And your brethren yet renounce superstition and demonology?"

"Mages of the Camarilla work entirely within the bounds of earth. They practice as methodically as do the scientists and natural philosophers you embrace."

Had I ever imagined having the opportunity to seed the king's mind with some good feeling for the art of sorcery, I would have prepared more refined arguments. Philippe was known as a man of lively intellect and devouring curiosity.

"Sire, it seems a sad waste that political disagreements with the Camarilla have so undermined your confidence in an art that has so much to offer your kingdom."

He choked down a laugh. "I will not argue science and magic with you, Portier. My bodyguard reports that you yourself carry a compass rather than some 'directional charm' that might fail inexplicably at the dark of the moon and lead you off a cliff."

We left the path and crossed a dark corner of the yard to a narrow downward stair. Wading through a litter of dead leaves, twigs, and walnut husks, we descended the stone steps to an iron grate that blocked the lower end.

Philippe twisted the latch and tugged a rusty handle, the grate rising more smoothly than its appearance and location would suggest. The low-ceilinged passage beyond, much older than the house, smelled of stagnant water and old leaves. The king adjusted his lamp to shine more brightly. Once the grate slid closed behind us, a fierce sobriety wiped away my cousin's affable demeanor.

"Last year, on the twenty-fifth day of Cinq, an arrow penetrated my mount's saddle, not three millimetres from the great vein in my thigh. By the grace of the Pantokrator's angels, the villain archer's hand wavered, and he lies dead instead of me. Gross evidence implicates my wife."

"Sainted ancestors! I never heard-" Well, perhaps a traveling mage had brought gleeful rumors of a foiled assassination plot, but I'd thought nothing of it. Few mages held excessive love for Philippe, who had set out to dismantle the Camarilla Magica's pervasive influence in Sabrian society, scholarship, and business, and done exceeding well at it. But the queen . . . the shadow queen, rumor named her, or the lady of sorrows, who had lost one husband already, her parents in a fire, her firstborn to an infant fever, and three others miscarried . . .

We proceeded deliberately through a warren of dank passages. "Few know the complete story, in particular that the nature of the archer, and certain other aspects of the event, evidenced the collaboration of one from your magical fraternity. Somewhere a sorcerer has, for whatever reason, decided that his king ought to be dead. Though her two pet mages have no use for me, I utterly reject the idea that my wife could be involved."

"Sorcery."

"That's why I chose you, cousin. I need a sorcerer to serve as my confidential agent in this matter."

The snaky uneasiness in my belly quickly tangled itself into a familiar knot of disappointment. Though I held no grievance against Philippe, man or king, or his predecessor, King Soren, I forever cursed their presence in my family tree. As early as age ten, I had realized that our royal connection and its excess of expectations had ruined my father, leaving him with no true friends, no money, no useful purpose to his life, and a marital contract sufficient to produce me, but naught else.

At fourteen, I learned that no girl with a wit larger than an acorn would touch a male who wore the interlaced S and V on the back of his hand. The Camarilla mandated severe penalties for promiscuity, and when one of the parties hailed from the most notable, if not the most vigorous, of Sabria's seventeen remaining magical bloodlines, inquisitorial scrutiny was assured.

In the very year I turned sixteen and began my studies at Seravain, the coolness between the young King Philippe and the Camarilla broke into an open struggle for dominance. Determined to make my way in the society of mages, I had quickly dropped the Savin from my name. Seven years later, my ambition had died its humiliating death, my Savin bloodline too weak to carry me farther in a life of sorcery.

"My lord . . ."

At the end of a branched passage, Philippe touched a most ordinary-seeming door of thick oak. The door swung open all of itself. Cool air rushed out, bristling with enchantment. For one moment I allowed the mystical wave to engulf me, a sensory pleasure as deeply human as the smell of damp earth in spring. But nine years of practiced honesty required I speak nature's inescapable verdict.

"My lord, I must confess: I am no sorcerer, nor will I ever be."

He swung around to face me.

"I am failed, sire," I said, lest he had not heard enough. "Incapable of spellwork."

"I see. Yet you excelled in your studies. Reports say you are as intimately familiar with the history and practice of magic as anyone in Sabria-including those who wear the collar of a Camarilla mage. Is that true? Answer squarely, cousin. False modesty has no place here."

The truth was not so simple. Yes, I had read widely. But who would ever separate knowledge of sorcery from its practice? "I suppose one could say that, but-"

"Skills can be bought. Knowledge takes much longer to acquire, and the ability to question, analyze, interpret, and deduce longer still. The capacity for loyalty is born in a man, reinforced, I believe, with family connection. I believe you the fit person to pursue a confidential, objective inquiry into a matter of sorcery. The burden of judgment is my duty and my prerogative. But if you take on this task, I shall give you freedom and resources to pursue matters as you think best. If you deem yourself unfit, turn right around and be on your way. My time is exceeding short."

Royal assassination. Magic bent to murder. The queen suspected. Were my eyes wholly dazzled with royal flattery that I would consider treading such dangerous ground? Did unseemly curiosity cloud my judgment? Or was I clinging to the improbable certainty that my life had meaning beyond breathing and dying?

Perhaps reasons didn't matter. My mentor, Kajetan, had instilled in me a determination to honesty, and I allowed that to be my guide. "Beyond the practice of sorcery itself, sire," I said, "I do believe myself fit for such a task."

"Good. Because now I must unnerve you a bit more." Philippe moved through the open door, his boots rapping sharply on the uneven paving of yet another passage. "The last man I set to this investigation, a skilled warrior and experienced diplomat, vanished nine months ago and is not found. For private reasons, I've allowed the public inquiry to lapse. Yet conscience nags that we speak not only of my personal safety, but of the security of Sabria herself."

We halted beside an iron door. Philippe hung his lamp from a bracket and unlocked the door with a plain bronze key, but he did not open it right away. The lamplight ringed his pale eyes with shadow and carved false hollows in his firm-fleshed cheeks.

"I don't believe in magic, Portier. For most of my eight-and-thirty years, I have judged its practice entirely illusion, trickery, or coincidence. Alchemists demonstrate every day that matter is not limited to sorcery's five divine elements. An opticum lens reveals that wood is not homogeneous, but is itself made up of water, air, and fibers. Water contains unseeable creatures and can be fractured into gaseous matter. Spark is but an explosive instance of heat and light and tinder. Similarly with air and base metal. Natural science brings logic and reason to a chaotic universe. We have discovered more of truth in the past twenty years than in the past twenty centuries, stimulating our minds, benefiting Sabria and her citizens in innumerable ways. However, in this room, it pains me to confess, we find something else again."

He dragged open the door and gestured me in, and though I held ready arguments against his inaccurate understanding of the divine elements, an eager excitement drew me into the small, bare chamber. Swept and brushed, the close room smelled of naught but damp stone and lamp oil. On a stone table at its center lay an arrow, its point, splintered shaft, and ragged fletching stained deep rusty red; a brass spyglass, as a military commander or shipboard officer might use; and an untarnished silver coin. Simple evidence, an observer might say, unless he could sense the enchantment that belched from them in a volcanic spew.

"Sight through the glass, Portier. Then I'll tell you my story of magic and murder."

Magic, as I had told the king, was entirely of the human world and subject to its laws. So it was bad enough that I peered through the enchanted glass and saw a man staggering through a tangle of leafless thorn trees toward a barred iron gate-a view nothing related to the place where I stood. Far worse was my eerie certainty of the land he traveled. To glimpse the Souleater's ice-bound caverns or spy on the surpassing mystery of the Creator's Heaven could be no more fearsome, for every passing soul must first endure the Perilous Demesne of Trial and Journey-Ixtador of the Ten Gates, the desolation that lies just beyond the Veil separating this life from the next. Most unsettling of all was the reason for my certainty. The wailing, exhausted traveler was my father, a man nine years dead.

*** ***

One short hour later, dread, like Discord's Worm, had taken up permanent residence in my bowels. I would have yielded my two legs to return to my dull library.

Less than two hundred years had passed since Sabria had retreated from near dissolution. A century of savagery, fueled by rivalries between the great magical families and between those blood families and the civil authorities, had left our cities in ruins, half of our villages empty or burnt, and more than two-thirds of Sabria's nobles, scholars, and sorcerers dead. Entire magical bloodlines had been wiped out. Even a whisper of those times yet caused cold sweats and shudders in every Sabrian.

Now someone had dredged up the foulest magic of those days to create an assassin and had dispatched him to murder Sabria's golden king. Philippe was convinced that his mysterious enemy, who might or might not be his wife, would make a second attempt on the anniversary of the first, some two months hence. The king's death by unholy sorcery must surely relight the smoldering embers of the Blood Wars, and the mysterious spyglass hinted that this time the conflagration might drive us into realms uncharted. I, Portier de Savin-Duplais, librarian and failed student of magic, was charged to stop it.

"As the secrecy of your investigation must preclude our public relationship, I've engaged you a partner agente confide." Philippe led me, still speechless, back into the sunny, peaceful house. I felt out of time, as if I'd just returned from the Souleater's frozen demesne. "Cousin Portier, meet Chevalier Ilario de Sylvae."

A tall, fair, long-nosed young man, garbed in an eye-searing ensemble of red silk sleeves, green satin waistcoat, gold link belt and bracelets, and lace-god's finger, ruffled lace everywhere-swept off a feathered hat and dropped to one knee as we entered the reception room. "Gracious lord. Such a delight to attend you on this glorious spring day-though 'tis a bit warmish for the season-and I am so forever humbled and ennobled to serve you, though my spirit trembles at the requirement for discretion. . . ."

Another hour and I was truly flummoxed. After charging me to uncover an assassination plot and halt the revival of the Blood Wars in the span of two short months, the king had paired me with an imbecile. But I had sworn him my service. Indeed, the implications of the spyglass could not be ignored, and left my first move clear. I needed a sorcerer.

*** ***

33 Trine

,i>64 days until the Anniversary

"Tell me again, good Portier," called my lanky companion over his shoulder, the plumes of his velvet toque bouncing despite the oppressive woodland damp. "Right or left at the chestnut tree? By my sacred mater's nose, headings and inclinations slip through my ears like sand through a sieve. I could lose my way in a bath!"

"Bear right, Lord Ilario," I said, biting back the oh-so-sweet temptation to send the pretty-faced moron the wrong way. "The plowman was most specific. Are you certain you'd not prefer to wait back in Bardeu? There's no need to discomfort-"

"La, brave comrade! How could I, a Knight of Sabria, leave you alone to beard this fearsome mage in his woody den-our first foray into the world as partner agentes?" My companion reversed the course of his palfrey with effortless grace, his idiot grin blazing like unwelcome sunrise in a drunkard's eye . "Surely I must collapse in shame, never again able to face our noble king or my fellow knights. Though, naturally, I could not discuss our business with my fellow knights until released from my vow of silence. I don't know that I've taken a vow of silence before. . . ."

With a sigh I checked my compass heading against the map I'd sketched in my journal that morning. All seemed correct. I waved the mewling popinjay onward, hoping to still his prattle with movement if I could neither send him away nor throttle him. Knight of Sabria, indeed. Ilario de Sylvae had been fostered since babyhood with his half sister, Queen Eugenie. If he had ever drawn his fine sword outside Merona's fencing halls, I'd eat my boots.

Philippe had claimed that Ilario's rank could gain me access to information none other could manage and that the young lord's determination to prove his half sister's innocence would provide me a trustworthy ally. Fifteen days together had eliminated my concerns that the fop's motives might be more complicated. Philippe's were yet in question. Even the humiliating need to hire a better sorcerer was easier to bear than the implication that, in my sovereign's eyes, my service ranked on par with an idiot's.

As the spreading canopy of oak and chestnut dimmed the feeble daylight, I spurred my mount past Ilario's. Turn right from the Carvalho road at the point where it leaves the village, so the Bardeu plowman had directed me. Proceed through a beynt of wheat fields and cow pasture (closing the hedge-gate behind you, if you please, sonjeur) and across the weedy bog. Then keep right of the great chestnut and pray the Pantokrator's angels the sorcerer's not bound a confusion spell to lose you in the groves. A well-trod path, he'd said, his great shoulders shuddering.

Both the obscurity and the local popularity . . . and the shudder . . . had encouraged my decision to seek out this man. Only a skilled mage would be able to explain the spyglass and untangle the workings of complex and illicit sorcery. And every other mage I knew of lived under the inquisitive eye of the Camarilla Magica, scarce an objective position, considering the eighteen years' hostility between king and Camarilla.

"Halloo! Most fearsome mage, are you to home?" Lord Ilario's cheerful trumpeting caromed off the crowding trees, only to die a quick death in the breathless stillness.

"Chevalier, I must ask again that you adhere to our plan," I said through clenched teeth. "We agreed to be oblique in our approach until we're sure of him. And please, sir, curb your . . . good humor. Rumor names this mage easily offended and unaccustomed to courtly manners."

"Nonsense. Any man of the blood will have had a proper upbringing, whether in the bosom of his family or at Collegia Seravain."

"This mage is unusual, Chevalier. His hand bears no blood family's mark. Nor did he study at Seravain."

That a man not kin to one of the noble families who carried the trait of magical talent, and not formally schooled in the accumulated knowledge of sorcery, much of which was secret, could earn a mage's collar was as likely as a rabbit writing a treatise on the movement of the planets. But so this fellow had done.

Three years previous, he had arrived at Seravain and demanded to sit for examination, naming himself Exsanguin-Bloodless. After five rigorous days, he had won through to the rank of master, leaving the collegia faculty in an uproar. Not only had he earned the right to practice sorcery without supervision, and to oversee and instruct other mages, but he was eligible to be named to the Camarilla Prefecture-those who ruled on the accuracy of teachings and charted the course of sorcery in the world. But to the amazement of all, in the same hour his silver collar was sealed about his neck, he had walked away, vanishing into the obscurity from which he'd come.

I had never met Exsanguin, but as Seravain's archivist, I had duly recorded his collaring and the demesne he'd claimed as residence. Twelve days traveling on the back roads of Louvel and much cajoling of reticent villagers had brought Ilario and me to Bardeu. The villagers did not know the sorcerer's true name, either.

"Saints Awaiting!" mumbled Ilario. "Rogue mages are the Souleater's servants. At the least, I've some protection." He pulled a lump of black string, seashells, scarlet beads, and silver bangles from his pocket and dangled it from silk-gloved fingers. "Adept Fedrigo made this for me before I traveled to the sea last summer, as I had expressed my mortal fear of crocodiles. I think it must be a most efficacious charm. For certain, I suffered neither scratch, bite, nor sighting of the wicked creatures. Indeed, I could not even complain about a poor bed upon my travels. Do you think it will suffice in this dismal wood?"

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. "Certainly, Chevalier. I'd wager we'll encounter not a single crocodile today."

Hilarity bubbled out of him until he near choked on it. At least he took no offense when my annoyance burst its bounds so injudiciously-damnable idiot.

Our mounts' hooves thudded solidly on the well-beat track through a tunnel of oaks and chestnuts. Stray gleams of sunlight glinted on bits of polished tin hung here and there on the lower branches. No matter the Camarilla's strictures against illicit practice, the ignorant would ever pay hedge witches and marketplace conjurers for such useless trinkets, thinking to ward their travels on perilous paths.

As we rounded a curve, the path opened into a trampled clearing. The unhandsome stone house with sagging thatch might have been a particularly large acorn dropped from one of the thick-boled oaks. I signaled a halt.

"At last!" Ilario flung a long leg over his beast and dropped lightly to the turf. With a flourish, the lanky young lord removed his traveling cloak and tossed it across his saddle, exposing a sky blue satin waistcoat and uselessly thin and tight leather breeches of the fashionable sort deemed suitable for "rustic" excursions. He swept his arm in my direction. "Lead me, good Portier."

I disembarked from my lead-footed mare and smoothed my sober gray tunic. No one would ever call me a "fashionable young twit" or "a preening peacock with a mind less weighty than his feathers." Sighing, I scuffed a clot of dung from my boots. Quite a duet we made-Ilario the Fop, the laughingstock of Merona, and Portier de Duplais, librarian, bound together like a peacock and a tortoise, ready to face the assaults of the unholy.

"Divine grace shine upon thee and thy ancestors, master mage!" I called.

No one answered. Ilario kissed his luck charm, and though his expression maintained a proper sobriety, he winked at me in the intimate manner that I had not yet deciphered, but which felt most unseemly.

I called again, a little louder this time. "Master mage, a word with you, if we might."

No leaf stirred in the thicket of saplings, buckthorn, and laurel that obscured much of the ugly house. No smoke rose from the peak of the roof.

"Bother, if the fellow is away." Ilario pursed his lips, blew a disappointed note, and propped his arms on his saddle, gazing mournfully at me across his beast. Even his plume seemed to droop.

Dried mud, gouged with footprints, bore witness to a great number of visitors-both men and women, many in thick, nailed boots and others on horseback. Some had come in sodden winter; others within the past tennight, as approaching summer tempered the rains. Horses had been tethered here for hours at a time.

"Ill-tempered," the locals had told us. "Wouldn't cross him . . . not for a purse full of kivrae." Yet yeomen, merchants, tradesmen, and even the poorest of husbandmen and laborers sought him out, and he served them willing. "'E fixes them as is cursed in the mind," was the clearest report we'd scavenged. That could mean anything from providing sleeping draughts to excising bits of brain tissue like the storied Mad Healer of Dock Street.

So why the shabby surroundings? Even in these times, when magical practitioners' prestige had ebbed to the level of jongleurs or card cheats, a master mage could live as well as a duc. Privacy could be bought in fairer packages than an ugly hut in a chestnut grove.

I rapped on the door but jerked my hand away. The awareness of living enchantment slithered up my arm like a fiery snake. I'd never felt the like. I grasped a small, smooth stone inside my coin pocket. The courret, a rare wardstone borrowed from Seravain, chilled my fingers, declaring that the lingering enchantment posed no danger. I'd no other way to tell. Disentangulation, discerning the particular nature of the enchantments or magical residues my trained senses perceived, required spellwork, and thus lay beyond my abilities.

Footsteps crunched in the brush.

"Who's there?" The resonant voice was a presence in itself, deep, substantial, brittle, cold as the north wind off the barrens of Delourre.

I whipped my head around.

A lean, wiry man halted at the edge of the trees. His gaunt face was unshaven. The dark hair that dangled wild and loose at front and sides had escaped from a shaggy tail. Despite the imperious greeting, the pick and three iron lever bars dangling from his belt, and the heavy boots, russet tunic, and work-stained canvas slops named him a common countryman. And though he measured scant centimetres taller than my own modest height, I was uncomfortably certain he could snap my scrawny limbs like twigs. He balanced a sizable stone on his shoulder with only one hand. He appeared entirely unlike any mage I had ever met, and yet . . .

"We've come to see the mage on important business, goodman. Is he nearby?" Ilario dabbed his long nose with a kerchief and craned his neck, peering deeper into the trees.

If I could but glimpse the man's neck . . . Mages were forbidden to hide or remove their silver collars, the Camarilla's concession to the fears of the powerless.

"Identify yourselves." The fellow emerged from the gloom and halted in the center of the clearing. Indeed, a seamless band of silver encircled his sinewed neck, wholly incongruous with his rough attire. The collar's fine tracery of gold inlay designated the wearer a master mage. Yet it was the voice that marked him as worthy of note . . . and the eyes set deep under heavy brows. The fiery green of new oak leaves, those eyes could slice paper edge-on. For certain, no common laborer had such.

The fop snapped his hands to his sides and inclined his head. "Ilario de Sylvae, Chevalier ys Sabria, sir mage. And my good companion, Portier de Duplais."

"Divine grace, Master," I said, bowing with my left hand laid on my right shoulder, the mark of my blood family clearly exposed. "We would appreciate a word with you on a matter of interest."

"I share no interests with aristos."

"I am the archivist at Collegia Seravain," I said. "When examining our records-"

"Go away. I dislike company." The sorcerer hefted his burden a little higher and vanished into the oak and blackthorn scrub crowding the left side of the house.

Ilario bolted after him like a startled doe. "Hold on, sir mage!"

"Please, Master! Chevalier!" My call might have been floating dust for all it slowed them.

I had no choice but to follow. I needed a talented outsider to pursue this investigation. If this mage had skills to match his arrogance, the level of knowledge his collar bespoke, and some quantity of honor that could be claimed or bought, we might have found our man.

Thorny branches snagged my clothes, and my boots sank into the soft earth.

However, the gangly fop darted through the tangle unhindered. "Hear me out, sir mage," he called brightly. "We've brought you an invitation . . . an opportunity, one might say. If we could but sit for a moment, share a glass of wine, perhaps. My mistress will be most distressed if her offer is unheard. Most distressed . . ."

Mistress? Enthroned god! I'd told the fool to let me handle this.

Wrenching my sleeve from the barbed grip of the brush, I stumbled into a small, sunny garden: a few orderly hills and rows of vegetables, and a raised bed of close-planted herbs, swarming with bees. Garlic shoots and thick, low masses of dusty greenery bordered the plot.

Astonishing. From the mage's wild appearance, and the smoldering fury that tainted his words, one might better have expected devilish machinery or smoking pits.

"I've tasks enough to occupy my time. Take your opportunity elsewhere." The earth quivered when he dropped his loaf-shaped stone to the barren ground on the far side of the garden. At least fifty similarly shaped stones lay about the area, some stacked, some scattered randomly, some carefully trimmed and fitted into three short walls set square to one another. Chips and flakes of stone littered the dirt.

Ilario blotted his cheeks with his lace kerchief. "Please, good sir mage "

The mage whirled, his fiery gaze raking Ilario's turnout from purple plume to sleek boots. He flared his nostrils. "If my oven was built, I could bake bread and serve a noble guest and his companion properly. Even a coarse meal would better suit your taste than converse with the likes of me. But my bakefire cannot be lit as yet, so you must leave my home unsatisfied." He removed the pick and the iron bar from his belt and tossed them to the dirt. "Leave. Do fine gentlemen like you understand a plain-spoke word?"

Shivers cooled my overheated skin. No welcome here; the villagers had not erred in that.

Squatting with his back to us, the mage shoved the new stone close to the others. His wide, long-fingered left hand palmed the height and width of the block as if to measure it against its fellows. The back of that hand, thick with black hair, was clean of any family mark, as the tale of Exsanguin bespoke. Odd how the right hand stayed so firmly inside his tunic. Was he armed?

Despairing, I ventured into the dismissive silence. "If you would but allow me to explain, Master. My position as archivist led me to your name-"

"We are sent, sir mage!" Ilario bellowed at the man's back, while bulging his eyes and waggling his brows at me incomprehensibly. "My mistress believes that current mania for scientific advancement has unfairly turned popular opinion against the mystic arts. She has assembled a consilium of mages, graciously lending her particular prestige to their works." He began to march up and down, bobbing his feathered cap like a cock in a hen roost. "Certainly your next question will be what works might these be? Unfortunately, I am incapable of telling you. Though I represent a woman whose intellect scales great heights, my own wit plods along the solid earth. My comrade Portier, here, himself a learned practitioner of your fantastical arts, could explain our aims better, but, of course, he is a modest man of modest rank and shy of intruding in conversation between his betters. Besides, my lady has particularly charged me to offer you her patronage. . . ."

Blessed saints, the mage would believe we were both flea-wits. The fool Ilario had gotten it wholly muddled. We had agreed that I would assess the mage by luring him into a test of his capability and honor. Only when I was satisfied would we broach the matter of the queen's mages and what we needed him to do. The queen knew-and could know-nothing about this mission.

Yet, indeed, the mage twisted around and stared at Ilario with an intensely curious expression.

"My lady relishes nurturing new talent. I can assure you . . ." Ilario's prattle skidded to a stop under the weight of the mage's scrutiny.

The disconcerting gaze shifted to me. My skin itched. Unease swelled in my belly, reaching full growth, then relaxed again like a flower that buds, blooms, and fades all in the space of ten heartbeats. My soul felt abraded-exposed. Likely it was my conscience. Surely this man recognized the lies.

"What game is this you play?" said the mage softly, returning his attention to Ilario. His dark brows knit a line. "Speak as yourself this time, lord."

Ilario's lips parted, but no sound issued from between them. I, too, felt rendered mute.

"Does truth pain a Sabrian chevalier so much?" The mage extracted a stylus from a jumble of tools in a wooden chest and scored the new block across several of its faces, rolling and marking it entirely with his left hand. "So, one or the other of you can tell me truthfully why you're here. Or I can draw it out of your asses with a billhook. Or you can go away and leave me to my common labor."

A sighing breeze shifted the overhanging branches. The sultry gloom deepened. I rubbed my arms through the worn velvet of my doublet.

I was no gullible stable hand who believed charmed cats could cure his pox or pond scum make his wife fertile. Though all agreed that Sabria's greater magic had faded, I had studied the testimony of those who had seen mages soothe whirlwinds and stem the advance of poisoned tides. I myself had felt the balance of the five divine elements and the flow of power through my veins and deepest self-no matter that the result was naught but a sputter in the scheme of the world. But the vibrant and richly textured power swirling about this sunny garden was no more kin to the magic I had experienced than a sunset is cousin to a candle flame. Pressing the back of my hand to my mouth, I fought a compulsion to spew King Philippe's secrets, though the mage had not even raised his uncommon voice.

Ilario's golden skin took on the hue of sour milk. He swallowed, blinked, and dabbed at his quivering lower lip, then straightened his long neck as if for the headsman. "My apologies, sir mage. Allow me to clarify. That my kinswoman defies popular beliefs with support of sorcery is true. What I failed to mention is that she is interested in certain areas of magical pursuit that many people might consider . . . unsavory. And I must confess that my mistress has not yet heard of you. I took this inquiry upon myself after hearing Portier's report-"

"My lord!" Father Creator, he was ready to tell all. "Discretion, sir!"

"We must tell him the truth, Portier! For my lady's sake. Sir mage, some days ago, my friend Portier told me of your unusual collaring at Collegia Seravain. I bade him locate you in hopes you might take an interest in my mistress's needs. In fact, I've been thinking of hiring my own mage. I've no staff at all save my valet, which is highly improper for a person of rank, depending on others to see to my requirements. . . ." Ilario, lost in his prattling deception, flashed me a desperate look. My head threatened to split.

The mage tossed his stylus aside and settled onto the dirt, resting his folded arms on his drawn-up knees, as if prepared to lecture us. "What part of my history leads you or you" he glared ferociously at me "to believe that I might be willing to be kept in some aristo's menagerie alongside the horses, hounds, and birds? I work as I please and study what I please, and no one demands my time be spent making love philtres or skin glamours or servicing whatever 'unsavory' desires your mistress wishes to indulge. I've countless better things to do."

As I tried not to stare at the mage's now-exposed right hand a red-scarred, twisted claw living ugly and useless at the end of a well-muscled arm-my mind raced to knit Ilario's unraveled stupidity into a useful story. The fop had skewed the truth just enough to leave me an opening for the very test of skill and character I wished this visit to encompass. If only I knew how to entice the mage into revelations. Obviously, he cared naught for comforts or renown. What induced him to accommodate those who came here seeking his help?

"Because the opportunities we offer are unique," I blurted, insight like a blade between my ears. "Your history and this place"-I waved my hand to encompass his odd home-"and gossip of a forbidding mage who untangles the mysteries of broken minds led me-us-to believe we might find in you a certain . . . nontraditional . . . approach to your work. A talented man interested in puzzles."

"Go on."

Scarce daring to believe I'd guessed right, I laid down another thread. "We could offer virtually unlimited resources to advance whatever studies you wish books, funds, connections to information and materials from every corner of the known world, the most prominent mages in Sabria as your colleagues. You would have the opportunity to collaborate in magic of a grander scale than you could "

Mirthless laughter halted me midargument. "So you are more fools than villains," said the mage. "Unfortunately for you, it has been many years since I concluded that large-scale magical works are entirely sham and chicanery, and that the 'most prominent mages' in Sabria have not the least concept of true sorcery. In short, your benevolent mistress is misguided at best, some duc's whore perpetuating a fraud at worst, and she could not offer me gold enough to participate in such a mockery."

"Speak no slander, sir!" Ilario's words dropped in the mage's lap like a challenge glove. "We serve the Queen of Sabria."

"Lord Ilario!" I snapped, horrified. The fop had almost got me believing he had a wit.

"The queen?" The mage guffawed. "So the 'prominent' colleagues you offer are the shadow queen's trained Camarilla pups? I'd sooner bed a leper than ally myself with clowns and fools."

No reasoning man could wholly discount the charges laid against sorcerers-that some of us paraded grand illusion in the guise of true sorcery. But this brutish arrogance was insupportable.

"Civilized men do not belittle those they do not know," I snapped, summoning what dignity I could muster ankle deep in a vegetable patch. "You may be gifted, sir, but the mages of the Camarilla have proved their talents over centuries."

He only grew quieter and more contemptuous. "Show me the great work of a Camarilla mage, student, and I will show you with what tools a minimally talented hod carrier can duplicate it. Show me one of your own great works. Or perhaps . . . even a small one?"

And so was Ilario's challenge glove returned to my own lap, along with the mage's choice of weapons. I had not thought my failed status so obvious.

Annoyed at my slip of control, I gathered my temper. I had not come here to demonstrate my own magical worth. If we were to fail at this, all the better this man believe me Ilario's intellectual peer.

"No," I said, crushing doubt and pride alike with the hammer of necessity. "You show us. Elsewise, we shall assume you're naught but a trickster with a crude mouth, afraid to speak your own name, and with no better concept of magical truth than those you disdain. I can provide interesting, magically challenging employment for a skilled mage who values truth, scorns danger, and bears no loyalty to the Camarilla or any other magical practitioner."

One corner of his mouth twisted in what might pass for amusement. Far more satisfying was the spark of curiosity that flared in his green eyes. "What employment might that be? You do not sacrifice your pride before a forbidding and unpleasant man for a charm to calm your horse."

Swallowing my discomfiture at his insight, I laid down my challenge. "If you are interested, clean yourself, dress as befits a master mage, and join us at Villa Margeroux, off the Tallemant Road, within three days. A hired mount will await your use in Bardeu. Be prepared to dazzle us with your demonstration of magical truth. If we are satisfied with your application, Master Exsanguin, we will explain our dangerous proposition."

I bowed to the fop and motioned him back through the underbrush to the horses. Lord Ilario nodded in return and marched away, patting my shoulder as if he had given birth to me.

The green gaze scorched my back as I followed Ilario out of the garden. "Dante," said the uncommon voice behind us. "My name is Dante."

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About the Author

Carol Berg majored in mathematics at Rice University, so she wouldn't have to write papers. But just to make sure she had time to keep reading, she took every English course that listed novels on the syllabus. Somewhere in the midst of raising three sons, earning another degree - this time in computer science - and a software engineering career, a friend teased her into exchanging letters 'in character' and writing became a hobby and then a career. Since Transformation was published in 2000, Carol's twelve mythic fantasy novels have earned national and international acclaim, including the Geffen, the Prism, and multiple Colorado Book Awards. Her Lighthouse duology, Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone won the 2009 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews calls Carol's latest novel, The Soul Mirror, "compelling and altogether admirable." Carol lives in Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

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TruthSeeker

by C.E. Murphy

"--once upon a time, not so long ago, it was driven by a little old lady I know personally. She drove it to the store weekly, that's it, so its four thousand miles are gentle ones, ladies. It's just two years old and has all the extras. You won't find a better deal than this here or anywhere else. Now, I know the sticker price is eighteen five and you're not looking to spend quite that much." The salesman leaned out from beneath his umbrella to get a better look at the V of Kelly Richards' T-shirt, and smiled. "It's cutting my own throat, but I think I can knock it down to seventeen flat. It's a bargain, ladies, a real bargain."

"Lara?" Kelly folded her arms beneath her breasts.

For a moment Lara found herself studying her friend's cleavage, though less avidly than the salesman had. Kelly had a lifetime's experience in using her assets to distract and command, whereas Lara's own figure had been described as more of a pirate's treasure: a sunken chest. Clinical curiosity made her wonder what it would be like to take control of a situation just by inhaling deeply.

"Earth to Lara, hello?" Kelly snapped her fingers under Lara's nose. "Are you in there?"

"Of course I am." Lara turned her attention back to the yellow Mazda Miata the salesman hawked. Or, rather, to the patter he'd shared, the quick flow of words meant to distract and impress in the same way Kelly's T-shirt was. Lara thought Kelly had taken the upper hand in dedication to distraction, though. It was too cold, with too much promise of serious rain, to be out without a coat, and the salesman's gaze kept wandering to Kelly's chest instead of the vehicle lot. "And he's lying."

Offense flew across the man's face and he clapped a hand over his heart. "How could I lie to two such lovely ladies as yourselves? But all right, all right, maybe a Miata isn't your style. Something with a little more kick to it, maybe something that makes a real impression when you pull up? I've got a Ford 450 over here, it gets thirty miles to the gallon--"

He broke off again as Lara and Kelly both turned incredulous looks on him. "All right, all right, maybe twenty-five in the city. But I can see discerning women like yourselves want better gas mileage than that. I've got just the thing for you. This way, please." He strode down the lot, Kelly at his side and Lara trailing behind, staying just close enough to overhear his routine. Kelly cast regular glances at her, and Lara shook her head each time.

Finally, exasperated, Kelly pointed at a ten-year-old Nissan with a four thousand dollar price tag. "What about that one?"

A spatter of rain hit the salesman's umbrella and rolled off in a pathetic dribble to match his expression. "Decent gas mileage, but the engine was overhauled by an amateur."

"How's it run?"

He muttered, "Fine," and Lara nodded.

Kelly's smile lit up. "I'll take it."

*** ***

Forty minutes later Lara sat with her elbows on the table and a burger clenched in her hands as Kelly ignored her own lunch to admire her new car through the diner window. "Kel, if you're bringing me out to the best diner lunch in Boston you might as well eat it, you know? Or am I the only one eating because I came along to play personal lie detector?"

Kelly tore herself from the window to waggle a finger at Lara. "Technically, the Deluxe is in Watertown, not Boston."

Lara laughed. "All right, the best diner in the greater Boston area. You don't like it when I get pedantic, so how come you get to do it to me?"

"Because you do it all the time. I'm just getting my own back. Anyway, yes, lunch is for you, not me."

"You've given up eating?"

"Well, no, it's just, you know. I don't know how you can eat as much as you do and stay so slim." Kelly picked up her burger regardless, having been distracted from her car.

"Some of us get Mae West figures, some get fast metabolisms. Want to trade?"

Kelly glanced past her burger into the V of her own t-shirt. "Nah, I guess not. But thanks for coming along. You always know when salesmen are lying."

"Kelly, anybody who sells used cars is lying. You don't need me along to tell you that." Lara squished her burger until bacon and cheese oozed out of the bun, then sank her teeth into it with a blissful sigh.

"Yeah, but you also know when they're telling the truth."

Lara shrugged her eyebrows, grateful her mouth was full. Kelly was right, the correctness--the truthfulness--of her statement humming under Lara's skin like a hive full of bees. She couldn't remember a time when lies didn't strike discordant notes. Santa and the Tooth Fairy had not gone over well in her home as a child, and her mother had learned early to explain that such things were stories that people told. Long discussions had helped Lara to understand, but even with understanding, the practice of telling children lies made her uncomfortable.

It would be easier if she could instantly know the truth when someone lied to her. It didn't work that way, though she'd learned to discern a great deal. The Miata had almost certainly never belonged to a granny, and its four thousand miles were probably the result of the odometer rolling over. She couldn't know, though, not without a direct statement. Worse, she couldn't tell the difference between a truth based on misinformation or a genuine truth: if someone believed what he was telling her, it read as true.

As peculiar talents went, it was good for getting her out of jury duty--a perk that Lara found frustrating, as she thought serving on a jury might be interesting to do at least once--and not a great deal else.

"Hey. Hey." Kelly reached across the table to thump Lara's forearm. "Look, it's that guy from the news. The weatherman. Why don't you go ask him if he's single?" She nodded out the window, where a slender blond man in a long coat hurried down the street, shoulders hunched against bursts of rain. A cameraman followed, looking irate. "Poor guy, he predicted sunshine today."

"Oh. Is that why you're wearing a t-shirt? I thought you were just trying to keep the car salesman off his game."

"Merely a side benefit. No, I'd have brought a coat if I'd known it was going to be this nasty. Wow, there's a job that'd suck for you, huh? What if you had to predict the weather and kept getting it wrong? You'd give yourself the heebie-jeebies."

Lara laughed, lowering her burger as she watched the weatherman cross the street. "I don't know if it would. I'd be predicting on the best data I had, so it might be okay."

"Best data." Kelly snorted. "How many times have I watched the news and it's said it's snowing when it's raining, or when they're predicting winds when it's calm as a crypt?"

"Calm as a crypt. Kelly, who says things like that? I don't know if you watch too much Addams Family or if you're just planning a career as an undertaker."

"I'm planning a career as a rich young widow," Kelly said archly. "See, if you were a really good friend you'd have already found me a rich old man to marry."

"Most of my clients aren't old."

"But they're rich, right?" Kelly's eyes brightened. "They have to be, to afford their spiffy custom suits."

Lara wrinkled her nose and put on a haughty accent. "Please. We at Lord Matthew's Tailor Shop prefer the term 'bespoke' to 'custom made'."

"That's because you at Lord Matthew's are a bunch of Europhile snobs," Kelly said cheerfully, and Lara laughed again.

"Steve's got three hundred years of tradition to live up to. Give him a break."

"Oh yes." Now Kelly put on the accent, sniffing disdainfully. "Steven Taylor, eighth in a line of tailors beholden to a Lord Matthew, whose name became so synonymous with quality that even during his lifetime men were referred to "Lord Matthew's tailor" rather than The Newbury Street Tailor Shop. That's your party line, isn't it?" she said in a normal voice. "You have to admit it sounds snooty."

"It is snooty. But I love it. The way everything fits together flawlessly, it's like a true thing made real. Someday I'll make your wedding dress and you'll understand why it's so fantastic. No patterns, just your body shape and your every whim conceded to. Except if you try to make a disastrous fashion choice, in which case I'll politely ignore you and make something suitable. At least I could do that with you. We've had clients with no taste at all. A couple of them were even famous."

"Fortune Five Hundred famous?"

"More like movie star famous."

Kelly brightened again. "Now, see, if I were even the tiniest bit interested in sewing, I would so make you get me a job. Intimately fitting clothes to movie stars. I want your life."

"No, you don't," Lara said with perfect confidence.

Kelly squashed her lips in mock irritation. "Shush. You're not supposed to call me on things like that and you know it. People say things like that, Lar. "

"I know. But you don't mean it." If Lara's high school yearbook had had a category for least likely to develop a sense of humor, her teenage self would have been pictured there. It wasn't that she lacked one, but even as an adult, the line between teasing and telling lies was a thin one to her sense of truthfulness. She frequently had to stop and consider what she'd been told, investigate it for irony before responding. At work, nearly the only topic of discussion was the work they did, and her fellow tailors had such passion and joy for their creations they rarely joked about it; Lara's under-developed sense of humor fit in well there.

Outside, in the real world, she was grateful for people like Kelly, who'd recognized Lara's talent on her own, and wasn't bothered by it. Building friendships without the polite gloss of white lies was difficult. People simply didn't tell each other the truth all the time, or even often. When Kelly had protested that they did, Lara had arched an eyebrow and asked, "How often do you say "fine" when someone asks you how you're doing?" Kelly had shut her mouth on further objections and rarely argued with Lara on matters of truthfulness again.

"Okay, I don't want your job. I want to hang out with you and meet the rich people you make clothes for," Kelly said cheerfully. "Is that more accurate?"

Lara laughed. "Much. The trouble with that is most of them never even see me, Kelly. I'd have a hard time introducing you to somebody when I'm effectively invisible."

"I don't understand that. They're the dressmaker's dummies. How can they not see the dressmaker?"

"It doesn't matter," Lara assured her. "I don't need to be noticed."

"No?" Kelly cast a glance out the window. "Not even by him?"

Lara followed her gaze to where the weatherman, hair blown askew, shouted enthusiastically into a microphone as rain splashed over him. He was vividly handsome, with angular cheekbones and a pointed jaw, and a well-shaped mouth currently stretched in a rueful grin. His eyes were crinkled against the weather, features animated as he spoke. "Nah. Not that I'd say no...."

Kelly clapped her hands together. "Finish your burger. Come on, hurry up."

Lara picked up the sandwich and bit in, automatic response to the command, then furled her eyebrows. "What's the hurry?"

"Look at him, Lar. He's a pretty-boy TV star, but that coat, those pants." She tsked, shaking her head, eyes wide with dismay. "The man needs a makeover to reach his full potential, and I know just the woman to give him one."

"You?"

Kelly gave an enthusiastic pah! of dismissal. "I like my men broad enough to fill doorways. Not that Mr. Weatherman doesn't have great shoulders, but my mighty thighs would crush those slender hips. I'm going to introduce you." She dropped a twenty on the table and caught Lara's wrist, tugging her up.

"Kelly! I'm not done eating! And you don't even know him!"

"Everybody knows him," Kelly insisted. "He's David Kirwen, Channel Four News weatherman, and they're shutting down filming. It's now or never. I'll buy you another burger. Come on, Lara. This is why you never meet guys. You never take any risks. Live a little!" She pulled Lara toward the door, ignoring her protests, and stepped out into the wind-driven rain, t-shirt soaking in a few seconds.

Lara muttered, "He'll notice you, anyway," and earned a second dismissive sound from her friend.

"Huge tracts of land aren't everyone's fancy, Lar. Excuse me! Excuse me, Mr. Kirwen? My friend here wanted to talk to you about your wardrobe!"

"For heaven's sake." Lara spoke the protest under her breath as Kirwen turned to face them, amusement writ large across his face, animating thin lips and brown eyes into pure sensual charm. "I didn't," she said to him in embarrassment. "I mean, your trench coat is really well made. The stitches must be oil-skinned, the way water's beading and rolling off. But really, I didn't want to talk to you. I'm sorry. My friend is--" She ran out of words, wrapping her arms around herself and shivering. The weatherman was dressed for the pelting rain; Lara, in a t-shirt and jeans, was not.

"An enabler," Kelly offered. "This is Lara Jansen. She's a tailor, a bespoke tailor, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but--"

"I'm only a journeyman," Lara mumbled, but Kelly went on heedless.

"--it's custom tailoring, not even a pattern, I can't remember how it all works, but anyway, Lara can tell you about it, and she thinks you're cute and well-dressed--"

"Kelly!"

"A tailor who thinks I'm well-dressed. I'm flattered, Miss Jansen. It's a pleasure to meet you." He turned a megawatt smile down on Lara, evidently unaware of its power. Bells chimed beneath her skin, ringing in the truth inherent in his statement, and Lara put her hand out automatically to meet his as he said, "I'm David Kirwen."

Pure tones shattered into discord.

TRUTHSEEKER is now available at:

Amazon

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About the Author

C.E. Murphy has held the usual grab-bag of jobs usually seen in an authorial biography, including public library volunteer (at ages 9 and 10; it's clear she was doomed to a career involving books), archival assistant, cannery worker, and web designer. Writing books is better, and she now has close to twenty in print. In her down time, she writes comic books and is working on a screenplay, which may be why her editor and agent independently suggested she get a hobby that *wasn't* writing.

She was born and raised in Alaska, and now lives in her ancestral homeland of Ireland, which is a magical land where it rains a lot but winter never actually arrives.

Actual information about C.E. Murphy and her career can be found at www.cemurphy.net.

Up Against It

by M.J. Locke

There isn't room for eccentricity in an asteroid community. When you are not working your freezing, grimy ass off out on a mining stroid-or in the refinery-or snatching a bite of vat-grown chow or a few hours' sleep (or if you are lucky, some sweaty, low-gee booty), you are crawling around the habitat machinery, scraping knees and knuckles, replacing broken parts and plugging leaks. Because that's what keeps you alive.

Everyone thought things would change when they brought the bugs Up, a few decades back. But they are not the magic medicine everyone thought they would be.

Make no mistake; without them, the population beyond lunar orbit would be a tiny fraction of what it is today. Bugs build and maintain the primary structures, create food and clean air and water from the raw materials we provide.

But they can't do everything, nor be everywhere. Fact is, they are sensitive to temperature and pressure changes, they eat a lot of fuel, and they are ass to program properly. Keeping them primed and ready to do what you need takes a small army.

The short version? You want to live, Upside; you work very hard, all the time, and you play by the rules. Don't waste time, don't waste resources, and especially don't mess with the bugs.

- From Downsider Upside by Lesley Marcus Vaughn (New York, copyright 2389).

So here they all were, Geoff and his three best buddies, way too early one Tuesday morning, in the spinning habitat city of Zekeston that lay buried a kilometer below asteroid 25 Phocaea's rocky surface: about to mess with the bugs.

Geoff and Amaya stood in the shadows near the university plaza. Kamal crouched behind a low wall on the mezzanine overhead. Kam's job was to call the op and film it. Ian sat blogging about rocketbikes at a nearby coffee kiosk on the edge of the plaza, eating a pastry and keeping an eye out for any city or university cops that might show up.

Geoff checked his heads-up. The timing had to be just right. A few seconds off in one direction and eight months' effort would be wasted. A few seconds off in the other and they would all go to jail. His heart was pounding harder than it ever did when he was out in the Big Empty, racing his rocketbike.

His fear wasn't of getting caught. No; what scared him was that in two minutes the whole solar system would know whether it would all pay off. All those hours of isolation; the sneaking around behind their parents' and teachers' backs; the endless succession of foul smells, burns, and stains that had ruined their clothing and scarred their hands-the risks he'd pressured his buddies to take, to help him do this-if this didn't work, he'd look like a fool.

Nearby, a handful of drowsy, puffy-eyed university students slumped on plaza benches. Class scrolls lay inert, half-furled, in their laps, blinking unnoted. Pastries and bulbs of coffee or tea cooled beside them on the plaza benches. The air was chilly and still, as always. Birds and ground squirrels-refugees from Kukuyoshi, the habitat's arboretum-snatched crumbs at their feet.

The fountain that dominated the plaza's center was called El Dorado. It was a tumble of rhombic, trapezoidal, and rectangular gold and platinum blocks jutting up at various angles in a metallic bloom. As usual, the fountain was turned off, though the toroidal pool at its base contained brackish liquid with bits of debris floating in it. The sour smell of spent assembly fluid wafted across to Geoff and Amaya in their hiding place. It seemed really noticeable to him, but no one in the plaza seemed bothered by it.

Kam radioed them. "A minute-fifteen before the cameras go live. We need to move now. Amaya, Geoff-you set?"

He and Amaya exchanged a glance, nodded to each other. "Set."

Kam's voice whispered the countdown. "Ten seconds…five…two, one. Amaya, go!"

Amaya strode into the plaza, not glancing up at Kam's shadowed spot, nor over at Ian. Kam said in his ear, "…two, one. Geoff, go!"

Geoff crossed the plaza, about six paces behind Amaya and to the left. He might as well have been invisible. Amaya had dressed up in Downsider chic: bustier, translucent beaded over-shirt, short-shorts, lace-up sandals; make-up, hair, neon animated tattoos that ran the length of her exposed flesh; the works.

She transected the plaza, headed away from the fountain, pulling the college students' gazes along in her wake. Geoff reached the fountain. He tossed the packet of triggering proteins he held into the dirty water. Then he headed for the coffee shop. No one seemed to notice; everyone's gaze was on Amaya as she strode breezily away.

Geoff sat down next to Ian at a small table near the plaza. His heart beat so hard it hurt. He tried to catch his breath and as nonchalantly as he could, turned to look.

Some guy had fallen in step with Amaya, trying to chat her up.

"Shit-!" Geoff started upright, but Ian grabbed his wrist.

"Relax, doof. We're chill."

Geoff forced himself back down. Ian was right. Amaya shed the college student-smiling with a shrug, turning to walk backward as she made a reply, then spinning again to continue at a swift, casual pace-without even breaking stride. She exited the plaza.

Geoff checked his waveface again. The blackout had just ended-the Stroider-cams were now live. It was close. He couldn't tell whether she had been on-scene or not when the cameras came on.

"Stroiders" was a reality-broadcast back to Earth. Up to two billion Downsiders tuned in to see what the good people of Zekeston were up to at any given moment. The Stroider-cams made it hard to be sneaky. But there were always ways to be sneaky. You just had to put your mind to it.

Sneaky? They had been downright paranoid.

Geoff had done the bug programming. That was how it had all started. In Honors Programmable Matter last semester-the only class he'd ever done truly well in; the only one that he cared about-he learned that assemblers were actually DNA, wrapped in membraned cells, much like carbon-based life-only made from silica rather than carbon. Plastic life forms, basically (except the teacher said they weren't really alive, not like carbon-based cells. They couldn't replicate indefinitely on their own).

You manipulated assemblers by washing them with silica-based proteins in a set sequence. In response, they gathered all the right molecules trapped in their suspension fluid-a silicone-ethanol colloid with metal salts and other stuff-to build what you wanted. They metabolized alcohol and excreted tiny glass pellets that under the right conditions clumped together and made what everybody called bug grapes. Geoff had always wondered what those lumps were at the seams and joints of the utility piping. Yep, they were bug turds. Spent bug juice contained lots of these glass pellets, which ranged in size from marbles to grains of rice. Which was why bug juice spills sparkled under the lights so beautifully. He had always wondered, ever since he was a little kid. Who would have thought spewage could be beautiful?

So yeah-it had been the glass turds that had given him the idea. Assemblers shit glass turds! How cool was that? It was a shame to let them go to waste. But to pull this off, they needed real bug juice. Since the good stuff was closely monitored, they would have to steal used juice, and see if they could distill it down and make it usable for their purposes.

Amaya had figured out how to tap the assembler discharge lines. They ran inside the maintenance tunnels that fed down the spokeway utility lines into the Hub. She had enlisted the help of her boyfriend Ian, and they had spent two months collecting, distilling, and priming depleted bug juice, so it would be at sufficient strength to handle Geoff's programming. The resulting juice was feeble, but Geoff had figured how to make it work. (In a lab. If he had gotten all of the glitches out of the protein code. If, if, if.)

While all this was going on, Kam had been making a detailed study of all the mounted cams, rovers, and motes in the university plaza. He calculated camera angles, paths, and ranges of view, based on their technical specifications, and created a surveillance shadow map. His efforts had been aided by a field trip their class had made up to the surface of 25 Phocaea to visit the "Stroiders" broadcast studios.

Two half-hour "Stroiders" blackouts occurred every day, to give Zekies small islands of privacy in their lives. One occurred at two a.m. and the other cycled between three a.m. one day and one a.m. the next. The rest of the time, Zekeston's citizens were under scrutiny by billions of people they would never meet. Mostly, it was just an annoyance that everyone put up with that resulted in a stipend in everyone's bank account every month. It was only when you were trying to be sneaky that it mattered when and where the "Stroiders" shadows were.

The main way "Stroiders" got their Zekeston data feed was from the stationary cams and the rovers, but when something important happened, "Stroiders" motes typically showed up, a hazy glamour emitted from jets in the assembler dispersal piping. You couldn't hide from motes. So next Kam did a science fair project: mote density versus "Stroiders" audiovisual resolution.

He sampled motes around the city and compared them to what people saw, Downside. (Phocaeans could not experience "Stroiders" the way Downsiders back on Earth did-as a fully realized, 3D virtual world-but they could sample it in video in small snatches, by submitting a request to the library and waiting a month). The lowest mote concentrations in the university plaza typically occurred between four-thirty and eight a.m. on Tuesdays. This pinned down the time and place for the event. (He also got an A+ on the project, and second place in the senior level information systems category.)

It was sheer serendipity that the best time to stage the event turned out to be the morning after high school graduation. The project became their secret graduation present to each other.

Over the past week and a half, they'd been spiking the fountain with bug juice. They had agonized over how to get the bug juice into the fountain without alerting everyone-Stroider-cams might black out periodically, but the plaza's security cameras didn't. And there were security guards, and scary sorts prowling the nearby Badlands. Geoff and the others had no way of knowing when the plaza was being watched. So during one of the nighttime blackout periods, Ian had climbed down into the maintenance tunnels from an out-of-the-way entry port, made his way to beneath the plaza, inserted tubing into the water line for the fountain, and piped the juice in. If the university students or staff had noticed that the fountain was leaking, no one said anything about the leak, nor any strange smells emanating from the pool. When the dribble stopped, Ian went back into the maintenance tunnel and removed the tap.

Geoff's final task was the riskiest. They had a plan to avoid the camera, but there would be people in the plaza even at that hour. So Amaya had volunteered to be a distraction. She wasn't into the whole clothes, tattoos, and make-up thing, and Geoff was dubious about whether it was a good idea. But when she had shown up in Downsider drag this morning, Geoff and the others had barely recognized her. ("Say one word," she'd warned them fiercely, "and I will pound you.")

Geoff's biggest worry was that her path was longer than his, and she might not exit the plaza before the Stroider-cams went live. The cops would be all over those Stroider broadcasts, to see who might have done it, and Geoff didn't want their attention directed to Amaya. If anyone would take the heat for this, it should be him.

Geoff radioed Kam. "Well?"

Kam checked his own wavespace display. "Yep. Just." They were careful not to say too much, in case their broadcasts were being monitored.

She wouldn't show up on the monitors. She'd gotten out clean. Geoff let out the breath he'd been holding, and drew another one in. He leaned on the table, trying to see what was going on without obviously staring at the fountain. Instead, he and Ian linked wavefaces and pretended to look at pictures of rocketbikes.

Then he saw Ian tense. Geoff shifted in his chair and looked at the fountain, trying to act casual. He couldn't believe anyone watching was going to buy their performance. Then he stopped caring.

Something was moving in the water. First a bubble, then two. He held his breath. Soon the water was boiling and seething like a live thing. The students sitting near the fountain began to notice. They scrambled back, scattering coffee bulbs. Flocks of panicked birds rose from their perches on the fountain blocks as dark shapes began to emerge from the surface of the water. A hand bone here. A foot bone there. Part of a skull. Teeth in a jawbone. A spine and pelvis.

The shapes began assembling themselves into skeletons. Most had a hunched, gnomish look. One or two were deformed, with feet where their hands should be, or heads growing out their butts. Geoff frowned. That glitch again. He thought he had fixed it.

Soon whole skeletons were lurching up and collapsing back into the brew. The glitch seemed to have fixed itself. Good. Soon there were a dozen. Twenty at least!

For a minute Geoff thought that would be all they'd do, and that was dramatic enough. But then they began climbing out onto the tiles of the plaza. They joined bony hands and began to dance. The skeletons made a line and curved through the plaza. Students stepped back and watched as they skipped and capered and leapt, banged on their arms, ribcages, and thighbones, waved their bony arms. They didn't sing-they couldn't; Geoff didn't even know where to start, to program larynxes and lungs-but they sure could shake their bones.

They didn't last long. They were made of spent juice and glass beads, after all, spun together by weak silica tendrils. The first shattered as its dancing and banging and clattering brought it in contact with a corner wall. Soon another burst. Even their own hands or elbows or knees were enough to cause them to fall to pieces. One burst in front of Geoff and Ian, who leapt back, knocking over their chairs-startled despite themselves. The air filled with clear, tan, and silvery beads, and spidery strands of silicone.

In moments the skeletons had all burst. It was over. The plaza tiles were coated in tiny beads.

Geoff realized how many people had gathered. Someone started clapping and laughing. Others joined in-but he could see irritation on some faces, and hear grumblings, and that had its own rewards. People began to disperse, carefully stepping among the beads. One young man slipped and fell. "Stroiders" camera motes had come, too, just as Geoff had hoped, and now swirled in the air currents like fairy dust, smelling of ozone and faint, bitter mint.

Ian pressed his hands over his mouth. "Cool…" Geoff looked over and grinned. "Domo, doof."

"Come on. Time to spin the sugar." Ian grabbed his sleeve and dragged him into the plaza. They dashed down the lane to meet Kam and Amaya, slipping and sliding on bug grapes.

Geoff desperately wanted to go home and watch the news. But not today. Today was the big ice shipment, and nothing-not even Geoff's bug-turd art obsession-could be allowed to interfere with the ice harvest.

*** ***

They got separated at the spokeway lifts. Amaya squeezed into a waiting elevator, and then Ian, who was holding her hand-but Geoff and Kamal stood one layer too far back in the crowd when the warning lights went off.

"You'll miss the harvest-!" Ian said.

"We'll take the stairs!" Geoff shouted, as the doors closed. He and Kam headed off at a run. "Meet you in the Hub!"

Zekeston was a fat, spinning habitat wheel buried below the surface of the asteroid. The city's spin generated a gravity gradient, which ranged from barely a thousandth of a gee in the Hub to about three-quarters of Earth's gravity at the outermost level. The university was on that highest-gee bottom level. That meant that the first fifty levels of Geoff and Kam's travel to the Hub were a brutal climb up the dual stairway that wound round the inner walls of Eenie Spoke. Geoff dodged around other climbers with an "On your left!" here and an "Excuse me!" there. Kam came right behind. They were gasping for air before they were a third of the way up, despite the light tailwind wafting up from the lower levels, which dried their sweat and boosted them up toward the Hub.

Zekeston used to be called Ezekiel's Town, but it wasn't just one wheel within a wheel. It had twelve spokes that connected twenty-five nested wheels, stacked one inside the next, to the Hub. Each wheel held ten stories, for a total of two-hundred-fifty levels. Upspoke, where gravitation approached Earth's, surfaces were flat-walkable and/ or rollable. The lower-gee levels near the Hub were honeycombed tubes separating webbed open spaces. As the boys gained altitude the climb got easier, and by the time they'd reached Level 150, they began to make better time. At Level 80, the low-gee ropeworks appeared and they lofted themselves up into it. Thereafter they made swift progress. Finally, they launched themselves out into the micro-gee Hub.

The Hub was a sphere nearly a quarter kilometer in diameter. The entries to the twelve spokeways ran around the Hub's girth: a ring of big holes, each with its own lift shaft, a dual spiral staircase, and ropeworks visible inside. The Hub also housed YuanBioPharma's main research facility and manufacturing plant; the main city hospital, Yamashiro Memorial; and the city assemblyworks.

Ian and Amaya stood in the queue for the big lifts up to Phocaea's surface. They faced away from each other. Amaya had her arms crossed, and Ian's jaw jutted out. Geoff exchanged a look with Kam as they crossed the Hub's ropeworks toward their friends.

Geoff groaned. "Another fight."

Kam rolled his eyes. "Why don't they break up and have done with it?"

Geoff said, "I don't want to listen to them bickering. Why don't you offer to partner with Ian this time, and I'll go with Amaya?"

"Why do I have to go with Ian and you get to go with Amaya?"

"I took Ian last time."

"Did not!"

"Did too!"

Kam held up his fist. Rock-Paper-Scissors. Geoff sighed. "Oh, all right." He chose scissors and Kam chose paper.

Kam dropped his fist. "Bastard." Geoff just grinned.

After a few minutes, Geoff began to doubt that he had the better end of the deal. Amaya remained furious all the way up in the lift. When they reached the asteroid's surface, she catapulted out of the lift so fast Geoff couldn't keep up. He found her at their bikes in the hangar. She had changed out of the Downsider outfit. But she still had the makeup on, and he got glimpses of her tattoo, as it ran out onto her hands and up onto her neck.

"You want to talk?" he asked.

She threw her diagnostic tools into her kit. "I was the one who came up with the plan for getting the juice. I was the one who figured out how to get it primed. I'm a better mechanic than Ian is. And I can kick your ass in a race." She glared at him. Geoff opened his mouth to argue. But maybe now wasn't the time. "And all he gives a flying fuck about," she said, "is how I look in a beaded bra."

Geoff refrained from telling her that she really had looked pretty amazing, and merely nodded.

"It's all about how big your tits are, whether you had your ass done, whether you put out," she said. "That's all anybody cares about. I could be Einstein, for fuck's sake." She glared at Geoff, daring him to argue. "I'm not saying I'm Einstein. It's just that nobody would care if I was! The only thing that matters is how tight a slab of ass I am."

"Oh, come on. Nobody thinks that." A storm gathered in her gaze. He lifted his hands. "That's not what I meant. What I mean is, we couldn't have pulled the op without you. You had great ideas. You are the best mechanic we've got."

She gave him an appreciative look, mollified. Then she tossed her tools into her kit and mounted her bike, waiting for him to finish his own checks.

As he tightened his fuel lines one last time, he added, "But…not to chafe you or anything…but wasn't that the whole point? Weren't you supposed to get that kind of reaction? It was your idea."

He swung up onto his rocketbike and started the engine.

She leaned her chin on her forearms, braced against the handlebars. "I thought it'd just be a good joke. But it got me to thinking. I get way more attention for dressing like a sex sapient than I do for anything I actually do that means anything. It just pisses me off. And then Ian…" she sighed. "He just doesn't get it. I told him what I'm telling you now, and he says he wants me to dress like that all the time. Butt floss, pushup bra, and all. Like all I am is girl-meat." She sighed again. "I wish he cared about more than how big my boobs are and whether he'll ever get the booty prize."

Geoff nodded with a rueful sigh. Ian's brains did go out his ears sometimes. Especially when his chinpo was involved. Geoff gave it fifty-fifty odds that Amaya would get tired of waiting before he figured her out.

*** ***

Geoff stepped out onto the commuter pad with his bike. 25 Phocaea's day lasted about ten hours, and the sun was below the horizon right now. But the lights blazing on the disassembler warehouses made it hard for his eyes to dark-adapt. He tweaked his light filter settings-if you wanted a good harvest, you needed your night vision-and fumbled his way toward Amaya and the others, who were pushing their bikes toward the launch ramps. Then his big brother Carl radioed him and waved. Geoff sent his buddies on, left his bike on the pad, and bounded over to Carl.

By the time he got there, he could see well enough to note that Carl wore a pony bottle and one of the cheap, bulky, standard-issue suits they provided at the disassembler and storage warehouses. Which meant he'd sneaked out to watch the delivery. Geoff was surprised. This was about the only misdemeanor Geoff had ever known him to commit.

"Hey. What are you doing off work?"

"Hey! You nearly missed it." Carl gestured into the inky sky, at the vast ice mountain that loomed overhead.

"I was busy."

Carl eyed him suspiciously, but Geoff knew his brother couldn't see his expression very well through their visors, and didn't elaborate. Carl hadn't heard about the bug-turd skeletons yet. But he would, and would freak if he learned Geoff had been responsible.

"Hurry!" Carl said, and set off. Geoff bounded after him, to the rim of the crater-leaping high in the low gravity, for the sheer joy of it-over to where the last of 25 Phocaea's remaining ice stores were.

It made Geoff's neck hairs bristle, how much ice filled the sky. The ice was a deep blue-green, with swirls of ruddy umber and streaks and lumps of dirt. Mostly methane. A rich take. Water ice was good-necessary, in fact, to replenish their air and water stores and provide raw hydrogen for the fusion plant-but methane ice was much more important. Kuiper objects always had plenty of water, and methane was needed for the bugs that made the air they breathed, the food they ate, the hydrogen feed for their power plant, and everything else.

The tugs' rockets flamed at the ice mountain's edges, slowing its approach, but it was still moving fast enough that he could not believe they would get it stopped in time to keep from knocking this asteroid right out of orbit. 25 Phocaea was only seventy-five kilometers across-it didn't take a lot of mass to shove it around.

The mountain grew and grew, and grew-till the brothers scrambled back reflexively. But as always, by the time the pilots blew the nets off, the ice mountain was moving no faster than a snail crawl. The ice touched down right in the crater's center. The cheers of his buddies and the other rocketbikers rang in Geoff's headset as the inverted crags of the mountain's belly touched the crater floor. The ground began to tremble and buck and the brothers flailed their arms, trying not to lose their balance.

Geoff whooped. "We'll make a fortune! Best ice harvest ever!"

There was a rule: what came back down belonged to the cluster. What made it into orbit around the asteroid was yours-if you could catch it.

"I knew you were going to say that," Carl said. "You always say that."

"That's because it's always true. Anyway, I've got to go. Don't want to spin wry and miss the first wave of ejecta."

"I'll never get why you're so into ice slinging."

"It beats trash slinging!"

"Hey," Carl broadcast, as Geoff bounded back toward his waiting rocketbike, "this job is just to pay tuition. Someday I'll be a ship captain. You need to take the long view."

"Burn hot," Geoff retorted. Burn hot; you might not be around tomorrow to enjoy whatever pleasure you've been putting off. Carl had always taken the long view and laid his plans carefully. Geoff had no patience for that. His bug-turd skeleton project was as long-term as he was willing to go. He leapt onto his bike, and raced to the far side of the crater.

Amaya, Kam, and Ian were already space-borne. He signaled to Amaya and she gave him her trajectory. Then he watched the spectacle of the ice mountain's collapse into the crater, while waiting his turn at the base of the ramp.

Down it kept coming, all that ice, onto the remains of their prior shipment. It tumbled out over the crater bed in an avalanche, collapsing on itself, flinging ice shrapnel. Geoff, waiting in line with the other bikers, gripped his handlebars, raced his engine, impatient. Some of the ejecta were beginning to rain back down; more was propelled into orbit.

His turn-finally! He raced up the ramp, dodging flying ice shards, as the ice mountain finished settling. He whooped again as he reached orbital velocity. The ramp arced upward and then fell away-he was space-borne. He fired his rockets and caught up with Amaya. They spread their nets and got started harvesting ice.

*** ***

Carl headed back to his shift work once the mountain had finished settling. On the way back to the warehouses, he thought about Geoff. Something was definitely up. Carl could always tell when Geoff had done something that was going to get him into trouble with Dad. It looked like another storm was brewing. Geoff couldn't seem to resist provoking their father. It didn't help that Dad was always holding Carl up as an example Geoff should emulate: Carl, who made straight A's, who had gotten a full scholarship to study celestine administration, who had been accepted to a top Downside university for graduate work next spring. Carl, studious and serious. Carl, the one whose teachers all said he'd go far. Exactly the opposite of Geoff, who zigzagged through the rest of his life the same insane, impulsive way he rode his bike.

Geoff and Dad would never get along. They were too much alike.

You could smell the disassembly warehouses through a bulkhead. The tart, oily smell of the disassembler bugs mingled with the rotting trash to create a truly foul brew. They had told Carl he would get used to it, but after three months, he still hated the smell. It was also noisy, with the big vats churning, and fluid hissing and rumbling in the pipes under the floor.

His coworker, Ivan, sat on a bench along one wall, pulling on his boots. Carl sat down next to him. "I'm back."

Ivan started and gave him a stare. Carl wondered if he was angry. "What are you doing here? I told you to take off."

"The ice is already in. I've a lot of catching up to do. No big deal." Then he noticed how pale Ivan was. His underarms and chest were stained with sweat. "Are you OK?"

Ivan shook his head. "You startled me, is all." He had been out-of-sorts for the past few weeks. Carl had heard a rumor his partners and children had left him recently.

He had been looking at something in his wavespace. Ivan noted the direction of Carl's gaze. "Ever seen my kids?"

Carl shook his head. Ivan pinged Carl's waveface, and he touched the icon that appeared in front of his vision. An image of Ivan, his wife and husband, and three snarly-haired children unfolded before Carl's gaze. The kids were playing micro-gee tag in a garden somewhere in Kukuyoshi while the adults watched. The image swooped down on the children's faces, and then moved back to an overhead view. Their mouths were open in silent shrieks of laughter. Carl grinned despite himself.

"That's Hersh and Alex," Ivan told him, pointing. "They're twins. Eight, now. And the little girl is Maia. She's six."

"Cute kids."

He gestured; the image vanished. "I'd do anything for them."

"Of course you would." Carl eyed him, worried. Ivan stepped into his work boots and strapped on his safety glasses. "Let's get this over with."

"Um, get what over with, exactly?"

"Nothing. I just-miss them, you know?"

"Sure." Carl eyed him, concerned.

Ivan glanced around. "Listen, will you do a favor for me? I left some of my tools back in the locker room. Could you go get them?"

"Mike will be pissed…"

"Nah, he won't even notice."

Ivan had a point. Mike rarely emerged from his office before lunchtime. "All right, sure."

"It's a small orange pouch with some fittings and clamps. It's in my locker."

Ivan leapt up to the crane operator cage mounted on the ceiling and climbed inside, as Carl bounded back down the tube toward the offices. As luck would have it, though, Mike wasn't in his office; he was at a tunnel junction just down the way. His gaze fell on Carl. "What are you doing wandering around the tunnels?"

"Ivan sent me for a tool kit."

"I don't pay you to run errands for the other workers. Kovak can get his own damn tools. Get back to work!"

Carl eyed him, fuming. He did have a way to strike back at Mike. The Resource Commissioner, Jane Navio, was a friend of his parents, and had pulled some strings to get Carl this job. She was Mike's boss's boss's boss. All he had to do was drop a word in his mom's ear, and before long, the hammer would come down on Mike.

But Mike's petty tyrannies weren't the Commissioner's problem. Someday soon, Carl thought, I'm going to be a ship's captain, and you'll still be slinging bug juice and smelling like garbage. "You're the boss."

"You got that right," Mike said, and floated off.

Carl went back to the trash warehouse, slapped on bug neutralizer lotion, got his bug juice tester from the benches, and headed over toward the vats. Ivan was working over at Vat 3A. Carl shouted up at him, "Sorry! No tools! Mike's on a tear!" but Ivan was doing something in the cab and did not see Carl, and the noise drowned him out. Oh, well. Later, then. Carl got to work.

Per safety rules, the tester never worked at the same vat that the crane operator did. The crane operator cages rode on rails that crisscrossed the open space below the geodesic ceiling. The cranes had long robotic arms that the operator used to lift the bunkers of trash and carry and tilt the debris into the funnels atop the disassembly vats.

There were two kinds of bugs. Assemblers built things: furniture, machine parts, food, walls; whatever. Disassemblers took matter down to its component atoms, and sorted it all into small, neat blocks or bubbles, to be collected, stored, and used the next time those compounds were needed.

Disassemblers were restricted in town. The specialty ones that only broke down matter of a particular kind-just a specific metal, or a particular class of polymer, or whatever-those were the only ones they used down in Zekeston, and even then, only in small quantities. Trash bugs were much more useful-and much more dangerous. Not only did they break down all materials, but they were programmed to copy themselves out of whatever was handy, when their numbers dropped too low. That's what they used out at the warehouses.

He went over to the sample port on the side of the first vat, put on his goggles, and stuck the probe into the port. Then he heard a guttural scream overhead. Something small flew out of the crane cab and struck the floor not far from him. Something bloody.

He heard a loud crash. Debris scattered. It was Ivan's dumpster-he had dropped it. Carl looked up. The crane's grappling arm pointed at the third vat like a spear, and the crane plummeted straight down toward it. He caught a glimpse of Ivan's pale, wide-eyed face as first the arm, then his cage, plunged into the vat. Disassembler fluid surged up and swallowed him and the crane. The vat walls buckled, and disassembler fluid spewed out.

Carl dove behind a stack of crates. Too late to help Ivan. The bugs were everywhere. Murky, grey-brown oil surged and splatted against the other vats, the trash, the walls, the floor. 25 Phocaea's gravity was a bare one-thousandth of Earth's; gobs of bug juice sloshed and wobbled about; the air filled with deadly mist.

The vats were coated on the inside with a special paint that the disassemblers were programmed not to touch, but on the outside they were vulnerable. One after another, the vats blew. As Carl made for the maintenance tunnel he was badly spattered. Burning, fizzing sores opened up on his arms and face. He changed course for the nearby safety showers and doused himself with neutralizer, and the burning stopped. But he felt a breeze, accompanied by a hiss that crescendoed to a shriek. The outer walls were being eaten away. The temperature dropped-sound died away-holes appeared in the warehouse wall.

He looked around. The bugs had destroyed the emergency life support lockers. The bug neutralization shower was across the way from the tunnel doors, and frothing blobs and puddles of disassembler were everywhere. By some miracle, the emergency systems had not yet shut those doors-so air was rushing in even as it was escaping out the holes-but with every second it got harder to breathe.

Carl leapt and dodged for the doors, looking for a path to safety. His ears popped. Sound was all but gone now. It made everything seem very far away. The floor was being eaten away, and bug juice poured into the steam and bug piping below. His lungs hurt and sparks danced before his eyes. With a desperate leap, he made it to within a meter of the door-as the emergency lights finally lit up, and the door slammed shut. In that instant before it was sealed he saw his boss Mike, Mike's boss's boss Sean Moriarty, and others scrambling down the hall toward him. Then he bashed into the closed door.

He pounded on it, shrieking, "Help me!"-but could not hear his own words. Pain seared his lungs. He sank to the floor.

Half the ceiling came down around him. Stars blazed overhead. The air was gone. Outside the crumbling warehouse perimeter, next to the crater, the massive disassembler manifolds fell apart and a blast of superheated steam and bug juice shot out and spread across the near faces of the ice mounds. Wave after wave of membranous bubbles, color-coded balloons holding molecular nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, tumbled upward into space as the bugs got to work on the ice.

Carl's eyesight failed. He curled up in agony. In those last seconds, while others suited up to come out and get him-as the air effervesced in his veins and saliva boiled on his tongue-he used up his last breath on a soundless scream. Not of fear, but of rage, at being reduced to component atoms himself.

*** ***

Geoff looked down from orbit and saw the geodesic collapse. He spotted a man go down amid the wreckage. An unsuited man. Then the lumpy horizon swallowed the scene. "Holy shit!"

Geoff checked his heads-up. Orbital time at this altitude was nearly forty minutes; far too long. The guy had ninety seconds, max. Geoff programmed a powered reversal that would get him to the landing pad in just over a minute.

It was a risk. If he miscalculated, he could make a new crater in the asteroid. But the time he bought might save the man's life. The main rockets cut in and his bike shuddered. The stabilizers kept him from going into a tumble. And the ground sped beneath, dangerously close.

Carl worked in the warehouses. Don't let it be him.

He alerted the others. Someone-Amaya-beamed an emergency message to the life support teams. But all Geoff's attention was on that uneven horizon. The cable station and warehouses crawled back into view, and as his rockets slowed him, he guided his bike in.

His wheels barked on the landing pad next to the Klosti-Alpha cable, but the pad was too short for his speed. The bike swerved wildly across the concrete and bounced off the edge of it, nearly unseating him. Using braking bursts from his rockets he soared, jounced, and dodged rocks to the warehouse, steering one-handed as he wrestled his spare life bag and pony bottle out of the saddlebag. His buddies were at least a dozen seconds behind him. By the time he reached the site of the collapse, the front face of the ice mountain was roiling and gas was billowing away. A thin mist filled the crater. He heard Kamal's exclamation of dismay as he leaped off his bike. But there wasn't time to think about that. He bounded over the rocks to where he had seen the figure go down.

He saw then he needn't have bothered with the powered orbit. The man was blue, ballooned up to twice the size of a normal human, and stiff: a giant corpsicle. And he did not have to see the face. That was his shirt, whose collar showed above the work overalls; Carl had borrowed it that morning. Those were Carl's shoes.

Geoff knelt next to Carl and rolled him over. His brother's eyes were whitish due to frost, run through with dark, swollen veins. His tongue had swollen up, too, and was jutting out of his mouth. His black hair was stiff as straw.

By this time Amaya, Kamal, and Ian had reached them. They recognized Carl, too.

"Hidoi…" Amaya gasped. Horrible…She was originally from Japan, and used Japanese slang.

"Are you sure he's dead?" Kam asked.

"Shit, man, look at him! What do you think?" Ian.

"Shut up," Kam said. "Just shut up. All right?"

Geoff stood up again, and looked down at his brother. He did not notice his friends' stares or their words. He felt nothing. But his mind was racing. He was thinking, Carl can't be dead. This is a dream. He was thinking, what if I had paused to let that other biker use the ramp? I'd have been closer to touchdown. Or if I had talked Carl into ditching work and coming out with us. Fat chance. Geoff would not have even asked; Carl would never shirk his duties.

He was trying to remember the last thing he had said to Carl. He couldn't. He was imagining what the muscles in his parents' faces would do, when they heard the news.

*** ***

In the few dozen seconds it took Stores Chief Sean Moriarty and his crew to suit up and force the locks open, the college intern-what was his name?-Sean struggled to remember. Carl. Carl Agre; that was it-lay dead amid the ruins of the fallen warehouse. Sean indulged himself with a string of obscenities. Not that he was surprised. But he had hoped.

A small group of rocketbikers stood over the body. Sean shuffled over-damned low gee; it was supposed to make locomotion easier-and bent to examine Carl Agre's remains. Sean sighed. He was so goddamn sick and tired of burying the dead. He had fought in three wars, Downside; he had seen a lot of young dead. Hell, he thought, I'm a fucking death midwife.

Commissioner Navio had recommended the kid for the job. Sean was not looking forward to that call.

Then he got a look at the young man crouched beside the body. He adjusted his radio settings till he got a ping. "You related? A friend?"

The young man said nothing. One of his companions said, "He's his brother."

It just kept getting better. Sean waved the responders forward. "Get him inside." He moved in front of the young man, Carl's brother, and laid hands on the shoulders of his pressure suit. The youth would not have felt the touch, through the suit. Sean jostled him gently, to get his attention. It was hard to see the boy's eyes clearly, through the visor's shielding, but his gaze looked glassy.

"We're taking your brother inside. We need to notify your parents. Come with us."

"What…?" The kid seemed to come out of his daze. "Oh."

As they turned, Sean caught a glimpse of Warehouse 1-H, which stood behind the ruins of this one. It had been hit by disassembler back-splash. Chunks were falling off, and Sean could see movement inside through the gaps. People? Yes. Some survivors were trapped in Warehouse 1-H.

"Get a command center set up right away," Sean told Shelley Marcellina, his chief engineer. "We've got people trapped in the rubble over there."

But Shelley, facing the opposite direction, gasped. "The ice." She was pointing over his shoulder.

The ice-? Sean turned and looked where she was pointing. His view had been obscured by his visor and the outcropping-but from this vantage point, he could see it. Interior areas in the ice mountain were glowing; jets of steam spewed out. He could feel the heat of reaction on his face, even through the visor. Clouds billowed all around. The ground trembled.

Terror surged in him. Three megatons of methane and water-the air, water, and fuel for over 200,000 people-was going up in wafts and jets of superheated gas.

"It's a runaway. The reaction has outpaced the bugs' half-life. We've got to stop it." Sean sprang upright. "Let's move, people! Move!"

Everyone hustled inside, two technicians carrying the body of Carl Agre. His brother, the young rocketbiker, and his friends followed behind.

Before he moved Upside and became Phocaea's Deputy Commissioner of Stores and Warehousing, Sean had spent fifty-five years in the military. And if there was one thing he had learned, it was how to move fast in a crisis. Within minutes he had a command center set up, designated lieutenants, established priorities, and enacted communication protocols. He organized a team to pump neutralizer out to the ice, a team to check the bulkheads and seal off breaches, and a team to rescue those stranded in the other damaged warehouse. People were bringing the injured in; he assigned the medical techs to set up triage and first aid. Everyone scrambled. Then he and his engineers had a pow-wow. They laid down maps and piped in live images of the ice.

Sean swore. The damned thing was nearly seven hundred feet on a side, and in the twelve minutes it had taken to set up command and lay the hoses, the ice was over a third gone. We're screwed.

"Shelley, the hoses are way too slow. We have to get that bug-killing juice out there now. And the reaction is occurring in the core, where the heat is trapped. Not around the bottom edges."

His chief engineer frowned at the images. "All our mobile equipment is down below, in Zekeston. Out here, everything is on tracks in the domes." She shrugged, looking grim. "There's not much we can do but lay hose and pump."

"We're dead, then," Cal, a disassembler programmer, said. "We can't stop it. We're dead." His voice rose at the end to a shriek. Heads turned.

"Calm down," Sean snapped, angry that Cal said what he had been thinking. "I need ideas. Not hysteria."

"We can dive bomb it," someone said. "Hit it from above."

Sean did not recognize the voice. He looked around. It was the kid, the one whose brother had just died. He stood at the opening to the triage area, helmet tucked under his arm.

"Who let him in here?" one of the engineers asked, but Sean felt a tingling in his scalp. The rocketbikers and their nets, the kid meant. They could dive-bomb the ice, kill the reaction. "Go on."

The teen lofted himself over. His friends hung back.

He was tall and gangly, straining his suit at the wrist and ankle joints. He had black hair in a longish cut that looked like an afterthought. He was talking in a monotone. Sean could not believe he was able to form coherent sentences at all. "The gang is all out there right now. Right?" He glanced over at his friends. "Right?"

The young man's companions moved closer, outside the ring of engineers. The young woman nodded slowly. "It could work, I guess."

"How many?" Shelley demanded. "How many are there?"

"Fifty," Carl's brother said. "Maybe more. We have our own comm frequencies." Smart kid-he had realized how critical communications were-and how long it took to set them up, if you didn't already have a system in place. "We're used to moving fast. To get the first ice, you know."

He leapt up again, and floated above the maps, spread-eagled. Finally he settled onto the table cross-legged, and eyed the map from all angles. "Take a look," he said to his friends. "What do you think?"

The engineers made room for the other three. "Our ramps are over here, on the other side of the Lake," the bigger boy said. He studied the map and pointed. "If your neutralizer can tolerate the deep cold and you can get the supplies out here, next to our launch ramp, in packages that fit in our nets, we can throw them at the mountain from low orbit."

His friends were nodding. "It'll work," the young woman said.

"What the hell are you talking about?" someone said, but Shelley got it.

"Like sling shots. They'll drizzle right down into the center of the ice, shut down the reaction." Another of the engineers protested-but Shelley insisted, "It's our best shot. If they can pull it off."

Sean gave the boy a searching look. "What's your name?"

"Geoff." The kid's voice cracked, whether from stress, grief, or ordinary hormones, Sean could not say. Maybe all three. "Geoff Agre."

"All right, Geoff, get off the goddamn table." The kid obliged. More graceful than he looked. Sean laid a heavy hand on the young man's shoulder as he touched down. Sean could tell the boy needed contact. He might have great ideas, but his gaze was still glassy, and he looked like he was about to float off into space. "Here is how it is, Geoff. We've got precious few supplies of neutralizer, and less time. You just saw your brother die. Are you going to fall apart on me up there?"

Anger glinted in the boy's eyes. Sean liked that better than the blank stare it supplanted. "No way!" He struggled for control. "No. We can help you. If you'll let us."

"You'll have to take orders from Shelley. All of you. Without question or hesitation. Even if you don't like what she tells you to do."

The kids surveyed Shelley, who eyed them back, a corner of her mouth quirked up. He looked at his companions, eyebrows raised. One by one, they gave him a nod.

"All right," he told Sean. As if he could make such a promise. The arrogance of youth. But hell; why not? Maybe the rest of the bikers would listen to him. At this point, the cluster had nothing to lose.

"You're on, Agre. Shelley, you lead the op."

*** ***

They suited up and went out. Geoff was still shaking. He could not believe he had said what he had out loud. Worse, Moriarty had listened. Now he had to act, fast, when all he wanted to do was curl up somewhere.

He kept seeing how Carl's face had looked-its swollen body, the frozen eyes and bulging veins. The world had shrunk, like he was seeing it through a long tunnel. Everything was happening in slow motion.

He remembered the old man's face as he had challenged him. Geoff had told Moriarty he could do this. If he could not keep his shit together, he should have said so then.

The big blond woman, the one they called Shelley, was talking to him. Near them, the cluster's ice was boiling away. If that wasn't a good enough reason to suck it up, he may as well take off his helmet right now.

For you, Carl, he thought. I'll do this, because you would.

"…to get your friends," she radioed. "We need them now. Whoever you can muster in the next three minutes. Less, if you can."

"What do we need to know about the bug neutralizer?" Kamal asked.

"The juice comes in five-hundred-kilo bladders. It's not damaged by cold, but it needs heat to liquefy. Solid, it's useless. And you'll have to break the packaging. The ice is hot-the packaging should melt on impact-but to be on the safe side, you'll need to hurl them hard. That means low, powered orbits. To shut down the reaction you'll have to blanket the ice, which means you'll need to come in from different angles, at high speeds. In other words, it'll be a death derby up there."

Amaya asked, "You know biking?"

"I know orbital mechanics. Think you guys can handle it?"

The four of them looked at each other. This time it was Ian who replied. That was fine with Geoff. He had done all the thinking he could handle for now. Now he just needed to go and do. He needed to outrun what he had just seen. "We can handle it. We'll be at the pickup spot in three.

"All right," Ian said, as they bounded across the landscape toward their bikes, "Geoff, you take One-ten Nanometers, Amaya take One-sixteen-point-five, and Kamal, you're One-twenty-two. I'll take One-twenty-seven-point-five. Let's start making calls."

Geoff switched his comm frequency to the first biker channel and leapt onto his bike.

*** ***

Sean got notice his boss, Jane Navio, was on the way up. He suited up and stepped out onto the commuter pad as she and a dozen Resource Commission staff poured out of the lifts. She spotted Sean.

"I come with extra hands," she radioed. "The big equipment is on its way. It'll be here in twenty minutes."

"Too late to do much good, sir-but the extra hands will help. We need them badly." He directed the new hands to Cal for assignments. Then they two bounded over to the crater.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Disassembler disaster in Warehouse 2-H. It set off a chain reaction and we have runaway disassembly in the lake. We lost two crew when the warehouse came down." He hesitated. "One of them was that young man you recommended for the position last fall. Carl Agre."

She was looking out at the vanishing lake; she did not say anything for a second. He watched her struggle with it.

"All right," she said softly. "All right. We'll deal with that later. What's happening out there?" She gestured at the bikers dive-bombing the dwindling ice pile.

"They're helping. Trying to stop the reaction."

Jane eyed the scene. "We're down at least seventy percent. More. Damn." The look on her face said all it needed to, even beneath the radiation shielding. Then Sean's words registered. "So we've recruited bikers? Ah, to dive-bomb the ice with neutralizer. Clever! My God." She eyed Sean. "Is it working?"

He squinted down at the ice: what with the mist and the boiling and splashing, it was hard to tell. "It's better. Don't know if it's enough."

She turned, taking information in. She pointed toward the ruined warehouses. The woman was like a fucking computer.

"What happened to 1-H, over there? Oh-I see. Partial collapse due to bug back-splash from 2-H. Jesus. That must have been a violent reaction. We need to know what caused that. All our simulations said the bugs should have frozen first. I see activity inside. There's a crew in there?"

"Several are trapped in the rubble," he replied. "They got to the emergency lockers in time, but they're buried under debris and they only have pony bottles and rescue bubbles, so they only have a few more minutes of air. We have to hurry."

She scanned further. "And that team?" She pointed to the workers guiding the neutralizer packets from the warehouse air locks. "They're taking the neutralizer to the bikers?"

"That's correct."

It was a long way from the warehouse locks, across the commuter pads, past the hangars to the rocketbike launch pad. It took four people to push-pull each neutralizer bladder. The supply chain inched along. Jane gestured at the biker ramps. "There are bikers backed up and waiting for the neutralizer, Sean."

"So?"

"So," she said, "You've got a resource bottleneck. Even with the new hands helping, it's going much too slowly. We need every gram of ice we can rescue. The last thing we can afford right now is a bottleneck."

Her meaning became clear. Sean glared. "If I reassign the rescue team to the neutralizer brigade, the crew trapped in the warehouse will die." My people will die.

"Sean. I can tell by looking-we're losing about a day's worth of ice every minute. I checked the shipping ledgers on the way up from Zekeston. There's not another ice shipment coming Down anytime soon. I don't know how I can keep everyone alive till we get another shipment in, even if the runaway were stopped this very instant. Hundreds of thousands of lives depend on how much ice we can save. We don't need your team for long. Maybe another fifteen minutes. Then you reassign them to the warehouse."

Sean shook his head. "Fifteen minutes is too long for those people trapped in there. We'll lose them."

She looked at him. "The cluster has to come first, Sean. There's no time to argue. Get someone to throw them some more pony bottles and then get your team out to the juice brigade."

"There's no way to get them ponies or air lines, or we already would have. You're telling me to abandon them."

The commissioner said, "Then you're right. I am."

Sean stared. He had been here before. After a long and honorable career, he had been dishonorably discharged, during the Gene Purges, for disobeying orders. But those had been stupid orders. Evil ones. These weren't. Jane Navio was a chrome-assed bitch. Damn her. But she was right.

"Reassign the warehouse team to the neutralizer brigade," she repeated. "Now." And he did.

*** ***

Geoff remembered the biker chatter in his headset. He recalled dodging other riders, dragging nets filled with neutralization bladders-dropping them-watching them crash onto the shrinking mound of ice, while Moriarty's engineer Shelley gave targeting and pickup instructions-then landing, waiting while technicians loaded up their nets, and taking off again. But everything blurred together in a jumble of events.

He did remember one pass in detail. He and Amaya went in low enough that the net dragged the top of the ice. They dodged ice crags and sudden spurts of superheated gas to drop the packet into a crevice deep in the ice's center. He caught a glimpse: the boiling ice looked like lava in a cauldron. Then they veered upward amid towering gas columns.

Another team veered into their nets as they rose, and Geoff got yanked off his bike. He spun wry-the stars, the flares of the other bikers' rockets, Phocaea's surface, all tumbled past. He had no idea where his bike was, or where Amaya was. He feared he'd plough into Phocaea's surface, but after a moment he realized he'd been thrown upward, out of 25 Phocaea orbit. His breath slowed. Numb calm fell over him. He breathed in and out. Dots of fog appeared and vanished on his faceplate.

Amaya was back there, somewhere, circling back around for him. He was sure of it. But for a moment he thought it might be good if nobody had noticed, and he could just float away, off into the Big Empty.

Then she radioed him that she was approaching. She shot a net that snared him. Geoff grabbed at it, stabilized himself, and then climbed along it to her bike and mounted behind her. She fired her rockets and took him back around to his own bike. Neither spoke a word. As he mounted his bike, she finally asked, "You OK?"

"Yeah."

It was hard to believe that only a half hour ago he had been so excited about his bug-turd art project. He had thought he was such hot shit. Now it all felt like clutter. Bullshit. A waste of time. He shook it off. Don't think. Just do.

*** ***

Half an hour after they started, Shelley gave the all-clear. By the time the reporters and their cameras had started showing up, most of the bikers were down, gathering near their hangar, checking their equipment. Geoff coasted to a stop and launched himself off his bike. He ached. He could smell his own sour stink, and though slimed in sweat, he was shivering. Dully, he wondered if his climate controls were malfunctioning. He shuffled clumsily over to the crater lip, near where he and Carl had been standing less than an hour before, and leaned over, hands on his thighs.

When he straightened, the mist in the crater was clearing. The pale sun rose low over the horizon in the southwest, and cast long shadows across the still steaming wreckage. The stars faded from view. The crater floor was covered in a graphite slick, with neatly spaced blocks on top in yellow, red, and an assortment of metallic hues. In the crater's middle was a lump of dirty ice about half the size of what they had had before the delivery. A couple weeks' worth, maybe. No more.

Amaya came up next to him; he recognized the stickers on her suit sleeve. He could not see her face well. But he knew what she was thinking.

"There's always other shipments coming Down," he said. "My mom says Commissioner Navio is a genius at making the ice last. We'll get more in soon. It'll be OK."

"Yeah," she said.

Shelley alighted next to them, and slapped Geoff and Amaya on the back. "You all saved us. Good work." She bounded off toward the warehouses. By then, Kamal and Ian had found them.

"Aren't you going to talk to the reporters?" Kamal asked, and Ian said, "You should get over there. This was your idea. You deserve the credit. Not those clowns."

Geoff shook his head. "Nah. Gotta bounce."

Kamal and Ian protested, but Amaya said, "Lay off." And to Geoff: "We'll talk to the reporters. Catch you later."

"Yeah. Later."

No point in delaying the inevitable. It was time to face his parents, and their disappointment that it was not Carl, but he, who'd survived.

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About the Author

Locke is an engineer who provides environmental compliance and sustainability management services, with an information management spin. She also writes science fiction, and her novel, Up Against It, is the first in a hard SF space opera series set several hundred years in the future. Her novelette "True North" appeared in Gordon van Gelder's climate-change anthology, Welcome to the Greenhouse in January, 2011.

She has also written several science fiction novels as Laura J. Mixon, and assorted short works, including stories for George R.R. Martin's Wild Card series.

You can visit Locke's blog, Feral Sapient or follow her on Twitter. For more about works written as Laura J. Mixon, check out her alter-ego website LauraMixon.com.

With Fate Conspire

by Marie Brennan

The Onyx Hall, London: January 29, 1707

The lights hovered in mid-air, like a cloud of unearthly fireflies. The corners of the room lay in shadow; all illumination had drawn inward, to this spot before the empty hearth, and the woman who stood there in silence.

Her right hand moved with absent surety, coaxing the lights into position. The left hung stiff at her side, a rigid claw insufficiently masked by its glove. Without compass or ruler, guided only by bone-deep instinct, she formed the lights into a map. Here, the Tower of London. To the west, the cathedral of St. Paul's. The long line of the Thames below them, and the Walbrook running down from the north to meet it, passing the London Stone on its way; and around the whole, touching the river on both sides, the bent and uneven arc of the city wall.

For a moment it floated before her, brilliant and perfect.

Then her fingertip reached up to a northeastern point on the wall, and flicked a few of the lights away.

As if that had been a summons, the door opened. Only one person in all this place had the right to interrupt her unannounced, and so she stayed where she was, regarding the newly-flawed map. Once the door was closed, she spoke, her voice carrying perfectly in the stillness of the room. "You were unable to stop them."

"I'm sorry, Lune." Joseph Winslow came forward, to the edge of the cool light. It gave his ordinary features a peculiar cast; what would have seemed like youth in the brightness of day-more youth than he should claim-turned into strange agelessness under such illumination. "It is too much in the way. An impediment to carts, riders, carriages, people on foot—it serves no purpose anymore. None that I can tell them, at least."

The silver of her eyes reflected blue as she traced the line of the wall. The old Roman and medieval fortification, much patched and altered over the centuries, but still, in its essence, the boundary of old London.

And of her realm, lying hidden below.

She should have seen this coming. Once it became impossible to crowd more people within the confines of London, they began to spill outside the wall. Up the river to Westminster, in great houses along the bank and pestilential tenements behind. Down the river to the ship-building yards, where sailors drank away their pay among the warehouses of goods from foreign lands. Across the river in Southwark, and north of the wall in suburbs-but at the heart of it, always, the City of London. And as the years went by, the seven great gates became ever more clogged, until they could not admit the endless rivers of humanity that flowed in and out.

In the hushed tone of a man asking a doctor for what he fears will be bad news, Winslow said, "What will this do to the Onyx Hall?"

Lune closed her eyes. She did not need them to look at her domain, the faerie palace that stretched beneath the square mile enclosed by the walls. Those black stones might have been her own bones, for a faerie queen ruled by virtue of the bond with her realm. "I do not know," she admitted. "Fifty years ago, when Parliament commanded General Monck to tear the gates from their hinges, I feared it might harm the Hall. Nothing came of it. Forty years ago, when the Great Fire burned the entrances to this place, and even St. Paul's Cathedral, I feared we might not recover. Those have been rebuilt. But now…"

Now, the mortals of London proposed to tear down part of the wall-tear it down, and not replace it. With the gates disabled, the City could no longer protect itself in war; in reality, it had no need to do so. Which made the wall itself little more than a historical curiosity, and an obstruction to London's growth.

Perhaps the Hall would yet stand, like a table with one of its legs broken away.

Perhaps it would not.

"I'm sorry," Winslow said again, hating the inadequacy of the words. He was her mortal consort, the Prince of the Stone; it was his privilege and duty to oversee the points at which faerie and mortal London came together. Lune had asked him to prevent the destruction of the wall, and he had failed.

Lune's posture was rarely less than perfect, but somehow she pulled herself even more upright, her shoulders going back to form a line he'd come to recognize. "It was an impossible task. And perhaps an unnecessary one; the Hall has survived difficulties before. But if some trouble comes of this, then we will surmount it, as we alway have."

She presented her arm to him, and he took it, guiding her with formal courtesy from the room. Back to their court, a world of faeries both kind and cruel, and the few mortals who knew of their presence beneath London.

Behind them, alone in the empty room, the lights drifted free once more, the map dissolving into meaningless chaos.

Part One

February-May 1884

I behold London; a Human awful wonder of God!

-William Blake

"Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion"

Oh City! Oh latest Throne! where I was rais'd

To be a mystery of loveliness

Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come

When I must render up this glorious home

To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers

Shall darken with the waving of her wand;

Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,

Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,

Low-built, mud-walled, Barbarian settlement,

How chang'd from this fair City!'

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Timbuctoo"

A great town is like a forest -- that is not the whole of it that you see above ground.

-Mr. Lowe, MP

address at the opening of the Metropolitan Railway

reported in the Times, January 10, 1863

Given enough time, anything can become familiar enough to be ignored.

Even pain.

The searing nails driven through her flesh ache as they always have, but those aches are known, enumerated, incorporated into her world. If her body is stretched upon a rack, muscles and sinews torn and ragged from the strain, at least no one has stretched it further of late. This is familiar. She can disregard it.

But the unfamiliar, the unpredictable, disrupts that disregard. This new pain is irregular and intense, not the steady torment of before. It is a knife driven into her shoulder, a sudden agony stabbing through her again. And again. And again.

Creeping ever closer to her heart.

Each new thrust awakens all the other pains, every bleeding nerve she had learned to accept. Nothing can be ignored, then. All she can do is endure. And this she does because she has no choice; she has bound herself to this agony, with chains that cannot be broken by any force short of death.

Or, perhaps, salvation.

Like a patient cast down by disease, she waits, and in her lucid moments she prays for a cure. No physician exists who can treat this sickness, but perhaps-if she endures long enough-someone will teach himself that science, and save her from this terrible death by degrees.

So she hopes, and has hoped for longer than she can recall. But each thrust brings the knife closer to her heart.

One way or another, she will not have to endure much more.

The monster city seethed with life. Its streets, like arteries both great and small, pulsed with the flow of traffic: hackneys and private carriages, omnibuses bursting with riders inside and out, horse trams rattling past on their iron rails. People on foot, on horseback, on the improbable wheels of bicycles. On the river, ships: forests of masts and steam funnels, skiffs hauling cargo to and fro, ferries spilling passengers onto piers that thrust out from the stinking foreshore. Trains thundered in from the suburbs and back out again, the population rising and falling, as if the city breathed.

The air that filled its lungs was humanity, of countless different kinds. The high and the low, glittering with diamonds or the tears of of despair, speaking dozens of languages in hundreds of accents, living cheek by jowl, above and below and beside one another, but occupying entirely different worlds. The city encompassed them all: living and dying, they formed part of the great organism, which daily threatened to strangle on its simultaneous growth and rot.

This was London, in all its filth and glory. Nostalgic for the past, while yearning to cast off the chains of bygone ages and step forward into the bright utopia of the future. Proud of its achievements, yet despising its own flaws. A monster in both size and nature, that would consume the unwary and spit them out again, in forms unrecognizable and undreamt.

London, the monster city.

The City of London: February 26, 1884

"Hot buns! A farthing apiece, warm you on a cold morning! Will you buy a bun, sir?"

The cry rose into the air and was lost among others, like one bird in a flock. A burst of steam from the open cut alongside Farringdon Road heralded the arrival of a subterranean train; a minute later, the station above disgorged a mass of men, joining those carried into the City by the power of their own feet. They shuffled along Snow Hill and up onto Holborn Viaduct, yawning and sleepy, their numbers sufficient to stop carriages and omnibuses when they flooded across the street crossings.

A costerwoman's voice had to be strong, to make itself heard above the voices and footsteps and the church bells ringing seven o'clock. Filling her lungs, Eliza bellowed again, "Hot buns! Hot from the oven! Only a farthing apiece!"

One fellow paused, dug in his pocket, handed over a penny. The four buns Eliza gave in exchange had been hot when she collected her load an hour ago; only the close-packed mass of their fellows had preserved any heat since then. But these were the clerks, the ink-stained men who slaved away in the City's halls of business for long hours and little pay; they wouldn't quibble over the truth of her advertising. By the time their wealthier betters came in to work, three hours or so from now, she would have sold her stock and filled her barrow with something else.

If all went well. Good days were the ones where she traced the streets again and again, with new wares every round: laces for boots and stays, lucifers, even larks one time. Bad days saw her peddling cold, stale buns at sundown, with no comfort save the surety that at least she would have something to eat that night. And sometimes a doss-house keeper could be persuaded to take a few as payment, in exchange for a spot on his bench.

Today was beginning well; even a bun of only moderate warmth was a pleasant touch on a cold morning like this one. But chill weather made men sullen in the afternoon and evening, turning up their collars and shoving their hands into pockets, thinking only of the train or omnibus or long walk that would take them home. Eliza knew better than to assume her luck would hold.

By the time she reached Cheapside, following the crowds of men on their way to the counting-houses, the press in the streets was thinning; those still out were hurrying, for fear their pay would be docked for lateness. Eliza counted her coins, stuck an experimental finger among the remaining buns, and decided they were cold enough that she could spare one for herself. And Tom Granger was always willing to let her sit a while with him.

She retraced her steps to the corner of Ivy Lane, where Tom was half-heartedly waving copies of The Times at passers-by. "You'll never sell them with that lazy hand," Eliza said, stopping her barrow alongside.

His grin was as crooked as his front teeeth. "Wait 'til tomorrow. Bill says we'll 'ave exciting news then."

"Oh?" Eliza offered him a bun, which he accepted. "Scandal, is it?"

"Better. There's been another bombing."

She had just taken a large bite; it caught in her throat, and for a moment she feared she would choke. Then it slid down, and she hoped that if Tom saw her distress, he'd chalk it up to that. "Where?"

Tom had already crammed half the bun in his own mouth. His answer was completely unintelligible; she had to wait while he chewed enough to swallow. "Victoria Station," he said, once he could speak more clearly. "Right early this morning. Blew the booking office and all 'alfway to the moon. Nobody 'urt, though-pity. We sells more papers when there's dead people."

"Who did it?"

He shrugged, then turned away to sell a paper to a man in a carpenter's flannel coat. That done, he said, "Harry thinks it was a gas pipe what blew, but I reckon it's the Fenians again." He spat onto the cobblestones. "Fucking micks. They sells papers, I'll give 'em that, but them and their bleeding bombs, eh?"

"Them and their bleeding bombs," Eliza echoed, staring at the remnants of her bun as if it needed her attention. She had lost all appetite, but forced herself to finish anyway. I missed it. While I slept tied to a bench, he was here, and I missed my chance.

Tom rattled on about the Irish, allowing as how they were devilish strong buggers and good at hard labor, but one paddy had come up the other day, bold as you please, and tried to get papers to sell. "Me and Bill ran 'im off right quick," Tom said.

Eliza didn't share his satisfaction in the slightest. While Tom spoke, her gaze raked the street, as if frantic effort now could make up for her failure. Too late, and you know it. What would you have done anyway, if you'd been here last night? Followed him again? Much good that did last time. But you missed your chance to do better. It took her by surprise when Tom left off his tirade and said, "Three months, it's been, and I still don't get you."

She hoped her stare was not as obviously startled as it felt. "What do you mean?"

Tom gestured at her, seeming to indicate both the ragged clothing and the young woman who wore it. "You. Who you are, and what you're doing 'ere."

She was suddenly far colder than could be explained by the morning air. "Trying to sell buns. But I think I'm about done in for these; I should go for fried fish soon, or something else."

"Which you'll bring right back 'ere. Maybe you'll go stand around the 'ospital, or the prison, but you'll stick near Newgate as long as you can, so long as you've got a few pennies to buy supper and a place to sleep. Them fine gents like to talk about lazy folks as don't care enough to earn a better wage-but you're the only one I've ever met where it's true." Tom scratched his neck, studying her in a way that made her want to run. "You don't drop your aitches, you ain't from a proper coster family-I know they runs you off sometimes, when you steps on their territory-in short, you's a mystery, and ever since you started coming 'ere I been trying to work you out. What's around Newgate for you, Elizabeth Marsh, that you'll spend three months waiting for it to show up?"

Her fingers felt like ice. Eliza fumbled with the ends of her shawl, then stopped, because it only drew attention to how her hands were shaking. What was there to fear? No crime in hanging about, not so long as she was engaged in honest work. Tom knew nothing. So far as he was aware, she was simply Elizabeth Marsh, and Elizabeth Marsh was nobody.

But she hadn't thought up a lie for him, because she hadn't expected him to ask. Before her mind could settle down enough to find a good one, his expression softened to sympathy. "Got someone in Newgate, 'ave you?"

He jerked his chin westward as he said it. Newgate in the specific sense, the prison that stood nearby. Which was close enough to a truth-if not the real truth-that Eliza seized upon it with relief. "My father."

"Thought it might be an 'usband," Tom said. "You wouldn't be the first mot walking around without a ring. Waiting for 'im to get out, or hoping 'e won't?"

Eliza thought about the last time she'd seen her father. Four months ago, and the words between them weren't pretty-they never were-but she'd clean forgotten about that after she walked out of the prison and saw a familiar, hated face.

She shrugged uncomfortably, hoping Tom would let the issue drop. The more questions she answered, the more likely it was that he'd catch a whiff of something odd. Better to leave it at a nameless father with an unnamed crime. Tom didn't press, but he did pick up one of his newspapers and begin searching through a back page. "'Ere, take a look at this."

The piece above his ragged fingernail was brief, just two short paragraphs under the header MR. CALHOUN'S NEW FACTORY. "Factory work ain't bad," Tom said. "Better than service, anyway-no missus always on you, and some factories pay more-and it would get you out of 'ere. Waiting around won't do you no good, Lizzie, and you keeps this up, sooner or later your luck'll go bad. Workhouse bad."

"Ah, you're just trying to get rid of me," Eliza said. It came out higher than usual, because of the tightness in her throat. Tom was useful; his corner was the best one to watch from. She never intended more than that-never friendship-and his kindness made her feel all the more guilty about her lies.

But he was right, as far as it went. She'd been in service before, to an Italian family that sold secondhand clothes in Spitalfields. Being a maid-of-all-work, regardless of the family, was little better than being a slave. Lots of girls said factory work was preferable, if you could get it. But abandoning Newgate…

She couldn't. Her disobedient eyes drifted back to the advertisement anyway. And then she saw what lay below, that Tom's hand had covered before.

LONDON FAIRY SOCIETY-A new association has formed in Islington, for the understanding of Britain's fast-vanishing fairy inhabitants. Meetings the second Friday of every month at 9 White Lion St, 7 p.m.

Eliza only barely kept from snatching the paper out of Tom's hands, to stare at the words and see if they vanished. "May I?" she asked.

She meant only to read it again, but Tom handed her the paper and flapped his hands in its wake. "Keep it."

The cold had gone; Eliza felt warm from head to toe. She could not look away from the words. Coincidence-or providence? It might be nothing: folk with money babbling on about little "flower fairies," rather than faeries, the kind Eliza knew all too well. This new society might not know anything that could help her.

But her alternative was waiting around here, with the fading hope that it would do her any good. Just because there'd been another bombing didn't mean any of the people involved had been here; it could have been pure chance last October, spotting him in Newgate. She'd spent nearly every day here since then, and not caught so much as another glimpse. They were tricksy creatures, faeries were, and not easily caught. But perhaps this London Fairy Society could help her.

"Thank you," Eliza told Tom, folding the newspaper and stuffing it into the sagging pocket of her shawl.

He shrugged, looking away in embarrassment. "Ah, it's nothing. You feeds me buns enough; I owes you a newspaper's worth, at least."

She wasn't thanking him for the paper, but saying so would only make him more awkward. "I'd best be moving," Eliza said. "These buns won't sell themselves. But I'll think about the factory, Tom; I will." She meant it, too. It would be glorious to go back to something like normal life. No more of this hand-to-mouth existence, gambling everything on the hope of a second stroke of luck. After these three months, she'd even go back into service with the DiGiuseppes, just to know each night that she'd have a roof over her head.

If a normal life was even possible anymore, after everything she'd been through. But that was a question for the future. First, she had to catch herself a faerie.

Tom wished her well, and she gripped the handles of her barrow again, wheeling it down Newgate toward a fellow in Holborn who would sell her fried fish, if she could dispose of the rest of her current load. Her eyes did their habitual dance over the crowds as she cried her wares, but saw nothing unusual.

Second Friday. That'll be the fourteenth, then. A bit more than a fortnight away. She'd keep on here until then, on the off chance that her luck would turn even better. But Islington, she hoped, held the answers.

*** ***

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: March 2, 1884

With a clicking of toenails upon cracked black stone, the dog trotted into the room of cages. A half-dozen lined the narrow chamber, three on a side, mostly full with sleeping humans. In the nearest, a young girl lay alone on a floor of filthy straw, curled in upon herself. The dog drew nearer, sniffing. His nose brushed her hair, close by the cage's wooden bars, and she jerked awake with a cry of fear.

The dog sat down on his haunches and studied her, tongue lolling just a little. It was as close to an appealing look as a scruffy thing like him could come; his black fur was untidy and matted, and a chunk had been torn from his left ear. But when he made no threatening move-merely sat and watched-the girl moved hesitantly from the corner where she'd retreated. Holding one hand out, she inched closer, until her hand was near enough to the bars for the dog to extend his nose and sniff politely. He even licked her dirty fingers, a brief, warm caress.

At that touch of kindness, the girl burst into tears.

"Oi there!"

The dog rose in a swift turn. A squat, ugly figure stood in the doorway, scratching the wiry hairs of his beard. "Get off it," the goblin said, scowling at him. "'E wants to see you, and not on four feet."

In the cage, the girl had retreated once more. The dog cast a brief glance over his shoulder at her, then sighed, a peculiarly human sound. Bending his head, he concentrated, and his body began to shift.

He heard a faint whimper from behind him as the transformation finished. However little reassurance his dog form had offered, as a man he was worse; Dead Rick knew that all too well. Ragged trousers stopped short of his bare feet, whose toenails curved thick and filthy to the floor. On his body he wore only a torn waistcoat, scavenged off a dead mortal; he hated the confining feel of sleeves on his arms. His hair was as dirty and matted as it had been when it was fur, and as for his face…he didn't turn around. He might not be a barguest, with a devil's flaming eyes, but he'd seen himself in a mirror; the hard slash of his mouth wouldn't reassure anyone.

He could have changed elsewhere, out of sight of the girl. But she was better off learning this now, that even the friendliest creature down here couldn't be trusted.

Gresh's toothy smile would never be mistaken for friendly. "She's a fine bit, ain't she?" he asked as Dead Rick came toward him. "Bit old to be stealing out of a cradle, but 'er mother kept 'er there anyway, as they didn't 'ave nowhere else to put 'er. Living sixteen to a room they was; now it's just fifteen, and she gets this whole cage to 'erself. Better for everyone!"

Dead Rick doubted the girl would agree, or her mother. Then again, what did he know? Perhaps her mother was a gin-soaked whore, and would be glad enough for one less mouth to feed. The girl might be bought by some kind faerie, who wanted a human child to play with like a doll.

Or angels might fly out of your arse, whelp. But she wouldn't age here, and disease would never touch her, which was more than anyone could say for life in the streets above.

"Come on," he said, pushing by Gresh. "You said 'e wants to see me."

"You don't need me to guide you," the goblin said.

Dead Rick paused in the corridor and glanced back. Gresh was standing in the doorway still, shoulders hunched with eagerness. "Don't," Dead Rick warned him. "You spoil 'er, and it'll be your hide."

The goblin glared back. "I don't need no dog telling me what to do."

He said dog like it was an insult-like Dead Rick should be ashamed of being a skriker. A habit he picked up from their mutual master. But there were advantages to being a dog; Dead Rick growled low in his throat, holding Gresh's eyes, and sure enough the goblin backed down first. With grumbling complaints, but he came with Dead Rick, and left the girl to what peace she could find.

Laughter echoed off the stone around them as they went along, its source impossible to determine. The warren of the Goblin Market was packed full, fae and the human creatures they kept for entertainment or use; they crowded almost as close as the East End poor that girl came from. For every faerie that flitted, going in search of a passage beyond the mortal world, another came here to London. To the Onyx Hall, twisted reflection of the City above, the palace that had once been the glory of faerie England-and now was their crumbling refuge against the progress of humankind.

Traces of that glory were still visible, in the sculpted columns and corner-posts, the arches spanning high-ceilinged chambers, the occasional mosaic laid into the black stone of a wall. It had all seen hard use these centuries past, though. Much was cracked, or stained, or half-hidden behind the clutter of the refugees. Curtains strung on cord divided larger rooms into smaller, giving the illusion of privacy; fae defended treasured belongings or mortal pets against the greedy hands of their neighbors. But anything could be sold, if the price was good enough: a human child bargained for mortal bread, an enchanted mirror traded for drugs that could make even a faerie forget his troubles.

Gresh was right; Dead Rick didn't need the goblin to tell him where to go. He knew his way through the warren blindfolded. The room he headed for had a broken floor, scuffed stone giving way to bare earth, into which someone had dug a pit; down at the bottom, a red-eared faerie hound, his muzzle stained with blood, seized a rat and shook the rodent until its back broke. The observers-mostly fae, a few mortals-roared him on. Dead Rick shoved through the crowd, making his way toward the short staircase that curved at the far end. By the time he reached it, Gresh had disappeared, into the wagering mass.

The staircase still showed a touch of refinement, though the balustrade's carving had taken some beating over the ages. The room it led to showed a bit more than a touch, largely because the rat-fighting rabble weren't allowed in. If its chairs were mismatched, some were at least carved of exotic wood, and the carpet on the floor was still vibrant with color. Silks draped along the walls helped cover the cracks behind, the signs of inevitable decay.

And there were only two people inside, one faerie and one mortal. The latter was dressed in a ridiculous parody of a footman's livery, styles that would have been old-fashioned fifty years before, but that hardly mattered; the more important thing was that he was there, uselessly, feeding the self-importance of his master.

Who scowled at Dead Rick. Nadrett waited for the door to close, then said, "I expects you 'ere when I needs you. Not to 'ave to send my goblins searching for you all over the warren."

He made an elegant figure, by Goblin Market standards. Not clad in patches and rags, nor parading around in a gaudy assortment of gypsy silks; his waistcoat might be red as children's blood, but it was restrained in its tailoring. One had to look closely to notice the buttons of bone, the cuff-links of knotted hair. He wore no coat, but did affect a gentleman's silk top hat, adorned with a large pin of crystalline starlight.

None of which hid the fact that Nadrett had clawed his way to the top of the Goblin Market heap by a combination of cunning and brutality. Dead Rick was forced to lower his gaze. "Sorry. I was looking in on the cages-"

"You better not 'ave been touching my property."

Dead Rick was no good at lying. His hesitation told enough, and Nadrett spat a curse. "That one ain't 'ere to tithe bread. Got a buyer, wants a girl as stinks of mortality. You go licking 'er, she starts to smell of faerie instead, and then I don't get as good a price."

He should keep his mouth shut, but the words came out anyway. "I ain't 'ere to help your coves in their perversions."

Quick as a striking snake, Nadrett was there, inches from his face. "Yes, you are," the faerie spat. "Because you serve me. Those perversions are where I makes my profit, see, and if I don't profit, then I takes the difference out of your mangy hide. So it's in your best interests to make sure my customers ain't unhappy."

Dead Rick opened his mouth to answer-stupid whelp; you never learn-and Nadrett's hand closed on his throat. He might weigh a stone less than the skriker, but his grip was iron. "Cross me," Nadrett hissed, "and I will destroy you. Everything you used to be. You'll be like this forever, broken, crawling, serving whatever master whips you worst."

Shame and fear twisted in his gut, like a worm, eating away at his pride. He felt a whine build, trapped under Nadrett's hand, and rolled his eyes in desperation. When Nadrett let go, Dead Rick turned his head to the side, casting his gaze down. "I won't cross you."

His master laughed. "'Course not. You'll do exactly what I says. And you're in luck: I've got use for you today. Follow me."

Hating himself for it, Dead Rick obeyed.

Their path was a long one, weaving through the shabby clamor of the Goblin Market. The constant, encroaching decay made it almost impossible to go anywhere directly; too many chambers and connecting passages had vanished. Whole sections were almost completely cut off, their only access being through patches too unsafe to traverse. A faerie who set foot there was liable to come out somewhere else entirely-or not come out at all.

London's foundation is rotting out from underneath it, Dead Rick thought. People still told tales of the glories of the Onyx Hall, but that was all that remained: tales, and these decaying fragments. And the Goblin Market's the most rotten of all.

The place Nadrett led him wasn't quite Market territory, and wasn't quite not. The night garden didn't belong to anyone, except the refugees who slept on blankets beneath the overgrown trees. It lay in what had once been the heart of the Onyx Hall, and in past ages had been the favored haunt of courtiers. But now the Walbrook ran foul through its heart, and the flowers grew among choking weeds.

A trio of goblins lounged on a chipped bench, and rose when Nadrett came through the entrance arch. Scots, and not familiar to Dead Rick; he would have wagered human bread, if he'd had any, that they were newcomers. Temporary residents of the night garden, who'd sold their services to the Goblin Market-to Nadrett-in exchange for a leg up. "We've cleared it," the leader said. "Got two fellows watching each of the other doors."

Nadrett clapped him on the shoulder and turned to Dead Rick. "You knows your job. Get to it."

He stared past his master, into the abandoned wilderness of the garden. "Who is it?"

"What does that matter? Some mortal. She's none of your concern."

Female, then. But not the little girl in the cage. Dead Rick swallowed, tasting bile. Not the little girl; just some other human who likely never did anything to bring this fate on herself.

The mere drawing of Nadrett's breath was enough to prompt him. Grinding his teeth, Dead Rick shifted back to dog-form, and ran out into the night garden.

A welter of smells filled his nose. The refugees might be gone for the moment, but their scents remained: hobs and goblins and pucks, courtly elves and nature-loving sprites, some so new they carried echoes of their homes with them. Cool soil, and the thick mat of vegetation that grew over it; once the garden had been planted with aromatic, night-blooming flowers-evening primrose, jasmine-and some of the hardier ones still survived. Up ahead lay the stinking Walbrook. The crumbling enchantments had mixed the buried river's reflection with its polluted reality, poisoning the earth around it.

Dead Rick paused near one of the stream's surviving footbridges, thinking he saw movement ahead. It proved to be just a faerie light, drifting aimlessly through the air. Most of them had abandoned the ceiling, where people said they used to form shifting constellations, but in the distance Dead Rick thought he saw a more solid glow.

He padded toward it, keeping to the underbrush. Yes, there was light ahead, behind that cluster of sickly apple trees. He sank to his belly and crawled forward one paw at a time until he could see.

The mortal was scarcely more than a girl, fifteen years old at most. She sat with her back to a stone plinth, knees pulled tight to her chest. Dead Rick wondered if she knew she was sitting on a grave. Her dress was reasonably fine; she ought to be able to read-but vines had grown over the inscription, making it easy to miss if she didn't look for it. And her attention was elsewhere, scouring the surrounding area for signs of a threat.

Signs of him.

Faerie lights floated about the small clearing, as if trying to comfort her. They had just enough awareness to respond to others' wishes; her fear might have drawn them. Or had she called them to her? Don't ask questions, Dead Rick growled to himself. Don't think of 'er as a person-just do your job.

The growl escaped his muzzle, without him intending it. The mortal gasped, rising to a wary crouch.

She shouldn't 'ave been sitting in the light. She'll be 'alf-blind once she runs.

So much the better for him.

Dead Rick growled again, this time with purpose. There was a gap in the hawthorn bushes; he snaked through it, making no sound, and snarled more sharply. Then circled further: another growl. To a frightened mind, it would sound like she was surrounded.

In every direction except one: the overgrown path that led away from the grave. And sure enough, she bolted.

He was running almost before she moved. She was human, and wearing a dress; he was a dog, and knew his way about the garden. A fallen tree had blocked the left-hand path years ago, so that even if she went that way-and he heard her try-in the end, she had to go right. And Dead Rick was there, waiting to harry her onward.

Nadrett had sent him to do this so often that it was almost routine. But the girl surprised him; she plunged through an overgrown holly bush, hissing as it raked her, to take a less obvious path. Dead Rick cursed inwardly. Two fellows watching each of the other doors-but were they watching all of them? Or only the ones that led anywhere anymore? The arch ahead opened on a corridor that went about fifty feet before fading into a bad patch of the Onyx Hall.

It had been fifty feet the last time he looked. It might be less now.

Dead Rick put on a burst of speed. A dry fountain near the wall gave him an advantage; he leapt up the enormous grotesque at the center, toenails scrabbling on the twisted stone, and launched himself through the air toward the arch. He landed with an almighty crash, but that served him well enough: he heard the girl stumble and fall, then claw to her feet and run in the other direction, away from whatever huge monster was lurking by the arch.

Huge, no. Monster, yes. That's what I've become.

Dead Rick shook himself, as if his gloom could be shaken off like water. If he failed at this, Nadrett would see to it he was more than just gloomy.

He trotted rapidly along the girl's trail, following her scent. His pause had given her time to get ahead, and in the absence of his snarls she'd gone quiet. The trail led him over the footbridge; he caught a whiff on the railing, as if she'd paused there, eyeing the filthy water. But for a girl in skirts, who likely couldn't swim, it would just be unpleasant suicide; in the end she'd gone on.

Across an expanse of shaggy grass, almost as tall as he was. Dead Rick leapt over a fallen urn, hoping to cut her off. The gamble worked: she was coming down the path toward him. Renewed snarling sent her the other way, and now he knew how this would end. Normally he trapped them against the wall, but with a bit of herding…

She was nearing the end of her strength. Dead Rick quickened his own pace, baying like a wolf, and burst into the open almost at her heels. The girl flung herself across the torn ground, up the steps of a ruined pavilion, and fell sprawling across the boards of its floor. Dead Rick leapt-

Her scream tore through the air, and then stopped.

Dead Rick's paws slammed down on her chest, and his jaws snapped shut just shy of her nose. The girl was rigid with terror beneath him, and her mouth gaped open, heaving again and again as if she were screaming still, but no sound came out.

For a moment, the desire was there. To sink his teeth into that vulnerable throat, to tear the flesh and lap up the hot blood as it fountained out. Death was part of a skriker's nature. It would be easy, so long as he didn't see her as a person-just meat and fear and a voice to be stolen.

But that was Nadrett's way, and the Goblin Market's. Clenching his muzzle until it hurt, Dead Rick backed off, slowly, stepping with care so his rough toenails wouldn't scratch the girl through her dress.

Nadrett was leaning against one of the pavilion's posts, tossing a small jar from hand to hand. "That's a good one," he said with a satisfied leer. "Prime stuff. That'll fetch a good price, it will. Maybe I'll even let you 'ave a bit of the profit, eh?"

If he had any pride left, Dead Rick would refuse it. Since he didn't, he jumped down to the grass, passing Nadrett without so much as a snarl.

His master laughed as he went. "Good dog."

Coming from Nadrett's mouth, the word made Dead Rick ashamed.

*** ***

Whitechapel, London: March 4, 1884

The shift was vivid, as the street's name changed from Fenchurch to Aldgate High Street to Whitechapel Road. In less than a mile, Eliza passed from one London to another, from the grand counting-houses and respectable shops of the City to the plain brick buildings and narrow back courts that, until a few months ago, she had called home.

She'd argued with herself all yesterday about coming back. A run of good days had given her money for last night's doss and tonight's, with enough left over to buy new wares to sell, but a day spent not working was one day closer to starvation. Selling as she went would have gotten her run off by the costers who worked this area, though, and besides, she didn't want anything linking her to the woman who sold hot buns and other oddments around the City. So her barrow was in the keeping of a woman in St. Giles who could hopefully be trusted not to sell it the moment Eliza's back was turned, and Eliza herself had taken a day's holiday. A risk, yes-but no more so than returning to Whitechapel in the first place.

"You've got a nerve on you, Eliza O'Malley, showing your face openly around here."

The call came from the doorway of a rag-and-bone shop at the corner of George Yard. Eliza had gone on three more steps before she realized she could stop: it was no longer necessary, or useful, to pretend she was Elizabeth Marsh, good English costerwoman. Those who would give her trouble here already knew who she was.

So she stopped, turning, and saw Fergus Boyle leaning in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest and one foot on the box he'd apparently been carrying. He grinned when she faced him. "Gave you a fright, did I?"

Her skin was still tingling from the sudden jolt of hearing her name, after months of playacting as someone else. The accustomed accents, though, rose to her lips with no difficulty at all. "Get you gone, Fergus Boyle; haven't you anything better to do with yourself than bedevil me?"

"With you vanishing the way you did? I don't." With his foot he shoved the box to the wall, out of harm's way. Eliza stood her ground as he came closer. "You should hear the stories. Some think you've been slung in gaol, like your aul da. The ones who think you're cautious say you went to America, never mind how you'd pay for the journey. I put my money on you hiding with the Fenians. Did you and your friends have anything to do with that dynamite at Victoria Station the other day?"

"I'm no Fenian," Eliza said, casting a wary glance across the people on the street. The bobbies hardly cared enough to keep order in Whitechapel, but since last year the new Special Irish Branch kept a lively ear out for any whisper of sedition.

"Sure," Boyle said, grinning in a way she didn't like. "You had nothing to do with Charing Cross last fall. You just happened to see the bomb in time to throw it out the back of the train. Pure chance, that was."

Not chance at all-but what could she tell him? That the Charing Cross and Praed Street bombings hadn't been Fenian jobs, not completely? That they'd had help from faeries? Boyle was descended from good County Roscommon stock, the son of a farmer's daughter and a fellow from the next farm over; they'd brought their stories with them when they came to London during the Great Hunger. He believed in fairies, right enough. But they were creatures you left milk for on the back step, to keep them from witching your cows or tangling your children's hair in the night. Not city-dwelling goblins who bombed railways.

As for telling him why she'd followed a faerie onto the Underground…she'd tried that before, near on seven years ago. Not Fergus Boyle, but other people. And none of them had listened.

"I can't stay long," she said, knowing he'd take her changing the subject as proof that he was right. "What is it you want? Just to tell me I've got a nerve on me?"

"Not staying long, is it? And what have you to hurry back to?" Boyle stepped even closer, so that he loomed over her. "Or is it that you're afraid the Special Branch boyos will catch you?"

Eliza shoved him, hard, at the point on his shoulder that would spin him back a step. "Sure I have better things to do with my time than spend it talking with the likes of yourself."

Fergus' mocking grin faded a hair. "Ach, you're not going to trouble Mrs. Darragh, are you?"

"I'm not."

She'd always been a good liar, but Boyle still looked at her suspiciously. "Good. Maggie's been glad to see the back of you-says her aul ma got upset when you were around."

Now it was Eliza's turn to look suspicious. "When did you and Maggie Darragh get on such close terms, that you'd be knowing what she's thinking?"

He grinned more broadly, and Eliza sighed. She knew perfectly well that Maggie didn't want her around, and was prepared for that; if she had to dodge Fergus Boyle, though, then this would be even more difficult. But she refused to abandon Mrs. Darragh-not when she was the only hope the woman had left.

Best to distract him with a believable lie. "Unlike some people," Eliza told him, "I have a care for my soul. I'm off to confession-that's a thing we do in church, that is, as I'm sure you've never heard of it." And lying about that is the least of the things I'm going to Hell for.

Boyle looked dubious. Fortunately, Eliza saw a stick-thin girl crouching over the crate behind him. "You might want to be watching that, you might," Eliza said mildly, with a nod of her head; then she slipped away while Boyle was busy clouting the girl over the ear.

Her heart beat too fast as she hurried down Whitechapel Road, weaving through the carts and the filthy fog. Four months and more since she'd been here, and it wasn't long enough. Boyle was right: what if some fellow from the Special Irish Branch remembered her face? She hadn't been stupid enough to tell them she was the one who threw the bomb from the Charing Cross train; they'd never believe she did it to save the people in the third-class carriage. More than seventy people were hurt that same night, when the other bomb exploded on a train leaving Praed Street. But Eliza was Irish; just being there was almost enough to hang her, and touching the bomb would be more than enough.

That was why she'd done her best to vanish, hiding behind the gift for mimicry and play-acting that had always amused Owen so much. With the bloody Irish Republican Brotherhood and their friends in America constantly making trouble, it wasn't safe to be Irish in London right now. And even less safe to be Eliza O'Malley.

Boyle was right: the cautious thing to do would be to scrape together enough money, somehow, to go elsewhere. America, or Ireland, or at least another city. Liverpool, perhaps. But even if she could give up her search, Eliza was London-born; she'd never known another home. God help her, she even missed the dirty, cramped slums of Whitechapel, so much more familiar than the stuffy businesses of the City.

Not that she had any romantic illusions about the area. It was a sink of vice and crime, filled with the cast-off poor of every race, with tails doing customers in back alleys for tuppence a fuck and gangs taking by threat or violence what little money other folk had managed to earn. But as she passed the narrow alleys and courts Eliza heard familiar accents, and sometimes even the Irish language itself, in raucous and friendly exchange. She pulled her shawl closer about her face and hurried onward, head down, to avoid being seen by anyone else she knew-or seeing them herself. That would just make it all the harder to leave again.

Mrs. Darragh and her daughter lived in a single room in a court off Old Montague Street, with a piece of canvas tacked over the window where the glass had been broken out. At least, they had when Eliza was last here; what if they'd moved on? Boyle wouldn't have told her. If he and Maggie had some kind of understanding, he might have even helped them into better lodgings.

She knocked at the door, leaning close to listen. No footsteps sounded in response, which at least told her Maggie wasn't there. She knocked again. "Mrs. Darragh? 'Tis Eliza O'Malley."

No answer, but the door was unlatched when she tried the handle. "I'm coming in," Eliza said, and opened it enough to peer through.

With fog and the grimy canvas window, the interior was gloomy as a tomb. Slowly Eliza's eyes adjusted, and then she made out the figure sitting in the room's one chair, near the smouldering hearth on the far wall. Right where I left her, four months ago. "Mrs. Darragh, 'tis Eliza," she repeated, and came in.

The woman stared dully at the floor, hands loose in her lap as if she could not be troubled to do anything with them. The dim light was kind to her face, smoothing away some of the lines that had carved themselves there, but her hopeless expression made Eliza's heart ache. The loss of Owen had broken his mother, and she'd never mended since.

Eliza left the door open a crack, for the light, and came to crouch at Mrs. Darragh's feet. All the chatter she'd planned faded in the woman's presence: it just wasn't possible to say oh, how well you look today, or anything else so false and cheerful. What good would it do? Nothing would raise her spirits, save one.

"Mrs. Darragh," she murmured, taking the older woman's slack hands in her own, "I've come to tell you good news, I have. I've almost caught him. The faerie."

No reply. Eliza pressed her lips together, then went on. "I told you I saw him, last October? Followed him to Mansion House Station, and saw the others there, getting on the train to Charing Cross. He came from near Newgate, though, and that's where I've been-waiting there, hoping to see him again, or another one. But I'm after finding something better. There's a society in Islington; I'll be going there in a few days to see if they know anything. Once I catch a faerie-any faerie-I'll make it talk. I'll make it tell me how to find Owen. And then I'll go after the bastards who took him, and I'll make them give him up, and I'll bring your son back to you."

The hands trembled in her grasp. Mrs. Darragh's lower lip quivered, too, and she had the despairing expression of a woman who could not even summon the energy to cry.

"I will," Eliza insisted, tightening her grip. Not too hard; the bones felt birdlike in her hands, as if they'd snap. "I haven't abandoned him. Or you. I-"

The brightening of the room was her warning, and the cold air that swept in with it. "Haven't abandoned her?" a sharp voice said from behind. "Odd way you have of showing it, Eliza O'Malley, vanishing without so much as a word."

She didn't rise from her crouch, or let go of Mrs. Darragh's hands, but only turned her head. Maggie Darragh stood in the entrance, a heel of bread gripped in one fist, other palm flat against the door. Her battered bonnet shadowed her face, but Eliza didn't need to see it to imagine her expression.

"You made it clear you didn't want me around," Eliza said.

Maggie made a disgusted sound and shoved the door away, so that it rebounded off the wall and swung a little back. "Not clear enough, I suppose, for here's yourself back again, whispering your poison in her ears."

The hands pulled free of Eliza's, Mrs. Darragh tucking them in beneath her elbows, hugging her body. In the greater light, the pitiful ragged state of her dress was revealed. "Poison?" Eliza said. "It's hope I bring, which is more than anyone else can be troubled to give her."

Maggie's laughter sounded like the cawing of a crow. "Hope, you call it, that makes Ma cry, and never an Owen to show for it. He's dead, you stupid fool, dead or run off. Or are you still too much in love with him to admit it?"

Contempt weighted down the word love. They'd barely been grown, Eliza and Owen; just fourteen years of age. Too young for Father Tooley to marry them, though everybody knew that was where it would end. But it wasn't love that made Eliza say, "He didn't run off. I know who took him. And I'm going to bring him back."

"You've had seven years," Maggie said cruelly. "What are you waiting for?"

Eliza flinched. In a whisper, she said, "Not quite seven." Not until October. Sometimes she felt like there was a clock ticking where her heart should be, marking off the hours and days and years. Running out of time. When the seven years were up, would Owen come back to them? Or would he be lost for good, beyond any hope of rescue?

Not the latter. She would never let it happen. She'd only let the years slip by because she had no clues, no lead to follow; it had been so easy to wonder if she imagined it all, as Maggie thought. But she didn't wonder anymore. She knew they were real, and she had their scent. She would keep hunting until she caught one, and forced it to tell her what she wanted to know.

"Get out," Maggie said, and Eliza could hear the angry tears in her voice. "We've troubles enough without you bringing more around. Leave Ma to mourn her son as she should."

Eliza rose, wincing as her knees protested. "I don't want to bring ye two any trouble, Maggie; you must believe me. Whatever Fergus has been saying about me, I'm no Fenian. I love Ireland as much as the next woman, and God knows it would be grand to get the English boot off our necks-but it isn't my home; London is. I would never do anything to this city, not for a country I've never even seen, and not if it means blowing up innocent people, you may be sure. I didn't leave Whitechapel because I was guilty. I did it because I thought I might be able to find Owen."

Maggie stood silent for a moment, digging her fingers into the heel of bread. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, if not friendly. "Get out, Eliza. We can't live in the past, and there's no future worth speaking of. Stop dancing it in front of us, like it'll do me or Ma any good. Just leave us be."

And that hurt worse than any of it-the hopelessness, the defeated line of Maggie's shoulders. They'd had such bright dreams, when Owen and Eliza were young, and now they'd been reduced to this ash. That, as much as Owen himself, was what the faeries had stolen from them.

Eliza fumbled blindly in her pocket, grabbed everything there. A little over a shilling in small coins: everything she'd saved, except what she needed to fill her barrow tomorrow, and her doss-money for tonight. Those, she always kept in her shoe. She spilled it out onto the bedside table, next to the unlit stub of a candle. "God keep ye safe, Maggie, Mrs. Darragh," Eliza said, and slipped out before pride could overcome need enough for her friend to protest.

WITH FATE CONSPIRE is now available at:

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About the Author

Marie Brennan is the author of the Onyx Court series of London-based historical faerie fantasies: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and the upcoming With Fate Conspire. She has published more than thirty short stories in venues such as On Spec, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the acclaimed anthology series Clockwork Phoenix. More information can be found on her website, Swan Tower.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this collection are fictitious or are used fictitiously.

All works within this collection are Copyright 2005 - 2011 by their respective authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

First electronic edition July 2011

Table of Contents

OPENING ACTS

In Case You Were Wondering...

7th Sigma

Bone Shop

Bones of Faerie

The Brahms Deception

Carousel Tides

The Cloud Roads

Dangerous Waters

The Dread Hammer

Flesh and Fire

Fright Court

The Heretic

House of the Star

Indigo Springs

Jade Tiger

Kat, Incorrigible

Medium Dead

Midnight at Spanish Gardens

Play Dead

Shade

The Snow Queen's Shadow

Spellcast

The Spirit Lens

TruthSeeker

Up Against It

With Fate Conspire